You Had to Know This Wasn't Good

The industrial meat industry is rife with problems and they often start with how the animals are gathered, transported, held in feed lots for fattening before being slaughtered.

Feed lots can resemble rock concerts, creatures crammed into a smallish space, only in feed lots the critters eat and poop in the same place right next to other critters doing the same thing. The proximity of the animals and the limits on their hygiene creates problems of disease, contagious and non. Here is the gauntlet of "issues" bossy may encounter long before she winds up on your plate: tick fever, footrot, Enterotoxaemia (pulpy kidney), Bovine respiratory disease (BRD), Blight (Pink eye), feedlot bloat, acidoses, liver abscesses, botulism. The most common cause of feedlot death is BRD. The most common feedlot disease is bovine viral diarrhea types 1 and 2.

Of course there's an answer. There has to be an answer. And it involves keeping those creatures medicated. Pharma-giant Merck offers an array of products including vaccines for infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, pneumonic pasteurellosis, parainfluenza 3 virus infection, bovine respiratory syncytial virus infection, Histophilus somni disease complex, bovine viral diarrhea types 1 and 2, and clostridial disease.

Critics argue that these medications aren't used to keep livestock healthy and well but to keep them sufficiently alive to make it to the abattoir door.

It's a system that has worked well enough so far that we still swing by the meat counter at our grocery stores to buy pieces of these creatures in shrink wrapped foam trays.

Now the World Health Organization has thrown a wrench into those well oiled gears with a warning that the antibiotics that defend your dinner's life may not be so good for your own.

New guidelines from the global body suggest farmers should stop using any antibiotics routinely to promote growth and prevent disease in animals that are otherwise healthy, a common practice in some parts of the world, including Asia and the US. Such routine use is banned in Europe, though campaigners fear the rules are sometimes flouted.

Using antimicrobial medicines on farm animals is one of the leading causes of the rise of superbugs, resistant to all but the strongest antibiotics. Medical authorities warn that the antibiotics available to treat even relatively minor human diseases are running out because of the rapid rise of such resistance.

Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, has warned repeatedly that, a decade from now, even routine, previously low-risk operations, such as hip replacements, may become dangerous because of the risk of infections resistant to medicines.

The WHO reported on Tuesday that in some countries, as much as 80% of antibiotic use is on farm animals. Even in some countries where routine use for enhancing growth is banned, more antibiotics are used on animals than on humans.

The use of the strongest antibiotics, a last resort for the most deadly infections affecting humans, should be banned altogether in animals, the guidelines advise. This should apply, according to the WHO, even in cases where an illness has been diagnosed in a food-producing animal. Implementing this could require animals to be quarantined, allowed to die, or for herds to be culled in order to halt the spread of a serious disease rather than attempting to cure it.

Well that would certainly put a ding in the wallets of those who can't live without a nice, thick, juicy steak. Don't expect the industrial cattle industry, especially the feedlot operators, to take that without a fight. 

Pause For a NRA Moment

It's Like a Western - Ranchers v. Farmers, Fences and Six Shooters

Only it's not a standard western. It's Africa. Extended drought is pitting ranchers against farmers as both vie for control of the remaining arable land.

In mid-October, people in the central Nigerian village of Nkyie Doghwro desperately sought shelter in a schoolhouse. Yet they did so in vain. Ultimately, 29 of them lost their lives; the victims of an ongoing conflict between ranchers and farmers in the region. Over the last 15 years more than 60,000 people have died in this forgotten conflict – almost four times as many as have been killed by the terror group Boko Haram.

Conflict between ranchers and farmers is a classic motif in Hollywood westerns. But conflict is also very much part of everyday life in many African nations – and the reality of it is far more brutal than that which is portrayed on the silver screen. Such conflict becomes unavoidable when ranchers seek new pastures after traditional grazing lands dry up, just as it does when climate change forces farmers to plant in areas where cattle had previously been herded.

...

 In 2012, several agencies within the United States' intelligence community prepared a report that predicted: "Many countries that are of strategic importance to the USA will suffer water shortages or flooding over the next 10 years." The report added that such situations would increase the risk of instability or even lead to failed state status as well as contributing to regional conflict.

It's Them and Us - And If You're Reading This, You're Not Them.

Sooner or later we're going to have to realize it's a "them and us" world. That wasn't our doing. It was theirs. And the ramifications of this world they've created goes far beyond stashing money and paying taxes. Its tentacles reach into almost every aspect of our society.

Their power is far greater than ours. They bend the ears of those whose sworn duty is to serve us. It's an inevitable corruption, even if somehow, sometimes inadvertent. Much of it is buried in a tax code so intricate, so confusing, so incoherent that it's far beyond the comprehension of the voting public.

As business professor and author, Brooke Harrington, puts it:

“There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose. These people “live the dream” of enjoying “the benefits of society without being subject to any of its constraints.”

“When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, because individual wealthy people are not paying their fair share of taxes. It won’t be lost on wealth managers and those in the offshore industry that we are reaching sort of French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.”

In the States today wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the few than it has been since the Gilded Age of the Vanderbilts, du Ponts, Mellons, Carnegies, Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Scripps, de Youngs, Buschs, Coors, the Cargills and other family names that are still prominent today.

Congressional Republicans are plotting a $5.8 trillion tax heist, 80% of which will flow to the wealthiest 1 per cent.

Across the developed world, inequality has gotten so out of hand that the IMF warns it imperils capitalism itself.  The IMF won't dare get into what awaits the plebs, you and me, if capitalism does fail. Let's just call it feudalism although many would argue we're already undergoing that transition.

It's getting so out of balance that even the billionaires are worried. They're growing increasingly fearful - of us.

Josef Stadler, lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients are concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about.

“The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”

It's not like they're feeling much love these days from the International Monetary Fund that recently prescribed what is essentially confiscatory taxation to relieve billionaires of the burden of their excess wealth and use it to diminish the scourge of inequality.

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

Here's the hard truth. This didn't come about by accident. It was neither market nor merit-based, not to any significant degree. No, it was legislated by the same people we have kept electing to represent us. Nobel laureate economist and former World Bank chief economist, the farmboy turned academic extraordinaire whose 1966 PhD thesis was entitled, "Studies in the theory of economic growth and income distribution," the guy who has literally made the study of inequality his life's work, sets this all out in his book, "The Price of Inequality."  Read it - if you dare.

Here's another hard truth. The same political caste who got us into this situation cannot be relied upon to get us out, to deliver us from this.  For this is the same political gang, Conservative or Liberal - no real difference, who made it legal for the richest and most advantaged of us to take the wealth this country provided them and spirit it away offshore, free of the constraints of our society.

This is why I argue that we need a genuine progressive restoration. Throw out the Trudeaus and the Harpers, the Martins and the Chretiens. Their governments got us into this mess. We're the frogs in their pots atop the stove. Do yourselves a favour. Read the history of progressivism. It's a real thing with real principles. Read it, learn it, and then ask yourself if we can settle for anything less and still hope to fight our way out of this.

And, let's end this with a word from George:

Is Trump Channeling the Spirit of Richard Nixon?

If there's one thing Donald Trump knows, it's ratings. Whenever his TV faux-reality show comes up he comes out with some line about his incomparable ratings.

Well he's got a different show now and, this time, his ratings are terrible and worsening. Right now, among Republicans, Trump's approval numbers are a little worse than Richard Nixon's were  at their nadir when Watergate drove Nixon to resign.

This is a bad place for The Donald to be in especially this early in his first term with Republican voters taking their leave, Congressional Republicans in a surly mood, a party that cannot pass any significant legislation and prosecutors closing in from all sides.

There's a slowly building chorus calling for Trump's head. A former GOP senator, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, has called for today's Congressional Republicans to rally around anti-Trump senators Corker and Flake and rid the GOP of this "vile president."

Meanwhile, the Flying Finger of Free Speech has cost Juli Briskman her job.

Juli Briskman works for a government contractor called Akima LLC. She is the cyclist who flipped off the Presidential Motorcade recently. The photo went viral, and Juli went to her HR department to admit that she is the woman in the photograph.

And the hits just keep on coming.  Sam Clovis, the campaign supervisor for former campaign foreign affairs adviser, George Papadopoulos, who recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, supposedly sang like a canary during a recent appearance before Mueller's grand jury.

Word has it that Clovis didn't mention his grand jury appearance to the White House. Team Trump learned of it from media reports. 

As Reagan put it, it's a great morning in America, especially with Trump in Asia.

Making Sense of the Paradise Papers

All the leaked documents tell you is the name of the players, the rich folks who gather up their spare cash and stash it in offshore tax shelters. Names are splashed about - Justin's chief fundraiser whose family fortune is associated with prohibition era bootlegging, a couple of former prime ministers, that sort of thing.

In many cases, probably most, what they've done is entirely legal. It probably shouldn't be but it is. They probably resent being outed, feeling they're being smeared, but such are the deserts of those who let their money rub shoulders with the money of some very, very bad actors.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the muscle behind these kind of investigations, explains it best.

The promise of tax havens is secrecy – offshore locales create and oversee companies that often are difficult, or impossible, to trace back to their owners. While having an offshore entity is often legal, the built-in secrecy attracts money launderers, drug traffickers, kleptocrats and others who want to operate in the shadows. Offshore companies, often “shells” with no employees or office space, are also used in complex tax-avoidance structures that drain billions from national treasuries.

The offshore industry makes “the poor poorer” and is “deepening wealth inequality,” said Brooke Harrington, a certified wealth manager and Copenhagen Business School professor who is the author of ‘Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent.’

“There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose,” Harrington said. These people “live the dream” of enjoying “the benefits of society without being subject to any of its constraints.”

The records expand on the revelations from the leak of offshore documents that spawned the 2016 Panama Papers investigation by ICIJ and its media partners. The new files shine a light on a different cast of underexplored island havens, including some with cleaner reputations and higher price tags, such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

The most detailed revelations emerge in decades of corporate records from the white-shoe offshore law firm Appleby and corporate services provider Estera, two businesses that operated together under the Appleby name until Estera became independent in 2016.

And then there's Justin's chief fundraiser, Bronfman.

Wealthy people across the political spectrum use the offshore system.

The files reveal that Stephen Bronfman, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s adviser and close friend, teamed up with Liberal Party stalwart Leo Kolber and Kolber’s son to quietly move millions of dollars to a Cayman trust. The offshore maneuvers may have avoided taxes in Canada, the United States and Israel, according to experts who reviewed some of the 3,000-plus files detailing the trust’s activities.

As the offshore riches grew, lawyers for Bronfman, the Kolbers and other wealthy interests lobbied Canada’s Parliament to fight legislative proposals to tax income from offshore trusts.

Bronfman remains a key fundraiser for Trudeau, who has championed openness in government and promised a crackdown on offshore tax dodging. In September, Trudeau told the U.N. General Assembly: “Right now, we have a system that encourages wealthy Canadians to use private corporations to pay a lower tax rate than middle-class Canadians. That’s not fair and we’re going to fix it.”

Bill please.  Now, let's move on to FaceBook and Team Trump.

In 2011, the investment fund run by tech mogul Yuri Milner received $191 million from one of the Russian government firms, VTB Bank, and quietly invested that money in Twitter. Documents also show that a financial subsidiary of the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom funded a shell company that invested in a Milner-affiliated company that held roughly $1 billion in Facebook shares shortly before the social network’s 2012 initial public offering.

More recently, Milner invested $850,000 in Cadre, a real estate firm co-founded by Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner.

Milner is a Russian citizen who lives in Silicon Valley. His ties to Twitter, Facebook and Kushner’s firm have been previously disclosed. But his links to the Kremlin financial institutions weren’t known.

VTB confirmed that it had used Milner’s fund to make an investment in Twitter. Facebook and Twitter said they had properly reviewed Milner’s investments.

...

Tax havens’ secrecy laws entice those who wish to place their wealth and dealings beyond the reach of regulators, investigators and the tax collectors.

Helping the rich get richer through offshore maneuvers is not a “benign benefit,” said Harrington, the Copenhagen Business School professor. “When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, because individual wealthy people are not paying their fair share of taxes.”

“It won’t be lost on wealth managers and those in the offshore industry,” she said, “that we are reaching sort of French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.”

Going back to the KPMG/Isle of Man/Canadian Revenue Agency scandal, Justin Trudeau has shown very little stomach for dealing with this. Maybe he thinks his hands are tied or that even the powers of a prime minister can't padlock this door. It's not just the United States that is losing "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Are we being turned into a kleptocracy?

We need to realize that the lines between what is legal and what is not are lines that we set, not the rich, not the privileged, not those with friends in high office.

America. This Won't Stop Until You Want it Stopped.

Jesus! Another mass killing in the States. This time in a church in a Baptist church in Southerland Springs, Texas. 26 dead, plenty more wounded. Scads of pictures of grieving survivors. Cop cars circling the church.

I don't get it. How did Americans become constitutionally incapable of not slaughtering each other? Is it that goddamned Second Amendment? Are they afraid if they don't freely and generously exercise their constitutional right to arm themselves to the teeth with all manner of battlefield weapons and to use those weapons to turn schools and movie theatres and churches into charnel houses that Second Amendment right may be forfeit? Use it or lose it?

I've lost the plot somewhere. This is beyond my understanding no matter how many theories are spun out to explain it. This is a nation degenerate, a place laid low and by choice.

Once More Into the Breach

This year's UN Climate Summit, COP 23, starts tomorrow in Bonn.  Here's a preview from The Washington Post:

The 2015 Paris accord set a target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — or 2 degrees at the most — by the end of the century.

But diplomats didn’t agree on the details of how their nations will reach that ambitious goal. The Bonn talks will flesh out the rule book that countries have to abide by.

This includes coming up with international standards for how to measure carbon emissions, to make sure that one nation’s efforts can be compare to another’s. A second debate centers around how countries take stock of what’s been achieved and set new, more ambitious goals for curbing carbon emissions after 2020.

The third big issue concerns money. Experts agree that shifting economies away from fossil fuels and preparing countries for some of the inevitable consequences of climate change will require vast financial resources — including some from the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump, which is doubtful about man-made climate change.

Fiji is hosting COP 23 but it's being held in Germany for a whole bunch of reasons.

Well, We Know How They Feel About Trump

Donald Trump has nations a bit on edge, even America's friends.

Take the Swedes for example. Sweden is a country with Cold War memories. During those dark years when the Soviet Union vied with the United States, Sweden constructed 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters. That's a lot.

Today, of course, the Soviet Union is gone. So too is the United States, at least in the sense that we once knew it. Today it's Putingrad and Trumpville. And that's got the Swedes on edge all over again. They're taking this pretty seriously, even to the point of planning to expand that already extensive network of nuclear fallout shelters.

Swedish authorities figure the existing 65,000 shelters will suffice for a population of seven million only, today, that still leaves three million with not much better than "duck and cover." Officials are now looking to construct new shelters to protect the overage. Swedish shelters are intended to provide protection against the gamut of WMDs - nuclear, biological and chemical.

If you find the Swedes extreme, the Swiss are way ahead of their Scandinavian counterparts. The Swiss have an abundance of shelters, more than enough to house their entire population.

Whereas confidence among Europeans that President Barack Obama would “do the right thing regarding world affairs” ranged between 70 and 90 percent in a number of surveyed nations during his term, those numbers plummeted after Trump’s inauguration and have only gone down since. Only 7 percent in Spain and 11 percent in Germany now say they have confidence in Trump. Top officials in Germany have also directly contradictedTrump’s North Korea policies, and have voiced concerns that the White House may overreact to nuclear provocations and escalate the war rhetoric being exchanged with North Korea.

Europeans are similarly worried that decades-long nonproliferation efforts could be dismantled virtually overnight, leading to a new arms race. In 2009, the Obama administration negotiated a treaty with Russia in which both countries agreed to cap the number of deployed warheads. Trump reportedly called the agreement a bad deal in his first phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year, although administration officials have since backtracked.

Sweden’s new shelter locations indicate that at least some of the concerns are connected to Russia. One of the regions where most new shelters are expected to be constructed in the coming years is the island of Gotland, where military defenses were recently expanded with the declared aim of stopping a possible Russian invasion.

Where There's Smoke... There's Wilbur

It's like dragging up a bucket of seawater and looking at all the tiny little critters swimming around inside. You're only getting the smallest of looks, a bare peep, into what's in the sea. A microcosm if you will.

The bucket of seawater in this case is being called the Paradise Papers, a massive media investigation into just two "offshore service providers and 19 tax haven's company registries." There are a bunch of critters, some of them tax cheats, who are being identified including Justin Trudeau's confidante and chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman.  Lorne has the rundown on Bronfman, here.

There's another, perhaps more interesting name, being splashed onto the pages of The Guardian, Wilbur Ross, Trump's commerce secretary, and it touches on the secretary's active business dealings with Vlad Putin's son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, the husband of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova.

Leaked documents and public filings show Ross holds a stake in a shipping company, Navigator, through a chain of offshore investments. Navigator operates a lucrative partnership with Sibur, a Russian gas company part-owned by Kirill Shamalov.

...

Analysts said the arrangement was troubling. Daniel Fried, an assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under George W Bush, said Ross’s connection to “cronies of Putin” threatened to undermine US sanctions.

“I don’t understand why anybody would decide to maintain this kind of relationship going into a senior government position,” he said. “What is he thinking?”

...

The disclosures come as inquiries intensify into Russian interference with the 2016 US election. Congress and Robert Mueller, the special counsel, are investigating possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Moscow. Ross has dismissed claims of collusion as “rumour and innuendo”.

The involvement of Ross and Shamalov in the shipping venture dates back to 2011. That year, Ross’s investment firm, WL Ross, began buying into Navigator with an investment that gave him two seats on the company’s board. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Shamalov began investing in Sibur, which was formerly state owned.

By January 2012, having built up his holding in the Russian company, Shamalov, then 29, was made its deputy chairman. That summer, WL Ross took control of Navigator by buying a further $110m stake from the collapsed Lehman Brothers bank.

Shamalov is the son of Nikolai Shamalov, one of Putin’s oldest friends from St Petersburg, where Putin worked in the mayor’s office. He married Katerina in a secret ceremony in February 2013.

Later that year, two ships from Ross’s company began transporting liquefied gas out of Russia for Putin’s son-in-law’s firm under a decade-long contract initially worth $226m.

Of greater interest is Wilbur's relationship to the Kremlin through his ownership interest in the major Cypriot bank, the Bank of Cyprus, where he served as vice-chairman. Cyprus is considered the first stop in the laundering of dirty money from Russia. It's alleged Paul Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars in rubles through Cyprus before transiting through Deutsche Bank en route to a new life as real estate and other investments in the US.

Back in March, The Guardian took a look at Wilbur's dealings with Moscow while at the Bank of Cyprus. 

In 2015, while [Ross] served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the bank’s Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who had ties to both the Russian president and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. At the time, Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Avetisyan had earlier been selected by Putin to head a new business branch of the Russian president’s strategic initiative agency, which was tasked with improving business and government ties.

Avetisyan’s business partner, Oleg Gref, is the son of Herman Gref, Sberbank’s chief executive officer, and their consultancy has served as a “partner” to Sberbank, according to their website. Ross had described the Russian businesses – including 120 bank branches in Russia – as being worth “hundreds of millions of euros” in 2014 but they were sold with other assets to Avetisyan for €7m (£6m).

Ross has not been accused of wrongdoing and there is no indication the Russian deal violated US or EU sanctions. Ross resigned from the Bank of Cyprus board after he was confirmed as commerce secretary last month.

...

In 2014, the Bank of Cyprus was still considered to be in a precarious state following a dramatic €10bn rescue of Cyprus’s banking sector by the ECB and the IMF. Under the terms of the deal, many of the bank’s wealthy Russian deposit holders lost their cash and became shareholders in the bank.

Ross, who had made billions of dollars years earlier by betting on bankrupt steel mills, was known for taking risky bets. But his decision to inject €400m into the bank with other investors encompassed a different kind of risk. It put him at the centre of the biggest financial institution in a country that was widely considered to be a tax haven for Russian oligarchs, even as the US and EU were imposing sanctions on Russia. In 2014, the year he made his investment, the US State Department considered Cyprus an area of “primary concern” for money laundering (pdf), according to its official assessment.

Meanwhile, the Paradise Papers scandal seems to have Ross working overtime to distance himself from the Russians and not very convincingly.

Rockas, Ross’s press secretary, tried to distance Ross from the Sibur deal with a series of statements that were contradicted by other sources. He said the Navigator-Sibur deal was signed in February 2012, before Ross joined the Navigator board. But Sibur’s annual report for that year said the deal was signed in March.

Rockas said Ross did not join Navigator’s board until 31 March 2012. But a press release filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on 2 March that year said Ross was by then already on the board. In ethics forms filed this year, Ross estimated that his start date had been January 2012.

Rockas said: “No funds managed by WL Ross & Co ever owned a majority of Navigator shares.” But a press release issued by the company in August 2012 was titled “WL Ross Agrees To Acquire Majority Stake In Navigator”.

Navigator vessels also carried out extensive business with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, records show, at a time when Venezuela’s government was cracking down on opposition. Trump imposed sanctions on PDVSA in August.

Rockas said Ross “has been generally supportive of the administration’s sanctions of Russian and Venezuelan entities.” He said Ross had never met Shamalov, Timchenko or Mikhelson.

It raises the question of why so many Trump administration principals have such close financial ties to Russian companies, Russian oligarchs, even Putin himself. Both Paul Manafort and Wilbur Ross were operating in Cyprus during the same period, Cyprus the first link in the money laundering trail leading out of Russia. Ross who was the vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus resigning only once he was confirmed to his appointment as Trump's commerce secretary.

What I want to know now is what does Robert Mueller know.

It's Sunday. How About a Sermon?

This being the Christian holy day and all I thought I might take a moment away from my constant struggles with Lucifer to contemplate my understanding of belief, that wondrous rock on which all religion is founded whether it calls you to worship on Friday, Saturday or Sunday or not at all.

Religious belief is made the more curious by how much of it there is scattered about every corner of the world. He believes this. She believes that. The family over there, the one with all the wives, well they believe something else altogether. It seems there are as many beliefs as there are calls for them. They come and go. New ones pop up. Old ones fall into desuetude (neat word, eh?).

Religion is an organizational construct of true believers, on one side, and infidels, apostates, heathens and pagans on the other. It may have distinctive features like an afterlife or hell. It may have one God or scores of Gods. Sometimes it is spread on foot, by word of mouth. Sometimes it arrives on the blade of a sword. Whatever it takes, it gets around.

It can get confusing. "Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." There's a dandy little phrase for sacking a town that holds true believers and infidels alike. Kill them all. God will know his own. Sorry folks. Some of you, anyway.

Religious belief is something you take on faith. You need faith that your chosen belief is real, that it is the true religion that stands alone among all the false religions.  What a predicament that poses. According to Wiki there are loads of religions, around 4,200 in all. You take it on faith that 4,199 of those are false religions.  Me, well.  We can bicker about that last one. You can tell the good faiths because they have their own, more or less identifiable, symbols or logos (see above).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against religion per se. After all, if you don't believe in 4,199 of the known religions while my tally is 4,200, we're really not that far apart, are we? That's a difference of 0.0238 per cent. We're awfully close. You have to give me that one.

The problem is that we're humans and our species doesn't deal well with religious belief. The point cannot be seriously argued. Since we invented the wheel, perhaps even before, we've been using our true religion as an excuse to slaughter the neighbours. We're in a holy war now, a jihad. This is in the tradition of a thousand years of Christians and Muslims having at each other. Look at the history of the Middle East, especially what we today conveniently call the "Holy Land." One conquering army after another carried a gaggle of peoples and their religions to and fro across that turf although we've settled on the idea that our God gave it to the Israelis. We take that on faith and we're prepared to see loads of blood shed for our belief. There we go, faith and belief again.

Yet the real problem posed by belief probably isn't some religious angle. It may be our willingness to allow belief to reign over some pretty worrisome knowledge.

We like to think of ourselves as Master of the Universe. At least on secular matters we think of ourselves as omnipotent. Just look around. We're the highest order of life as we know it. I believe we're the Top Dog.

It's not easy being master of all we survey. We need rules that we gather into codes, written, sometimes unwritten, sometimes a bit of both. We have rules defining statehood, rules for trade, rules dictating how ships must pass each other at sea, rules of war for when we're simply not getting along.

Accumulate enough rules and you'll wind up with modes of organization on a societal or even civilizational scale. We are organized socially, politically, geopolitically, economically, and industrially. It's all based on "norms" or standards that we believe are meet and just and, by and large, we're expected to take that on faith.

A lot of our secular beliefs seem eerily similar to what we see in religious belief. Ideologies are belief based. We believe them to be true. Economics and other social sciences, are largely belief based. They're the thinking of the day around which we build a consensus that can be, like most faiths, rather tenuous and transitory, often inconsistent or even contradictory.

A fine example of contemporary belief-based constructs is neoliberal economics of the type sparked by Hayek and Friedman. Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney picked that ball up and ran with it. It wasn't long before everyone else fell in line. We took it on faith.  More than a decade ago John Ralston Saul proclaimed neoliberal globalism dead. He observed that it was just another failed economic religion in a long series of successive economic religions that tend to enjoy a 30-year shelf life until they're displaced by the next great thing. We're still waiting for that next great thing even as the perils and pitfalls of the neoliberal order becomes so glaring that even the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have turned their back on it in shame.

Since we're doing such a lousy job of getting out from under the scourge of neoliberalism and, while we're waiting for the next big thing to materialize, the safe bet might be to wean ourselves from belief-based thinking and veer to the safety of knowledge-based thinking. As legendary sleuth, hard-bitten sergeant Joe Friday would  put it, "Just the facts, ma'am."

Knowledge, evidence based knowledge. Facts. Science. Experiments, studies, research, analysis, testing, observations, verification. Stuff you don't have to believe or take on faith. Stuff you can verify and accept.

It's when we try to lacquer over knowledge with a thick coat of belief that we stray into trouble.  Too many of us fall back on belief as a means of thwarting knowledge. Take climate change. Harper believed it was a socialist plot. Trump believes it is a Chinese hoax. Plenty of people believe that it's not man-made. They're constantly exhorted not to believe the science. It's a giant scam perpetrated by scientists out to protect their lavish, five figure salaries.

Wait a second. The science community isn't peddling belief. They're not asking you to take their knowledge on faith. Especially on climate change.  That's science of all disciplines - physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, glaciology, oceanography, hydrology, atmospherics, zoology, botany, biology, marine biology, epidemiology, agronomy, just about any Earth or life science.  Each discipline tests the central hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And, with its own tests, and research and analysis, each discipline validates the central hypothesis.

My point is that, if we're going to get through this century with some vestiges of our civilization intact that's going to require us to relegate the belief and the faith-based stuff to our religious needs and aspirations and go with the knowledge-based stuff, the science, wherever else it's needed. We have a lot of mental catching up to do.

It's Time to Kick Over the Traces.

It began in England around the year 1760 almost five thousand years after humans were first organized into civilizations in southwest Asia and northeast Africa. It, the Industrial Revolution, ushered in the greatest and most abrupt changes and advancements ever witnessed by mankind.

The Industrial Revolution was truly revolutionary and shaped virtually all our modes of organization - economic, industrial, political, social and geo-political. It was much more than new ways of making stuff. It was a revolution in energy, especially fossil fuels, that altered the ways we mass produced products, accessed resources and markets, the ways we lived and our relationship with governments, the way we waged war across the entire world. It was a revolution of everything.

And now it's run its course.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution the global population stood at some 770 million. Today we've swelled in numbers tenfold. China alone is nearly and soon will be double the entire world human population at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution just two and a half centuries ago.

770 million what? There seem to be no reliable data for per capita consumption in much of the world in 1770 but in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was launched, average per capita GDP first hit 2,000 pounds sterling in GDP in the 1830s and has grown between 30 and 40 times that in the UK today.  Most of the world still trails Britain in per capita GDP but much of it is beginning on the road to catching up.

Let's say that, since 1760 we've increased our gross numbers tenfold while we've increased our individual consumption about twenty fold. That means humankind's burden on the Earth and every other lifeform that must share it with us has increased about 200 fold in 250 years. And, we're warned, we're on the cusp of another explosion in growth, both population and individual consumption. They've even coined a name for it, "The Great Acceleration."

The Revolution is fizzling and fast.

We've become nations run by fools and grifters. You can see the fear, even despair, in their eyes and hear it in their words. They don't have answers and they know it. A tale of two prime ministers, both named Trudeau.

The first held his head up. He looked forward to the future. He had vision and that came through in advancements such as our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  That Trudeau looked at people, friend or foe, in the eye and when he spoke it was with a confidence that usually disarmed his adversaries.

The second Trudeau reveals little that speaks of the first. He isn't confident. He stammers and looks to the ground. There is no grand vision. Duty to country is obscured by the drive to retain power in the next election. Party over country. Party over people. Don't take risks. Don't make waves. Leave the hard things for the next guy.

Bill Moyers hosted an excellent series many years ago on posterity. He explored what it was and the fundamental role it had played in building his country, America. He looked at how posterity had fallen out of fashion in the halls of power. Back then we didn't realize that posterity was to be one of the big losers in the age of neoliberalism. Moyers concluded by imagining how some fine day posterity might again claim its place in government planning and policy. That last bit is beginning to look like a pipe dream.

Posterity is preparing a foundation for the future. It's investing money and effort today to leave the land better for coming generations. It's also the equivalent of putting a new roof on the house or keeping the fence well maintained. It's about doing what all of us, at some level, know is right.

This "Everyday Low Taxes" mentality that has taken hold cannot and does not accommodate posterity. It's extremely dangerous thinking.

The prosperity, the ease and comfort we enjoy today, was paid for in good measure by the sacrifices and investments made by our grandparents and our parents. Do you imagine you paid for those highways and overpasses and bridges and docks? We balk at even paying to maintain that essential infrastructure and we watch it decay before our own eyes.

We're cannibalizing our societies - extracting every small vestige of value that was bequeathed to us by our predecessors while putting next to nothing back in for future generations. There is no "pay forward" in the era of Everyday Low Taxes. From the squats occupied by the homeless to the boardrooms of giant enterprise, society is starting to crumble.

I recall a couple of articles written for The Globalist by Chris Kutarna, academic, award winning writer, Oxford scholar and more.

In one essay, excerpted from "Age of Discovery," Kutarna addresses the paralyzing power of this age of uncertainty.

...uncertainty reigns supreme – so much so that the boardrooms of many Fortune 500 companies have decided to punt.

Instead of investing, which they are supposed to do in order to grow their businesses, they are collectively holding onto a record wad of cash. They simply lack the confidence to make bold investments.

Whether as citizens, policy makers or business leaders, going about our life in a tumultuous time without a reliable way to make sense of surprises is downright dangerous.

Why? First, because rapid change usually demands rapid responses, and — as the cash accounts of big companies show — when we lose all confidence in our judgments, we hesitate when instead we need to act.

Second, because — as present-day surges of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, anti-trade agendas in the United States and ultra-nationalism in India suggest — it’s when ugly surprises leave us grasping for the big picture that we are most likely to adopt the wrong picture for the wrong reasons.

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The hollowed-out middle needs to find its collective voice, roll up its sleeves and reshape society’s distribution of unwarranted gains and blameless losses. Or wait for the times to shape it for them.

In another essay to mark the 500th anniversary of Luther's Reformation, Kutarna finds that faith in the prevailing dogmas of the Western world is again faltering, perhaps calling for another revolution or reformation.

Economists now realize that past a certain point, the social costs of rising inequality outweigh the incentive benefits of letting people hoard the wealth they create. Extreme inequality depresses economic growth.

The logic is that when the rich get richer, they don’t buy more stuff, because they already have everything; they just save and invest more.

However, if the poor get richer, they buy all the things they don’t yet have – including, most importantly, better health for themselves and better schooling for their kids.

The very rich can also tilt the economic playing field in socially harmful ways by using their outsized wealth to influence policymaking. They can fix the rules to favour themselves and to discourage would-be competitors from innovating.

That leads us to the second grave doubt that is gnawing away the faith/foundation of our society. Can democracy still deliver “rule by the people”?

In authoritarian states, the capture and corruption of public institutions by wealthy elites is plain to see.

Russia’s oligarchs won vast fortunes at taxpayers’ expense in the early 1990s when, under the guise of market reform, state-owned infrastructure and natural resources were sold off to friends of the regime for pennies on the dollar.

In China, more than one-third of all wealth is in the hands of the 1%. Corrupt officials, many now disgraced, have amassed private fortunes through their control of state assets and their authority to award licences and contracts without independent oversight.

In the United States, too, the top 1% hold more than one-third of all wealth. In the 2016 election cycle, U.S. presidential and congressional candidates raised and spent a total of over $7 billion.

...

Back in the 1990s-era Battle of Seattle, protestors still had faith in democracy to set things right. It was the lack of democratic scrutiny over trade deals that frustrated them.

But by the time they arrived in New York’s Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street, ‘If Voting Made a Difference, It Would Already Have Made a Difference’ and ‘Error 404: Democracy not Found’ were top-trending #slogans.

As it was for Martin Luther, so it is for many today: The distinction between corrupt leaders and a corrupt system has eroded until the only way forward now is to reject the whole religion.

For them, through too many successive crises, no leader has convincingly demonstrated how our present politics and economics can accomplish anything, but to magnify the gains of the winners at the cost of the losers.

Our "religion" today is neoliberal capitalism and it is a corruption of our society. It is detrimental to our society, it is devastating to our environment and it lays waste to any hopes we may still have for our grandchildren. No neoliberal leader "has convincingly demonstrated how our present politics and economics can accomplish anything." That goes for Canada's leadership as for any of them. And, yes, we're painfully slow to realize it but "the only way forward now is to reject the whole, utterly foul religion."

As Kutarna argues it's up to us. We either reclaim power in our own hands and use it to reshape our society or wait for the times to shape it for us.

I'm President. Why Can't I Prosecute My Enemies?

America's Thug in Chief bristles at the fact that he cannot use "his" government to prosecute whomever he likes, as in Hillary Clinton. Trump doesn't seem very comfortable with this whole "Rule of Law" business.



A year after defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump is still really, really angry that the federal government he runs isn’t going after her.

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

....People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

Trump opened up to talk-radio host and Mediaite contributor Larry O’Connor on Thursday, in an interview broadcast on Washington radio station WBAL. “The saddest thing,” Trump told O’Connor, “is because I’m the president of the United States, I’m not supposed to be involved in the Justice Department.”

Oh Dear. How Will Trump Square this Circle?

Donald Trump screwed up, big time. He forgot to get Congress to repeal the US Global Change Research Act of 1990. And, today, that earned the Mango Mussolini a swift kick in his climate change denying ass with the release of the programme's fourth National Climate Assessment.

From The Washington Post.


The report stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to downplay humans’ role in global warming, withdraw from an international climate accord and reverse Obama-era policies aimed at curbing America’s greenhouse-gas output.

...The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of potential sea level rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, and enumerates myriad climate-related damages across the United States that are already occurring due to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since 1900.

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Trump have all questioned the extent of humans’ contribution to climate change. One of EPA’s Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt’s deputies ordered it removed.
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The report could have considerable legal and policy significance, as the scientific matter provides new and stronger support for EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act, which lays the foundation for regulations on emissions.

“This is a federal government report whose contents completely undercut their policies, completely undercut the statements made by senior members of the administration,” said Phil Duffy, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The government is required to produce the National Assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being impacted on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.
...

Talk of Tipping Points

When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”

Most striking, perhaps, the report warns of the unpredictable — changes that scientists cannot foresee that could involve tipping points or fast changes in the climate system. These could switch the climate into “new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

Faint Hope

These days good news on climate change is hard to find.  Yet recent progress by major emitters, specifically China, give hope that the world might just meet the Paris Climate Summit goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Over the past half-century, growth in the global economy and carbon pollution have been tied together. When the global economy has been strong, we’ve consumed more energy, which has translated into burning more fossil fuels and releasing more carbon pollution. But over the past four years, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions have been decoupled. The global economy has continued to grow, while data from the EU Joint Research Centre shows carbon pollution has held fairly steady.

China’s shift away from coal to clean energy has been largely responsible for this decoupling. Due to its large population (1.4 billion) – more than four times that of the USA (323 million) and nearly triple the EU (510 million) – and rapid growth in its economy and coal power supply, China has become the world’s largest net carbon polluter (though still less than half America’s per-person carbon emissions, and on par with those of Europeans). But as with the global total, China’s carbon pollution has flattened out since 2013.

The good news of a slowing in the growth of man-made carbon dioxide emissions is tempered by the warning that we still face the Herculean chore of rapidly abandoning fossil fuels after 2020. We have a chance, if we're prepared to decarbonize our economies and our societies within the very near future. And the way that can be done isn't easy. It requires what Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told delegates at Paris in 2015 is essential, the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.  That means governments intervening to force the closure and abandonment of the oil and gas wells and the fossil fuels mines.

We pride ourselves on being a really progressive country that wants only the best for the world. Can you think of a Canadian leader, not only Justin Trudeau but his predecessors and his rivals today, who would padlock Athabasca or force the closure of the gas and oil wells of western Canada?

Let's not kid ourselves. In order to decarbonize we're probably going to have to endure an economic collapse. That's because the fossil energy giants have us by the - cojones. They have an estimated $27 Trillion dollars of proven fossil fuel reserves subscribed on every stock exchange and bourse around the world. 27,000,000,000 dollars from banks, institutional investors, pension funds and ma and pa punters are floating around in today's Carbon Bubble. That's an enormous amount of wealth to simply wipe off the books of the global economy. Bursting that bubble is going to leave lasting scars.

Freedom from fossil energy will take a concerted global effort. We've been lucky so far. Renewable energy costs have been falling to the point where they're sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. What will fossil fuels cost when that Carbon Bubble bursts?  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Especially if we revert to pre-globalization, slave labour rates in the Third World.

My point is that getting off carbon energy is going to cause enormous economic upheaval of the sort that can readily destabilize vulnerable nations, even entire regions. How do you maintain that concerted global effort to decarbonize in the midst of that sort of dystopian-lite upheaval? Are we prepared for a global sharing economy in which wealth is voluntarily transferred from the haves to the have nots for the sake of global stability? The developed world's record of dealing with growing inequality within their own economies doesn't offer much cause for optimism.

And then there's the real stumbling block, the synergy of climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of very finite resources. Jared Diamond illustrates in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," drives home the point that, when you have these interwoven, synergistic, existential threats you either resolve them all or you'll solve none of them.

Am I suggesting we simply throw in the towel, give up, wait to die off? Of course not. We have to resolve our entirely man-made predicaments.  The overpopulated have to slash their populations. The over-consumptive have to slash their consumption. Everyone, but particularly the big emitters, have to slash their emissions and move off carbon energy. We have to build a new, post-carbon economy first nationally, then regionally and finally globally.

We must give up our illusions that carbon taxes and solar panels will solve our problems. That horse left the barn sometime in the early 1970s.

We have to revert to the past when we lived within the bounds of our environment. We're simply too big for our planet, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. It's time we had a serious discussion about sustainable retreat.

Where Nazi Germany Refined the Art of Racism and White Supremacy

Hard as this to accept, Hitler's Germany seems to have taken many of its cues on building the Aryan state by exploring how the American south organized its white supremacist regime.

It's set out in James Whitman's book, "Hitler's American Model, the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law."

Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School, wanted to know how the United States, a country grounded in such liberal principles as individual rights and the rule of law, could have produced legal ideas and practices “that seemed intriguing and attractive to Nazis.” In exploring this apparent incongruity, his short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values.
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As race law’s global leader, Whitman stresses, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.
...

But even indisputable evidence of the Germans’ intense interest in American models doesn’t clinch a formative role for U.S. racial law, as Whitman himself is careful to acknowledge. After all, Nazism’s intellectual and political leaders may well have utilized American examples merely to make more legitimate the grotesque designs they already planned to pursue. In any case, answering the question of cross-national influence is ultimately less important than Whitman’s other goal, which is to examine the status of racial hierarchy in the United States through Nazi eyes. “What the history presented in this book demands that we confront,” he writes, “are questions not about the genesis of Nazism, but about the character of America.”

His disturbing report thus takes its place within the larger history of the United States as a polity founded on principles of human equality, Enlightenment reason, and constitutional limits on state power, yet molded by the prodigious evil and long-term consequences of chattel slavery based on race. To read Hitler’s American Model is to be forced to engage with the stubborn fact that during the 1933–45 period of the Third Reich, roughly half of the Democratic Party’s members in Congress represented Jim Crow states, and neither major party sought to curtail the race laws so admired by German lawyers and judges.

...

Whitman’s history does not expose the liberal tradition in the United States as merely a sham, as many of the Third Reich’s legal theorists intimated when they highlighted patterns of black and American Indian subordination. Rather, he implicitly challenges readers to consider when and how, under what conditions and in which domains, the ugly features of racism have come most saliently to the fore in America’s liberal democracy. Conversely, we might ask, when and why have those features been repressed, leading to more-equal access for racial minorities to physical space, cultural regard, material life, and civic membership?

Liberal-democratic ideas and institutions in America, unlike in Hitler’s regime, have always been both vulnerable and resistant to racist exclusions. Although the United States entered the 1930s as the globe’s most established racialized order, the pathways from Nuremberg and Jim Crow unfolded very differently, one culminating in mass genocide, the other, after much struggle, in civil-rights achievements. Yet none of these gains, not even the presidency of an African American, has taken issues of race and citizenship off the political agenda. Current debates over both sharply remind us that positive outcomes are not guaranteed. The very rules of the democratic game—elections, open media, and political representation—create persisting possibilities for racial demagoguery, fear, and exclusion. As Freisler and other Third Reich jurists understood all too well, racial ideas and racist policies are profound products of political decisions.

A New Standard for "Batshit Crazy"

You knew he was an idiot but former Texas governor turned Trump energy secretary, Rick Perry, has really tumbled out of the Stupid Tree, hitting every branch on the way down, this time.

The latest - fossil fuels can prevent sexual assault.  Brace yourself.

Perry described his belief at an energy policy event in Washington hosted by Axios and NBC News, while talking about how bringing power to African villages would save lives.

"But also from the standpoint of sexual assault, when the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts," Perry said. "So from the standpoint of how you really affect people's lives, fossil fuels is going to play a role in that. I happen to think it's going to play a positive role."\

Maybe Trump's first take was right.

America's Biggest Ever Theft by Ideology

Robert Reich has worked out that the Republican's latest "tax plan" would pilfer nearly $6 trillion from the public coffers almost all of which would make its way into the bank accounts of America's elite, its richest 1% and mega-corporations.  Among the beneficiaries, naturally, are the Mango Mussolini, his daughter, Ivanka, and the genetically modified (mutated) boy twins, 'Tardo and Ambergris.

Reich calls it a "heist"

The robbers are the American oligarchs who bankroll the Republican Party, and who are plotting the biggest heist in American history – a massive tax cut estimated to be up to 5.8 trillion dollars.

Around 80 percent of it will benefit the richest 1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.

So, where is all this money going to come from? Well, from throwing a lot of people - the poor and the elderly mainly - off Obamacare and Medicaid, and by slashing tax deductions including some that the middle class have long taken for granted.

The Republicans are very weak on basic math. They can't add columns and subtraction, well that's out of the question. They have the Congressional Budget Office for that only it almost never comes up with numbers they want to hear. In this case it's how many tens of millions would be thrown off health care or how their "tax cuts" would actually increase the taxes of their middle class base and the vaunted "heart of the American economy," small business.

I would love to see every Congressional Democrat come down with Dengue Fever and hospitalized while the Repugs perpetrate this ideological theft on America's white and blue-collar working classes and small business entrepreneurs. It's not that I want to see them suffer but the Republicans seem determined to do that anyway. It's that I want the American people to feel the lash and, perhaps, finally realize that Republicans are not their friends and that their fantasies of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" are just that, fantasies, delusions.

The Republicans are neither fiscally prudent nor do they offer good government. Left to their own devices with control of the House, the Senate and the White House they're ruinous.  Unitary Republican governments gave America the Panic of 1907, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007-2008.  Now with the Obama hiatus over they're back at it dismembering Dodd-Frank to reinstate Casino Capitalism and tax cuts for the rich paid for by savaging the little guy.

With the American public believing Republicans are the party of fiscal restraint, isn't it time the Democrats stepped back and allowed the GOP to reveal the truth?

And This Is Where We Need to Worry

China is in the process of ascending to superpowerdom, displacing America from its perch. And the US Navy is worried that they'll get away with it without a fight.

There have been instances where a dominant power, an empire, yields to another peacefully. The transition from the British Empire to American dominance is a fine example. However the experts tell us that nearly two thirds of these events result in warfare at some point in the transition.

Jeebus but it sounds like the Americans want to repeat the Alamo only on a global, possibly nuclear scale.

"PRC is the most pressing threat in the Pacific," one U.S. military official in the region said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China. While North Korea is a near-term issue, "it's a fight we could win," the official said — but he worries about a fight with China.

Among the U.S. concerns: China's controversial island-building, theft of technology, currency manipulation, cyberattacks, and both military and non-military aggression.

The U.S. military officials in the region warn that China's ultimate goal is to become dominant by slowly making changes to the international order. China will use the laws it likes, ignore the ones it doesn't and eventually other nations will have to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favor.

"China is on a path to win without a fight," one official said.

No fair, China. Who do you think you are becoming dominant by slowly making changes to the international order, the United States of America? Imagine the nerve, using laws you like, ignoring ones you don't and eventually leaving other nations to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favour? Hey, rice-munchers, only America gets to do that.

What's that awful stench? Oh yeah, that's American hypocrisy. China, doing much the same as America did in the immediate postwar era when the rest of the world was still in rubble and ashes.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford returned from a six-day trip to the Pacific late Monday night. He agreed that while North Korea is the immediate threat to the U.S., China is the enduring threat.

"China's path of capability development," said Dunford, "and their efforts I think to address our power projection capability, our ability to deploy when and where necessary to advance our interests, is very much the long-term challenge in the region."

The official said the U.S. military spends a lot of time making sure they don't forget about the long-term existential problem.

"We are ready" for North Korea, the official said. But the peer-level fight with China "is the real challenge."

The Americans refuse to concede how much they're doing to antagonize China. The latest move is their alliance with India to contain China and, if desired, cut off Beijing's sea access even across its own waters, the East and South China Seas. Would America tolerate that sort of thing along its Pacific coast. Not in a million years. Only subordinate nations have to endure that sort of provocation.

America has no sense of how deeply some Chinese, especially China's military leadership, perceive their "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of Europeans and Americans. And that's what makes this transition so dangerous, so worrisome. There's a reason why China is moving to quickly narrow the weapons technology gap with the United States. In some critical areas, such as hypersonics, it's thought they're already well ahead of the Americans.

The Chinese know that, while America has to squander its national treasure on immensely wasteful spending to maintain a military presence in most every corner of the world, they can bring Goliath down if they can defeat it in one or two core technologies. America's greatest weakness is America.

That said, America might not be able to abide China's ascendancy without going to war over it. Remember the Bush Doctrine? Remember when Bush, on behalf of America, reserved the right to launch pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that endangered America dominance, economic or military? I remember.

The Debasement of John Kelly Continues

This jackass has ridden his four stars into the dirt. Having made a fool of himself over his remarks on the Civil War that aped his fuhrer's comments, the "good people on both sides" and Robert E. Lee was a good man bullshit, this Jarhead has doubled down, parroting Trump's call for an investigation into Hillary Clinton.

In a Fox News interview, John Kelly said he thought an investigation was needed into funding from Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC for the research behind the Trump/Russia dossier, and Clinton's involvement in the Uranium One deal.

"The American people really do have a right to know what their government does… have a right to know what their government is doing on any given day, and by this same token what private citizens are doing if they break the law," he said.

Why it matters: As Peter Baker noted in a recent NY Times piece, Kelly was until recently viewed as a fairly apolitical figure. With comments like these, that's clearly no longer the case.

I Wonder What an Original Hitler Goes For?

An original Donald Trump sketch just went for $16,000. Here it is.

That's Trump's sketch of the Empire State Building. Impressive, huh?

Probably not the best week to bring this to the Cheeto Benito's attention but this original Hitler went for $161,000.

Maybe next time Donnie could try crayons, add a little colour, eh?

Russia's Dog-Whistle Ads on Facebook. Election Meddling? You Betcha!

More than a few commenters on this blog have dismissed Russia's Facebook ad campaign as a load of hooey, meaningless pap.

To relieve them of their profound ignorance and/or stupidity, I'll invite them to follow this link to today's Washington Post.




Lawmakers on Wednesday released a trove of ads that Russian operatives bought on Facebook, providing the fullest picture yet of how foreign actors sought to promote Republican Donald Trump, denigrate Democrat Hillary Clinton and divide Americans over some of the nation’s most sensitive social issues. 

The ads that emerged, a sampling of the 3,000 that Russians bought during the 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath, demonstrated in words and images a striking ability to mimic American political discourse at its most fractious. The targeting information also showed a shrewd understanding of how best to use Facebook to find and influence voters most likely to respond to the pitches. 

As a group, the ads made visceral appeals to voters upset about illegal immigration, black political activism, the declining economic fortunes of coal miners, gun ownership, African American political activisms, the rising prominence of Muslims in some U.S. communities and many other issues. Some ads, many of which were bought in Russian rubles, also explicitly called for people to attend political rallies amid a campaign season that already was among the most polarizing in recent U.S. history.

Do yourself a favour and read the whole article. It is stomach churning to see how the Russians played to, and upon, racism, bigotry and every base instinct with which Trump's base is identified. And it worked.

Trump Fights Collusion Threat by Resorting to Obstruction

A stupid man is one who has no grasp of his limitations and, on that score, Donald Trump is an exemplar.

Trump is in trouble. Special counsel Mueller gave the Mango Mussolini a plus sized wedgie Monday with his surprise disclosure of the guilty plea entered by former Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.

As soon as the Papadopoulos fiasco broke somebody in the White House should have taken a ball peen hammer to Trump's smartphone. No such luck. And, as Norman Eisen, chief White House ethics lawyer to the Obama administration, sees it, Trump's reactionary tweets attacking Papadopoulos might have given Mueller a stronger case for indictment on obstruction of justice charges.


The president was apparently as surprised as everyone else by the George Papadopoulos guilty plea. 

Unsealing the plea was a smart advance move by Mueller to rebut the “no collusion” characterization of his investigation that might otherwise have taken hold by just charging Manafort and Gates. Papadopoulos’s admissions offer another, new piece of evidence of collusion. The most striking is that a foreign intermediary told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that he had just returned from Moscow and the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary in the form of thousands of emails. The plea also details Papadopoulos’s many other Russia-related contacts, and his communications about those contacts with other senior campaign officials (according to media reports, including Manafort, Corey Lewandowski and Sam Clovis).

That evidence hits hard because it goes with similar, already known evidence of collusion: the emails between Rob Goldstone and Donald Trump Jr.; the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Jared Kushner and the apparent Russian emissaries; Trump's own public remarks welcoming Russian hacking of emails shortly thereafter; Roger Stone's contacts with hackers and his claims that he knew of forthcoming leaks from WikiLeaks. Can anyone doubt more evidence will follow?

Trump is rightly freaking out, and so Tuesday he pivoted to minimizing Papadopoulos and calling him a liar. 

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To say the least, it is very unusual for the president of the United States to attack a witness who is cooperating with the United States an ongoing federal investigation. It raises obstruction of justice and witness intimidation questions, just as it did when the president similarly went after former FBI Directory James Comey. Think about it: When you are a witness in a case that threatens the most powerful man in the world, and he attacks you publicly, that is scary.

Trump’s tweet also creates more problems for Trump with Mueller. By far the biggest personal danger to Trump is that Mueller moves against him for obstruction. That decision could go either way, but there is already substantial evidence that he obstructed justice. The reason Trump's lawyers keep talking about the White House’s efforts to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation is to convince the special counsel of Trump’s good faith, and so to limit further exposure of the president.

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Whatever other bad things happened for Trump on Monday, at least the revelations hadn’t wiggled the obstruction needle — until Tuesday morning, when Trump attacked Mueller's cooperating witness. Take it from me as someone who for a quarter of a century worked against and with prosecutors and FBI agents (including Mueller himself): they are fiercely protective of their cooperators. By attacking Papadopoulos as a liar, Trump hardly signals his good faith to Mueller. After all, Mueller is offering Papadopoulos's testimony as true. So Trump is not just assaulting the special counsel’s cooperator; Trump is contradicting Mueller, and maybe even hinting that Mueller is intentionally offering the testimony of a liar.

I Don't Get It.

A neighbour of mine who'll turn 80 next week sometimes asks what's happened in recent years, has the world gone crazy? She's having trouble making sense of why so many of us, especially Americans, are doing what we're doing. It's becoming increasingly harder to argue with that sentiment.

Take the States. Polls show that a majority of Americans support everything from gun control to universal health care, action on climate change and reversing spreading inequality and yet they wind up with a unitary government of Republicans controlling the House, Senate and the White House. The rightwing also dominates the Supreme Court of the United States. Somebody elected all those representatives and senators and, well, that president too.

Sure gerrymandering plays a big role but so does big money, money big enough to saddle America with a thoroughly "bought and paid for" Congress. Big money has swept aside any vestige of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" and big money intends to see that notion doesn't return.  Big money leads to legislative capture, regulatory capture, even executive branch capture and, through all that, judicial capture.

Are we that much better when a party that grabs a minority of the votes, high 30s will do, walks away with a majority and the virtually unfettered power to govern the country for four years no matter what the other 60 plus per cent may want? And then, once they get that majority, they shrug their shoulders and turn their backs on just about every solemn promise they made to dupe voters into giving them that high 30 per cent, false majority.

That's "fuck you" squared. Electoral reform? Absolutely, well no. Social licence. Sure, well no. First Nations consultation? Cross my heart, well no. Honest environmental assessments. Damn straight, well no. Reforming the surveillance state? Did you really expect we would? Well no. It goes on and on and on. You want it? You got it, well no. But don't fret. It wasn't all for nothing. The other guy was worse, wasn't he? Isn't getting rid of him reward enough?

No, that's not enough. If you get a majority without the support of 60 per cent of the voting public then your legitimacy hangs by a thread and that thread is honouring your campaign promises. If you renege on those solemn commitments then you jettison your legitimacy with them. You have confessed to conning the gullible, the people who so wanted to believe, to get your lying ass into power. You've done what the guy before you did with all his talk about "transparency" and "accountability."

The very foundation of our democracy is the "informed consent" of the voter. When someone betrays the public, as Trudeau has done so fulsomely, it makes a mockery of informed consent.

A government as free from its obligations as this one, and several of its predecessors before it, does not govern with the informed consent of the electorate. It rules them. It reigns over them, imposing its will, not honouring theirs. That is the antithesis of democracy. It offends me deeply.


I guess I was wrong. I do "get it" after all.