FOX News, The More You Watch It, the Dumber You Get

And it's not coincidence and it sure as hell isn't accidental either.   A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found Fox News viewers far more misinformed than those who got their news elsewhere and, better yet, the more viewers watched Fox, the more misinformed they became.

That's because Fox has precious little to do with information and almost everything to do with manipulating the gullible with misinformation.   Misinformation is what they convey and they do it quite deliberately to achieve a result - badly misinformed, hence easily manipulated, followers.  From AlterNet:

This study corroborates a previous PIPA study that focused on the Iraq war with similar results. And there was an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that demonstrated the break with reality on the part of Fox viewers with regard to health care. The body of evidence that Fox News is nothing but a propaganda machine dedicated to lies is growing by the day.

In eight of the nine questions below, Fox News placed first in the percentage of those who were misinformed (they placed second in the question on TARP). That’s a pretty high batting average for journalistic fraud. Here is a list of what Fox News viewers believe that just aint so:

• 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
• 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
• 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
• 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
• 49 percent believe income taxes have gone up
• 63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
• 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
• 38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP
• 63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear)

FOX is pernicious and ought to be investigated.  A great amount of money and power lies behind its campaign to warp the minds of Americans for the direct and specific advantage of those FOX serves.  We can mock the stooges gullible enough to fall for the FOX gang's transparent lies but we should see them as victims of a genuinely evil organization.

An Era Ends in Washington

In January when incoming Congressmen are sworn in it will usher in something Washington hasn't known since 1947.   When Representative Patrick Kennedy, an eight-term Congressman, retires it will be the first time in more than six decades that there's been no member of the Kennedy clan serving in the House, the Senate or the White House.

Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Edward Kennedy, wasn't even born when his uncle John was assassinated and was just 11-months old when Robert Kennedy was killed. 

Just Sayin', That's All

I got dropped from Iggy's real Christmas list last year so I was a bit surprised to get an e-card from the Igster today.  It's not actually a Christmas card as such.  It's a "Happy Holidays" card with all the baby Jesus stuff left out.   Wouldn't want to offend anybody while folks are celebrating the birth of our Lord and Saviour.   That wouldn't be right.   So let's be politically correct and keep religion out of it entirely except let's toss in a dandy pair of Menorahs!  Now I could be wrong.  There's a little figure in there and I think it's Caspar the Friendly Ghost or a snow-covered Charlie Brown.   Could that be the Baby J hisself?  Nah, he'd have that little halo thing wouldn't he?

In any case I was pleased to have Michael so openly thank me for keeping the Liberal tradition strong in 2010.   Well, Mike, somebody had to.   Lord know there wasn't much of it to be seen up on Parliament Hill.

And a merry, merry, merry to you and yours too Mike.

Reuters Report - America, Sick Man of The World

Reuters has published a special report on the structural threats that beset America's economy and must be solved if the United States is to recover its place in the world.  It compares America's predicament today to the years when Germany was considered the "sick man of Europe" and finds lessons in how the Germans restored their country to its place today as an economic powerhouse.

Unfortunately, what worked to salvage Germany - vision, willpower and sacrifice - are qualities that America would have to relearn, attributes at odds with America's deeply divided society and disparate wellbeing.  In today's America the answers may be out of reach.

Because Canada's future is so tightly lashed to America's the Reuters report is well worth reading.    We have to realize what's coming long before it arrives.

How Do You Say "Buggered" In Irish?

Whatever it is, I'll bet that word is on the tip of the tongue of most Irishmen today as their country staggers on the brink a financial disaster that just won't go away.

Ireland recently relented and accepted an E.U. bailout but on terms that might make the IMF look like the Sally Anns.   According to Der Spiegel, the bailout is shifting the crushing burden of the rash profligacy of Ireland's banks from the speculators onto the backs of the Irish people.

The EU has failed to make the foreign bondholders take a hit on the losses from toxic real estate loans. In particular, the ECB insisted that the interests of the German, British and French banks would continue to be protected. Instead, Irish taxpayers are being asked to pay the bill: at a hefty interest rate of 5.8 percent, to ensure the foreign creditors will get their money back rather than face any losses.

That may be something German banks welcome, but it is a disaster for Ireland. And many economists now predicts that it is just a question of time before the country defaults. " This 'bailout' will sink the Republic,"   warns economist David McWilliams in the Belfast Telegraph. "  It is the EU giving us enough rope to hang ourselves in the hope that we don't hang all of them."

If Ireland fully exhausts the EU bailout then it will double the national debt to €175 billion by 2014, he calculates, and the interest on that would come to €8.5 billion a year -- more than even the thriftiest of governments could afford.

To make sure that the state does not drown in its debts, the annual rate of growth has to be significantly higher than the interest due on the national debt, McWilliams argues. If the Irish economy does not grow by 8-10 percent, then the country will end in a debt-deflationary spiral. And even the most optimistic government projections are just below 4 percent.

Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a similar argument. It would be neither politically nor economically sustainable to force Ireland to pay 10 percent of its national income as reparations to bondholders, he wrote recently in German business daily Handelsblatt, " as anyone who remembers Germany's own experience with World War I reparations should know."   It would be more sensible to have a debt restructuring and offer the bondholders 20 cents on the euro, he argues. 

[Trinity College economics professor Kevin] O'Rourke's prognosis is as foreboding as that of his colleagues. " We now face a negative spiral in which austerity causes emigration, which increases the burden of the debt, which ultimately leads to more austerity,"   he writes. He recommends as a way out the path pursued by Iceland. In a referendum, the voters rejected a proposal to pay back their banks' international creditors. Ireland, O'Rourke argues, needs a "  radical change."

And so ends the once vaunted Celtic Tiger.   The average Irish household is predicted to be 7,500 Euros poorer annually by 2012 due to government austerity.   The initial bailout adds another 17,000 Euros per capita to the national debt.   But the bondholders, the European banks that colluded with the Irish banks in the recklessness that brought Ireland to its knees - they'll be safe.

Yeah, Just as Soon as We Let Clifford Olsen Adopt

Michael Vick says he's looking forward to some day having a pet dog.   The convicted dogfighting ring operator has been prohibited by court order from ever again owning a dog.   The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback also spent 18-months in prison for his crimes that included disposing of wounded dogs by hanging and electrocution.

Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard

I Know, Let's Give Them More Guns

Good news:  Western military forces are making headway in Afghanistan and it's good enough that Washington can begin withdrawing its forces next July.

Headway seems to be defined as the suppression of the Taliban presence in Kandahar and Helmand provinces due to the recent military offensive.

If the Afghan report sounds good to Washington, it probably sounds even better to the Talibs.   We're sticking to this notion of a military solution to Afghanistan's troubles and that's music to the ears of the Taliban.  When we turn up the heat, they lay low.  We've had ten years, plenty of time, to watch the rebels disappear only to return when it suits them.   That's what you do when you're outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned by a foreign army, you fall back on the one decisive advantage you've got - time.   You win simply by surviving with your capabilities more or less intact.

Elsewhere on the front page of today's New York Times is another Afghanistan story, this one about the spreading presence of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.   That's what they do.  You press here, they go somewhere else.

The Pentagon’s year-end review will emphasize hard-won progress in the south, the heartland of the insurgency, where the military has concentrated most troops. But those advances have come at the expense of security in the north and east, with some questioning the wisdom of the focus on the south and whether the coalition can control the entire country. 

 The NATO command has largely defined Afghanistan's instability in terms of the Taliban insurgency, which is the most recent fight here, but hardly the only one that looms in people’s memories. For many, the period 20 years ago when mujahedeen warlords divided the country into fiefs shapes their current fears. It was the behavior of the warlords, among other factors, that drove people into the arms of the Taliban in the 1990s. 

Pablo Percelsi, the director of operations in northern Afghanistan for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has had a staff and presence here for 30 years [warns], “The Taliban are only a small part of the equation.”
“You have the whole fabric of the militias,” he added. “There are groups that collect money, and they collect it from civilians and by doing kidnapping and bold actions against internationals.”

NATO’s current strategy aims to transform many of these militias into local police forces that would augment the often thin national police. However, many local Afghan officials worry that the plan legitimizes the groups, some of which are made up of little more than thugs, and amounts to putting government uniforms on gunmen whose real loyalty is to their local strongman. 

Isn't that interesting.   It's only taken a decade for us to realize that the Talibs aren't the only bunch that undermine the future of Afghanistan.  So are the guys we're supporting, the thugs we want to equip and arm.  I'm sorry but that's what happens when you perpetuate a culture of tribalism and warlordism - which is precisely what we have done in Afghanistan.  We have never attempted to douse the embers that will reignite the Afghan civil war once we clear out.  This is what you get for a decade of indifference and rank stupidity.

My head hurts.   Can we go home now?

Flooding Imperils Britain's Food Supply

One of the things climate change has brought the United Kingdom is water - much too much of it.   Always known as a rainy place, Britain is now known as a flooding place.   In London the government is pursuing massive infrastructure programmes to protect British cities and towns from fresh and seawater inundation but a report warns they're leaving the country's farmland at risk:

The government's emphasis on protecting towns and cities will expose low-lying food-producing areas to flooding and salination, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA).

" Land managers need to be able to defend their properties ... even when the Environment Agency has withdrawn funding from what it regards as uneconomic defences,"   it says in a report. " The ability to continue using land for producing food, energy, textiles, pharmaceutical and industrial products is a national asset and not the liability it is treated as in the government's cost benefit analysis."   The cost of traditional "hard" sea defences is about £5m a mile.

The report, entitled The Tide is High, criticises " managed retreat"   policies. " The amount of high-grade agricultural land that will be lost through erosion and flooding in Lincolnshire alone could have a significant impact on our ability to produce food in the future, at a time when it will be more needed than ever. Current projections put 39% of Lincolnshire's land area in danger of flooding from the sea and rivers."

Has nobody told these Brits that global warming is a hoax?

Halliburton, Bush Sr. and James Baker Get Cheney Off the Hook for 250-Million Dollars

Yes it does, only we need them in a cell.

It took a bit of arm twisting and bags of cash but George Bush Sr., his former Secretary of State, James Baker, and Halliburton succeeded in getting Nigeria to drop corruption charges against Dick Cheney.

A spokesman for Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says a plea bargain that saved Cheney from prosecution was reached in London last week.

A quarter-billion bucks.   That's a lot of mea culpa for the Dickster.   The sum is said to include $130-million "trapped" in Switzerland.   That sounds like code for "misappropriated" which is a nice way of saying purloined or filched.

Global Warming, check. Freshwater Crisis, check. Desertification? Really?

Apparently desertification, the degradation of arable, productive farmland into barren desert, is the "greatest environmental challenge of our time."  At least that's how the UN's  top drylands official, Luc Gnacadja, sees it.

Today kicks off the UN decade for the fight against desertification.   Gnacadja, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, warns, "The top 20cm of soil is all that stands between us and extinction."

Land conflicts in Somalia, dust storms in Asia and the food price crises of recent years all stem from the degradation of land, he said, due to overuse by humans and the impacts of global warming. Since the early 1980s, a quarter of the planet's land has been despoiled and 1% a year continues to be lost.

The better known issues of climate change and loss of biodiversity are both rooted in the global loss of fertile soil, said Gnacadja, as the soil harbours a huge stock of carbon and the health of creatures living in the soil underpins global food production and forest growth. The reason desertification has not been a priority is because 90% of the 2.1 billion people who live in drylands live in developing countries, he said.

" Even in their own countries, they are the poorest among the poor and live in remote areas,"  said Gnacadja. "  The world is driven by city dwellers: political leaders are setting agendas to satisfy people who live in the cities, we therefore tend to perceive soil as just dust, or mud, or a dumping place. But if we don't preserve that first 20cm of soil, where will we get our food and water from?"   Half the world's livestock are raised on drylands and a third of crops, especially wheat.

Gnacadja is pushing for carbon credits to be earned by drylands people for preserving their land.   I don't know how well that's going to go over.  Paying people to not harm themselves, for not destroying their own property perhaps isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

Desertification leads to starvation and that leads to wars of subsistence and other perils.  It is intertwined with a gaggle of environmental challenges beginning with the big two - global warming and freshwater exhaustion - and includes deforestation, species extinction and migration, resource depletion, disease and pest migration, air/soil/water contamination, the collapse of fisheries, drought and the increasing frequency of severe storm events and, underlying them all, overpopulation and global security threats.

Here's the thing.  You can't fight any one of these successfully unless you fight them all.  They're all interconnected.   They all share some common causes and they all require some similar solutions.  Gnacadja is right.   That top 20 cms. of soil is all that stands between civilization and extinction but so does that onion-skin of atmosphere that wraps our planet and so does the distribution and recycling of the earth's freshwater resources.   Without them life becomes a matter of weeks, days or even minutes.

What I find frustrating in the annual climate change summits is that world leaders take global warming in isolation and then try to apply skewed mechanisms that ultimately block effective solutions.  At the end of the day the only thing that can block carbon emissions is carbon rationing enforced through effective carbon pricing - the very policy that Harper and Layton used to destroy the Dion Liberals.

These challenges need responses that measure the problems and calibrate the responses according to what is required to rectify them, not a haze of negotiations, dubious "targets" and offsets.   These are organic, living problems and that means they're moving targets which defy convoluted solutions based on out of date data.   All you can do with the current approach is to chase your tail.

This isn't about saving the earth.  The earth will be fine.   It isn't about saving the trees.   They'll be fine too.   It is entirely about saving mankind and preserving our civilization but in a form that can live in harmony with the very finite limits of our biosphere.  Even if you believe that biblical claptrap about god promising never to destroy earth again this has nothing to do with a god destroying anything.   It is solely mankind that's destroying, not the planet, but man's and a lot of other animals' ability to keep living on earth.   Your god has nothing to do with this.  This one's on you.

I feel badly for Stephane Dion.   He had the vision we need in our leaders but he utterly failed to lead the Canadian public to his vision or to defend his vision against the unscrupulous attacks of Stephen Harper and Jack Layton.

In Fairness to the Tar Sands

An independent team of researchers from The Royal Society of Canada reports that there's no credible evidence that Tar Sands contaminants are causing cancer in downstream communities.   But the team went on to castigate Alberta and federal government authorities for being asleep at the wheel:

But when it comes to regulating the industry, governments have not kept up with its growth, especially Alberta's Environment and Resource Development ministries, the report says.

" These agencies need to seriously review whether they have and can effectively maintain the specialized technical expertise needed to regulate industrial development of this scope and sophistication,"  the summary says.

As well, Alberta's environmental review process is " seriously deficient"  in assessing health and socio-economic impacts.

..." There has generally been inadequate overall risk assessment for technological and natural disasters, assessment of community health impacts, integrated and cumulative ecological impact assessment, and assessment of regional socio-economic impacts."

Water monitoring of the oilsands is of a lower standard than that used for forestry and the data from the program isn't made public.

" There are valid concerns about the structure of [the monitoring program] that need to be addressed regarding the appropriateness of the data collected, public access to data, independent scientific oversight and verification of results."

Not enough is known about groundwater movement in northern Alberta, says the summary, especially as the industry moves from open-pit to underground mining.

As well, the report says the province hasn't obtained enough financial guarantees to ensure oilsands mines get cleaned up — although the province has said it is negotiating with industry on the issue.

The report also scolds Ottawa for failing to enforce federal legislation over the oilsands.

" Despite many clear areas of valid federal interest, the profile of relevant federal agencies has been low."


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/12/15/oilsands-scientists.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g4:r2:c0:b40275744#ixzz18D8ZjCLr

Global Warming Impacts - Arctic Cross-Breeding

Polar bears breeding with grizzlies, bowheads breeding with right whales, narwhals with belugas, even porpoises with seals.   This is apparently going on in the Arctic.

In a commentary published in Wednesday's peer-reviewed journal Nature, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine biologist Brendan Kelly and his co-authors say rapidly disappearing sea ice means the barrier that once kept Arctic species apart is literally melting away.

" In addition to that, marine mammals are particularly infamous for hybridizing,"  says Kelly. " It turns out their genes haven't changed so much that they can't interbreed."

Co-author David Tallmon, a marine biologist with the University of Alaska, says while it's unlikely hybridization is widespread in the Arctic, no one has looked systemically at the issue. He and Kelly, along with Andrew Whiteley, a conservation geneticist at the University of Massachusetts, say the question of whether to try to stop animals from crossbreeding needs immediate attention.
" It's likely to become increasingly important as the summer ice diminishes and is ultimately lost,"  says Tallmon. " Hybridization is essentially impossible to reverse once it has begun on a large scale. So, we want to be sure to halt any hybridization before it becomes unmanageable and unique lineages are lost forever."


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/12/15/science-arctic-hybrids.html#ixzz18D6wBHIy

Claimed Stem Cell Cure for HIV & Leukemia

If this is true it is the story of the decade.  

DOCTORS in Berlin, working with an American patient with HIV and leukaemia, have declared in a peer-reviewed journal they believe they have cured both illnesses.

It would be the first time a HIV patient has been cured. The procedure is creating a buzz among HIV academics in the US.

Experts call the development encouraging, but warn that years of work remain before the treatment could lead to a general therapy against HIV.

 

'''Cured' is a strong word. But this is very encouraging,'' said Dr David Scadden, a co-director of the Harvard University Stem Cell Institute. ''From all indications, there was no residual virus.

''It's as good an outcome as one could hope for.''

There'll Never Be an Effective Global Warming Treaty. Here's Why.

 Can you imagine North America reducing its carbon emissions by 74% by 2020, 95% by 2030 - from a 1990 baseline to boot?   Roughly put that's what we would do if the balance of the atmosphere's safe carbon carrying capacity was divided up on a per capita basis.

A 74% reduction from 1990 levels within just 10-years.  Never in our wildest dreams is that going to happen.  So we're going to need help from the low-emitting nations, the poor countries.   And that's going to be costly.  It is going to require the transfer of an awful lot of wealth from the industrialized world to the Third World.   And that's going to be an ongoing thing.  We're going to have to pay them to adopt the green technologies that our locked-in carbon dependency won't allow except through a slow transition.

We've dithered so long that we're now pretty much reduced to schemes like this.  Probably the worst thing about this solution is how vulnerable it is to attack by its opponents.  You'll hear the usual battle cries about "world government" and devious, liberal plots to effect massive and pointless transfers of wealth to the undeserving Third World and all the other claptrap they still fling from their pants about global warming.

This does not exactly arrive at an auspicious moment.  The rich people have suddenly found themselves up to their necks in government, commercial and individual debt.   We don't know how to provide for our own societies so where are we going to find those extra trillions for the poor countries?   Even if we found the money and the will to part with it, this won't save us from the pain of decarbonizing our economies and our societies nor will it spare us from the climate change impacts already in the pipeline.

These are policies that would be a very tough sell even to very cohesive societies in periods of general affluence.   Yet the success of these policies falls to very divided societies driven by wedge politics in a period of protracted and deep financial uncertainty.

This has the makings of a political football unlike any we have ever seen.  And the longer the forces of delay prevail, the more enormous that football becomes.  It's the sort of thing that breeds its own inertia even as time to adopt it is running out.

Leaving South Asia's Problems to Asians

Afghanistan bled the coffers of the Soviet Union in the past just as it bleeds the American treasury today.   The question is why America keeps banging away after a decade of a war that could easily go on for another two decades or longer?

Where's the reward?  What is America actually getting out of this?  Many years ago I asked a psychiatrist about an individual who exhibited what I considered irrational and self-defeating behaviours.  This person was reasonably well educated and moderately accomplished and, in most respects, quite rational.  The doctor explained that rational people can indeed do seemingly irrational things against their self interest.   The difficult problem was determining why.  People do what they do for what they get out of it, even though that can be real or imagined.

So what does the United States hope to get out of Afghanistan?  It won't defeat al Qaeda there.   Those guys have gone to Pakistan and destinations beyond.  If it wants to shoot al Qaeda guys it should move its army to Yemen.  The Taliban?  You can hold them at bay, sort of, but they're really just a tribal militia in a land packed full of tribal militias headed by warlords of incredibly flexible loyalties.  We set out to build a strong, central government defended by a strong national army and a strong national police service.  We did this despite the history of the place that only saw peace in a very loosely federated form.  Even the Bible says you can't build a house on sand.

So what's the payoff?  Who is keeping this war going and what are they getting out of it?  An article in The Guardian on the death of Richard Holbrooke suggests that his former boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has bought the Pentagon's position that the military campaign will work in the end.  She (and presumably her boss likewise) accepts General Petraeus' assurance that a little more banging away on the Talibs will motivate the rebels to negotiate in earnest.  That is breathtakingly simplistic yet that's the only answer short of outright lunacy that is consistent with America's posture toward Afghanistan.

So there it is in a nutshell.   America's strategy is "Whack a Mole."    The White House believes it can achieve a desired political outcome through military force.  Is it pure coincidence that our political objectives have steadily diminished even as our military force has escalated? 

Remember what we went over there to accomplish?   We were going to destroy al Qaeda; crush the Taliban; establish a secular, Western-democracy complete with the essential core institutions - legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, armed and police forces.   How well have we done so far?   We've got a rigged executive and legislative branch, a judiciary and bureaucracy that rival each other in corruption, a relatively hapless military and a positively predatory police force.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention a narco-economy that fuels all of the institutions I just mentioned.  We're setting out to build an Afghan army that the Afghan government's treasury cannot begin to afford.   And we're going to force the Taliban to negotiate with whom exactly, for what, when?

So that's it.   That's what America hopes to get by prolonging its war.   It hopes to get out.   Well maybe Washington should simply cut to the chase and get out.  The only reason for staying on is if it results in a better outcome than we've achieved over the past decade.   We're like Charlie Brown and the military is like Lucy holding the football.

Oh well.

Here's what I think is going to happen.  Washington will drag this out for a few more years and leave a Potemkin Village of an Afghan state behind.  Then the neighbours will either intervene to broker a peace deal or the country will power up their unresolved civil war and go back at it, each side with its own sponsors.   One way or the other, South Asian problems won't be decided by anyone other than South Asians and certainly not by us.

Did Amelia Earhart Die a Slow Death on a Desert Island?

We'll know soon enough when DNA recovered from a bone found on a forlorn Pacific atoll is tested against that from a descendant of the Earhart line.  If it is part of the remains of Amelia Earhart we'll know she probably died of thirst and was eventually consumed by crabs.

Read more here

America's Emerging Oligarchy - Dismantling Checks & Balances

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court tossed George W. Bush the American presidency, courts in that country have been thundering along on a rightwing, corporatist stampede that makes a mockery of America's once vaunted system of checks and balances. 

Remember Tony Scalia indulging himself on hunting trips with Dick Cheney while he had before him appeals against Cheney himself?

The Roberts court showed its true colours in the Citizens United case that granted corporations the right to spend as much as they liked to skew elections their way.

More recently, a federal court judge struck down as unconstitutional a key part of the Democrat's healthcare reform law.  Now it has been disclosed that Virginia judge Henry Hudson has a financial interest in Campaign Solutions Inc., a GOP consulting firm that has backed anti healthcare reform candidates including Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner and John Mccain.

America's judicial system isn't bent, it's broken.   It has now offered itself up as a annex to the rightwing of the legislative branch.   This is just one more step in the advance of oligarchy, one more body blow to what once was American democracy.   The merger of government and corporatism becomes stronger by the day.  Mussolini would be proud that someone is keeping his dream of fascism alive.

Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan - Three Strikes and You're Out.

Remember when we bombed the hell out of Serbia to shoehorn the liberation of Kosovo?   So how well has that worked out?   When Kosovo became independent agencies like the CIA described the place as pretty much a criminal enterprise that lived off smuggled cigarettes, gasoline and concrete.   Sort of like a Mafia state.

Who knew?   Now the European Union has released a report from a 2-year investigation that accuses the Kosovar P.M. of heading a human organs, drugs and arms ring.  Well, at least he diversifies.

[Prime Minister] Hashim Thaçi is identified as " the boss"  of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.

The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade.

Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are accused of secretly taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a few Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.
Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.

Why do we even bother?   This is the sort of thing that Harper & Ignatieff love - "muscular foreign policy" as Iggy puts it.   Canada went to war to liberate Kuwait.  We went to war to liberate Kosovo.   We went to war to liberate Afghanistan.  Kuwait funnels money to support the Islamists who kill us.   Kosovo and Afghanistan promptly turn into drug-dealing, criminal enterprises.

Does Canada need another leader who will get us into more of this lunacy?

When will we ever learn.   Consider this warning, given three years ago, from Paddy Ashdowne, the international community's High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina until 2006:


" The Iraq experience represents the triumph of hubris, nemesis and, above all, amnesia over common sense. We have abandoned experience in favour of a kind of 19th-century 'gunboat' diplomacy approach to peace making. And it isn't working. Getting intervention right is not rocket science and it's not new. Spend at least as much time and effort planning the peace as preparing for the war that precedes it. Base plans on a proper knowledge of the country. Leave ideologies and prejudices at home. Do not try to fashion someone else's country in your own image. Leave space for its people to reconstruct the country they want, not the one you want for them. Don't lose the 'golden hour' after the fighting is over. Dominate security from the start; then concentrate on the rule of law. Make economic regeneration a priority. Understand the importance to the international community effort of co-ordination, cohesion and speaking with one voice. And do not wait until everything is as it would be in our country. Leave when the peace is sustainable.

" At present, we intervene as though democracy was our big idea. It is not. We are not even particularly good at it ourselves. Good governance is our big idea; the rule of law is our big idea; open systems and the market-based economy - these are our big ideas. A stable democracy, fashioned to the conditions and the cultures of the country concerned, is what comes afterwards. It is the product of good governance, not its precursor.

"...we have chosen the wrong mindset to defeat al-Qaeda. We have chosen to fight an idea primarily with force. We seek to control territory; it seeks to capture minds. This is, at heart, a battle of ideas and values. Unless we realise that and can win on that agenda, no amount of force can deliver victory.

" We are not winning. In those regions of the world where this struggle is fiercest, civilisation is losing and medievalism is winning."

Gee, I wonder if Ashdowne would be interested in leading our Liberal Party?

Desert Storm - Coalitition of the Not Very Bright

Gee, it sounded like such a good war when it started.   Saddam had overrun Kuwait.   Iraqi forces were on the Saudis border and supposedly threatening them too.   We had us one of those "just" wars everybody likes to much.

We bombed the living hell out of Saddam's army in Kuwait and destroyed most of his war waging infrastructure throughout Iraq and then a 48-hour land war and, voila - we win!  It was about the most one-sided military victory ever and we even had video recordings taken right from our missiles' nose cones.  Cool or what.

So we restored Kuwait to the Kuwaitis or at least the oligarchs who run that oil state (curious how petro-states evolve into oligarchies) and they couldn't have been more grateful, could they?  Apparently not.

WikiLeak's diplo dump had a few eye-openers about how our good buds in Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, yes, Kuwait continue to shovel big bucks to Islamist radicals, including al Qaeda.   Say what?   We went halfway around the world to save their asses and they're paying guys to blow our asses off with IEDs?

Actually our Kuwaiti buddies are a pernicious bunch of little pricks.   The Kuwaiti bosses have now given al-Jazeera the boot, complaining the Arabic news service defied government warnings not to cover recent political developments in their country.   Recent political developments like video of police attacking opposition assembly members at a meeting to discuss their government's crackdown on freedoms.

From Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE to Kuwait we're propping up a gaggle of anti-democratic thugs, a lot of whom think it's just dandy to use the West's oil money to finance Islamist radicalism.  If we really can't, or won't, live without their oil maybe we should crack down and start supporting democratic reform in these countries.   Radical groups like al Qaeda can't survive without the backing of the Arab Street but by supporting oppressive Arab regimes we're helping to keep the Islamists' lifelines open.

There are Cyclists, Then There's Danny

Even if you aren't or never have been into bicycling, prepare to be floored by Danny MacAskill: