It Really Is Time to Cull the Herd

My daughter called me during her lunch break today.  She was at a trendy Vancouver grocery called Urban Fare, the sort of place that makes Whole Foods seems a bit declasse, or so I'm told.  On display at said Urban Fare was the latest and greatest - square watermelons going for the enticing price of just $199.99.  Not even two hundred dollars, imagine!

 

 





 Seriously, isn't it time to cull the herd?

China Moves to Nationalize Christianity

Yeah, I know, it sounds wacky but it's true.  China wants to nationalize as in "Sinicize" the Christian religion as it's practiced in the Peoples Republic.

“The construction of Chinese Christian theology should adapt to China’s national condition and integrate with Chinese culture,” Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, said at a Shanghai forum on the “Sinicization of Christianity,” according to Chinese state media.

...the officials’ comments last week indicate that the Chinese Communist Party intends to further tighten its grip over Christianity. There are a number of possible targets and motivations for the crackdown.

 

First, Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, has exploded in China in recent years. As The Diplomat has previously noted, China is already estimated to have 58 million Protestants and some believe it will be home to the largest Christian population by 2030. Roughly one half of China’s current Protestants are estimated to belong to underground, illegal churches.

 

The officials who spoke at the Shanghai forum indicated that this rapid growth was the rationale behind the crackdown. For example, Gao Feng, the president of the China Christian Council, told the audience: “Over the past years, China’s Protestantism has become one of the fastest growing universal churches.” Wang himself noted: “Over the past decades, the Protestant churches in China have developed very quickly with the implementation of the country’s religious policy. In the future, we will continue to boost the development of Christianity in China.”

 

The growth of religion in China is to be expected given the government’s relaxation of restrictions on it (compared to the Mao era) and the profound socio-economic changes China has undergone since the reform and opening up period began. However, its growth also gives it the potential to act as a unifying force for political opposition to the CCP’s authority. Crucially, Christianity could potentially cut across regional divides in China.

Hedges Invokes "God's Covenant" on Gaza

Chris Hedges spoke at a rally and march in support of Gaza in New York on Saturday.  A Harvard divinity school grad, he invoked God's Covenant.   Here are excerpts from his speech:

God’s covenant in the Promised Land was not made, finally, with any race or religion. It was not made with the Jews. It was not made with the Muslims. It was not made with the Christians. God’s covenant—in the Bible and the Koran—was made with the righteous. When Ibrahim asked in the holy Koran if the covenant could be inherited, he was told bluntly: “My covenant is not given to oppressors.” And God’s iron requirement to stand with the oppressed occurs as well in the Hebrew and Greek bibles. Those who turn away from righteousness—be they Jew, Christian or Muslim—violate that covenant. They are not God’s people.

God’s covenant is made with those who love mercy and do justice, with those who care for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, with those who frustrate the ways of the wicked, with those who bring good news to the oppressed, who bind up the brokenhearted, who proclaim liberty to the captives and release to all those in prison, including those imprisoned in Gaza. God’s covenant is with those men and women—Jews, Christians and Muslims, believers and nonbelievers—who say, “Let my people go, oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go.” And God calls these people oaks of righteousness. And they are God’s people.

Read more here.

The F-35 Also Comes Up Short in the Eyes of the US Navy

A few days ago it was the US Air Force Air Combat Command chief arguing that his air force needs to get working on a 6th-generation replacement before the 5th generation F-35 even enters operational service.  General Mike Hostage's complaint was that the troubled warplane's weapons bays were too "shallow" - were too small to hold an adequate amount of weaponry.

Now it's the US Navy complaining that getting stuck with only the F-35 could render America's mighty carrier fleet "irrelevant."  What's the navy's gripe?  It's that the F-35 is no longer very stealthy.  An article in the US Naval Institute News warns that the 35's intended targets, Russia and China, have made terrific progress on developing multi-band radars capable of seeing through and targeting the F-35.

The navy seems to believe it needs an "all-aspect" aircraft, a thinly veiled criticism of the F-35's stealth cloaking that is frontal aspect only.  Adversaries approaching from either side, above, below or behind can detect - and attack -  the F-35 just fine.

 "...given the proliferation of low frequency radars, there are serious questions about the ability of the F-35C’s survivability against the toughest of air defenses."  That's not pulling any punches, eh? 

"All-aspect is highly desirable against this sort of networked [anti-air] environment.”

"Fundamentally, the Navy's lack of an all-aspect broadband stealth jet on the carrier flight deck is giving fuel to advocates of a high-end Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft that can tackle the toughest enemy air defenses.

"Without such capability, the Navy's carrier fleet will fade into irrelevance." 

What is the message for Canada when America's two main customers for the F-35 - the US Air Force and the US Navy - are already voicing complaints about the inadequacies of the warplane and clamouring for another warplane to take its place?  Bear in mind that these latest complaints - the inadequate weapons load and the obsolescence of the F-35's stealth cloaking - are just two of the recognized drawbacks.  Add to that, when the F-35 does run into the opposition, its limited fuel load and lack of supercruise could leave it at the mercy of modern fighter interceptors except they're not likely to be very merciful.

I think the message is clear.  Let's not take the enormously expensive leap into unproven and dubious "5th generation" technology.  Remember that, while this is supposedly 5th generation, it's also "beta" technology.  If we're really of a mind to get into air wars with China and Russia in the next 20-years, let's invest in bargain-price cruise missiles.  Congress has the US military in a headlock that will force those admirals and generals to buy 2,400 F-35's.  Another 65 of them parked in Canadian hangars won't do much to improve or weaken either country's air defences. 

"This Changes Everything"

Naomi Klein's new book, "This Changes Everything, Capitalism v. the Climate," is due for release September 12.

The theme of the book echoes what has been written here for years - we cannot survive capitalism.  Free market capitalism, enshrined by neo-liberalism, guarantees that we will perish.  It should be alarming that all of our big 3 political leaders today are devoutly neo-liberal.  Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair are unquestionably neo-liberal.

Here are a few excerpts from posts of the past. 

January, 2012: "Capitalism No Longer Fits."  -  "Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us."  What a curious thing for the founder and chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum, professor Klaus Schwab to declare.  "A global transformation is urgently needed and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility," he added.

"Growing inequities within and between countries and rising unemployment are no longer sustainable ... We must rethink our traditional notions of economic growth and global competitiveness, not only by focusing on growth rates and market penetration, but also, equally — if not more importantly — by assessing the quality of economic growth."

January, 2014: "A Reformed Capitalism for the 21st Century." - As we steadily run out of resources, we'll need to devise some sort of allocation system to replace the free market model of the past two centuries.  It would be entirely sensible, if we are to start living within the finite limits of our environment, to require those who want access to resources to justify themselves.

What do they intend to produce?  How is it superior to other products? How much research and development has gone into the product?  To what extent is it durable, upgradeable?  What will be the lifespan of the product?  How will it improve the consumer's quality of life?  What will be the resources to production ratios?  What will be the resources to utility ratios? How much of it will be made with recycled materials and how much will be recyclable at the end of its lifespan?  How will it be produced?  What will the manufacturer do to curb emissions and other forms of environmental degradation?

What if we could deter companies from making enormously wasteful, useless junk?  Imagine if we could withhold energy and resources from the production of crap?

August, 2011: "Is Capitalism Self-Destructing; Was Karl Marx Right?" - An interview clip with Nouriel Roubini who warns that the self-destructive transfer of wealth from labour to capital could lead to an economic death spiral.

August, 2011:  "Kapitalism = Capitalism - Regulation." - What we're learning the hard way is that capitalism works best for us when it's subordinate to the state, that is to say it's regulated.   Today the evidence is inescapable that capitalism without regulation becomes the Kapitalism that Marx foresaw.

A word about deregulation.   When you see a politician preaching deregulation you should immediately look for the "for sale" sign tattooed on his forehead.   A politician in a mood to deregulate is generally a politician with something to sell.   What he's selling, in many cases, is the public interest but, of all the forms of political larceny, deregulation is, hands down, the safest.   Sell government assets out the back door and you can go to jail.   Get caught fixing a contract and you may be headed for the Greybar Hotel.   Push through deregulation and you're merely freeing up the economy.  That's why there are six registered lobbyists for every member of the House and Senate - to buy subsidies, tax favouritism, and deregulation for the rich and powerful.

February, 2012: "The Myth of Free Market Capitalism." - Barry Lynn explores this in a fascinating essay in this month's Harper's , "Killing the Competition, How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets."  Lynn traces the powerful narrowing of control of American market sectors, transforming small producers into serfs to an insidious form of feudal capitalism.

"...every day, there are fewer buyers; fewer of them.  Hence they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms - or simply to dictate.

"...monopolization of our public markets is first and foremost a political crisis, amounting to nothing less than the re-establishment of private government.   What is at stake is the survival of our democratic republic."

August, 2011: "What Adam Smith Didn't Know." -  Now it's Paul Woolley speaking out.   The expert in market dysfunctionality who founded a research institute into the subject at the London School of Economics, tells Der Spiegel that today's markets are spinning out of control.

The developments in recent weeks have made it quite clear that the markets don't function properly. Things are spinning out of control and are potentially dangerous for society. Only a fraternity of academic high priests connected to the finance markets is still speaking of efficient markets. Still each market participant is pursuing their own selfish interests. The market isn't reaching equilibrium -- it's falling into chaos.

...The finance sector can -- and is -- growing until it overwhelms the economy. In good years the US finance industry cashes in on more than 40 percent of all corporate profits. In bad years they are saved by the taxpayers. The agents are doing a devilishly good job of developing innovative, complicated new products that people can't understand. It gives them the opportunity to earn excess returns and attract the best talent. While they are acting rationally, the result is a catastrophe.

The thrust of these posts is that both nationally and globally, free market capitalism has reached the point where it has rendered us economically and environmentally dysfunctional.  It has led us, much as Marx predicted, to the edge of the abyss, to collapse.  Our political leadership will not see the writing on the wall no matter how obvious and plain.  The measure of their madness is that they still cling to neo-classical economics and its fixation with perpetual, exponential economic growth.

As for Ms. Klein and her new book, she sees the onset of global warming as delivering up an incentive for us to abandon traditional capitalism.  It's our last, best chance to remake our world.

Hillary's Neo-Con Tendencies Come Shining Through

The Empress strikes back and she's coming on hard - right.  Barack Obama's ex-secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, bit the hand that once fed her with a drive-by attack on her president's foreign policy.

Hillary slammed Obama on both Syria and Gaza.  She criticized him for not acting decisively on Syria at the outset.  Obama should have helped "build a credible fighting force" of people involved in the original anti-Assad rebellion.  She blamed the president's failure for leaving the door open for radical Islamists to take over. Wow, that sounds like exactly what happened in Libya while she was secretary of state.

"Asked about Obama's slogan of 'Don't do stupid stuff' to describe his foreign policy thinking, Clinton said, 'Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." 

Hillary showed her true, neo-con colours with her support of Netanyahu's butchery in Gaza.  She naturally fell onto the banal business about Israel's right to defend itself but she even went further when asked about the civilian casualties in Gaza.  Hillary's response?  It was basically along the lines of "shit happens." 

Clinton added that the U.S. also tries to avoid civilian casualties but sometimes mistakes are made.  The trifecta came when she blamed the civilian deaths on Hamas.  "I don't know a nation ...that hasn't made mistakes, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas."

There you have a picture of the woman who stands to become the first female president of the United States.  Hang onto your hat for this woman plainly has something to prove - that she can be as bloodthirsty and obnoxious as anyone the  Republicans can throw against her.  Today, that's the American way.

Politico offers this take:

” I guess she is ready to begin to rip the Clinton franchise away from the Obama franchise,” said Steve Clemons, an Atlantic foreign policy blogger. “This is a staggeringly important interview and, in many ways, is going to reawaken the substantial resistance to her as a reckless interventionist by some quarters. … Her comments on Syria are very provocative.”

One Democratic operative who asked not to be identified said the clear takeaway from the interview was simply that Clinton advisers are “good poll readers,” a reference to Obama’s sinking public approval ratings. A Clinton adviser replied, “That’s ridiculous,” stressing she has no polling operation.
 

Will Scotland Show Us the Way?

Polly Toynbee writes that Scotland might just show the rest of us the way to reset social democracy.  Hint - it involves raising taxes.

The Guardian columnist, writing in the Daily Record, says that with a "yes" vote on independence, Scots will have an opportunity to close the poverty gap if they have the will to pay for it.

Of places in the UK where you are likely to die earliest, heading the list are Glasgow, Dundee, Greenock, Hamilton and Clydebank, alongside England’s unhealthiest spots – Manchester, Blackpool and Burnley – and Belfast. Things look even worse when you measure how many good years residents can expect before they fall into ill health with long-term conditions.

A Yes vote won’t change the facts of social life. That needs a) a radical, egalitarian administration in power at Holyrood that b) adopts an active social programme based on higher tax to pay for higher welfare benefits and fairer pay.

I understand all the other reasons for choosing Yes or No. But for me, an outsider looking in, here’s the No1 independence question. Are the people of Scotland genuinely willing to tax themselves towards social democracy?

That includes all those company bosses threatening to decamp if corporation tax goes up or any hint of top rates rising. But it takes not just taxing the rich – real redistribution means middling folk paying more too.

...It’s admirable that many Scots look north, aspiring to join the Nordics. Who wouldn’t choose to be more Swedish than Cameron British? But those countries start out fairer than Scotland or the UK, with fewer people paid rock-bottom wages and fewer executives elbow-deep in company treasure chests.

To become as fair as Sweden, Scotland would have to move five points on the
Gini coefficient measure of inequality – no small feat. It would take more benefits for the low paid, sick and unemployed, higher tax on incomes over £100,000 and more council tax. It would need a hike in the minimum wage to a living wage and tough controls on boardroom pay.

Would Scotland wear all that? Across the UK, eight out of 10 say the gap between rich and poor is too great – a high and rising number, spurred by the spectacle of bank bonuses in austere times.

Attitude surveys find Scottish residents are a bit more willing to redistribute by a margin of 43 per cent in favour to 34 per cent against. But the rest of the UK is only marginally behind, at 41 per cent for redistributing to 30 per cent against – at least in theory but are they willing in practice?

Does Scotland have the will to show the rest of us the way? With a Yes or a No vote, greater devolved powers will mean freedom to make significant difference. Let’s hope that means more than a shoddy corporation tax race to the bottom.

There It Is Then, Welcome to Our Own Hundred Year War.

According to the former chief of the Australian army, the West has just begun what he foresees to be a hundred year war with Islam.  Now "professor" Peter Leahy says radical Islam has us in its sights.

Currently the director of the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra, professor Leahy told Daily Mail Australia that as a liberal, secular society, Australia is perceived as 'the far enemy' by radical Islamic groups and individuals, and would no doubt continue to be targeted.

'We are already affected in that there are places that would be wise for us not to travel to and there have been terrorist bombings in places that we do travel to, as we can see from 9/11 and both of the Bali bombings,' Mr Leahy said.

 'Australia is involved in the early stages of a war which is likely to last for the rest of the century,' he said. 

'We must be ready to protect ourselves and, where necessary, act pre-emptively to neutralise the evident threat. Get ready for a long war.'

The problem I have with Herr Doktor Leahy and others of his sort is that they never tell us how we're going to win this supposed war or even if we're going to win.  All this guy is telling us is that, in his opinion, we'll be banging this drum for a century.  In other words, he has no idea how in hell we're going to sort this out which seems to be code for one side is going to have to exterminate the other or at least bomb them into submission and servitude.  

Which brings me back to my solution.   The way to defeat radical Islam is through moderate Islam, not slung from the bomb rack of an F-16.  End the factors that radicalize ordinary Muslims.  Recognize that most Muslims have no interest in jihad and simply want to live peaceful lives in freedom.  We need to stop propping up those who oppress them - Muslim, Jewish or Christian.  We need to put the boot in with the Saudi and Kuwaiti sheikhs who fund these radical operators.  Or else we are left with Leahy's default option - endless war.  How well has that worked out for us so far?

 

Chomsky - Gaza In One Paragraph

Noam Chomsky sums up the Gaza butchery:

"It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises in what they delicately call "mowing the lawn." That means shooting fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage that you’ve constructed for them, after which you go to a period of what’s called "ceasefire," which means that Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel concedes, while Israel continues to violate it. Then it’s broken by an Israeli escalation, Hamas reaction. Then you have period of "mowing the lawn." This one is, in many ways, more sadistic and vicious even than the earlier ones."

It's Like the Noonday Sun to a Vampire - Fascist Governments Cannot Stand the Rule of Law

And by "fascist government" I'm referring to the government of Stephen Harper. Steve doesn't like the rule of law.  I'll bet he figures Magna Carta was a huge mistake. Our federal fuhrer thinks himself the supreme law, above the law of those meddling courts of the land.  The law is His to carve into tablets. The courts are merely to dutifully uphold and apply his law.

Steve is regularly at odds with Canada's judiciary and, as CBC News reports, it's Harper government policy to run afoul of the law.

Edgar Schmidt agrees that something is wrong, and he would know — he was the general counsel for the legislative branch at the Department of Justice, until he became a whistleblower and was suspended without pay in late 2012.

He filed documents in December of that year accusing the department of working under "faint hope" — approving legislation even if it has a "combined likelihood of five per cent or less" of being upheld by the courts.

He argued that Ottawa has a duty to introduce charter-compliant legislation — or, at least, tell the public when legislation doesn't pass the test.

The government disagreed, saying that it only needs to do so if legislation is "manifestly unconstitutional, such that no credible argument exists in support of it."

If a lawyer raises an issue with legislation, and management isn't worried, internal documents instruct government lawyers to "proceed to complete drafting or examination (blue-stamping)."

"Blue-stamping" is bureaucrat lingo for approving.

So, even if a piece of legislation has a 99 per cent chance of being defeated by the courts, government policy is to forge ahead.

That throws some cold water on MacKay's now-infamous refrain that even the government's most controversial pieces of legislation are vetted to be charter-compliant.

In other words, Harper deliberately and constantly tries to engage our courts in a pissing contest for his own perverse, political objectives.  Enacting laws that you know full well offend the Charter is patently vexatious and an abuse of the legislative and judicial processes. It's a behaviour that holds the nation itself in contempt.  It's the product of a troubled personality.

China's Coastal Time Bomb

Algae bloom, Qingdao

Much of China's industrialization has occurred in its coastal areas.  As is to be expected, China's coastal waters have paid a horrible price for the country's economic miracle.

A joint Chinese and American research team analyzed five decades of data from Chinese government records and found that the country's coastal marine ecosystem has steadily degraded to an almost irreversible point since 1978—the year the Chinese government introduced sweeping reform to industrialize the country's economy.

...ecosystem changes may only get worse, threatening the 28,000 different marine species that live along the coast as well as China's 1.3 billion people—half of whom live on the industrialized coast.

Before 1978, the diversity and size of China's fish species were steady, but since the economic reforms took place, both have been steadily decreasing. Coral cover in the South China Sea has crashed to 15 percent of pre-1978 levels, according to the study, and red tides—algal blooms that turn coastal waters a deep, biblical red and can be debilitating and fatal to marine life—have increased from around 10 each year before 1980 to between 70 and 120 each year since.

China's coastal gross domestic product growth and population movements mirror this coastal degradation. Between 1950 and the 1978 reforms, China's coastal GDP grew annually by around $2.2 billion. Between 1978 and 2010, China's coastal GDP increased by over two orders of magnitude with the country's coastal GDP contribution rising from 50 percent of the total to 60 percent. China's coastal population also increased from 260 million in 1954 to 400 million in 1978, and to 590 million in 2010.

During that time, China has been fueling its industrial and economic growth partly through massive development of its coastline. Mariculture and fishing activities have expanded to support local populations, pollution levels have increased, and miles of coastlines have been developed and filled in with mud to build larger and busier ports.

"The coastal degradation has been just phenomenal," said Mark Bertness, a marine ecologist at Brown who supervised the study. "The message here is without some kind of regulation on this, some kind of conservation, they're going to burn out the resource base."

The sheer density of China's coastal population boom presents enormous challenges in the context of sea level rise and saltwater inundation of coastal freshwater resources as well as the destruction of coastal fisheries.  If recent predictions of fairly massive and abrupt sea level rise over the next few decades become reality Beijing could face a massive challenge of relocating hundreds of millions of citizens retreating from the sea.  It would be the same story across south, east and southeast Asia and it would spell immense dislocation, suffering and instability.

Mulcair and Trudeau Ignore the Facts

To Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau, Israel's butchery in Gaza is merely self-defence.  That's their opportunistic story and you'll get nowhere trying to shift them off it.  All of which makes it so infuriating to read another factual account of Israel's calculated march to war.  One of these comes via the International Crisis Group and Nathan Thrall:

The current war in Gaza was not one Israel or Hamas sought. But both had no doubt that a new confrontation would come. The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented. It stipulated that all Palestinian factions in Gaza would stop hostilities against Israel, that Israel would end attacks against Gaza by land, sea and air – including the ‘targeting of individuals’ (assassinations, typically by drone-fired missile) – and that the closure of Gaza would essentially end as a result of Israel’s ‘opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas’. An additional clause noted that ‘other matters as may be requested shall be addressed,’ a reference to private commitments by Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause.

During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the quiet on Gaza’s border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.

The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones – agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn’t enter without being fired on – were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.

Israel had committed to holding indirect negotiations with Hamas over the implementation of the ceasefire but repeatedly delayed them, at first because it wanted to see whether Hamas would stick to its side of the deal, then because Netanyahu couldn’t afford to make further concessions to Hamas in the weeks leading up to the January 2013 elections, and then because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it.

This is obviously not the Israel nor is it the Gaza of Mulcair's and Trudeau's fantasies.  Yet it is on those miserable fantasies that Mulcair and Trudeau would have us empower them to forge Canadian foreign policy.  A pox on both of them.

Thrall has chronicled, in detail, the reduction of Gaza by Israel and Egypt in the runup to this latest butchery.  The article deserves to be read in its entirety in order to have an understanding of what underlies this slaughter that our opposition leaders cannot bother to acquire.   

Is It Time to Leave the Muslim World to Sort Out Its Own Troubles?

Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt makes a compelling argument for a new American approach to the Middle East - hands off.

"...the Middle East today is riven by a series of overlapping conflicts along multiple fault lines, driven in good part by protracted government failures and exacerbated by misguided outside meddling. There's the division between Sunni and Shiite, of course, and between Islamists (of many different stripes) and traditional authoritarians (also of several different types). Add to that mix the conflicts along sectarian lines (as in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere), and the recurring suspicions between Arabs and Persians. And don't forget the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which still reverberates throughout the Arab and Islamic world.

"Here's where Americans need to remember the United States may have permanent interests in the Middle East, but not necessarily permanent friends. In terms of its strategic interests, the central U.S. goal since World War II has been to prevent any single power from dominating the oil rich Persian Gulf. However troubled we may be by all the divisions and quarrels in the region, those conflicts also make the possibility that one power will dominate the region more remote than ever. Does anyone seriously think Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS), the Kurds, Russia, Turkey, China or anyone else is going to take over and manage this vast and turbulent area, and smooth out all these rifts and feuds? Of course not. And if that is the case, then America's primary strategic goal will be met whether Washington lifts a finger or not.

"Some will argue that we have a moral responsibility to try to end the obvious suffering in different places, and a strategic imperative to eradicate terrorists and prevent the spread of WMD. These are laudable goals, but if the history of the past twenty years teaches us anything, it is that forceful American interference of this sort just makes these problems worse. The Islamic State wouldn't exist if the neocons hadn't led us blindly into Iraq, and Iran would have less reason to contemplate getting nuclear weapons if it hadn't watched the United States throw its weight around in the region and threaten it directly with regime change.

"So instead of acting like a hyperactive juggler dashing between a dozen spinning plates, maybe the best course is to step back even more than we have already. No, I don't mean isolationism: What I mean is taking seriously the idea of strategic disengagement and putting the whole region further down on America's list of foreign policy priorities. Instead of constantly cajoling these states to do what we think is best -- and mostly getting ignored or rebuked by them -- maybe we should let them sort out these problems themselves for awhile. And if any of them eventually want American help, it should come at a steep price."

Warning from Germany - We Are "Mentally Mobilizing" for War

Every war is accompanied by a kind of mental mobilization: war fever. 

An editorial in a leading German financial paper, Handelsblatt, warns of the dangerous spread of war fever through the West.

Even smart people are not immune to controlled bouts of this fever. “This war in all its atrociousness is still a great and wonderful thing. It is an experience worth having“ rejoiced Max Weber in 1914 when the lights went out in Europe. Thomas Mann felt a “cleansing, liberation, and a tremendous amount of hope“.

We interrupt our own train of thought: “History is not repeating itself!” But can we be so sure about that these days? In view of the war events in the Crimean and eastern Ukraine, the heads of states and governments of the West suddenly have no more questions and all the answers. The US Congress is openly discussing arming Ukraine. The former security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recommends arming the citizens there for house-to-house and street combat. The German Chancellor, as it is her habit, is much less clear but no less ominous: “We are ready to take severe measures.“

German journalism has switched from level-headed to agitated in a matter of weeks. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the field of vision of a sniper scope.

Newspapers we thought to be all about thoughts and ideas now march in lock-step with politicians in their calls for sanctions against Russia's President Putin. Even the headlines betray an aggressive tension as is usually characteristic of hooligans when they 'support' their respective teams.

The Tagesspiegel: “Enough talk!“ The FAZ: “Show strength“. The Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Now or never.“ The Spiegel calls for an “End to cowardice“: “Putin's web of lies, propaganda, and deception has been exposed. The wreckage of MH 17 is also the result of a crashed diplomacy.“

Western politics and German media agree.

Every reflexive string of accusations results in the same outcome: in no time allegations and counter-allegations become so entangled that the facts become almost completely obscured. Who deceived who first?

Did it all start with the Russian invasion of the Crimean or did the West first promote the destabilization of the Ukraine? Does Russia want to expand into the West or NATO into the East? Or did maybe two world-powers meet at the same door in the middle of the night, driven by very similar intentions towards a defenseless third that now pays for the resulting quagmire with the first phases of a civil war?

If Only the Kaiser Had Won

"Imagine, a hundred years from now they'll be celebrating all this."

Stephen Harper might be in a one-man orgy of triumphalism over the First World War, celebrating Canada's grand victory, but a Canadian who actually knows something about military history, Gwynne Dyer, says the world might have been a better place if only our side had lost.

But suppose Germany had somehow managed to win. What would the peace treaty have been like?

Not nearly as bad as the Treaty of Versailles, the peace we imposed. A “victorious” Germany would not have had the power to strip the losers of their colonies, take away parts of their home territory, impose huge reparations and make the losers “admit” that the war was all their fault, the way we did. It would have been a peace treaty that basically restored the prewar status quo.

In the aftermath, having achieved a no-score draw thinly disguised as a victory, Germany likely would have been more or less democratic: no Hitler.

And the losers, Britain and France (and, at a great distance off, Canada), would not have lost so badly that they were at risk of slipping into some sort of dictatorship. Which probably also means that there would not have been a Second World War just 20 years later.

So a German victory wouldn’t have been all that bad a result, really. Certainly no worse than the Allied victory, which led to a second world war that killed far more people than the first, and was effectively won by the Soviet Union.

That in turn led to a 40-year Cold War (which could easily have turned into a Third World War) – and Canada signed up for that as well.

Now that's not going to be music to the ears of our old gosh shucker of a prime minister but reality almost never is.  To Stephen Harper, the First World War, like the War of 1812 and everything else, is so much better as he wishes to believe it was.

Unlike Sideshow Steve, Gwynne Dyer knows a good deal about wars and the people who fight them.  Having served in the armed forces of Canada, the United States and Great Britain, he earned a PhD in war studies at the University of London and went on to be a lecturer at the British Military College, Sandhurst, and serves on the Board of Governors of the Royal Military College of Canada.

We're Back

Effective immediately The Disaffected Lib is back in business with no end of thanks to Lorne for putting up with me these past several months.

I laid out my reasons for shutting down this blog in my previous post in March. I'll now explain why I've returned.

Those who have followed my posts over at Lorne's blog, Politics and Its Discontents, will be aware that a lot of my attention lately has been on changes underway in the Arctic from huge methane craters erupting in Siberia, to wildfires sweeping the tundra and northern boreal forest, the thawing of the permafrost, the black and brown soot problem, sea level rise and soil erosion, the accelerating decline in Arctic sea ice and the deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheet.

The research that keeps pouring in suggests that we may be awfully near, perhaps even past, a major climate change tipping point.  All of these events underway in the polar latitudes are synergistic.  Each fuels all others.  No one seems to be able to weigh the overall synergy.  It's hard enough to keep up with these phenomena individually much less collectively.

Last week there was an analysis positing sea level rise far more severe than anything previously forecast.  It suggested we could be in for as much as 2.5-metres of sea level rise by 2040.  On delving into this assessment I realized that, if it is accurate, we should begin to see a noticeable increase in the annual rate of sea level rise within five or six years.  If that happens, there's a strong indication that we have passed a major climate change tipping point and face the real prospect of natural feedback mechanisms driving runaway global warming.

I have already begun making enquiries of municipal and provincial agencies involved with climate change impacts and sea level rise.  After that I plan to pursue the scientific community before venturing into the federal maelstrom of denialism.

Governments at all levels need to open a dialogue with the Canadian people to inform the public of where we stand and what the future portends.  Without that discussion we will not have the informed electorate capable of driving effective political action.  Without that dialogue we'll remain trapped under the smothering blanket of neo-liberal, petro-pols that now has a strangle hold on our Parliament.

Maybe this blog and others like it, with your help, can compel our political class to start engaging with us on this and other critical issues and begin formulating policy that has been too long neglected.  Maybe.

Here's the Deal

I'm packing in this blog for a while.  It's simply not worth it.  I have other things deserving of my attention that have been too long neglected.   One of these entails churning through studies and research papers pertaining to a form of carbon sequestration that holds the promise of significant benefits to the western provinces and states.  I've been exploring this idea for about two years and it's now time to see if it can be put through a feasibility study.

Another is to pursue some writing opportunities that I've been skirting around for some time.  Trust me, I can write far better than the fare that's been dished up on this blog, most of which never gets proofread.

I want to become directly involved in the effort to stop the Northern Gateway and, if possible, Kinder Morgan also.  Writing about it isn't going to make a meaningful difference.  That much has become clear to me over the past three years.  Elizabeth May alone stands against these pipelines and she isn't going to be able to convince the NDP or the Liberals to place Canada ahead of their partisan political pursuits.

I think our children and theirs are in for a very bumpy ride over the next several decades.  Change is setting in far faster than anyone had envisioned just a few years ago.  Democracy is no longer safe in my country and I can't see that improving in the future.  Hard and uncertain times lie ahead.  On the world scene we may be lapsing into another Cold War, this one focused on the South China Sea instead of the Fulda Gap.  We don't seem to have the will - or the goodwill - to prevent this from happening.


See you all later.

What follows is a post, "The Cult of Living Large" from March 2 that somehow got taken down.  I think it's a worthwhile read.  I managed to recover it from another site where it had been cross-posted.

2015, we're told, is the year the developed world (that's us) and the emerging economies (China, India, etc., etc., etc.) will close ranks to formulate an effective plan of action to fight climate change.  It's going to be Kyoto on steroids, a true hallelujah moment, a meeting of minds, a global joining of hands, a flexing of collective muscle and sinew.

Yeah, right.

2015 is probably our final chance to reach some sort of meaningful, global consensus.  In case you haven't noticed we're already being overtaken by climate change impacts, and this is the 'early onset' stuff.

So why am I writing this off?  That's simple, it's not going to work. We're focusing on a symptom, not the disease.   That's right, - climate change, anthropogenic global warming, call it what you like - is a symptom, a major symptom to be sure but just one aspect of the really lethal malady that lurks beneath it.

Let's consider another symptom - population.  We're now at 7+ billion and headed to 9-billion and more.  That's nearly triple the number of mouths to feed than we had when I was born.  There's something stirring inside that 7+ billion, an emerging middle class of gargantuan proportions.  It's said there's a larger middle class in India than in the United States.   China has an even larger middle class.  It's a phenomenon of social mobility that's sweeping every emerging economy in Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America, pretty much everywhere.

Here's the thing.  This emerging mega-middle class wants the same things we have.   They want more and better food, bigger homes, they want cars and consumer goods of every description, they want travel and luxuries.  They want more, a lot more.  And, as they get what they want, it consumes more energy, more resources especially freshwater, and produces more CO2, more waste and more pollution of every variety.

In the half century following the end of WWII, India added roughly a billion people to its population. The United States, during this same interval, grew by about 100-million.  Here's the thing.  A hundred million people in the ultimate consumer society had about the same overall environmental footprint as those billion Indians.  So you can see where I'm going with this emerging mega-middle class issue.

Now, consider this.  Even before this onset of the mega-middle class, mankind, our global civilization was using about 1.5 Earths worth of resources.  We're using resources at an ever growing rate that's already one and a half times greater than our planet's ability to replenish them.  That's impossible, isn't it?  Well eventually it will be but for now we've come up with some conjuring tricks to keep the party rolling.

There's a term for it.  We're 'eating our seed corn.'  Instead of settling for what nature puts on the table before us, we're also raiding the pantry and we're hitting it hard.  You can see it with the naked eye from space.  Astronauts can see the state of deforestation as we raid our forests, the 'lungs of the planet' to satisfy all that middle class demand.  We can see rivers that no longer flow to the sea.  We can see the dust plumes that rise in China and now cross the Pacific to North America.  We can see the encroaching deserts.  We can see the tailing ponds of Athabasca.  We can monitor the collapse of one global fishery after another as our commercial boats, responding to middle class demands, 'fish down the food chain.'  We have satellites that can now measure surface subsidence triggered by our exhaustion of groundwater - aquifers.  

We even awarded a Nobel prize to the fellow who came up with the greatest conjuring act of them all, the Green Revolution.  His idea was that a country that was food insecure could boost agricultural production by tuning up its marginal farmland through the use of irrigation and the application of modern fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.   It worked.  India, for example, once beset by periodic famines, became a major food exporter.  The bounty was so wonderful that nobody paid much mind to what awaited in the long term.  Now, just decades later, the land is becoming exhausted.  In some places more than twice as much fertilizer is needed to grow crops and, worse yet, the groundwater resource is in distress.  If you pump out water at many times the natural recharge rate, you're heading for 'empty.' 

We usually overlook the critical fact that not only does nature put food on our table, she also empties our bedpans.  The biosphere cleans our waste.  It always has and, if it hadn't, we wouldn't be here having images of bedpans run through our brains.  Rain cleans pollution from our atmosphere.   Rivers are magnificent at cleaning waste as they run to the oceans.  Our oceans suck CO2 in massive tonnage from the atmosphere.   Soil, the microbes and chemicals within it and the plants that grow from it,  absorb and then clean waste in a variety of ways.  It's just another vital function of our biomass.  But, here's the thing.  It's a finite planet, remember?  That means our biosphere has a finite limit to the amount of waste it can process.  Once it reaches capacity, waste backs up, accumulates.  We're familiar enough with polluted rivers and lakes, polluted air.  China is now hitting a major soil contamination problem, the result of massive industrial pollution of some really bad stuff like arsenic building up in soil to the point where crops are unfit for human consumption.  We've got all sorts of this going on in just about every corner of the world, especially the heavily populated hot spots. 

We've engineered a global cult of living large.  The high priests mass in the financial districts and legislative assemblies of every major centre on the planet.  They lead us in the worship of growth.  If we have a problem they teach us that the solution lies in growth.  Their liturgy is founded in 18th century neo-classical economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geo-politics.  There you will find the faith, chapter and verse.  That this might be madness almost never occurs to us.

Here's the thing.  China may zoom off the charts with 10% annual growth in GDP but we in the West target about 3% annual GDP growth.  It's compounded growth.  We expect the current year to be 3% larger than the previous year.  Now let's run the math.  As a scale let's use a hypothetical adult lifetime of 50-years - 35 working years, 15 years of retirement.  Let's begin at Year 1 of lifetime 1.  By the time lifetime 1 is over, at year 50, 3% annual GDP growth would mean the economy had grown 4.4 times larger overall.  At the end of lifetime 2, the economy would have grown over 19 times larger than it was in Year 1.  After lifetime 3, GDP would have swelled by 84 times.  At the end of lifetime 4, Year 200, GDP would have grown 369 times what it had been in Year 1.  Not 369 per cent larger.  No, 36,900 per cent larger.  369 times larger.  That would be reflected in commensurate massive increases in consumption of energy and other resources and massive increases in consumption of goods and services and massive increases in waste and pollution of all sorts.  How do you squeeze all that growth into a finite world?

You do it by eating your seed corn, raiding the wine cellar and, eventually, you empty the pantry.  What then?  Well, at that point, your options are narrowed considerably.  You start wondering what your neighbour might have left in their pantry.  If you're tribal, you might go raiding.  Happens all the time.  Eventually something has to give.  Usually the strong take from the weak, the rich take from the poor.  Hell, rich countries are already buying up the best farmland in food insecure countries like Somalia where we routinely have to provide famine relief.  Go figure, eh?

This essay started with climate change.  That morphed into a look at population and the approaching plague of the mega-middle class and then into rapacious excess consumption and finally into our addiction to growth and how that leads us to the edge of a cliff.  See, they're all connected.

Climate change is not a disease.  It's a symptom of the disease that underlies all of these other symptoms.  That disease is the lethal and dysfunctional manner in which we, as a global civilization, have become organized - socially, economically and politically.  We have crafted institutions and modes of interaction based on a bountiful supply of cheap energy and the remarkable advancements in technology and science.  We have evolved into a civilization of "because we can" with scant regard to whether we should.

Fighting climate change is like a needle exchange programme for heroin addicts.   It's harm prevention and that's really, really great and wonderful and necessary.  It reduces the transmission of HIV and other diseases that create enormous costs to society.  It does not, however, remedy the addiction itself.  Fighting climate change isn't going to save us any more than a clean needle will save a junkie from the inevitable ravages of addiction.  It may buy us time and that's a good thing but, with everything else that's building, it probably won't be much. 

There are solutions - logical, equitable, justifiable solutions if we, as a global civilization want to take them.  Rapidly decarbonizing our economies and societies is one and it's essential.  We have to get rid of our fossil fuel addiction. 

Getting free of our toxic, growth-based, neo-classical economics model is just as essential.  We need to shift to steady state or 'Full Earth' economics.  I can refer you to several good texts on this or you can get the idea from consulting Wiki.

 Population.  What to do?  We must calculate our biosphere's population carrying capacity.  It is said that we began exceeding our planet's resource replenishment rate in the second half of the 70s at between three to four billion people.  Much has changed since then.  We've not only packed on another three plus billion in numbers but we've also significantly increased our per capita consumption, our environmental footprint which means we're probably looking at a maximum very close to the three billion mark.

How do we get from 7-billion to 3-billion.  There's just one way that I can think of short of resorting to mass annihilation.   We gradually phase out globalized agriculture, a trade as old as civilization itself.  Each country should curb agricultural exports by something in the range of 5 to 10% each year.  Eventually the nations of the world, rich and poor, are left with a reality of self-sufficiency.  That would be a shock to countries like the U.K. that have found it cheaper to import food than grow it domestically and now rely on 75% imported food.  It would entail rationing in some countries and the diversion of investment from financial and industrial growth into agriculture.  I just cannot think of any other way to drive depopulation.

We need institutions to oversee and enforce the protection and allocation of common resources including global fisheries.  No longer can we have massive commercial fleets pillaging our oceans.

In effect there are real solutions, not just the cheap and dirty fixes we have used in the past but real solutions.  We need the resolve to take them.  If we don't do this on our own terms, we'll reach the same point in other ways.   That would be insanely tragic.  We have a choice.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves. We're Backing Anti-Semitic Fascists.

Your Country is on Their Side

The Guardian's Seumas Milne dismembers the rank hypocrisy of our position on Ukraine, the role we played in creating this crisis and the villainous cutthroats we're backing.

Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".

That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.

...The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.

In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.

The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place a government of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.

...Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.

Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.

...Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.

But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.

Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.

Were the Maidan Murders the Work of the Ukrainian Opposition, a Staged Provocation?

We know that in the Ukrainian unrest, no side has clean hands exactly.  The pro-Europe group we're backing is generously laced with some pretty nasty types.  One incendiary moment that sparked the Ukrainian revolt was the sniper attack on Ukrainian police and civilians, the so-called Maidan murders.  The killings have been blamed on snipers supporting ousted president Viktor Yanukovych. 

An intercepted phone conversation between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet suggests the snipers might have been provocateurs working for our side, the coalition.

In the call, Paet said he had been told snipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Ashton responds: "I didn't know … Gosh."

The leak came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the snipers may have been opposition provocateurs. The Kremlin-funded Russia Today first carried the leaked call online.

The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: "Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition's involvement in the violence." Ashton's office said it did not comment on leaks.

During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

"What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides," Paet said.

"So she also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened."

"So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition," Paet says.

He's Back! Bruce Carson Under Investigation for Influence Peddling.

Bruce Carson (R) and Unknown Tory Supporter

Former top aide to Stephano Harper, Bruce Carson, is back in the news and, predictably, it's bad news.

CBC reports  that the disgraced senior advisor to Mr. Harper is the subject of an RCMP investigation into illegal lobbying.  This scandal may also have snared another Harper senate appointment, Doug Black.

CBC News has learned the RCMP have seized banking records for Bruce Carson, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, amid their investigation into allegations he illegally lobbied his former government colleagues.

In court records CBC News retrieved Wednesday, the RCMP allege Carson used his connections to lobby on behalf of an organization called the Energy Policy Institute of Canada, or EPIC, for a national energy strategy.

Const. Marie-Josée Robert says Carson's "continuous association" with public office holders allowed him to accept money for "consideration for his co-operation, assistance or exercise of influence in connection with business matters with the government on behalf of EPIC."

"I believe without this inferred influence, Mr. Carson would have not performed his services so effectively," she wrote in an affidavit known as an "information to obtain a production order."

...Doug Black, whom Harper appointed a senator in January 2013, became president of EPIC, at a salary of $10,000 a month, the affidavit says.

[While at EPIC] Black responded to one of Carson's requests for money with praise.

"No issue.... We are making progress and you are the secret sauce," Black wrote, according to the affidavit.