Michael Brown Gunned Down by Six Shots

This keeps getting worse.  An autopsy on the corpse of Michael Brown concludes the unarmed, young black man sustained six gunshots including two to his head.

Renowned ("celebrity") medical examiner, Michael Baden, conducted the autopsy on behalf of Brown's family.  He concluded that the fatal shot, the final shot, was a bullet to the top of Brown's skull suggesting the victim's head was bowed.

Baden effectively cut off any suggestion that Brown was shot in self-defence by noting that there was no gunpowder residue on the body.

The Shooting May Have Stopped But, For Civilians, Gaza's Suffering Deepens.

For good and obvious reasons, destruction of essential civilian infrastructure such as water supply and sewage systems is prohibited by the laws of war.  Attacking such targets is a war crime.

For Israel, it's not just a war crime.  It's a strategy and it's called Dahiyeh. It's the deliberate targeting of civilians; their homes, schools and hospitals; and the water plants and sewage systems essential for public health and safety.

When Israel began waging Dahiyeh against Gaza Palestinians in July, it sent warplanes in to take down the water station and sewage plants.  Now a group of 30-humanitarian agencies banded together under the name EWASH (Emergency Water Sanitation and Health) warns that two-thirds of the Gazan population is running out of water and the besieged territory is at risk of outbreaks of water-borne diseases.

Israeli destruction of Gaza's sewage infrastructure has led to broken mains and open sewage flooding.

Expect the Unexpected

I remember when a hard rain meant you might see standing water in farm fields. That was a different time even if it was just a couple of decades ago.  Today our notion of a hard rain is different.  Today it means flash flooding, highly destructive inundation that typically overwhelms infrastructure that was designed and built to handle a climate that is no longer with us, that has been displaced.

No place is immune.  In September of last year, even my little seaside town sustained flash flooding when nearly an inch and a half of rain fell in the span of just 18-minutes.

In early August, about five inches of rain fell in Burlington within a matter of hours.  For the municipality that represented about two months of normal rainfall.

The United States, from the southwest to the northeast, has been hammered by flash flooding events this year.  Even drought-stricken southern California reeled as heavy rains swept out of the mountains into San Bernardino county.  In Detroit, a "once in a century" storm (the second in two years), filled the I-75 expressway right up to an overpass.

The same storm that hammered Detroit moved on to bring flash flooding to Long Island, New York, and Baltimore.  Today the US National Weather Service (NOAA) has issued flash flood warnings for Memphis/Nashville and north central Texas.

The message is clear.  From now on we have to expect the unexpected.  The climate has changed and the impacts can be both severe and abrupt.  From severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration to sustained droughts to sea level rise of a magnitude far beyond what we expected just a few years ago, we are being overtaken by events.



We don't have a lot of options and we don't have a lot of time.  We can stick with our current approach, a state of catatonic stupor, or we can recognize that the climate has changed and we need to catch up in order to change with it.  Changing - adapting - is going to be a Herculean challenge.  It's going to be costly.  It will require governments at all levels to change focus and redirect assets.  One thing is clear, the current federal government is not up to this challenge.

I've Never Done This Before

I want to share an amazing recipe with you all.  It's from America's Test Kitchen and it's for "summer tomato pie."

The key to this recipe is the tomatoes.  You need really good beefsteak tomatoes of the sort we used to enjoy half a century ago.  Some of these vintage varieties are making comebacks and they remind us of how lifeless most of the grocery store offerings can be.

It's a simple recipe.  Pie crusts (2).  2 lbs. of ripe beefsteak tomatoes, cored and sliced into 1/4" slices. 1/2 tsp. salt.  1/4 c. mayo.  4 tsp. cornstarch.  1-1/2 c. grated sharp cheddar.  4 scallions thin sliced.  That's it.  Easy, peasy - and it's amazing.

Click on the link, print a copy of the recipe, and enjoy.

The trick is having the right tomatoes.  It's the tomato flavour that comes through and makes this recipe magic.  Weak tomatoes will be overwhelmed by the cheeses.
Follow the recipe to the letter the first time.  That's the best way to appreciate how great this pie is and, from there, you can figure out how to personalize it.  You might want to add fresh basil, for example, or try other cheeses or cheese combinations.

If you're interested, get the recipe printed off fairly soon as they don't stay up for very long.

Adios "El Presidente" Perry

Texas governor Rick Perry's presidential aspirations could be over.  The New York Times reports a Texas grand jury has indicted Perry on two felony counts of abuse of power.

At the heart of Perry's legal woes is a district attorney and corruption buster, a Democrat, who was arrested for drunk driving.  Following the DA's arrest, Perry threatened to use the governor's veto power to block $7.5-million in funding for the anti-corruption unit unless she resigned.  Perry followed through with the threat.

A non-profit group filed a complaint alleging Perry had misused his powers in order to coerce a public servant.  Perry doesn't seem to dispute what happened but maintains what he did was a legitimate exercise of the governor's powers.  The grand jury seems to have agreed with the complainants.

It's Our New Normal - It's Yours and Mine. Now Let's Deal With It.

Every morning Google Alerts delivers to my inbox a digest of the day's stories about flooding.   For several years I've begun my morning sorting through these and other alerts to which I've subscribed.

Over the past two years I've noticed significant change in the flooding alert stories. What has come to dominate the flooding stories is flash flooding.  It's the same story wherever it happens.  A massive rainstorm parks over one area, sometimes just one city, and delivers a "once in a hundred year" deluge that quickly overwhelms storm sewers and leaves streets and entire neighbourhoods awash with torrents of flood waters sweeping down gullies and ravines.

What are these immensely destructive severe weather events teaching us?  One important lesson that we still choose to ignore is that the infrastructure we designed and built during the 20th century is not up to the 'new normal' of the 21st century.

Our environment in the 20th century shaped what we built, how we built it and where.  We laid out our neighbourhoods and streets and designed and constructed core services based on the environment of the day.  While we were busy doing that we did not foresee that there would be a much different, more challenging environment by the early part of the 21st century.  We had no idea.

British Columbia's west coast, where I live, is the wettest area in Canada.  Some spots average 12 to 14-feet of rain annually.  You can't live here and be a stranger to heavy, sustained rain.  That said, my town got hit with a squall that brought rainfall like I've never seen.  An inch and a half of rain in just 18-minutes.  As quickly as it began it stopped.  The interesting part is that my town, which normally has no problem with heavy rain, was overwhelmed.  There were cars floating downtown within a couple of hundred yards of the beach.   If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.

Now the Christian Science Monitor is asking whether these deluge-triggered flash floods are the new normal.

As people clean up after torrential rains and heavy flooding in cities in the Midwest and along the Atlantic Coast, the events highlight what many climate researchers say is a new "normal" for severe rainfall in the US. 

Quite apart from what long-term changes in precipitation say about global warming, these events also provide a reality check on the ability of urban areas to cope with flooding from intense downpours in a warming climate.

As we saw last year in Calgary, these flash floods can cause immense damage to buildings, to essential infrastructure and to commerce.  Roads can be washed out, bridges can be compromised, light rail lines can be buckled, sanitary sewer systems can be overwhelmed.  This sort of flooding can be extremely challenging to local officials and law enforcement and can leave provincial and federal governments with enormous costs for disaster relief.

Even if structures can survive one flash flood, they can't endure too many recurrences.  Some centuries-old villages in rural Britain have already announced that one more flood and they're finished.  It's just too costly to save those great heritage buildings from centuries past.

This morning I discussed sea level rise with our city engineer.  Our municipality is working on a "storm water master plan" that focuses on predicted rainfall curves.   Consultants have been retained to advise on the sea level rise factor, the second half of the double-whammy.  The city engineer said that we're expecting to see more of these monster-intensity squalls like the one that recently hit the town centre and they're expected to worsen in intensity, duration and frequency. Fortunately for us the sea is nearby so it's a matter of channeling flood water through conduits to the ocean.   Inland, as Calgary demonstrates, it'll be a different story.

When I asked the city engineer what the province was doing for coastal communities, he said virtually nothing.  The provincial government has apparently downloaded responsibility for sea level rise and flooding issues to the affected municipalities and regional governments.  There is no unified programme for the coast and islands.   The amount of duplication and wasted money this must cause is ridiculous.  Perhaps that's why the provincial ministries have been so cool to my attempts to engage them on this.

The engineer also confirmed that the consultants are working with the old, and now questionable, estimate of 1-metre of sea level rise by 2100.  That was the figure tossed out by the IPCC back when the Panel was warning that the Arctic could be seasonally ice free, also by 2100.   Now the US Navy has determined that the Arctic will be seasonally ice free by no later than 2019 and possibly as early as 2016 which means those IPCC estimates are out by more than 80-years.

We can't respond to these flash floods with disaster relief measures that we would have used in the past.  When a "once a century" severe weather event becomes a once every two or three years storm, no government can afford to continuously raid the treasury to write cheques for reconstruction.  Instead of shoveling money into rebuilding structures in time for them to be destroyed in the next great storm, it might be better for all concerned to assist property owners to simply relocate to less vulnerable areas.

The first step is to analyze and define this "new normal."  That's obviously not welcome to governments that don't want to discuss climate change when they need that time to focus on extracting and exporting high-carbon fossil fuels as quickly as possible.  Yet nothing our government's do will help us hold back the sea or clear those storm clouds and nature is not going to work on their schedule.

Have You Heard the Latest?

Have you heard the latest about last month's Malaysian Airlines MH-17 shootdown over Ukraine?  No? Neither have I.

When the Boeing 777 plunged to the ground killing everyone aboard, Western leaders were quick out of the gate to finger Vlad Putin, directly or indirectly, and Ukraine's pro-Russia separatist militias for downing the jetliner.

America is supposed to have that area under satellite observation.  American technology is supposed to be able to spot and identify the launch of a surface-to-air missile that, we were told, downed MH-17.  Meanwhile the Brits have had the aircraft's intact flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder for more than two weeks.

All of which begs the question why Washington and London have gone silent about this tragedy?  In the past when they had hard evidence of this sort they went public with their findings in short order.  Not this time. Why?

Former congressman, Ron Paul, says America knows more than it's letting on and is "likely hiding the truth."

That Shining Bunker on the Hill

What else is there for a genuine, honest to God-Fearin', Warfare State?  Once you've militarized your economy, militarized your foreign policy, militarized your society with M-16s under every other bed, why would you not militarize your law enforcement agencies?  What is that beyond a sign of progress toward the evolution of illiberal democracy, nascent oligarchy as prescribed by the ascent of corporatist rule? 

Ferguson, Missouri is not an aberration.  It's no fluke. That's what they tell you but it's not true.   It's a calculated atrocity that lies in wait in any number of hot spots across modern America.  There's a reason why America's national security apparatus, in collaboration with the private sector, spies on ordinary citizens, evaluates them via algorithms as either complacent stooges or potential resistors, threats.  It's the same reason why the Pentagon gives IED-resistant armoured vehicles and oodles of combat gear to the country's police departments. This is a nation that has lost its moorings; a country that takes to itself the right to execute its own citizens abroad without due process, a state that believes it has an inherent right to imprison and torture individuals permanently without charge or trial.  With that in mind, how can anyone get all queasy about cops reprising the role of storm troopers, a 21st century Waffen SS for unruly street corners?

No, That's Not a Soldier and He's Not in Afghanistan Either.

I had hoped that Ferguson, Missouri would be the event that pricked America's conscience, that generated an unstoppable reform of the Warfare-Security State. That's not going to happen.  From the execution-style shooting of young Brown to the rampaging iron fist of a small-town Sturmabteilung, it was all a mistake, one giant screw-up.  For a brief moment the world was allowed to see what's lurking in the basement recesses of police stations across America - nests of body-armoured vipers armed with war-fighting weapons and an inclination to unleash them on ordinary Americans.

We got a glimpse at what we were never supposed to see.  The optics were terrible.  The mistake must never be repeated - until the next time.

Americans are brought up believing that United States citizenship is a blessing, a precious gift.  It is - until the day the state turns on its people, monitors their activities for signs of anything unusual, keeps lists.

Roxane Gay, writing in The Guardian, says that Ferguson has been a demonstration of an "occupation ...in plain sight."

An alderman was arrested.  Reporters from the Washington Post and Huffington Post were arrested.  An Al Jazeera America news crew was attacked with tear gas and had their equipment dismantled. Nonviolent protestors were confronted by a police department that is, in fact, an armed militia. The crowd stood before armored personnel carriers and men wearing Swat gear.  There were snipers, aiming their rifles at unarmed, nonviolent citizens. 

According to The New Republic, not all Americans were horrified at the outrages in Ferguson, including some of the residents of nearby, largely white community of Olivette.

We're Going to Missouri.  Some Place Called Ferguson.

Harper's Whipping Boy Guilty in Robocall Case.

A whipping boy was a young boy assigned to a young prince who was designated to take a flogging when the prince misbehaved.

Methinks Michael Sona is the Harper Conservatives' whipping boy.  Sona is the one taking the fall for the widespread robocall scam in the last federal election. He'll be sacrificed.  He'll get the heat.  Everyone else will be off the hook.

Is Missouri America's New Mississippi?

Damn but this sounds like the south in the turbulent 50s and 60s.  The governor of Missouri has ordered St. Louis County police out of the community of Ferguson, the site of the recent killing of a young black man, Michael Brown.

"The governor [Jay Nixon] just called me and he's on his way to St. Louis now to announce he's taking away St. Louis County police out of the situation," Clay, a Missouri Democrat, said in a telephone interview.  He added that Nixon may ask the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to step in.

Clay said that he has been urging US Attorney General Eric Holder to "take over the entire situation because we will not get justice for Michael Brown and his family and friends if the St. Louis County police and prosecutor have a say."

Meanwhile, images of cops in Ferguson clad in full war-fighting gear have even military veterans uneasy.

Afghan veteran Paul Szoldra writes:

"While serving as a US Marine on patrol in Afghanistan, we wore desert camouflage to blend in with our surroundings, carried rifles to shoot back when under enemy attack, and drove around in armored vehicles to ward off roadside bombs.

We looked intimidating, but all our vehicles and equipment had a clear purpose for combat against enemy forces.  So why is this same gear being used on our city streets?

In Afghanistan, we patrolled in big, armored trucks.  We wore uniforms that conveyed the message, 'We are a military force, and we are in control right now.' Many Afghans saw us as occupiers.

And now we see some of our police officers in thius same way. 'The militarization of law enforcement is counter-productive to domestic policing and needs to stop.'

The Tibetan Plateau - Asia's Armageddon?

To Asia's three nuclear powers, the Tibetan plateau represents life or death. China, India and Pakistan are all dependent on the headwaters of rivers that are fed by the glaciers in Tibet.  The geo-political enormity of these rivers drove China to invade and occupy Tibet in 1950.

What happens in the Himalayas powerfully impacts the security of these three Asian powers.  That's why a new study on the state of the plateau is particularly worrisome.

The report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences concludes that the Tibetan plateau has experienced double the average level of global warming and that the past fifty years have been the warmest in the past two millennia.  Further warming is predicted for the balance of this century that could accelerate the retreat of Himalayan glaciers and the spread of desertification.

The rivers fed by the Himalayan ice fields constitute the water supply to hundreds of millions of people in Asia.  These rivers include the Yellow and the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Bhramaputra and Salween, the Indus and the Ganges.

The Chunder Down Under

Let's get this unpleasantness out of the way.  "Chunder" is an Australian colloquialism for vomit, puke.  The latest chunder from Down Under comes to us via Tony Abbott's chief business adviser, Maurice Newman.  The chairman of the prime minister's Business Advisory Council warns that Australia is dangerously unprepared for - wait for it - global cooling.

Newman ...said there is evidence that the world is set for a periuod of cooling, rather than warming, leading to  significant geopolitical problems because of a lack of preparedness.

Mark Butler, Labor's environment spokesman, said of Newman's article: 'These kinds of comments would be laughable if he didn't have the prime minister's ear.'

When Confidence Fails

Few who lived through the Cold War with its constant threat of nuclear annihilation realize the role confidence played in preventing an outbreak of apocalyptic hostilities.  Even at times when we thought the "other side" might be nearing the point of pre-emptive attack, we had a sufficient degree of confidence that they would do no such thing.  The Red Telephone that connected the White House to the Kremlin was specifically intended as an instrument for maintaining confidence.

The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the leadership needed to maintain confidence - and peace - in stressful circumstances.  Kennedy was being pulled by contradictory advice given by competing forces some of which demanded a shooting war.  In the end, Kennedy's confidence in Khrushchev prevailed and a diplomatic result was obtained but it was a very close call.

Today I sense that we have discounted the importance of confidence and confidence-building between major powers.  Under Bush/Cheney, America drove NATO right up to Russia's doorstep.  That was an act of diplomatic aggression that showed no interest in maintaining, much less building, confidence between west and east. It was both a threat to Russia and a humiliation of Vlad Putin. Imagine if Russia reached a pact with Mexico and wound up parking tanks, surface to air missile batteries and mobile rocket artillery along the south bank of the Rio Grande.

What has the Ukraine conflict become?  It resembles a proxy war reminiscent of the Cold War era.  We support the west-leaning government that ousted the previous democratically-elected (yet horribly corrupt) government in a coup. Putin sees us as interlopers, meddlers, once again wreaking mischief at Russia's doorstep.  That he took Crimea should have been expected.  That he should support pro-Russia rebels seeking to pry loose the Donetsk region is equally predictable.

It's probably safe to say that the confidence level between Putin and western leaders has fallen into an abyss.  We have imposed successive waves of sanctions against Russia and its leaders.  We have actually threatened Russia with dire consequences that await if it doesn't leave Ukraine alone.  NATO Secretary General Anders "Foggy" Rasmussen, an avowed and bellicose neoliberal, is using the final months of his tenure to get straight into Putin's face.  He gives the impression that he's just itching to see NATO jets over the Ukraine before he's put out to pasture.  There are plenty of other prominent hawks in Rasmussen's camp including our own warrior-prince, Stephen Harper.

The German financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, recently warned that the people of the west are being "mentally mobilized" for war by our corporate mass media cartel.  This could hardly have gone unnoticed by the Kremlin.

And what happens when confidence plummets?  Rearmament is one usual result. Rearmament that further undermines confidence.  Russia is rearming with a new strategic bomber, a new ballistic missile that may breach one or more of its treaty obligations, two new submarine designs and a dandy new stealth fighter designed to turn F-35s into lawn ornaments.  Is this a Russian provocation? Hardly.

America kicked off today's arms race when Bush/Cheney introduced the incredibly bellicose Bush Doctrine that threatened friend and adversary alike with the use of pre-emptive and overwhelming military force against any country or group of countries that should deign to rival America militarily or economically.  That was accompanied by a massive increase in military spending focused on achieving enormous technological advances that would leave all other nations so far behind that they couldn't catch up.  Out of that depraved mentality emerged the F-35.

For Beijing, a real confidence-buster came with the staging of "Operation Chimichanga", a full scale, dress rehearsal of a pre-emptive "first strike" stealth attack on China to render the Peoples Republic defenceless.  Provocative, yes. Confidence building, plainly not.

America is doing no end of sabre-rattling and we're playing our part in it also.  Our foreign policy has been subsumed into America's.  The F-35 is our admission ticket into America's Aerial Foreign Legion.  There's a reason American commanders refer to it as their "kick in the front door weapon."

On this, the centenary of World War One, it's important to remember that not all wars are intended or even desired.  History shows it's remarkably easy for leaders to back us into wars of durations and dimensions that were never foreseen.  It doesn't take much - an arms race here or there, sabre-rattling and other provocations, a power vacuum real or perceived, the "mental mobilization" of society - go ahead, light the fuse.

Without seeming to recognize it, we're creating an incredibly dangerous world packed with stressors such as arms races; geo-political transitions with contested spheres of influence; power vacuums and the rise of failed states; militarized foreign policy; economic, resource and territorial rivalries; and, of course, early onset climate change impacts, all under the umbrella of western neoliberalism. What could possibly go wrong?

Another Indictment of Neoliberalism, This Time from Monbiot

Neoliberalism, sometimes known as "market fundamentalism", is the scourge of our age.  It infests our federal politics.  Stephen Harper is a disciple.  Mulcair and Trudeau may be somewhat less neoliberal but it's a matter of degree and it ain't much.

Neoliberalism is a path littered with flawed assumptions and empty promises.  It is a cancer that eats away at social cohesion, that drives inequality that itself arises mainly out of privilege and unjust government largesse from tax favouritism to outright gifting of public property.  It is the engine of economic feudalism.

Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, has additional insights into the scam of neoliberalism:

Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.

If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.

Free market capitalism, market fundamentalism, neoliberalism - call it what you like - relentlessly moves to clear-cut social democracy to sweep away the last obstacles to the ascent of oligarchy.  It is a corruption of both capitalism and democracy.  It is the conquest of human dignity.  It is very much Kapitalism as foreseen by Karl Marx.  

It is a devilish thing that neoliberalism is becoming so entrenched at the very time that our world is struggling with the early onset impacts of climate change. Neoliberalism, the ethos of modern political classes, can only hasten and deepen our decline.  It is our societal thumbscrew.

Monbiot adds that pernicious neoliberalism silences the vox populi, and renders public will irrelevant.

We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.  

Exactly.   

We Need New Ways of Pricing Natural Capital

A case in point.  This summer's B.C. spot prawn season got derailed - by Asia.  Delicious local prawns that usually would go for 8-9 dollars a pound were suddenly demanding prices of 38-39 dollars a pound, head on, in Vancouver.

What happened?  Apparently Asia's (China's) shrimp/prawn stocks succumbed to some sort of environmental disorder.  Asian buyers flocked to buy up British Columbia's prawn catch (and Dungeness crabs to boot), sending market prices through the roof.  Vancouver restaurants were reported to have taken them off the menu, substituting far more affordable Atlantic lobster instead.

In the midst of this I wound up at my doctor's office.  I sat beside a fellow in the waiting room who had brought a plastic bag full of something.  It turned out he was a prawn fisherman who had brought a bag of his finest as a gift for the same doctor I see. 

We began a discussion about the prawn market and this fellow was giddy at the windfall profits he was raking in.  At this point I asked the fisherman what the people of British Columbia got out of the prawns he was flogging to Asia?  After all, I said, weren't those prawns really the property of the province and people of British Columbia?  These were wild sea life.  The harvesters didn't operate prawn hatcheries.  They didn't feed the creatures.  All they did was show up to harvest and sell our prawns, my prawns.  So, when prices go through the roof for my prawns, high enough that I and most of my fellow British Columbians are priced out of the market, why then should the market windfall at least not belong to us, not the harvester?

It strikes me that we've become a little too lax in allowing those who really do little besides harvesting, packaging and distributing commodities based on public property, natural resources, to accede to ownership at below market prices.  If the market price escalates, so too should the public's share of that enhanced value.  In the case of seafood, such a provision could easily be incorporated into our licensing regime. 

Products such as freshwater would require different treatment.  Water is often one of those great government give-aways especially for big business.  Yet water has a value.  We often hear today that it's the "new oil".  What would happen if we priced it fairly to take into account not only its inherent value but also the purpose to which it was being used and how it was treated afterward?  For example, there should be a far higher price if it is to wind up as an environmental contaminant in some massive tailing pond than if it was to be returned to nature in a clean state.  Likewise, those who seek to commodify it, for example as bottled water, should remit an amount commensurate with its retail value. 

This conundrum is so multi-faceted that it defies specific rules beyond core principles and individual applications.  Yet, in a world running scarce of so many things, we have to safeguard the public purse if only to buffer ourselves against volatile market forces that we're going to face one way or the other.

Valuing natural capital realistically isn't anti-business.  It's merely putting the public-business relationship on a fair footing.  It's also putting an end to the vast transfer of unearned wealth out of the public purse and into private pockets. 

Severe Weather Events Linked to Some Guy Named Rossby

We owe a lot to Carl-Gustav Rossby, the Swedish-born American scientist who pioneered research into atmospheric thermodynamics at MIT and was instrumental in the university establishing America's first department of meteorology.

Today, Rossby's name is most commonly associated with this:

This image depicts what are sometimes called "Rossby Waves", the deep and meandering jet stream waves that now draw warm air from the south far up into the north and cold northern air far into the south.  Remember when Atlanta, Georgia went into deep freeze in February while a small village in northern Alaska basked in 62 degree F heat?  That was a Rossby Wave at work.  It's said to be the result of a warming Arctic and a heated, more energetic Arctic atmosphere. Atmospheric thermodynamics, get it?

Researchers have noticed that this new. undulating jet stream doesn't progress more or less steadily west to east like the old jet stream we grew up with.  Instead there are periods when it seems to stall or stop for days or weeks at a time (think Polar Vortex).   When it does stall it seems to bring extreme or severe weather events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves or freezing states.

These observations have now been analyzed by German scientists who confirm the recent increase in these "blocking patterns" that trigger severe weather events.

Climate scientists in Germany noticed that since 2000 there have been an "exceptional number of summer weather extremes, some causing massive damage to society".  So they examined the huge meanders in the high-level jet stream winds that dominate the weather at mid-latitudes, by analysing 35 yers of wind data amassed from satellits, ships, weather stations and meteorological balloons.  They found that blocking patterns, which occur when these meanders slow down, have happened far more frequently.

"Since 2000, we have seen a cluster of these events.  When these high-altitude waves become quasi-stationary, then we see more extreme weather at the surface," said Dr. Dim Coumou, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.  "It is especially noticeable for heat extremes."  The intense heawaves in Russia in 2010, which saw 50,000 people die and the wheat harvest hit hard, and in western Europe in 2003, which saw 30,000 deaths were both the result of blocking patterns.

These blocking patterns are also behind an increase in flash flooding of the sort that overwhelmed Calgary last year and southern California last month.  A heavy rainstorm develops and, instead of moving eastward to some other place the next day, it stays overhead in one place.

So far the research shows a correlation between Arctic warming but we'll have to wait for further computer modeling before we have clear proof of a causal link.    

Egypt's Government - The One We Like - Mass Murderers?

A Human Rights Watch investigation into the deaths of more than 800-protesters by Egyptian security forces at last August's Rabaa massacre finds the slaughter was both planned and politically motivated.

"The 195-page investigation based on interviews with 122 survivors and witnesses has found Egypt's police and army 'systematically and deliberately killed unarmed protesters on political grounds' in actions that 'likely amounted to crimes against humanity'.

"The report recommends that several senior individuals within Egypt's security apparatus be investigated and, where appropriate, held to account for their role in the planning of both the Rabaa massacre and others that occurred last summer - including Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Egypt's then defence minister and new president.  As head of the army at the time, Sisi had overall responsibility for the army's role at Rabaa, and has publicly acknowledged spending 'very many long days to discuss all the details'." 

Okay, I just started the clock.  How long do you think it will be before Mr. Human Rights, John Baird, rears up on his hind legs to denounce al-Sisi and demand he stand trial?

The Anchor Around Our Necks - Neoliberalism

Modern neoliberalism, of the Hayek and Friedman schools, has been defined as "capitalism with the gloves off."  Today it's a term associated with laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation and free trade.

Neoliberalism has made deep inroads into our federal body politic.  Stephen Harper is a disciple.  Our opposition leaders appear less neoliberal than their prime minister but it could be argued that is a matter of degree.

Few dare mention it but the spread of neoliberalism has ushered in the rise of corporatism at the direct expense of social democracy.  Nowhere is this more obvious than at our Head Office, Washington, where the transformation that began with Reagan is manifested in today's "bought and paid for" Congress. There's even a term for what has happened. It's called "political capture." The political apparatus, the levers of power, have been captured by monied interests such that America today is no longer a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The United States is becoming an increasingly illiberal democracy which is a fairly widespread trend in the era of neoliberalism. A study to be released by Princeton this fall will contend that America is no longer a genuine democracy at all but an unfreely elected oligarchy.

Our democracies have always witnessed the struggle of capital versus labour and we have attempted to balance those competing forces in the awareness that domination by either would not be in the interests of the nation.  Theodore Roosevelt addressed this in his "Square Deal" speech in 1910.  It was the principles restated by Roosevelt and others that led to the progressive era and, in the second half of the 20th century, to the greatest middle class that has ever been known that, in turn, brought America to the pinnacle of world leadership.  And then, along came Reagan, Thatcher and their man in short pants, Mulroney.

Today we need to consider the utility of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics in our rapidly changing reality.  What worked reasonably well in the past (well enough that we were often willing to look the other way at its excesses) may become unsuitable to the future.  We're already feeling the "early onset" impacts of a number of forces including climate change, over-population, over-consumption, domestic and global inequality, and the depletion of both renewable and non-renewable resources.  Our struggle to externalize these negatives is no longer keeping pace with their growth.

An article from Australia's Business Spectator, addressed Thomas Piketty's views from his book, Capital, in the context of climate change.  It reminds us of how modern neoliberalism poses a grave threat to the continuation of our global civilization.

It seems to me that the main issue in terms of addressing the climate change problem is that, if we agree to reduce emissions now – and there is currently no global agreement in sight that provides for such reduction – people living in the future will benefit, not those living today. But we will, today, bear the costs of reducing such emissions.

Stern in The Economics of Climate Change, better known as the Stern Review, concludes that strong action on climate change is urgently required; Nordhaus’s view is not so much. Nordhaus thinks climate change requires only a modest response now, with more significant action delayed for decades (read more in A Question of Balance and The Climate Casino).

The discount rate accounts for these different approaches. It weighs future people’s benefits against costs borne by people in the present. If a cost benefit analysis uses a high discount rate, it discounts future benefits to a high degree, giving little weight to the interests of future people – on the basis that future people will be cleverer, richer and they’ll work it out (the Nordhaus approach). In contrast, Stern uses a low discount rate, and asks the present generation to make urgent sacrifices for the sake of future people.

...Put another way, these questions highlight why the market may fail to adequately address the climate change problem. As Harvard’s Martin Nowak says: “Even if you want to cooperate with the future, you may not do so because you are afraid of being exploited by the present”.

The prevailing view at the international level about action on climate change seems to be, “Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” And it’s those views about what future generations are worth that will determine climate change policy in 2014 and beyond.

The fallacy inherent in this sort of neo-liberal world view is that it focuses on "what have future generations ever done for me?" instead of acknowledging what we have already set in store for those future generations, what we have deprived them of, and how our reluctance to "sacrifice" will inevitably make their plight that much more miserable.  These same voices that so loudly champion responsibility in others, themselves choose to duck it when it comes to deferred costs that they can treat as externalities.  The conditions we have created have already benefited us enormously.  We've taken the benefits but we expect future generations to carry our burden.

Neoliberalism is a perverse mindset that treats dealing responsibly with current indulgences that have future costs as "sacrifices."  And that, in a nutshell, is why it's a lethal philosophy, attractive as it is to today's political classes.  These types have no answers as to how our society is to get through the challenges we will face for the remainder of this century much less beyond that.  When it comes to the future, they're asleep at the wheel and our kids are sleeping in the backseat.  

By the way, World Overshoot Day 2014 is about a week away.  That will be the date on which the scientists at the Global Footprint Network calculate mankind has consumed a full year's worth of renewable resources.  We're already using up more than 1.5-times our planet's ability to replenish our natural resources something that is manifest in our depletion of fish stocks, and forests; the spreading exhaustion of our farmland; the exhaustion of freshwater resources and the steady accumulation of pollution of our soil, our water and our atmosphere. The rate of this depletion is increasing every year and we're going in the wrong direction ever faster.  Again, your leaders have no answers for this enormous threat.  It defies their chosen worldview.

We may be in the backseat but there's still time for us to wake up.  We just need to find someone better to do the driving.  Time is not on our side.

Robin Williams, Dead

It seems depression finally claimed comedian/actor Robin Williams.  Dead, suicide, age 63.

Israel & Palestine - It's All a Game of Who Controls the Narrative

And it's a game in which Israel and its collaborators abroad consistently win.  The side with the loudest, most professional voice - Israel, of course - gets the all important advantage of fixing the beginning of the conflict.  Israel decides what started it and exactly when.  What happened before that carefully selected start point is conveniently omitted by people like Harper & Co, and his associates, J. Trudeau and T. Mulcair.  Le Monde captures this reality:

...inspiring pity is not an effective political weapon; it is better to control the account of what has happened. For decades, we have been told that Israel is “responding” or “retaliating”. The story is always that of a peaceful little state, poorly protected, without a single powerful ally, which manages to win through, sometimes without a scratch. And the confrontation always starts at the precise moment when Israel appears as the victim, shocked by misfortune — an abduction, an attack, an act of aggression, an assassination. A commentator will express indignation that rockets are being fired at civilians; then another will argue that the Israeli “response” was much more murderous. Score, one all, ball still in play.

And everything else, everything that matters, is forgotten: the military occupation of the West Bank, the economic blockade of Gaza, the colonisation of the land (1). News channels never take the time to go into details... 

Israel's "cut and paste" reality is instrumental to its control of the narrative that, in turn, allows its overseas sops to support its butchery as the mere exercise of the right of self-defence.