How's This For a Script? Warning - It's a Tough Read.

Young men and women, conscripts, manning the ramparts at Festung (fortress) Europa as legions of desperate migrants approach seeking safety. As the steely commander shouts the order the young defenders reluctantly open fire on the horde knowing they have no other choice - the migrants carry among them a highly infectious strain of cholera.

Sounds like utter dystopia, doesn't it? Well, relax, there is no Festung Europa yet and no infectious horde is marching on Europe yet, but... an outbreak of cholera is now sweeping Iran and experts warn that the impacts of war, climate change and this year's powerful El Nino, create ideal conditions for it and other infectious diseases associated with extreme, mass suffering to spread rapidly and far. From Foreign Policy:

Although the scope of the current outbreak is moderate so far, with fewer than 11,000 illnesses confirmed, it has already spread across an expanse far larger than the 1997 epidemic, taken a greater toll in the Middle East, and still threatens to travel with refugee populations to a even wider geographic area. Moreover, there is ample reason to believe the official tally is grossly undercounted.

At least 2,000 people in Iraq have contracted cholera since mid-September, and Vibriobacteria have contaminated the Euphrates River, possibly the Tigris, as well. The epidemic is thriving amid a perfect storm of failed-state capacity in Baghdad, even worse “state” failures in Anbar province and other regions controlled by the self-declared Islamic State, encampments of millions of Syrian refugees and other homeless displaced people, and harsh downpours slamming parts of Africa and the Middle East thanks to one of the worstPacific El Niño climate events in recorded history.

On Oct. 26, the Syrian American Medical Society, a nongovernmental organization providing aid inside the war-torn country, said it was “very likely” a child living outside of Aleppo died from cholera, possibly due to a widespread contagion in the area. Since January, UNICEF has reported more than 105,000 cases of acute diarrheal disease in Syrian children inside the country, though no laboratories there are available to determine the infectious cause of most of the illnesses. Some, perhaps many, could be due to cholera.

And there’s reason to fear the epidemic could spread further afield, too. Turkish officials have assured their people that no cases of cholera have been confirmed among Syrian refugees living in that country. In Lebanon, where millions of refugees reside and government chaos is responsible for a nearly four-month cessation of garbage collection,doctors warn that conditions are ripe for an explosive spread of the disease. On Oct. 2,Greek health officials placed a Dutch tourist in treatment in Athens after the individual developed acute diarrhea on the island of Kos, a landing point for thousands of Syrian refugees. Although cholera was feared, it was never confirmed. Nevertheless, there isgrowing concern in Europe that with the refugees will come the Vibrio cholerae.

But this year’s cholera crisis already goes far beyond the borders of Iraq or even the lengths of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

...Cholera bacteria can travel from one place to another via two ways: through water systems or through infected people. When contaminated human waste is dumped into a river, cholera is carried downstream. Food that is irrigated with contaminated water, and then shipped to another region or country, may carry the disease to new areas if the produce is eaten raw and unwashed. In 1979, I was in a cholera epidemic in Tanzania that spread far and wide on cashew nuts that were packaged by the unwashed hands of people who were infected. International travelers may unknowingly carry cholera and pass it with their waste, spreading Vibrio bacteria from one country to another.

The El-Nino Conveyor.

Climate and weather play a key role. In the 1997-1998 epidemic, the disease’s spread was hastened by torrential downpours and mudslides from a periodic climate swing that occurs when transpacific winds change, for reasons unknown, pushing ocean currents out of their normal patterns. This weather pattern is called El Niño.

...By mid-October, the El Niño drama was clearly unfolding. The weather system was blamed for holding toxic air in a stagnant dome over Singapore, sending killer typhoons across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, causing a drought in usually drenched parts of West Africa, and showering parts of East Africa with sporadic rains of such force that mudslides and floods resulted. Changes in the hunting patterns of King Penguins have been blamed on El Niño, along with an overall East African drought so dire that the United Nations warns thatsevere food insecurity may loom. And on Oct. 25, an atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University credited El Niño with feeding Hurricane Patricia, which had record-breaking winds as high as 200 miles per hour.

El Niño’s impact on the Middle East, coupled with climate change, has been two-fold: First, temperatures from southern Iraq all the way into Turkey reached record highs this summer, topping more than 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire region is now locked in a severe drought, worse than the one some have credited with spawning the Syrian uprisings of 2011 that led to the Assad regime’s crackdown and current civil war.

Climate change, meanwhile, has hit the South Asia/Middle East region with severe drought causing some major rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates to be dammed by the countries they pass through. This slows or halts the flow of the rivers increasing the growth of cholera bacteria. Getting ISIS to open the Ramadi dam they control will not be easy. Meanwhile the river water and produce grown with that water become increasingly dangerous.

The Good News

So far the cholera that has spread from the Middle East into Africa is just one strain, Inaba, that is relatively easily treated and for which an effective and inexpensive vaccine is available but there are inadequate stocks of it. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a million doses but it intends to use half of that to vaccinate 250,000 displaced people in government-controlled regions of Iraq.

The Future

More than 10 million Iraqis, Syrians, and Kurds are now living in squalor, displaced within their own countries or in refugee settlements in the region. Among refugees over the last four years have been outbreaks of measles (1,000 cases currently inside Iraq), typhoid fever, hepatitis A, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and even polio, which was once all but eradicated from the Middle East. Conditions are ripe for a cholera epidemic that might take hold for a very long time.

Epidemiologists have been warning us for years that mass-migrations of the sort foreseen for much of this century will trigger and spread highly lethal epidemics. We live in a world in which more than one in three has no access to basic sanitation. In the Third World more people have cell phones than the number with toilets. Putting these people to flight from any cause - war, famine, water shortages, sea level rise, whatever - magnifies the risk of rapidly spreading, lethal epidemics.

This cholera epidemic is the world's wake-up call. Will we even hear it?

It is  

The 20/20 Project - Warnings Worth Heeding

The International Crisis Group, a prestigious think tank devoted to conflict resolution and avoidance formerly headed by Canadian Louise Arbour, is celebrating its 20th anniversary by unveiling the 20/20 Project. This is a series of 20 essays by some magnificent minds to be released over the course of the year.

As a teaser, here are some excerpts from two of the first tranche of essays, "Failures of Democracy," by Lord Christopher Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford; and "The World's Fragmenting Conflicts," by Crisis Group president, Jean-Marie Guehenno.

On our faltering democracy, Lord Patten observes:

The Great Wars’ victors created a better world with remarkable generosity and virtuosity on Washington’s part. The UN, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, together with the steady spread of democracy and the rule of law, promised and provided for a better world for millions.

So what happened? When and how did things change? When did the world seem to swing off its previous course and turn onto a new path in a different direction leading to who knows where?

Since then the old certainties have crumbled away into confusion and doubt. China’s economic rise seems to have faltered with the prospect, Larry Summers thinks, of a sharp growth regression to the much lower mean of other previously fast-growing economies. The U.S. retains its prominence as the world’s only real super-power, but seems to have lost its international self-confidence and its enthusiasm for global leadership somewhere in the thankless deserts of Mesopotamia and the committee rooms on Capitol Hill.

To some, Europe looks as decadent as a Sorrentino movie; at best it drifts between past dreams and tough contemporary choices — flashy and introverted or competitive and outward-looking. Failing states from Central and Western Asia to the Sahel export their problems and people. The bleak prospects for the world’s poorest, the bottom billion, threaten to turn much of the world into a Darwinian battlefield.

One potentially bright spot on the horizon is the prospect this year of a global deal on climate change — too late and arguably too little, but at least something to build on for the future. It is a reminder, as well, that the problems that assail us can only be tackled effectively by international co-operation. Perhaps people really are aware that our future depends on such a sense of common interest and common humanity, and yet they and their leaders do not behave as though they are.

...In the mid-years of the last century, the old democracies took the lead in making cooperation work and creating institutions that could channel and manage that common endeavour. Rhetoric on the whole ran ahead of reality. It usually does. But the UN and its family had real success despite the early years of brutish Russian behaviour and the long-term ambivalence of the great powers about ceding authority to a quasi-global government. Yet today, along with the authority of other regional organisations like the European Union, the credibility and legitimacy of sovereignty-sharing as a means of overcoming that bypass or demolish national frontiers is discredited or ignored.

...In the U.S. and Europe — which bear a particular responsibility for the effectiveness of all these global institutions — politicians run scared of challenging voters with the brute realities of the 21st century. Is speaking the truth to your nation’s citizens a certain way to lose office? Perhaps, but surely not forever. Moreover, if someone doesn’t try, political leaders will in any event lose their posts and much more besides. It is not enough for elected presidents and prime ministers, like Abbé Sieyès during the French Revolution and its aftermath, to regard mere survival as a triumph.

Can the excessively partisan, money-dominated American political system rediscover its vitality as an exemplar of democracy? Can European politics recover their morale, with Europe’s leaders telling their citizens more than these voters may find comfortable to hear? There seems to me to be a host of existential questions about the way the oldest democracies run their affairs. Perhaps even without a real democratic exertion, even without putting our faith again in reason and in the willingness of voters to behave rationally, we can somehow muddle through the next few years. The danger is that muddle is no longer sufficient. The danger is that we can’t and won’t muddle through. The danger is that we are at a real tipping-point on what Matthew Arnold described as “this darkling plain”. The danger is that this time things will tip.

On 21st century conflicts, Guehenno writes:

There was for a while a significant decline in conflict, as the world got better at peacemaking and peacekeeping.

But here we are, with a war in Syria that has claimed a quarter million deaths and displaced some twelve million people from their homes; with the return of power politics and great power rivalry playing out in Ukraine, as well as in Syria, and, in different form, the South China Sea; and with a new transnational jihadist agenda that infects an increasing number of conflicts that were, at their inception, simpler local disputes.

The threat of big war is back, and new forms of violence — cyber-attacks, hybrid war, and terrorism with a global reach — are redefining conflict.

They threaten to reverse the progress achieved since the end of the Cold War and challenge the legal order that emerged from World War II. At issue is not just that violent non-state actors threaten an international order based on the sovereignty of states. The problem is also that states themselves increasingly use force in situations that stretch or violate the UN founding principle that prohibits the use force except in cases of self-defence, or when the UN Security Council has authorised action in the interests of international peace and security.

...It is not enough to say that there are more intra- than inter-state conflicts. In a world that is as much multi-layered as it is multipolar, conflict is also multilayered: most conflicts still have very local roots, but they are often manipulated by external powers or hijacked by transnational ideologies.

The world is no more the top-down strategic play that it often was during the Cold War, but it would be naïve to think that a purely bottom-up analysis can explain the complexities of recent conflicts. Ukraine is about Ukraine, and it is also about Russia, and about Russia and the West. Syria is about the Assad regime, but it is also about the rivalry between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and about the spread of transnational jihadism.

States are losing their centrality as the theatre within which politics is played, and they compete with other actors, benevolent or malevolent, whose goals may not be confined within the borders of a particular country.

...let’s admit that when confronted with conflict and change, there is no such thing as an “international community”.

There never was, but there was the pretense, and that pretense was useful. Exposing hypocrisy can be the beginning of virtue, and the world’s thugs could sometimes be shamed into not blatantly challenging a working, if shallow, international consensus. This is no longer the case: established and emerging norms, as well as values that were still considered universal a decade ago, are now openly attacked as the props of an unfair order imposed by Western powers.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that Western powers have a significant share of responsibility for the unraveling of the international order: they launched a military operation in Iraq without the explicit authorisation of the UN Security Council, and they used the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect as cover for a policy of regime change in Libya. Both actions have had a disastrous aftermath.

Western powers lost moral authority as they were accused of double standards.

Guehenno's arguments make the case that we live in a world bereft of vision and statesmanship, the helmsmen of international comity. We go to distant corners of the world indulging in "whack-a-mole" warfare that earns us nothing but enmity from those we attack and, often, those we pretend to be helping alike.

As the year goes on and more essays are released I'll try to link to them.

Now that Harper's Gone, the University of Calgary Comes In for Scrutiny

Over the past decade the University of Calgary became a regular source of rightwing advocacy. At times it seemed like Canada's answer to the University of Chicago. There were a number of world-class, courageous academics but, during Harper's reign, the university also became a favoured bastion of the energy giants, especially Enbridge, and shady characters such as repeat jailbird/Harper confidante Bruce Carson.

Eventually the stench of bitumen-laundering overwhelmed the hallowed halls of foothills academia, sending some of UC's best and brightest fleeing in pursuit of academic integrity south of the border.

Two of these top-drawer academics have come out to expose what sent them packing. In September, David Keith, now professor of public policy at Harvard, wrote a piece in the Toronto Star chronicling how Bruce Carson and his Ottawa funded Canada School for Energy and Environment were welcomed into the university.

"It soon became clear that Carson was simply using his academic post to further the interests of the conservative government and a narrow segment of the energy industry. Documents released by the RCMP contain emails and interviews making it unequivocally clear that Carson worked closely with industry leaders to produce meetings and reports that had the patina of stakeholder representation, while in fact aiming to avoid meaningful public debate.

"Leaders of Alberta’s universities did nothing substantive to manage the problem until Carson’s scandal forced their hands. Even then, they failed to act decisively to ensure that public money was used for research that supported broad public interests."

CBC News has a report today of another leading academic, Joe Arvai, and what drove him to leave the University of Calgary. Professor Arvai's sage revolves around pipeline giant, Enbridge, and the Enbridge Center for Corporate Sustainability.

The story of the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability covers a short and troubled two-and-a-half years that ended in the fall of 2014.

In that time, documents obtained by the CBC reveal a university bending over backward to accommodate the apparent public relations ambitions of a corporate patron.

Along the way, concerns about academic independence, the role of university research and the credibility of the researchers were dismissed.
...Faculty members, such as business professor Harrie Vredenburg, described Enbridge's influence at the university as a classic case of "he who pays the piper calls the tunes" in an email complaint to Waverman on Aug. 26, 2011.

...The pairing, though, was fraught from the start, and one of those who felt that way was Joe Arvai, the young academic – a rising star in the area of organizational decision-making – who had been brought in to head the new venture.

...From the outset, though, Enbridge's hands-on approach to the new centre troubled Arvai, according to the email trail.

Beyond naming rights, Enbridge sought to influence board memberships, staffing and the type of students that would be considered for awards, the emails show.

...In a Jan. 3, 2012 email to Leonard Waverman, the dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the time, Arvai wrote: "I am not sure what we are signing up for. I have the impression that Enbridge sees the centre as a PR machine for themselves, whereas I see it as an academic research centre.

"In the latter case, it's likely that finds of academic work in the centre will not, at times, paint industry — including Enbridge — in the best light. I'm not sure that Enbridge understands this."

The dean responded that he did not understand Arvai's concerns.

At one point the dean told Arvai in a voicemail message, "If this goes belly up my ass is on the line and I won't feel happy with you either on this."

...Increased corporate sponsorship, however, also means that appropriate protocols must be in place to protect researchers and the public interest.

When it comes to the Enbridge Centre, questions remain about whether the university's administration — and U of C president Elizabeth Cannon, in particular — did enough to safeguard these concerns.

Emails show that Cannon was aware of the problems at the Enbridge centre before and after its launch in 2012.

But her emails at the time show she was intent on keeping Enbridge happy, especially considering the company had in the past given more money to the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

...When it comes to Enbridge, Cannon also has her own potential conflict of interest by virtue of her being an independent director of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings, since late 2010. She has disclosed this position. Last year, her board compensation from that position amounted to $130,500.

When it comes to academic independence a university ought to be like Caesar's wife - above reproach. The departures of David Keith and Joe Arvai plus all the records and documents the university had to disclose at the very least call the University of Calgary's integrity into question.

In so many ways this seems emblematic of the culture of the Decade of Harper.,

What Do Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger Have in Common?

Okay, it's time for a bit of unrepentant fluff.

Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger have one thing in common - Jerry Hall.

Jagger's former companion of 23-years and mother to some of his children is now Reptilian Rupert's companion.

Here, see for yourself:

Now They Notice? Too Little, Far Too Late. Give Them the Sack.

Almost from the day he ascended to power, Stephen Harper has held the public service, and most other government institutions, in a choke hold. Harper, the Great Corrupter, transformed government institutions into his personal, partisan political agencies.

Everything was skewed from the National Energy Board to the federal Competition Bureau (see the previous post on the looming collapse of Canada's newspaper chains).

Now we get word that in May, almost a decade on, top bureaucrats met to discuss "creeping politicization" of the public service.

As a new Liberal government takes the reins this week, Canada's top bureaucrats are looking for ways to purge partisan politics from the shell-shocked public service.

The highest echelon of the bureaucracy met in the spring, before the election was called, to discuss ways to insulate public servants from intense pressure to be "promiscuously partisan" instead of neutral in carrying out the government's agenda.

Ralph Heintzman, a research professor at the University of Ottawa, has cited the example of a communications directive requiring bureaucrats to refer to the "Harper government" in news releases, rather than the government of Canada.

Other examples include a request last year that departments send retweets promoting a family-tax measure not yet passed by Parliament, including a hashtag with the Conservative slogan #StrongFamilies, and public servants working overtime to create promotional videos about child benefits, spots that prominently featured Pierre Poilievre, the employment minister.

"For anyone who cares about the condition of our federal public service, this is a very depressing story," Heintzman wrote about the "Strong Families" tweets last April, a month before the deputy ministers' meeting.

What's wrong with this story? Just about everything. The mandarins are running for cover. They failed to stand up to Harper. They chose not to defend the public service over which they presided. They allowed themselves to be intimidated into colluding with a corrupt government. They abandoned their responsibility to the nation and the Canadian people and they now, unforgivably and outrageously, depict themselves as victims.

I've had veteran public servants tell me of the Harper culture of intimidation that set in where they became fearful of even telling the truth lest it put their jobs in jeopardy. They saw too many others lose everything for not parroting the party line, not going along to get along while advancement was reserved for sycophants. They knew there was no one above them willing to stand up for them and so they toiled on, hoping not to be noticed. 

These top bureaucrats should be required to submit letters of resignation on the swearing-in of Canada's new prime minister and Trudeau should not be timid about accepting them.

The Guardian's Obituary for PostMedia

Did the shameful performance of Canada's major newspaper chains sound their deathknell? Have they so broken faith with the Canadian people that the days are numbered for would-be media giants such as PostMedia? According to The Guardian, Canada's corporate media cartel may be on its way out.

The most common prediction ahead of last month’s Canadian election was that the country’s many polling firms would again fail to predict the results. In the event, most of them accurately foresaw Justin Trudeau’s Liberals sweeping into power. Instead, it was the country’s daily newspapers that got it wrong, promoting the incumbent Conservatives while readers and voters turned en masse against the party. Social media pounced on the striking disconnect with increasing ferocity as editors in virtually every Canadian city and town published tortured endorsements of Stephen Harper’s government.

Yet the defeat was a particularly brutal blow for Canada’s dominant chain, Postmedia, which publishes more than half of the traditional daily newspapers in English-speaking Canada and all but a handful of those that matter. Postmedia achieved its market dominance in step with the rise of Harper’s Conservatives. Its support for Harper was widely seen as an expression of the company’s will rather than editorial judgment. One columnist at the Postmedia title the Edmonton Journal wrote on Twitter that owners rather than editors had decided which party to back.

The company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.

...The company has halved its workforce from 5,400 to 2,500 since it first arose from the bankruptcy of a predecessor chain in 2010, gutting newsrooms in response to falling annual revenue. It has lost money every year since, most recently posting a C$263m loss on revenues of $750m for the year ending August 2015. Despite that, it continues to expand, having recently swallowed up the rival Sun chain of tabloid newspapers to give it a near-monopoly position in the print advertising markets of all but three English-speaking Canadian cities.

Postmedia has been able to expand despite its dire financial condition thanks to a succession of high-interest loans from US financiers led by Golden Tree Asset Management, a hedge fund that specialises in the debt of distressed companies. Paying Golden Tree rates ranging from 8.25% to 12.5% on what is now $650m in debt, Postmedia has sent more than $60m annually in interest payments to New York even as revenues collapse and losses mount.

“I don’t think they care much about the economic viability of these newspapers over the long run,” says Dwayne Winseck, professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University. “They’re just riding this thing down and milking what they can out of it until the papers disappear, except for maybe a handful. It’s a pretty lousy situation.

...The Harper government did not challenge the foreign takover of Postmedia, despite longstanding tax rules designed to ensure the country’s newspapers remain in Canadian hands. Earlier this year, the federal Competition Bureau approved Postmedia’s acquisition of the Sun papers, saying the new near-monopoly “is unlikely to substantially lessen or prevent competition”. In seeking permission for the takeover, Postmedia assured the regulator that its newspapers would pursue independent editorial policies. Mere months later they were predictably backing Harper’s Conservatives. The company is led by Paul Godfrey, a former Conservative politician and powerbroker from Toronto who has said he expects the chain to be sold to a wealthy businessman more interested in political influence than profits.

However, a decoupling of Postmedia from the political establishment could benefit the wider media ecosystem in Canada. “[The federal government] should stop trying to play handmaiden to owners who have made a hash of the business they’re in,” Winseck says. “These folks have been going on acquisition sprees now since the late 1990s, and they’ve been doing this at precisely the time we need all hands on deck to deal with the rapidly changing media.”

Update:

Overnight I kept coming back to Arthur Miller's observation, the caption of the cartoon atop: "A Good Newspaper is a Nation Talking to Itself." In just nine words I think he might have diagnosed the terminal affliction that has spread through modern newspapers.

Today's newspapers aren't conversations. They're corporate messaging. PostMedia's shameless "partnership" with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is an extreme example but illustrative of what goes on regularly albeit in more subtle fashion.

In the Sun chain or the PostMedia pack we aren't talking to ourselves for, after all, we are the nation. The corporate media cartel is not "of us." It is "of them" and it is using, no abusing, its dominance to lecture us, scold us, manipulate us.

The Guardian article reveals just how terribly pernicious has become the partnership between the corporate media and high political office holders, how the corporate media, in a transformation befitting Jeckyll and Hyde, went from the watchdog of government to the government's lap dog, both sides shifting their allegiance from the public to each other for their mutual, symbiotic advantage.

Foreign ownership? No problem, approved. A monopolistic merger of the two largest newspaper chains? No problem. "Don't worry, we'll take care of the federal Competition Bureau, we own it. It does as we say."

We're told that newspapers are dying. If so it's by their own hand. They saw fit to abandon their responsibility as the Fourth Estate to pursue a path of influence peddling. They commodified information, polluting it with messaging directed to benefit or harm particular interests and promote or undermine targeted viewpoints. They commodified it so that thereby they would have a value-added product of merchantable and proprietary value. And with it they sought to corrupt the national conversation.

I am becoming less convinced that the 'day of the newspaper' is over. The day of these newspapers is certainly over and that can only be a good thing.

As Miller so sagely notes, a newspaper is the vehicle of a national conversation and the need for that is, if anything, greater than ever. It's been withheld from us for so long that we've come to see the notion of a Canada without the Sun papers or PostMedia broadsheets as tragic. It's not. It is an essential part of renewal. It is how we go ahead.

Connie Black Flips his Wig

Why does he keep using "us" when he's referencing the Canadian people? He left "us" when he renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to become a British citizen entitled to claim a seat in Britain's House of Lords. By the way, isn't he somehow AWOL, absent without leave, from that elevated post on the other side of the pond? Or does his stretch in an American greybar hotel put his very lordship in jeopardy if he again sets foot in Britain's upper chamber?

Conrad is, however, an enthusiastic pseudo-Canadian and it's from this ersatz perch that he has opined on exactly what Trudeau the younger must do to put Canada once again on an even keel.

Black begins by complimenting Trudeau on achieving a real majority, reminiscent of Mulroney's electoral triumphs, and not the wee majority held by the dastardly Harper for just one term. Having done that, Lord Black of Piddlepuddle turns truly unhinged.

Here are some of the highlights. A modest wealth tax on high net worth people that would not be collected. The government wouldn't get the exigible money but the taxpayer would apply it to innovative means to reduce poverty. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Connie calls for a doubling in size of the Canadian Armed Forces because he read somewhere that bloated military outlays - not frivolous distractions like replacing collapsing infrastructure - are the best form of stimulus spending. And, with a nod to Hugo Boss, Black wants Canada's fashion bright lights to design really neat uniforms for all those soldiers, something that speaks of style, sizzle.

But wait, there's more. The old jailbird wants major change in the way we're governed. No more prime minister. An elected president instead, one who would double as our governor general.  I won't get into his convoluted ideas about Senate reform.

There is one area in which Black does have some expertise - prison reform. Here he wants non-violent offenders (such as himself) to avoid imprisonment altogether but, instead, to "contribute their work and live in freedom in Spartan circumstances" but with provisions for a quickie on the weekends.

The Global South is On the Move.

The amazing part about the migration of refugees out of war-torn Syria is the alarm it seems to be causing to so many Westerners. Here's a tip. Don't ask yourself how this is going to end. The real question is where the next wave of human migration will come from - and the one after that, and the next one, and all the rest.

People in many parts of the world realize that their ancient homelands are no longer livable or won't be much longer. To them it's time to  di di mau, get out of Dodge, head for the high ground. And, to them, that pretty much means the Western World, the Global North. They know that those who wait risk leaving it until too late.

In other words, the pre-migration world is over. This is the new reality.

Lord Paddy Ashdown, former head of Britain's Liberal Democrats, recently warned that the Syrian migration is just a "dress rehearsal." 

As I've written often for several years, both the American and British military have studied the risks of massive migrations and see it as a huge security threat, one that must be met, if necessary, by force.  Meanwhile an article today in the Sydney Morning Herald warns that the Global South is indeed "on the move."

Egypt's 5 million or more Copts, the Middle East's last remaining major Christian sect, are deeply worried about their future in an unstable and hostile country. Ancient minority groups like the Yazidis of Iraq are already homeless, as are many small communities of Assyrian, Nestorian and Chaldean Christians from northern Iraq.

Nor is it only the Middle East and North Africa that European leaders need to consider. The Gallup Poll, based on data compiled from more than 450,000 interviews in 151 nations from 2009 to 2011, found that in Nigeria, which already has double the population of Germany, 40 per cent of people would emigrate to the West if they could. And the lesson of 2015 – for them and much of the world – is that they can.

While the flow of migrants to Europe this year already represents the biggest influx from outside the Continent in modern history, many experts warn that the mass movement may continue and even increase – possibly for years to come. "We are talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands," Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said in a recent Twitter posting.

While most of the migrants have been from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, those who came through villages like this last summer could have arrived from almost anywhere.

Two women from Haiti and a young girl, the daughter of one of them, passed through in early October, according to officials here representing the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. They had flown to Turkey from Haiti, then joined smugglers' routes through the Balkans.

"I don't think this wave can stop," said Sonja Licht of the International Centre for Democratic Transition. "It can maybe from time to time be somewhat less intensive; we simply have to prepare. The global north must be prepared that the global south is on the move, the entire global south. This is not just a problem for Europe but for the whole world."

 

Voices from the Past - Busting the Corporate Media Cartel

It startled me when Owen at Northern Reflections posted an item yesterday on a Murray Dobbin op-ed calling for the restoration of a free press as the first step in rehabilitating Canada's ailing democracy.

Busting up the corporate media cartel (CMC) wasn't an issue in the last election. Only one party called for it in their platform and it wasn't the Liberals or the NDP and certainly not the Tories either. It was my party, the Greens.

This blog has been around for nearly ten years and for almost as long I've been championing the need to reform Canada's mass media as the cornerstone to restoring liberal democracy to our country.

One of the features common to both liberal and illiberal democracy is that they both allow voting. Where they differ is that in just one, liberal democracy, the will of the electorate matters while in the other it often doesn't. How can that be? It's as simple as it is deviously subtle. Part of it is voter manipulation. One way to control voters is to manage the information they receive. A misinformed public is a manipulated public. Sure they vote but the political power of their votes, the clout, transfers to the agent that steers them, not the voters. Those who can manufacture consent can have nearly anything they wish.

I grew up with these theories. The Davey Commission (1970) was held just a few years before I became a budding Ottawa journo. It was followed by the Kent Commission in 1981 just as I began my legal career in Vancouver. A nicely digested summary of these reports is available here.

These commissions looked at the threats to democracy posed by concentration of ownership (one chain obtaining an unhealthy dominance by owning too many newspapers) and media cross-ownership (whereby corporations gained dominance in individual markets by acquiring newspaper, TV and radio outlets).

I'll paraphrase the theory behind these inquiries. True democracy depends on a truly free press that furnishes the public generous access to information and opinion from the greatest number of voices spanning the broadest political spectrum from far right to far left and everything in between. This required that media ownership be as diversified, broadly owned, as possible. This was critical to preventing the media from becoming the lapdog of government (as today) instead of the watchdog of government.

To people like the Aspers and the Blacks and the denizens of the PostMedia and Sun chain, this thinking is as the noonday sun to a vampire.

Concentration of ownership gives rise to a democratically corrosive symbiosis between the few hands that control the media and the government of the day. Each has an interest in the health and welfare of the other. Through this the fealty of the media shifts from the public to those who govern the public. In return, government pretty much allows the media barons to have their way with us.

We never saw this more clearly than in the solidarity between Canada's major newspapers and the Harper government in the pre-election editorials this time around. The media took Harper's side, not ours. Their support of Harper was unanimous and anyone who sought to say differently, even Andrew Coyne, was gagged. That wasn't a fluke. It was merely a powerfully obvious display of what's been going on in Canada's CMC for years.

When just three or four or five hands direct Canada's mainstream media, all you can reliably expect to hear is the one voice that reflects their narrow, common interest. Newsrooms are gutted. Information is streamlined. The lines between news, opinion, and commercial messaging are blurred and eventually fade. News is no longer news but something that can be quite inimical to liberal democracy.

Now the good news. We don't have to re-invent the wheel. Davey and Kent have already done the heavy lifting. They've thought this through. We just need to dust off their wisdom and shape it to Canada almost half a century later.

Brace yourself. This, to your now thoroughly conditioned mind, could sound pretty radical.

Here are the recommendations on ownership and divestment:

In the area of ownership and divestment, the Commission proposed legislation to:

• prohibit the expansion of existing chains owning or controlling five or more daily newspapers;
• prohibit any future chain from acquiring more than five papers;
• prevent a conglomerate from purchasing a daily newspaper by prohibiting purchases where the value of the purchaser’s non-newspaper assets exceeded the value of the newspaper;
• prohibit ownership of newspapers and radio or television stations where 50% or more of the radio/television market was within the paper’s market;
• require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area;
• prohibit ownership of both a daily newspaper published in more than one province and any other daily newspaper (thus requiring Thomson to sell either the Globe and Mail or all of its other newspapers);
• allow a minimum of five and a maximum of ten years from proclamation of the legislation for divestiture of newspapers whose ownership became illegal on proclamation;
• create an administrative agency (the Press Rights Panel) which would apply the ownership and divestiture rules and have the power, in certain areas, to permit exceptions to them;
• allow a minimum of five and a maximum of seven years for any subsequent divesting order made by the Press Right Panel;
• require any paper intending to close down to publish notice of that intention and thereafter not to close down until after the expiration of a defined period;
• prohibit the sale of assets of any paper intending to close operation until the ownership had satisfied the Press Rights Panel that there was no economically viable offer that would allow the paper to continue as a going concern.

Here are the recommendations on Editorial Independence. Brace yourselves:

The Commission proposed that all daily papers other than those qualifying as "individual" papers should employ their managing editors under a written contract guaranteeing their editorial independence from the newspaper publisher.(3) This contract would give the managing editor (acting within the budget set by the owner) full responsibility for:

• editorial policy within the parameters of the newspaper’s principles and objectives as set out in the contract;
• editorial expenses;
• the content of the newspaper (excluding advertising); and
• labour relations, including the hiring and firing of employees.

The proposed contract would also have given the managing editor the right to comment adversely on the activities of the owners and any associates, and prohibited the proprietor from attempting to override the managing editor’s judgement as to what could be published.

Can you imagine living in a Canada where the media operated under these rules, provisions that didn't harness their voice but actually freed it?

One powerful reason why I couldn't vote Liberal or NDP was because they were both content with the status quo on our CMC. As I have argued so often, busting the Corporate Media Cartel is where the process of democratic reform must begin. Voting reform is important, no question, but what is it without an informed electorate? Not very much.

Forcillo, Might Be a Good Time to Review Your Options.

This don't seem to be going swimmingly for Const. James Forcillo in his trial for the the July, 2013 shooting death of Sammy Yatim.  When Forcillo opened fire, Yatim was standing still near the driver's seat of an empty TTC streetcar.  The officer was standing at the curb a good ten feet away.

At no point did Yatim even move into the streetcar stairwell. There was no indication he was going to attack Forcillo or any of the other police officers present. Forcillo pulls his gun and a good 35-seconds elapse before the constable empties his 9-round service automatic, instantly downing Yatim who collapsed into the aisle of the streetcar.

You or I or anybody can do a lot of things in 35-seconds. We can puzzle things through, evaluate situations, come to reasoned conclusions.

Forcillo's defence counsel, Peter Brauti, sought to gloss over the epic 35-second interval thusly:

“We’ve got to consider the individual that we’re dealing with, we’ve got to consider the environment we’re in, we’ve got to consider the nature of the call, we’ve got to consider the use of force options that we have, we have to consider which ones are the most appropriate to use at the time . . .

“I can keep going, but the problem is that sometimes we only have 30 seconds, 50 seconds to think about all of those different things,” Brauti said.

The big problem with the 'heat of the moment' argument is that there was no imminent threat from Yatim. He never left the aisle of the streetcar. He was just standing there - until Forcillo opened up. Yatim went down with the first shot. The onboard bus video shows that. Forcillo just kept on firing, emptying his sidearm into the unmoving body.

It's hard to see this "only 30 seconds" defence holding up. The reason it was only 30 seconds is because that's how long Forcillo and Yatim stood still before Forcillo chose to open fire. 

My guess is that Brauti wants to plea this thing down but the Crown won't accept anything less than 2nd degree murder. It's hard to see the prosecution losing this one.

If We Are Known by the Company We Keep, Why Are We Keeping Company with Thugs and Butchers?

By "thugs and butchers" I'm referring to the House of Saud and the detritus of princes and sheikhs of the other Gulf States at whose behest we in the West keep getting mired in ground and air wars against the little Sunni hellions they keep spawning.

These jackasses are depraved thugs and butchers. Take the Saudis who practice a form of radical Sunni Islamism that's shared with outfits like al Qaeda and the even bloodier Islamic State.  We know from Hillary Clinton's state department cables, duly leaked and published by WikiLeaks, that the US was well aware that ISIS was a Saudi initiative.  Which goes a long way to explaining why, while we're over there playing aerial "whack-a-mole" with ISIS, Saudi jets are screaming over Yemen bombing Houthi rebels who are actually fiercely fighting both ISIS and al Qaeda forces.

Then there's the beheading business that really offended Western sensibilities when conducted by ISIS insurgents but not so much when directed by our Saudi allies. The Saudis like to execute their condemned in public and they're doing it roughly every other day. Half of those are executed for drug offences which, by simple math, means the Saudis execute someone for drug offences about every four days.

One thing about those Saudis is they're unbelievably tough on drugs. Zero tolerance. Capital punishment - by scimitar blows to the neck in the public square. Unless...

Unless you're a member in good standing of the House of Saud. Then, to borrow a Jim Jeffries line, you can "take drugs like a champion" and it's all okay, even if you're caught.

Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz was caught in an airport in Lebanon on Monday with over two tons of drugs.

Lebanese security found 40 suitcases full of more than 4,000 pounds of amphetamine pills and cocaine on the prince’s private plane, which was on its way to Saudi capital city Riyadh. A security source told AFP that this was the largest smuggling operation ever foiled by Beirut International Airport security.

And prince Abdel Abdulaziz? He caught the next flight back to the sanctuary of Riyadh. Word is he might have gotten a scolding - nah!

Mere days before he was caught in Lebanon, female staffers at a Beverly Hills mansion filed a lawsuit against another Saudi prince, Majid bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, accusing him of sexually abusing them and using illegal drugs. Staffers say the prince, who was doing cocaine and heavily drinking — another illegal activity in Saudi Arabia — ordered them all to strip naked, while uttering “I am a prince and I do what I want.” They also say the prince engaged in homosexual sex, which is punishable by death in the Saudi regime.

The Saudi royal family is infamous for its decadence. These two recent cases are not isolated. WikiLeaks cables show that Saudi princes regularly throw opulent parties inundated with alcohol, drugs, and sex, while the totalitarian religious police turn a blind eye to their felonious activities.

It's funny how we like to cast a stinkeye at Shiite Iran and yet the Shia had nothing to do with the embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center bombing, the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al Qaeda, al Nusra and ISIS. Those are all on the Sunni side of the ledger and they all link back to the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and the other Gulf States. This is all the handiwork of our allies. 

Christ, no wonder we're furious with Iran. Those underhanded, deceptive buggers didn't do any of this - but I'll bet you they would have if they could have only wanted to but I suppose they couldn't be bothered. Oh well. We've stopped the Shiites from getting nuclear weapons, what a relief! That reminds me, there is a Muslim country with nukes, scads of them. It's the Sunni Muslim nation of Pakistan.

Monbiot Proclaims the Arrival of Eco-Apocalypse

That's Indonesia - Under the Smoke

Who knew it would begin in Indonesia? Who knew the world's mainstream media would simply ignore it?  Guardian enviro-scribe George Monbiot is gobsmacked at the wildfire devastation that has swept Indonesia along its entire 5000 km. length and how almost no one is noticing.

I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century – so far.

And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?

What I’m discussing is a barbecue on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page. It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.

Monbiot points out that the devastation is the handiwork of man and nature in combination.

It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases such as ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.

Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.

Monbiot concludes with a dark outlook for the upcoming Paris climate summit.

Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well, there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a de-skilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.

At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

Promises, Promises

They've run the numbers and it's not enough; not nearly enough. In advance of the Paris climate summit, officials of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have worked out that if the 146 nations' promised emissions reductions are met, we'll have locked in 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming.

Here's the thing. The long stated target is to hold global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial temperatures. The idea is to avoid triggering 'natural feedback loops' or what is known as runaway global warming.

Think of it this way. We're holding a gun to our heads. Man has his finger on the trigger but nature is the bullet in the chamber. And, sticking with this metaphor, think of it as a hair trigger. We're just guessing at how far we can pull it before the firing pin trips.

In other words, 2C is a guess and it's a mortal guess. Yet we've tagged 2C as the point at which we might have a 50% chance, an even chance but no more, of not triggering runaway global warming. That means we'll also have a 50% chance that we will activate these natural feedback loops.

Now that 2C target was a quasi-scientific/quasi-political number - a ginned-up best guess if you will - that was conjured up years ago based on old data and a relatively optimistic outlook. We've got mountains of new data now, including observed natural feedback loops already underway, that suggest 2C isn't an even bet after all.

Some of these feedback loops include the drying and burning of the tundra across the high north exposing the methane-rich permafrost beneath to melting and gaseous release; the loss of glaciers and polar ice caps that means the atmosphere now absorbs heat that was once reflected back into space; temperate and tropical forests that are drying out, turning to tinder and fueling massive, carbon-belching wildfires; and the release of once safely frozen but now thawing seabed and lakebed methane hydrates across the far north. Guy McPherson over at Nature Bats Last calculates we've triggered some 60 feedback loops in all but don't go to his site, not today. You don't want to do that when, tonight, you'll have to look into all those faces of young trick-or-treaters. Don't.

So here's the thing. If you suspect that McPherson and many other newly added voices might possibly be onto something, then the natural feedback loop horse might have already slipped out of the runaway global warming barn.

Now the UN is trying to put the best face on these disappointing pledges. Executive director Christina Figures basically says they're better than nothing. Only that's not true. Think of it as a 5-lb. trigger. 5 pounds of force and - bang. Now we used to be looking at 9 pounds of force and it seems that if we keep our promises (for the first time ever) we'll get that down to 7 pounds of force on that 5-lb. trigger. Better than nothing? Not really. Anything past 5 pounds is irrelevant.

But what if McPherson and others are right and we're actually squeezing a 3-lb. trigger? We just think it's a 5-lb. trigger because that's something we made up a long time ago and, despite all the science since then, we're sticking to it. You can think that one through.

So, as Ms. Figueres puts it, 2.7 C is our best, worst-case scenario.

It sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? Well, it is. And that's taking climate change - anthropogenic global warming - in isolation, free of its companion scourges such as the fresh water crisis, overpopulation, over-consumption of resources and the collapse of biodiversity as well as ocean acidification.

The thing is that we don't have much chance, perhaps no chance, of actually fixing climate change or any of these other existential challenges without fixing them all. That can't be done if we keep growing our numbers; expanding our overall and per capita consumption levels that already far outstrip our planet's carrying capacity; and fouling our oceans, rivers and lakes.

Ultimately the biggest threat, bar none, is us - mankind. We're writing cheques the planet cannot possibly cash. We need to collectively, as a community of nations, cut our numbers by about half while, at the same time, slashing our out of control consumption/waste levels. This requires recognizing that we have to shrink economic activity to the point that it exists within environmental capacity because, when you stray outside, collapse is inevitable.

We tell addicts that the road to recovery begins when they recognize they have a problem that they can't live with and so too for all of humanity. Cutting carbon emissions is like a drunk promising that he won't touch a drop - on Wednesdays. Promises, promises.

I Just Can't Win

I've had beagles since around 1976. Ever since the first I've pledged, "never again." 39-years later you can figure out how well that has worked.

The new guy, Buddy. If you could boil down the essence of all hounds, it'd be him. Everything great, everything mortally infuriating. It's hyper-concentrated inside Buddy.

There's a powerful psychological game in play between any dog and its owner. They (the dogs) worked out the rules (theirs) over the thousands of years we have allowed them to sleep safely beside our hearths. They read us as we could never read ourselves.

Buddy, not yet 2-years old, has a new way of controlling his owner, master, slave. As I'm just getting comfy in my recliner, planning to doze my way through some late evening TV, he does this:

He sits there, unmoving, staring straight at me. He doesn't move, even when I peer over and his gaze catches mine. He just sits there and stares at me until one of us gives in.

He never gives in.

Justin's Dream Girl Steps Up to the Plate

Canada's answer to Michelle Bachmann will be seeking to become interim leader of the Conservative party.

Rona "Big Hair" Ambrose says she's just the gal to take Justin Trudeau to the mat and wrassle him into submission.

"We must focus on challenging the Trudeau government by defending and promoting the conservative values and policies that so many Canadians embraced and voted in favour of," she said in a memo to her caucus colleagues.

"Our party needs to stand united and strong in the fight to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and that government programs are managed effectively. The Liberals must be held accountable for their actions at every step."

It's too good to be true. The chance of the social conservative vixen scoring interim leader is a real long shot. That said, it would be hilarious, and it's been a long time since we had much of that in the House of Commons.



Photo - the late health minister decked out in scrubs, stethoscope and pager making her rounds. Maybe no one pointed out that her degree is in political science.

They Knew There Would Be No Nuremberg for Them

How do the directing minds of a company persist through 40-years in growing an industry they knew could endanger all of mankind?

The obvious answer is that they also knew they could get away with it.  They knew they could pocket enormous profits earned from the eventual misery, suffering and even deaths of millions of others and they could do it with impunity. All they had to do was buy off the political caste and keep the public confused and off balance.

As Scientific American reports, the masterminds at Exxon knew all about climate change and the greenhouse gas effects 40-years ago, well before it entered the public consciousness.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

...Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”

...Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

Ah, Bugger the Bible, Mate. Don't Let That Jesus Stuff Mess With Your Mind!

If Steve Harper is looking for a new career he should consider teaming up with his fellow ousted prime minister, Australia's Tony Abbott in the lucrative field of political vaudeville.

Abbott hit the dinner circuit last night, with a rib-tickling Margaret Thatcher Lecture at the meeting of the Margaret Thatcher Centre in London.

The former seminarian from Down Under who doesn't seem to like too much Catholic or even Christian these days urged the black tie crowd to take a less than Biblical approach to Europe's immigration crisis. Abbott's advice was to push'em back out to sea and let them take their chances.

Mr Abbott, a former trainee priest and devout Catholic, urged Tory ministers to ignore their consciences and the "wholesome instinct" to love thy neighbour, as is preached to Catholics in the Bible.

"It will gnaw at our consciences, yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever."

"This wholesome instinct [to love thy neighbour] is leading Europe to catastrophic error," he declared.

 

The Hershey Highway - It's Real !!

And what's more, despite gravity it sometimes runs uphill.

When you sat down with your morning coffee today you probably didn't spare a thought for how much your very existence depends on poop or the perils of existing in a poop deficient ecosystem.

The Hershey Highway - it begins at the bottom of the ocean and follows a meandering path that brings it ashore and then up almost to the peak of our mountains and far inland. That's right, uphill. Here's what that looks like:

Whales hunt along the sea bed. They surface and poop. Whale poop gets eaten by surface algae that feed plankton that feed what we consider bait fish that are eaten by marine mammals and sea birds that bring all that nutrition ashore where it fertilizes the soil, growing delicious plants for herbivores. Meanwhile eagles, bears and such gorge on spawning fish as they head upstream. The herbivores and carnivores carry their phosphorous rich blessings uphill, doing their bit for growing our meadows and forests. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Stop snickering, I mean it!

A report from the US National Academy of Sciences entitled "Global Nutrient Transport in a World of Giants" explores the damage we're causing by wiping out the world's truly great poopers. Let's put it this way, it's not a pretty picture.

The capacity to move nutrients away from hotspots decreased to 6% of past values across land and ocean. The vertical movement of phosphorus (P) by marine mammals was reduced by 77% and movement of P from sea to land by seabirds and anadromous fish was reduced by 96%, effectively disrupting an efficient nutrient distribution pump that once existed from the deep sea to the continental interiors.

The paper explores how little time we have to restart the "nutrient distribution pump" and we do need to get our minds around this. One suggestion is to restore the traditional bison herds and every other link in the nutrient pathway beginning with our whale populations. Time's a wastin'.

It'll Never Fly

A glance at the morning headlines found several items asking if Canada should have a "Stephen J. Harper International Airport."  Sure, why not.

A short runway, maybe 1,800 feet all in, made up of broken concrete and asphalt to resemble the decay in our other national infrastructure. For overshoot protection, an emergency bitumen tailing pond shall be constructed at either end. Completely deregulated. No approach aids, no ILS, nothing. You're on your own at Harper International. There will be a tower. It will be unstaffed in the style of west coast Coast Guard facilities.

No terminal, no skyways. Arriving passengers will use emergency evacuation chutes and proceed to stand beneath the hold to catch their luggage. Those wishing to avoid full cavity search security will have twelve minutes to exit the airport perimeter fence.

In keeping with the theme of Harper International, there will be no access roads to the airport. That would be too much of a concession to vision. Access to the nearest town will be by foot along a pipeline trail.

As you can tell, I haven't fully thought this through. Your turn. What do you think would be fitting for Harper International?

Executive Position Available. Serious Enquiries Only.

Applicants sought for position of leader of national political party.

Applicants must be white, very white, preferably of fundamentalist Christian faith. No "immigrant religions" will be considered. Females may apply - again and again - until they collapse in tears.

The successful applicant must be able to demonstrate a variety of skills. He shall be entirely proficient in the use of the cudgel as an instrument of caucus solidarity. He must have a full range of vulgarian vocabulary and a demonstrated ability to kick articles of furniture across rooms.

Experience in the Stalinist arts of political management is an asset. Applicants lacking such skills must demonstrate an eagerness to learn. An ability to reduce clerical staffers to tears is essential.

Candidates must demonstrate an understanding of the role of relentless fear-mongering in motivating this party's base.

In the final selection stage, short-listed candidates must submit to urine and blood testing to establish they are completely vision-free and incapable of either mid- or long-term thinking.

Finalists will participate in a talent competition in which they will demonstrate their ability to entertain, placate and enrich a full range of foreign energy company titans. The "friends with benefits" rule will be in force.

For the purposes of this competition, the Nigel Wright protocols apply. Nothing in writing, no paper trail. Eye contact is frowned upon. Candidates must apply in person and, remember, the secret handshake is required for admission.

Do not forget the non-refundable envelopes stuffed with cash. No cheques, no electronic transfers will be accepted. For particulars, including a list of approved coffee shops where payments will be accepted, consult Mr. B. Mulroney.