The Cost of Tax Cuts

Stephen Harper is on the neo-conservative track to fiscal ruin. He's given up on deficits. How can you tell? By his insistence on going ahead with corporate tax cuts.

Taxes are, of course, how government pays its bills. When tax revenues fall short, government makes up the difference by going into debt, by borrowing. But Bush/Cheney set the bar for fiscal irresponsibility by introducing a witches brew' of borrowing coupled with tax cuts and topped off with two foreign wars and reckless financial deregulation.

When you're already deep in deficits, the only way you can fund tax cuts is by borrowing the money. You get yourself in hock to lenders so that you can take taxpayers off the hook. It's pure, neo-conservative ideology straight from the Bush/Cheney playbook and you can find the payoff in the current disastrous state of the American economy.

Stephen Harper is a neo-conservative ideologue, a reactionary blinded to reality. Harper's tax cuts merely shift the burden to the non-exempted taxpayers - the rest of us - but he hasn't got the guts to be upfront and raise our rates so he defers the impact by borrowing the money we'll have to repay, with interest. And this is the joker who promised to "Stand Up for Canada"?

Deepwater Horizon is Not a Petro-Fluke

A long overdue, cautionary tale on the global dimension of oil disasters - including Athabasca - from today's McClatchey Newspapers. With attention riveted on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it's a story repeated around the world.

Like many of her neighbors, Celina Harpe is angry about the oil pollution at her doorstep. No longer can she eat the silvery fish that dart along the shore near her home. Even the wind that hurries over the water reeks of oil waste.

"I get so mad," she said. "I feel very sad."

Harpe, 70, isn't a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She lives in a remote corner of Alberta, Canada, where another oil field that's vital to the United States is damaging one of the world's most important ecosystems: Canada's northern forest.

Across the globe, people such as Harpe in oil-producing regions are watching the catastrophe in the Gulf with a mixture of horror, hope and resignation. To some, the black tide is a global event that finally may awaken the world to the real cost of oil.

...There's no denying that the rust-red plumes of oil and tar balls in the Gulf of Mexico are a potential ecological calamity for American Southern shores. More than half the petroleum consumed in this country, however, is imported from other countries, where damage from exploration and drilling is more common but goes largely unnoticed.

No one's tallied the damage worldwide, but it includes at least 200 square miles of ruined wildlife habitat in Alberta, more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater spilled into the rainforests of Ecuador and a parade of purple-black oil slicks that skim across Africa's Niger Delta, where more than 2,000 polluted sites are estimated to need cleaning up.

..."Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oil fields all over the world, and very few people seem to care," said Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and the author of "Amazon Crude," a book about oil development in Ecuador.

"No one is accepting responsibility," Kimerling said. "Our fingerprint is on those disasters because we are such a major consumer of oil."

Europe, Africa Heat Up

Europe's Mediterranean region is headed for a real scorching according to the Zurich-based Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science. From Reuters:

People in cities around the Mediterranean including Athens, Rome and Marseilles are likely to suffer most in Europe from ever more scorching heatwaves this century caused by climate change, scientists said on Sunday.

The number of heatwaves was likely to surge to almost 3 each summer from 2071-2100 in the Mediterranean region from just one every third year from 1961-1990, it said. Most other parts of Europe would suffer far less.

"Some of the most densely populated European regions, such as the urban areas of Athens, Bucharest, Marseilles, Milan, Rome and Naples, would experience the severest changes in health indicators," they wrote.

..the study was the first to pinpoint areas of Europe where rising temperatures would coincide with rising humidity, high night-time temperatures and long-lasting heatwaves -- all factors that can aggravate health problems.

Global warming will mean more moisture in the air from the Mediterranean, for instance, making it harder for people to sweat away excess heat. High night-time temperatures can make sleep harder.

Another recent study has found a dangerous warming of Lake Tanganyika, the world's second largest lake, that is being linked to global warming. The heating is a threat to the lake's rich fishery. Heating intensifies stratification forming a barrier to prevent nutrients from the lake bed from reaching surface algae that form the beginning of the lake's food chain.

About those Tamil Tigers

Harper made enormous political hay out of Canadian Tamils and their support for the Tamil Tigers in their rebellion in Sri Lanka. Naturally in Harper's black and white world view it was Tigers-Bad, Government of Sri Lanka-Good.

According to the latest report from the International Crisis Group, maybe we ought not to have been so uncritically supportive of Sri Lanka:

Both sides in Sri Lanka’s civil war violated international humanitarian law throughout the decades-long conflict. However the violations became particularly frequent and deadly in the months leading to the government’s declaration of victory over the LTTE in May 2009.

Evidence gathered by Crisis Group provides reasonable grounds to believe that government security forces repeatedly and intentionally violated the law by attacking civilians, hospitals and humanitarian operations. The government declined to respond to Crisis Group’s request for comment on these allegations. Evidence also shows that the LTTE violated the law by killing, wounding or otherwise endangering civilians, including by shooting them and preventing them from leaving the conflict zone even when injured and dying.

Much of the international community turned a blind eye to the violations when they were happening. Many countries welcomed the LTTE’s defeat regardless of the cost of immense civilian suffering and an acute challenge to the laws of war. The United Nations too readily complied with the government’s demands to withdraw from conflict areas.

Today's political leadership, Conservative and Liberal, have abandoned the calm, even-handedness that once marked Canadian foreign policy and our country is the worse for it. When you give uncritical support to one side in a conflict, you're condoning if not outright supporting what they do and whether it's Honduras or Gaza or Sri Lanka you usually wind up backing some pretty ugly atrocities.

UN Calls for End to Over-Fishing

A UN report warns that saving global fish stocks from total collapse means beaching 13-million fishing boats worldwide. From The Guardian:

The UN's environment branch, UNEP, gave a sneak preview of its green economy report that will be published in October. It said that if the world remained on its current path of over-fishing, by 2050 all fish stocks could have become uneconomic to exploit or actually extinct.

Pavan Sukhdev, who heads UNEP's green economy initiative, said: "That is not as absurd as it sounds, as already 30% of the ocean fisheries have collapsed and are producing less than 10% of their original ability."

At the heart of the UN's analysis is the $27bn of subsidies it estimates is being injected into fishing every year, mainly by developing countries. The UN says the subsidies are huge in terms of the scale of the industry – amounting to almost a third of the $85bn total value of fish caught.

Among those subsidies, the UN defines just $8bn-worth as "good" in the sense of encouraging sustainable fishing of healthy stocks. Most of the subsidies are "bad", meaning they lead to overcapacity and exploitation, and about $3bn of the subsidies are "ugly", actively leading to the depletion of fish populations.

Among the most egregious practices targeted by the report are inducements to increase the size of massive trawler fleets that are among the main culprits of overfishing, and fuel subsidies on fuel for fleets.

"We are paying ourselves to destroy the very resource on which the whole fishing industry is dependant. We are in the process of eroding the natural capital that underpins our economies," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's director.

The UN estimates 20-million jobs need to be cut from the global fishing industry.

Uh-Oh - Costa Rican Scores Top UN Climate Post

Hammer, meet Tong. UN Secretary General Ban has chosen Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica will be the new U.N. climate chief. A Costa Rican, eh? Curious.

Ms. Figueres hails from a country that's expected to take it in the neck from global warming on everything from sea level rise to increasingly violent storms. From Reuters AlterNet:

Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.

Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting also to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.

Figueres' challenge will truly be to herd cats, an awful lot of cats including some very big cats that are decidedly opposed to being herded by anyone. Good luck, Christiana!

The US Justice System Blinks on Life Sentences for Kids.

By the slimmest of majorities, 5-4, the US Supreme Court has turned all wobbly and ruled it's unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole unless somebody actually died. US courts can still give kids life but they have to leave open the possibility of parole maybe after 50 or 60-years or long after it really matters any more.

The case concerned a young Floridian who commited armed robberies at the age of 16 and 17. The Sunshine State likes banging up kids and boasts an impressive 70% of America's children imprisoned for life.

Chief Justice Roberts sided with Kennedy and what the New York Times describes as the court's "four liberal justices" to ban life without parole for kids. The four losers predictably included Alito, Thomas and Scalia. Thomas, in a remarkable burst of creativity, acutally said something, holding, ''I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens.'' In other words, as far as Thomas is concerned, who cares what's constitutional when the Florida legislature has okayed life without parole for kids? With his way of thinking, he'd be a stable boy on a fine, Southern plantation or at least riding at the back of the bus.

Lawyers, Guns & Money - Playing and Being Played in Afghanistan

Only now are we truly coming to grasp the real nature of the Afghan war. For the first seven or eight years, we thought that we defined the war. We deployed our weapons, our technology, our soldiers to fight what we stubbornly insisted was our way of warfare.

And they let us do it because they knew it was suiting their purposes, not ours.

"They" are all the crazies in Afghanistan - the politicians, the bureaucrats, the warlords, the drug lords, the insurgents. Each was well served by the way we fought our "war without end" in their homeland. It became obvious early on that we weren't going to win this one, we weren't in it to win. Once that reality settled in, each of these players shaped a course to best exploit what we had to offer - while it lasted. In a country that doesn't see a lot of opportunity, we were the best deal they'd had in a very long time.

If you doubt that assessment, ask yourself this. How would Karzai, how would the Fahims and the Dostums, how would the bureaucratic mandarins, how would the national police and how would the insurgents in all their varieties have acted these past eight years if they truly believed we were in this war to win, to do whatever it took for however long that took? Much of Karzai's intransigence and double-dealing is fueled by his conviction that we're not going to win our war and I suppose he can't be blamed for that. The rest are merely following suit.

They knew from their rich history of these things that we weren't fighting their war, the only war over there that matters, the war that will decide the course of their future. We certainly know how to fight their war, the Yanks have even developed a brilliant field manual on the subject, but, when its precepts aren't followed, invoked, it's just a nice book on the shelf.

A glimpse into the nature of our Afghan conundrum appears in today's Washington Post. WaPo reporter Greg Jaffe has penned an insightful piece entitled "Combat Generation: Trying to Work with an Afghan Insurgent." The article tells of the experience of Army Lt. Col. Robert Brown and the strange offer he received last November from insurgent warlord, Mullah Sadiq, who has been on the Army's "kill list" since 2005:

"Sadiq wanted 50 assault rifles, $20,000 and a promise that U.S. forces would not kill him. In return, he promised to turn against more-radical Taliban insurgents and to begin to work with the Afghan government.

Sadiq's proposition gave Brown a chance, however tentative, to achieve a victory of sorts in his corner of Afghanistan and redeem the loss of his men.

"This has the potential to work," Brown told his commander."

Lawyers, Guns & Money. Overturn the "kill order", hand over the weapons and pony up a bag of cash and Sadiq will turn on the really, really bad guys. If only. Was this Brown's chance to play the insurgency or were the insurgents playing Brown? In a country were treachery is the routine and capacity for betrayal is bottomless, chances are it was a mix of both.

..."It has become a given within the U.S. military after nearly a decade of grinding battle in Afghanistan and seven years in Iraq that U.S. forces cannot kill their way to victory. Enemies must be persuaded to lay down their weapons through a mix of negotiation and force. Grievances must be understood and wherever possible addressed. These principles are at the core of the military's coming campaign in Kandahar, which U.S officials are touting as the most important battle of the nine-year war.

Sadiq had collaborated with the Americans before. Right up to 2004 he regularly dealt with a US Special Forces officer. Dealings with that officer's successors soured and, in 2005, the Americans tried to take Sadiq out with a Hellfire missile.

..."Sadiq's brother-in-law insisted that the U.S. commandos were acting on bad intelligence from a rival who had accused Sadiq of murdering his father a decade earlier.

Brown has no idea why previous U.S. commanders sought to kill Sadiq.

"We spent the first five or six years in Afghanistan making enemies, because we were used to settle political, economic and historical conflicts," he said. "We were pretty credulous."

Even as Col. Brown was working to shore up a deal with Sadiq, the Karzai government in Kabul balked. Sadiq, they feared, might emerge to challenge their own control over his region even if he did thwart the Taliban. Who would control Sadiq after the Americans left?

For going on nine years now we've been waging our form of warfare in Afghanistan, deluding ourselves into believing it works even as we are taught that this isn't war as we understand it with allies and enemies readily defined and constant. We don't comprehend warfare where enemies and allies cross sides with fluidity as and when that suits them, where even our supposed friends manipulate us to their purposes and against our own.

At the end of the day we're just banging away on drums. Why?

Gunter Makes the Case For No Oil Tanker Terminal in BC

I know he didn't mean to warn us about the Athabasca Tar Sands but the Edmonton Journal's Lorne Gunter has never been the sharpest pencil in the box. In his latest drivel piece on the Deepwater Horizon debacle, Gunter defends offshore drilling platforms as inherently safer than oil tankers when it comes to spills:

According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, offshore drilling remains less damaging than shipping oil by tanker.

"Since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines."

So there you have it, courtesy of CanWest's own Lorne Gunter. Bad as offshore oil rigs are, they're nothing compared to oil tankers when it comes to oil spills. Ergo, thanks to Lorne, no oil tanker terminal on the BC coast should be built to ship Tar Sands oil to Asia, right?

Of course this is just another example of Gunter getting tripped up by his rank ideology. Tankers may have spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms but that's peanuts when you compare the amount of oil they deliver from the oil fields of the Middle East to the piddly amounts produced by our local, offshore rigs. Gunter is comparing apples to oranges but handily making the case against a BC oil seaport anyway.

The man may not be sentient but, at times, he's damned handy.

An Exxon Valdez Every Four Days?

That's the high end of the range of assessments of oil pouring out of BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico - 70,000 barrels a day. The low end remains the initial 5,000 barrel a day guess of the US Coast Guard and British Petroleum.

The estimates were increased by some observers based on recent sea bed video showing raw oil belching into the sea. From The Guardian:

"National Public Radio in the United States last night reported that the well is spewing up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every four days. Nearly 11 million [gallons] of oil were spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground, oiling beaches and poisoning marine life for generations. NPR said scientific analysis of newly released video footage from the ocean floor suggested the gusher was 12 times more powerful than estimates offered so far by the Coast Guard or BP.

"Its analysis was conducted by Steve Werely, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry, a method was accurate to 20%. That puts the range of the oil spill from 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day."

If Werely's forecast is even remotely accurate, the Deepwater Horizon disaster will stand as a compelling indictment of seabed oil drilling. Here in British Columbia it has grabbed the attention of a lot of people no longer willing to accept Premier Campbell's blithe assurances that it can be done safely.

By the way, while the North American media has come to use the Exxon Valdez disaster as a benchmark, in terms of global oil spills in ranks a paltry 52nd.

My, My, My Halliburton Hearts Inhofe

Senator James Imhofe, who is to climate change denialism what Joseph Goebels was to Aryan supremacy, stands alone atop the list of US senators sitting on the Energy and NaturalResources Committee and the Environment and Public WorksCommittee who received handouts from Halliburton. Imhofe's take was more than double even the other Republicans on these committees while most of the Dems were shutout altogether.

Hmm, wonder if Jimmy Imhofe is going to give Halliburton a rough time over that Deepwater Horizon disaster. After all accidents, like global warming, do happen, no?

Coastal First Nations Slam Alberta Oil Tanker Route

Their message is clear, we've seen what's happening today in the Gulf of Mexico and, "if Enbridge brings oil tankers to British Columbia's coast, we will wake up one day to the same kind of disaster on our own shores."

Coastal First Nations officers Art Sterritt and Gerald Amos don't pull any punches in their editorial in today's Vancouver Sun.

...Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline would carry the world's dirtiest oil from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat on the B.C. coast, to be loaded onto foreign-bound supertankers. Some 225 tankers per year would attempt to navigate the waters where a passenger ferry sank in 2006, and where last year a freighter ran aground.

...Like the Exxon Valdez, the impact of a spill so close to shore would be swift, devastating and would last for generations.
Our people are fishing people. While many Canadians do not know where the food they buy comes from, we still rely on traditional foods such as wild salmon, halibut and shellfish. We thrive despite high unemployment because we have access to these foods. Lose this, and we lose our way of life.

...With Enbridge's tankers lurking in the shadows, the future of the area we pledged to protect hangs in the balance.
Because it threatens the basis of our culture, Coastal First Nations firmly oppose the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. In accordance with traditional laws, we declared a ban on the transport of oilsands crude oil through our territories.

It is a declaration we will defend by whatever means necessary. It is one Enbridge would be wise to abide by.

The Campbell faux-Liberal government is already plunging in popularity thanks to its excessively business-oriented policies. A petition to force Campbell to put his HST (harmonized sales tax) to a referendum is said to already have enough signatures even with two months of canvassing time remaining. This oil tanker venture and Campbell's support for offshore oil exploration and offshore drilling could very easily be the final nails in his political coffin. The sooner he's gone, the better for British Columbians and our province.

Food for Thought - Canada's Growing Agricultural Deficit

A lot of us think of Canada as a land of great agricultural abundance. It's not and that's entirely our own doing. Watch this badly needed wake-up call:



While domestic food production is important in its own right, it will become critical in less than a generation. We'll pay dearly if we don't wean ourselves from our dependence on cheap imported foodstuffs. Globally, agriculture is taking a beating due to a variety of ecological scourges from desertification and freshwater depletion to the migration of pests. If the warnings about Peak Oil are true that, combined with the other pressures, could land us with a dramatic and quick food crisis. We have the ability to restore Canada to agricultural self-sufficiency and now is the time to see to it. Yes it may be more expensive to produce locally but that difference could all but disappear before long.

Here's another critical policy that the Libs can run with, if only...

Skin Cancers Linked to Driving

A new study by the St. Louis School of Medicine has found an apparent link between skin cancer and long hours spent at the wheel. Americans, of course, drive on the right meaning the driver sits on the left side. That leaves the driver's left side, arm and face in particular, exposed to UV radiation.

What the researchers found was an increased incidence of left-side skin cancers. For men it was 56% while women were still 52% left-side over right-side. However when it came to the most lethal of skin cancers, melanoma, they occured on the left side in 74% of cases.

There's nothing really new to this. Airline pilots have known this for years because, with the large side cockpit windows and the high altitude exposure to not just UV but also elevated gamma radiation, they've been particularly vulnerable to these sorts of cancers.

Warren Grabs the D-Ring and Ejects

This may be old news but I haven't seen anything about it on Liberal or Progressive aggregators so I thought maybe someone should get it out there.

Warren Kinsella has bailed on Michael Ignatieff. The Globe's Jane Taber says Warren, like Elvis, has left the building:

Warren Kinsella has quit as head of the Liberal war room, complaining in part about the treatment of Michael Ignatieff’s former chief of staff, Ian Davey, and ex-communications director Jill Fairbrother.

Although he says he has moved on and is still a federal Liberal, Mr. Kinsella told The Globe in an email this month he “was unhappy about the way in which some people were dealt with.”

“For example, Ian and Jill and others are my friends, and they brought me in. I didn’t like how they were treated but they moved on, and so have I.”

This seems to run true to course for the Liberal leader. Even at that I wonder if Kinsella would have ditched him if he thought Ignatieff had even a remote chance of winning the next election?

Update: I've since checked and found that WK posted the announcement himself yesterday on Liblogs. That's the price you pay for ditching those guys.

A Tory Is ...a Tory, On Either Side of the Atlantic

Who can forget Canada's great "Coalition Days" when the Liberals might have formed a government in partnership with the NDP and the contractual backing of the Bloc? Who can forget the Harpies' response, the nonsense about an unconstitutional coup d'etat that revealed the profound depth of ignorance about Canada by oh so many Canadians?

Well the UK Tories are up to the same bullshit tricks. Labour and the Tories, neither of which can form a government without a coalition, are vying for the favour of the Liberal-Democrats. So far both are offering the Lib-Dems the promise to hold a referendum on proportional voting after they ascend to power.

But it was the remark of the Tory deputy leader, William Hague, that had that old familiar ring of Harper. Hague argued that a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition would mean, "a second unelected prime minister in a row." Say that again? Since when did the Brits get the right to elect any prime minister? They, like us, get at best the right to vote for a member of parliament and that's about it. And besides, if Tory leader Cameron wasn't able to get a majority, by what possible stretch could he claim to be anything but "...a second unelected prime minister in a row"? Or the 30th or the 80th or whatever?

These Tory greaseballs seem to have an inexhaustible ability to pull these remarks straight out of their backsides.

When Nothing Else Sticks, Sometimes You Have to Fall on Your Own Sword

You can't say they didn't try - try and try again. However it seems the Vatican has run out of would-be scapegoats to carry the blame for its global, clerical paedophilia scandal. So, when in Rome... be a good gladiator and fall on your own sword.


Joe Ratzinger, reprising his role as Pope Benny the XVIth, just couldn't stick this to the media or the pro-choice movement or the gay rights activists or the Semites or the anti-Semites either. So now that he's fresh out of alternatives, he's blaming the kid diddling on - wait for it - the Church. Well, not so much the Church, as the priests and bishops and cardinals. After all, you can't blame buildings, can you?


"The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church," the pontiff said. "The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice."


Well that's a lovely sentiment but the world waits to see how it plays out. And, in fairness to Joe, he has ditched a bunch of buggering bishops of late and even impounded the Legionairies of Christ order after revelations that its founder was a father in every sense of the word and perhaps had his way with a few seminarians to boot. Still, the one hot topic that, for Joe, is not on the table for discussion remains the Church's doctrine of celibacy.

Epitaph for an Ambitious but Lacking Man

"...there was no other way. Let's not pretend this is an elegant departure of his own volition in the interests of the country. [The man] lost an election that might have been won outright had he only departed sooner. No good grace now can erase the catastrophic mistake the man has made in so over-reaching his political skills and talents. Should there be pity and generosity for him now in his leaving? For all those years he plotted, planned, schemed and wrought havoc on his party in his single-minded determination to seize the crown he was not equipped to wear – though he had gifts and virtues too. But there will be time enough on many a long winter evening to ponder the dark and strange character of [the Man] when he is gone."

Polly Toynbee wrote this passage of the soon to retire Labour leader, prime minister Gordon Brown. As her words sunk in I had a moment to wonder if Canadians are not just one election away from the moment when we might well say these same things about another man, one closer to home?

The Prince of Pot - Just What Did He Expect?

Marijuana activist Marc Emery will be extradited to the US sometime this week to serve up to five years in Uncle Sam's Greybar Hotel. Emery pleaded guilty to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana in the US.

The debate isn't whether Emery sold marijuana seeds to Americans nor whether that is a criminal offence in the oh so United States of America. The issue is whether a five year tariff is remotely fair? Even the BC Court of Appeal thought a couple of months slammed up followed by a year of probation would be appropriate but that wasn't the issue before them.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for Emery. He did appear to enjoy his passing notoriety and made a bit of a martyr out of himself and, quite possibly, a good bit of money in the process (but I confess I don't know).

What is beyond question is this - Emery's martyrdom would be neutralized if only the government (both in fact) would decriminalize pot and market it in a manner similar to the way they reap the rewards of booze sales.

Now I'm a beer guy myself although I do enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. That said, in my immediate region, pot growing may be what passes for agriculture. It's pretty much just rocks and Christmas trees here, rocks and Christmas trees and pot. That said, I think it's harmless enough that it deserves to be treated like our other pet intoxicants.

My best buddy of some 40-years now is a freshly retired Detroit cop and Vietnam marine. For the sake of this item I'll only refer to Bob as "Bob." Many years ago Bob, as I'll call him, told me that he was all for the decriminalization of pot. He explained that he'd been to too many domestic violence scenes where the evidence comprised a corpse, a still warm gun, and a nearly empty bottle of bourbon on the kitchen table. Yet he'd never attended a murder that featured a corpse, a still warm gun and a stoner sprawled on the sofa. There was pot violence, make no mistake about that, plenty of it. But the pot violence came from the criminal element that enjoyed the exclusive market to traffic in the highly lucrative, illegal product. Kill two birds with one stone, Bob argued, stop banging up kids for a relatively harmless intoxicant while simultaneously cutting out the powerful criminal element that was profiting from it.

If people like the Lord of Flies could truly stop the pot trade by retaining the criminal sanction I'd say okay. But he can't, and he knows it. Does he, or anyone remotely sentient, believe that mandatory sentencing is going to reverse that, is going to put a meaningful dent in the pot trade? That has to be the sine qua non. You have to have some weird shit going on in your cortex to buy that and, if you do, your problem is far worse than pot.

Unfortunately, Marc Emery's martyrdom is a diversion to the debate we need to be having on this issue. I guess that's why this guy gets under my skin.

Softpeddling Torture - CSIS Runs Interference for Harper?

The National Spot is doing its best to take the heat off the Son of Perdition over the Afghan torture scandal. Today it offered up a claim by Michael Coulombe, a top official of CSIS, that Canadians would be okay with torture if it meant saving Canadian lives.

Implicit in Coulombe's fantasy is that torture generates reliable intelligence, something the Americans have tried and thoroughly debunked long ago. Torture is what you use to elicit confessions, not intelligence. Even the Khmer Rouge knew that dipshit.

What Coulombe is also spinning is the idea that torture has somehow saved Canadian lives. Too bad he didn't seem to have any specifics to back that up but, then again, that wasn't the point of his remarks, was it? He doesn't want to try to make the case for torture, he just wants to confuse the issue.

One cardinal achievement of the FBI during the Bush years was to prove, conclusively prove, that standard interrogation techniques consistently yield high-grade, actionable intelligence while coercive, even illegal CIA and military techniques yield precisely whatever the interrogator/torturer wants to hear.