A Breath of Fresh Air From the Edmonton Journal

Alberta is Harper country, plain and simple.   That's why it was refreshing to read the Edmonton Journal lay the blame for Canada's failure to win a UN Security Council seat right where it belongs - at the feet of Stephen Harper:

Regardless of what you think of the UN, we are not held in the same high regard we once were. In the second round of voting, we were supported by only 40 per cent of member nations (Portugal 113, Canada 78).


To top it off, Harper is like the child who blames everyone but himself for his failures.
Instead of "manning up," the Tories offer the classic dog-ate-my-homework excuse that it's all Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's fault for saying in a single, informal interview that the government's actions did not merit a seat on the council.


I'm unsure how Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon could keep a straight face when he trotted out that classic, but it may be the thought of Harper's typical, mean-spirited retribution as evidenced by how he treated Helena Guergis based on rumours. With the "Iggy did it" canard, the Conservatives keep their hypocrisy record intact by an opportunistic attack on opposition criticism of Harper's policies.

In 2003 Harper cowrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal criticizing Jean Chretien for not supporting the Brits and Yanks by sending troops to Iraq. Publicly opposing government policy on important matters is apparently OK only when Harper does it. In that letter, Harper and Stockwell Day wrote, as representatives of the then Canadian Alliance: "Prime Minister Jean Chretien has left Canada outside this multilateral coalition of nations."
 

Stephen Harper, or as I like to call him "the two legged tantrum we call prime minister" is pretty rapidly turning into the clown prince.   This bozo, who promised to elevate Canada's stature on the world stage, has instead transformed our country into a joke and, in some aspects, a global pariah.  Maybe the U.N. simply didn't want him kicking their chairs.

The Price to Hang a Dictator

Does Iraq even matter anymore?  We Westerners have a blazingly short attention span when it comes to kicking over other countries.   Canadians were focused on Iraq for a while when Jean Chretien declined Bush's invitation to join the party (for which that moron, Stephen Harper roundly condemned not just Chretien but Canada itself).   Then there was the conquest and the looting.  Abu Ghraib sent us into a state of high dudgeon, although we were just a tad sanctimonious about it.   Then there was the online execution of Saddam Hussein and, with that, we began to turn the page.   At the 11th hour, Bush threw in his star quarterback, David Petraeus, for the Hail Mary play, the Surge, that supposedly clinched the game in the dying seconds.

Now it's becoming apparent the Surge was mainly smoke and mirrors.  As discussed here yesterday, "In Baghdad It's 2007 Again," the targeted assassination of Iraqi police and security officials has resumed in Baghdad.  Moqtada al Sadr is back from Iran.  Al Qaeda is resurgent.  The Kurds are becoming insistent on gaining autonomy over Kirkuk and its massive oilfields.   And the cornerstone of the Surge, the Sunni resistance is changing sides once again.   The Sunni problem is discussed in today's New York Times:

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency. 
 
The Awakening members’ switch in loyalties poses a new threat to Iraq’s tenuous social and political balance during the country’s ongoing political crisis and as the United States military prepares to withdraw next year.


“The Awakening doesn’t know what the future holds because it is not clear what the government intends for them,” said Nathum al-Jubouri, a former Awakening Council leader in Salahuddin Province who recently quit the organization.


“At this point, Awakening members have two options: Stay with the government, which would be a threat to their lives, or help Al Qaeda by being a double agent,” he said. “The Awakening is like a database for Al Qaeda that can be used to target places that had been out of reach before.”

Think of all the lives taken, by some accounts over a hundred thousand civilians, the million plus Iraqis displaced, America's thousands of casualties and the trillion dollars plus of borrowed money Washington squandered on this Iraq venture.   Was hanging one despot really worth all those lives, all that treasure?  Madness.

Wikileaks Poses No Threat to U.S. or Afghan Security

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has put to rest the notion that the release by WikiLeaks of some 70,000 documents concerning Afghanistan has endangered national security.  The Americans have scrutinized the materials.   The only concern is that the release of names of Afhgans working for or assisting allied forces could place those individuals and their families in jeopardy of retaliation from the Talibs.

At least the security canard has finally been put to rest.

Just Checking

Live long enough and you'll discover plenty of changes in your language.  In fact language is a living, vibrant thing reflective of the society of the day.   Vulgar becomes merely colloquial becomes fully accepted.

The question I've got concerns one of my lifelong interests, aircraft.   To me, "aircraft" was one of those nouns that was at once singular and collective.  Example - "that's a splendid aircraft," or, "the Allies lost 65-aircraft last night over Berlin."   What I don't get is how a perfectly suitable "aircraft" was transformed into "aircrafts."   There, even my spellchecker is choking on that one.

Consider this news service item about Bombardier introducing two new ships to its lineup:

"The Montreal-based company announced the aircrafts Saturday and said they will be more fuel efficient than current models."  (Oh dear, I think my spellchecker is becoming apoplectic).

This wouldn't bug me if it was the first time I'd run into this but it seems to be happening an awful lot lately.  So, tell me, what gives?

Maude Barlow is Warning Us - Will You Listen?

Maude Barlow - former UN Senior Water Advisor, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, founder of the Blue Planet Project, has spent her life in the service of others.  For many years she has been an outspoken critic of the world's water consumption habits, the spreading privatization of water resources and the need to understand the looming freshwater crisis to be every bit as threatening to the survival of mankind as global warming itself.

AlterNet has published the text of a speech Barlow recently gave to an environmental funding group in California.  I urge you to follow the link and read it.   Here are a few excerpts to pique your interest:

A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world.

The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced. As vast areas of the planet are becoming desert as we suck the remaining waters out of living ecosystems and drain remaining aquifers in India, China, Australia, most of Africa, all of the Middle East, Mexico, Southern Europe, US Southwest and other places. Dirty water is the biggest killer of children; every day more children die of water borne disease than HIV/AIDS, malaria and war together. In the global South, dirty water kills a child every three and a half seconds. And it is getting worse, fast. By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.

Barlow goes on to explore what can be done to deal with this pending water crisis.  In essence she argues for what I've advocated on these pages for a very long time.  We, mankind, simply have to find new rules for living together, rules that place our long-term survival at the top of our priorities.

She echoes the efforts of many, including the Germans, to gain global acceptance of the concept of "commons."   These are assets that must be taken to belong to no one and hence to belong to everyone.   Two obvious assets are the oceans and the earth's atmosphere.   The latter of these illustrates the hurdles we have to clear.

No matter where you are in the world when you look up at the night sky you see the same moon and you see it through the same atmosphere.   I imagine not one in a thousand of us can possibly believe that he owns that atmosphere.   We can't possess it.   It constantly moves as our earth rotates.   What's above you today is going to be somewhere else tomorrow and far off next month.

We can't possess the atmosphere yet, with our 19th century economics and geo-politics, we act as though we can and do.   That is exactly what we do when it comes to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.   Those emissions go into the atmosphere.  We now know the limited but, we hope, safe CO2 carrying capacity of our atmosphere and less than half of that capacity remains.   The question then becomes who has the right to the remaining CO2 carrying capacity?

The industrialized West's position is that it's ours.   For no remotely defensible reason, we tacitly claim priority to emit CO2 into the world's atmosphere.  Oh, we don't say that in so many words but that's the inescapable intent of our policies.

Look at it this way.   If we, the industrialized West, were to accept the atmosphere as a commons to which all of mankind had an equal interest, our right to emit greenhouse gases would be fixed.   It would be our population divided into 6.8 billion times the remaining carrying capacity.   Know what happens if you do the math?   We would have a very short time, a decade perhaps, to decarbonize our economies and our societies.   We would have to launch a Marshall Plan-scale effort to develop and implement non-carbon based energy alternatives.

I suppose we could buy up other nations' carbon quotas but, placed in these terms (the Commons) and subjected to the supply and demand dynamics, the cost to the West would be punishing.

So, let's be honest.   We're not going to do it, are we?   Nope.   But, in rejecting that principle for governance of the atmosphere, we are simultaneously closing the door on peaceful solutions to most other existential threats that face mankind - deforestation, collapse of fisheries stocks and ocean acidification, the freshwater crisis, desertification, air/soil/water contamination, species extinction, disease migration, regional security threats, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Barlow cites Einstein's observation that you can't solve problems with the same thinking that created them.   That's never been truer than today.

We're living with global consumption obesity.   A U.N. study this week confirmed what others have been saying for some time - mankind now consumes resources fully one and a half times the rate at which the earth can replenish them.   How is that even possible?  The proof is right before your eyes.   The vanishing fish stocks are the result of over-exploitation.   Same thing for the spreading deforestation.  We're cutting those trees faster than nature can replace them.   Desertification is the same story.   We're working the land to exhaustion, turning it into useless desert.  Freshwater - again the same story.  When we fell short of surface water we went to the ground, draining our aquifers far faster than nature could replenish them.   Is it really that surprising that we're doing the same thing to the atmosphere itself?   Surely not.

My point is that this global consumption obesity is happening right before our eyes.   It's visible.  It's tangible.  It's unquestionably dangerous to our survival.   Why, then, do the people into whose hands we entrust our welfare and that of our children and grandchildren, the very future of Canada itself, why do they stand mute?   Why do they have no vision to meet these enormous challenges?   You can ask them.   Maybe you'll have better luck than I did.

-----------------------
Postscript

As indicated above, I have written our leaders but in vain.  Therefore I'm going to continue thrashing away at these problems here in hope that you and others will come to grasp the seriousness of these issues and, collectively, demand change.   I'm reasonably optimistic that I'll be able to get through the remaining fifteen to twenty years of my lifespan without feeling the lash of these threats.   It's my kids and their kids and yours too and the future of our country that I worry about.  I can't let it go without a fight and I hope you can't either.

Deutschland Uber Amerika

Why is Germany steamrollering ahead, even despite the woes of the E.U., while America languishes, showing many signs of entering a great decline?   For ordinary Germans and ordinary Americans the differences are as night and day.

Earlier this week I found this fascinating article on AlterNet, Why Germany Has It So Good - and Why America Is Going Down the Drain.   It's an interview with progressive American labour lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent.  In his book, Geoghegan makes the case that blue and white collar America have a lot to learn from European social democracies, particularly Germany.

According to Geoghegan, "Since 2003, it's not China but Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either led the world in export sales or at least been tied for first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into the clutches of our foreign creditors -- China foremost among them -- Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage, unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or creating a massive trade deficit, or any trade deficit at all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're beating us with one hand tied behind their back."
It's a great interview and well worth a read.   As I was going through it I couldn't help but recall our own Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, who used to denounce Canada as a "northern European welfare state."   Compared to his empty vision of Canada, a northern European model doesn't sound all that bad, not at all.

Will Gordon Campbell At Last Fall on His Sword?

If the hopelessly reviled British Columbia premier won't put himself out of his well deserved misery his caucus had better do it or they're in for the same.

Angus Reid puts Gordo's popularity at just 9%.   That's lower than any other premier, including Van der Zalm and Clark, and every other BC premier since Angus Reid began polling in 1979.

You would think that Campbell's descent into electoral hell would have been reflected in a real boost for the default alternative option, the NDP's Carole James.   Nope.   We've seen enough of her that, even with a pushover like Campbell to help her, she still languishes at just 27% popularity, far behind her party.   Much as I loathe Campbell, I think Carole James is an arrogant dud, a feeling that seems fairly common to British Columbians.   If she becomes our next premier it'll be because she was the second worst choice.   In other words, most of us will don the gas masks before we next visit the polls.

EU Pressing for Arctic Deepwater Drilling Ban

European Union vice-president Diana Wallis says there'll be protesters marching the streets if the fragile Arctic environment isn't safeguarded.   Wallis claims there's been plenty of talk but no action and doesn't want the region's fate left entirely to the club of Arctic nations:


At a workshop under the aegis of NATO held at Cambridge University,  Wallis said she was bored by continuing talk rather than immediate action over wider participation in the Arctic Council.

"It's got to be widened out. If we don't do things then people will take to the streets to make sure something is done over climate change," she argued.

The Arctic Council is largely made up of nations with coastal regions surrounding the north pole, such as Russia, Norway and Greenland. The council is charged with protecting the environment.

It's hard to imagine what Wallis is worrying about. Surely you don't think Ottawa would sacrifice the Arctic environment for oil and gas riches, do you? Why just look at the wonderful job they've done in Athabasca.

In fact, Canada, the U.S. and Russia are just waiting to pounce on the resources of the Arctic. Let's face it kids, our Canada is now a classic petro-state and all this business about environmental safeguards is a bet you probably shouldn't take.

In Baghdad It's 2007 Again

Remember the Petraeus "surge" that was supposed to have settled things in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.   Well, any sentient observer realized that was nothing more than a parlour trick, a very useful conjuring act that allowed George w. Bush to leave office with some claim to success.

Even today General David Petraeus is all too happy to wear the laurel wreath of victory for his surge.   It was imagined to have worked so well that he sought to replicate it in Afghanistan. 

In reality the Baghdad Surge was a vehicle to steal credit for a number of positive changes that had nothing at all to do with the extra troops Bush sent to Iraq.   Foremost among these was the departure of Moqtada al Sadr to Iran and the standing down of his Mahdi Army.  There was no way Sadr was going to waste his militia battling Americans when they would be far more useful to him in muscling his way back in the post-U.S. era.  Another was the simple fact that many of the deaths in Baghdad were part of a process of ethnic cleansing that was pretty much finished as the Surge began.  Yet another was the Awakening Councils that actually predated the Surge.   These saw Sunni militias split with al Qaeda in exchange for U.S. cash and at least temporary immunity.

That was then, this is now. Sadr has returned to Iraq.  The Sunni militias, feeling betrayed by the ruling Shia and facing prosecution and suppression, are again taking up arms.  Al Qaeda in Iraq is staging a comeback.  The Kurds are getting restless over their claims to Kirkuk and the surrounding oil fields.  And eight months after a general election there's still been no national government formed.

A wave of assassinations is sweeping through Baghdad.  Iraqi police and army officers are the targets.  Al Qaeda is being blamed for the killings.   The weapons of choice are silenced firearms or limpet-style, magnetic bombs attached to the bottom of victims' cars.  From The Guardian:

A wave of targeted attacks on soldiers, police, traffic officers and senior officials is steadily picking off the custodians of Iraq's streets at rates that are nearing the darkest days of the insurgency, according to security commanders.

As of last Monday 710 Iraqis had been killed this year with silenced pistols or rifles. At least 600 more had been killed by magnet bombs placed under the cars of officials, according to Baghdad's Major Crimes Unit. Hundreds more have been injured.

The killings have increased sharply in the past four months amid fears that the ongoing failure to form a government in Baghdad is fuelling a worsening security vacuum.

... traffic officer, Omar Sabah, said he was now almost too scared to turn up to work.
"I have worked with the police since 2004 and this is the most dangerous atmosphere in all of that time. Al-Qaida have very accurate information. They are not random attacks. They are organised. Al-Qaida are seeking their revenge. They want to destroy the government."

Ali Sayed, 30, an army lieutenant at a nearby checkpoint, agreed. "The delay in forming the government is creating this atmosphere. I cannot hide my concerns. Every day, three or four of my colleagues are being killed."


There are some among us who argue we should keep fighting in Afghanistan, claiming the Americans can prevail there as they did in Iraq.   That's a completely false premise.   Iraq is really just four or five burning fuzes.   What we don't know is which one is going to reach the powder keg first.

Keef Slags Sir Brenda

If you're a Stones fan you'll probably be shelling out for Keith Richards' new autobiography, Life.  The 527-page book, to be serialized in The Times, is said to be replete with remarks slamming Mick Jagger, or Sir Mick.  Richards refers to Jagger as "Your Majesty" or "Brenda."  From Reuters:

"Richards, 66, who met Jagger at the age of four, says he has not stepped foot in Jagger's dressing room in 20 years. 
"It was the beginning of the Eighties when Mick started to become unbearable," Richards writes in the memoir, "Life," which brought him an advance of 4.8 million pounds ($7.7 million) after a massive bidding war among publishers.

...He added about Jagger: "We've had our beefs but, hey, who doesn't? You try and keep something together for 50 years," adding the band was considering going on tour again.

"I think it's going to happen. I've had a chat with ... Her Majesty. Brenda."

"I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep," Richards said.

During his addict days in the 1960s and 1970s, he spent a decade on the "People Most Likely to Die List."
"
Well, I'm not putting death on the agenda," he told the Times. "I don't want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet."
 I guess I know what I'll be getting for Christmas

Good News, Not So Good News

The WWF's Living Planet Report, 2010 has just been released and it really is enough to make you wonder if mankind has taken leave of its collective senses.

The good news is that the extinction of animals seems to have stabilized.    The not so good news is just about everything else.  By the WWF's assessment, we're now consuming resources at 1.5 times the rate our planet can replenish them.   Think about that. 

We're drawing down resources, particularly freshwater, far faster than Spaceship Earth is capable of generating more.  In fact we've created societies dependent on resources we simply don't have.  How have we managed so well so far?   By raiding nature's reserves.

You know those fancy fountains and artificial lakes in Las Vegas?   Where does all that rapidly-evaporating water come from?  Here's a hint, it's not rainwater.   No, it's ancient water pumped out of aquifers deep underground.   But where is the water going to come from to refill ("recharge") those aquifers?   Here's another hint, nowhere.  Desert resorts and shopping centres actually mist the air along the sidewalks to keep the public comfortable.   So what happens when those aquifers run empty?   Here's your third hint, don't invest all your money in real estate in Nevada, Arizona or New Mexico.  Bad idea.

The LPI reveals a stark distinction between southern and northern hemisphere countries.  Between 1970 and 2007, animal and marine life populations actually rebounded in the north but suffered devastating declines in the southern hemisphere.   The southern hemisphere losses resulted in a global decline of 29% in animal and marine life since 1970.

The Index was compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).  From The Guardian:'

"Healthy ecosystems form the basis of all we have - lose them and we destroy our life support system," said Jonathan Baillie, ZSL's conservation programme director.

"This is like spending the savings: we're spending the natural capital we have on this planet," said Jim Leape, WWF's director, at the launch of the report in Bristol. "That's an economic crisis in the making."

Measurements of the "ecological footprint" of different countries – the area required to provide the resources consumed by the population or average person in a year, compiled by the Global Footprint Network, shows the richest countries consume, on average, five times the quantity of natural resources as the poorest countries. At the extremes are the United Arab Emirates, with an average footprint of more than 10 hectares, and Timor-Leste at less than one hectare. The global average is about three hectares, and the UK figure is around five.

Just in case you're curious, Canada scored an even seven on the global footprint index.  This truly is a truly global economic, humanitarian, environmental and security crisis in the making.  Nobody is immune from the fallout from this, even us.  Why then does this looming, multi-faceted crisis not even appear on our leaders' radar screens?
 

Is Our Afghan War About to Fizzle Out?

What most signifies the endless war in Afghanistan?   For me it would be it would be the appalling military and political leadership shown by America and her allies.  They've come and gone, in succession, but they've all been the same - bloody awful.

Look at the spectre of the world's inarguably most powerful military, multi-billion dollar budgets, the latest and greatest in high-tech firepower, fielding weaponry the other side couldn't dream of having, yet getting its shoelaces tied by a ragtag bunch of farmers turned rebels armed with Korean-war vintage assault rifles, rocket launchers, and miscellaneous explosives leftover from the past 30-years of conflict.  We've even got them outnumbered, massively outnumbered - 10, 20, maybe 30 to one.  We fly and truck our stuff in.   They make do with what they can lug on their backs or pack on mules as they cross hundreds of miles of treacherous mountain terrain to get to our people.    This is David versus Goliath - on acid.

So why are the bad guys winning and why are we losing (and make no mistake about it, we're losing)?  It's because the idiots political and military leadership of America and her allies ordained our failure.   They sent our forces over there to give the primitive heathen a good taste of our 21st century, high-tech lash.   We were going to show them a thing or two about warfighting and we did and they watched and then they went about fighting their war, the one that matters, the one we're losing.

Our war is tanks and armour, field artillery, attack helicopters and ground attack strike fighters and a variety of unmanned drones.   The bad guys don't have any of that stuff so why would we expect them to fight the sort of war we can wage with that technology?  They would literally have to stand up, en masse, to be mowed down, en masse.   That sort of war would be over in a matter of months.  To stand and die fight, the rebels would have to be even bigger idiots than our generals.

The bad guys don't have a manpower advantage.   They don't have a firepower advantage.   They don't have a technology advantage.   But those things that are so vital to  our war don't count for much in their war.   All the King's horses and all the King's men still don't allow us to kill enough of them to make them quit.  In fact, in their war, all our Big Boom stuff works against us.   They dupe us into attacking civilians as we attack them and, in this country, tribal custom requires the survivors of those civilian dead to avenge their deaths.

We moan and bitch about the filthy insurgents using civilians as shields.  We dodge the real issue.   It is our job, the only way we can hope to win this sort of war, to protect those civilians from the Taliban, to prevent the Taliban from getting among them in the first place.   If you can't safeguard the civilian population by keeping the insurgents out of their villages, not for a few days here and there but permanently, all you're doing is banging on a drum.   So why haven't we done that?   Because the incompetents we know as our political and military leaders wanted to fight this war on the cheap.

Holding the Taliban at bay until a stable government defended by a competent military was established would have required far more troops than we've ever deployed to Afghanistan.   Not just far more troops (think 400,000+) but far more troops taking far greater casualties.  It would have meant flooding the countryside with small units of infantry defending each village and hamlet.  Those small units are very vulnerable to being ambushed or overrun but that's the blood price you have to pay to win this sort of war.  You can't win it hunkering in the safety of garrisons, fighting by day and yielding the countryside to the bad guys at night.   All that does is leave you precisely where we are today.

And just where are we today?  Well, according to The New York Times, we're doing just about everything we can to find the exit.  It's come to the point where ISAF commanders are giving the Taliban leadership safe conduct to meet with Karzai's people in Kabul while, at the same time, trying to egg them into a deal by bombing the hell out of rebel forces wherever they can be found:

 American pilots pounded the Taliban with 2,100 bombs or missiles from June through September, with 700 in September alone, Air Force officers here said Thursday. That is an increase of nearly 50 percent over the same period last year, the records show.


The stepped-up air campaign is part of what appears to be an intensifying American effort, orchestrated by Gen. David H. Petraeus, to break the military stalemate here as pressure intensifies at home to bring the nine-year-old war to an end. In recent weeks, General Petraeus has increased raids by Special Forces units and launched large operations to clear territory of Taliban militants.


And it seems increasingly clear that he is partly using the attacks to expand a parallel path to the end of the war: an American-led diplomatic initiative, very much in its infancy but ultimately aimed at persuading the Taliban — or large parts of the movement — to make peace with the Afghan government.

This probably sounds sort of reasonable but it's way off the mark.  For starters it's aimed at breaking a "military stalemate."   What military stalemate?  Only in our war, the military war, is there anything resembling a stalemate.  Their war, the political war, is going just dandy (from their perspective) and terribly (from ours).   No stalemate there.  The rebellion (it long since evolved past an insurgency) is growing stronger and it won't take much more to tip more fence-sitting warlords into the rebel forces.

This notion of "stalemate" would amuse a Talib leader because, for them, that is a victory.  They're the home team and they'll settle for a tie any day because, at the end of the game, the visitors get back aboard their bus and head out of town.  We can't fight an inconclusive military war in Afghanistan for another ten or fifteen years.   There's a whole world full of bad guys out there and far too many challenges we need to deal with to remain tied down in a place like Afghanistan.   We know it.   So do the Talibs.

Brain Candy - Just Getting Grounded Again

The late, great, Gerald Levert with the living legends, the Funk Brothers:


The Funk Brothers & Gerald Levert - Shotgun (live)
Uploaded by coolfunk. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

And, if that's not enough, here's Bootsy


Bootsy collins.do you love me
Uploaded by zorore0. - Explore more music videos.

"We Stand Shoulder to Shoulder with ...Israel. End of Story."

What?  Really?  Before he sacrificed his own genitals to self-mutilation for political expediency, Michael Ignatieff embraced a far more nuanced, balanced, honest and plain-spoken perspective on Israel and the Palestinians.   Now the Liberal Lizard King has shed that skin and wrapped himself in new scales.

And this is what the Liberal Party of Canada is to become?  Its integrity sacrificed to political expediency for a hack who couldn't get elected dog catcher in a one-man race?

C'mon, really, dig deep.  This guy isn't Liberal.

h/t Pogge

Germany Wastes No Time Calling for Security Council Reform

Canada's bid for a Security Council heap had barely hit the trash heap before the somewhat more successful Germans began calling for Security Council reform.  From Deutsche Welle:

 "It is not appropriate that two continents, like Africa and Latin America, do not have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Asia, too, rightfully views itself as underrepresented," the German foreign minister [Guido Westerwelle] said.

"That is why any reform of the United Nations is not first and foremost about a permanent seat on the Security Council for us, but rather about a better reflection of global distribution of power," Westerwelle emphasized.

reform of the United Nations is a major issue on Germany's agenda. Westerwelle recently met counterparts from Japan, India and Brazil to discuss launching a reform campaign.

The so-called G-4 group has been calling for the addition of six permanent seats to the Council without the power of veto, and a further four non-permanent seats.

"Today's Security Council reflects the world's power architecture after World War II. It should reflect the power structure of today's world," Westerwelle said.

This Is No Time to Make Nice with the Right

I don't respect any political party - anywhere - that doesn't accept global warming as the greatest threat to mankind.   It's really quite simple.   If you accept global warming is real and poses an existential threat to our species then you'll be focused on policies to mitigate where we can and adapt were we can't mitigate.   In other words you'll give real priority to implementing ways to cut carbon emissions to minimize future impacts and prevent runaway global warming while preparing remediation and adaptation measures for the coming impacts we cannot hope to avert.  Those stipulations rule out certain political parties.    In Canada these are the parties of the Petro-Pols, the Fossil Fuelers, the Tar Sanders.   They're the folks who can't break free of 18th century economics, 19th century energy solutions and 20th century geo-politics.  You know who they are just as well as I do.

Bad as the political pickings are here in Canada, what's going on in the United States is nothing short of dreadful.   Bill McKibben, writing in The New Republic, explores how America's conservatives have turned radical over climate change.

"Climate legislation didn’t pass the current Congress, and it won’t have a prayer in the next one. If the Republicans take the Senate, James Inhofe has said that the Environment and Public Works Committee will “stop wasting all of our time on all that silly stuff, all the hearings on global warming.” And in the House, Representative Darrell Issa says that he would turn his Oversight and Government Reform Committee over to the eleventeenth investigation of Climategate, the British e-mail scandal. But, for the moment, it’s less the legislative fallout that interests me than what this denial of climate change says about modern conservatism. On what is quite possibly the single biggest issue the planet has faced, American conservatism has reached a near-unanimous position, and that position is: pay no attention to all those scientists.

  Only 10 percent of Republicans think that global warming is very serious, according to recent data. Conservative opinion has been steadily hardening—for decades Republicans were part of the coalition on almost every environmental issue, but now it’s positively weird to think that as late as 2004, McCain thought it would make sense for a GOP presidential candidate to position himself as a fighter for climate legislation. And all of that is troubling. Because we’re going to be dealing with climate change for a very long time, and if one of the great schools of political thought in this country has checked out completely, that process is going to be even harder. I don’t have any expectation that conservatives will mute their tune between now and November—but it is worth thinking in some depth about what lies beneath this newly overwhelming sentiment."

McKibben argues that Big Carbon's money plays a part in today's Republican radicalism but says there's more to their madness than petro-bucks lining the pockets of Congressmen:

No, something else is causing people to fly into a rage about climate. Read the comments on one of the representative websites: Global warming is a “fraud” or a “plot.” Scientists are liars out to line their pockets with government grants. Environmentalism is nothing but a money-spinning “scam.” These people aren’t reading the science and thinking, I have some questions about this. They’re convinced of a massive conspiracy.

...there’s a kind of right-wing nationalism that demands we take no action until China, India, and the rest have played their part. But that doesn’t even make mathematical sense—China’s per capita emissions are one-quarter of ours. If leadership in the world means anything, then that imposes certain burdens on us. But it feels like resentment is becoming the leitmotif of conservatism, in a way that makes it ever more cramped and ever less noble. In this worldview, environmentalists are seen as scolds or even traitors. A recent poll asked right-wing bloggers to name the worst people in American history. President Obama came in second. The victor? Jimmy Carter, ten spots ahead of John Wilkes Booth (Al Gore was thirteenth, tied with Al Sharpton, Noam Chomsky, Jane Fonda, and Harry Reid). If Jimmy Carter was the worst guy the country ever produced, we’re doing pretty well—but surely it was his nagging reminders that there were limits to our national power that account for his ranking. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote an embarrassed piece earlier this fall about the failure of conservatives to take climate change seriously—it was the ’70s, “a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms,” that turned many of them off, he concluded. That’s not much of an argument—it’s like saying “conservatives mostly got it wrong on civil rights, so let’s never listen to them again about liberty and freedom.”

McKibbin says there's still reason for hope.   It's coming from the evangelicals who are seeing the impacts of climate change on their missionary work abroad and from the Pentagon where global warming has been assessed as a threat to global security.

What missionaries and militaries have in common is that they have to deal with reality. In fact, that was always the trump card of conservatism: It refused to indulge in sentimentality and idealism, insisting on seeing the world as it was. But, at the moment, it’s the right that is indulging in illusion, insisting, fists balled up and face turning red, that the reports from scientists simply can’t be true.  

Conservatives in much of the rest of the world have figured this out. The new Tory government in England is doing at least as much as its Labour predecessors; in Germany, Angela Merkel is presiding over one of the greatest renewable-energy buildouts ever. And eventually, I imagine, American conservatism, too, will come around and make its vital contributions to the task of figuring out what needs to be done to protect the civilization we should cherish. But we don’t have until eventually. We have, the scientists say, a very short time to make very big changes. So let’s hope the fever passes quickly.

This is no time to make nice with the Right, no matter what the party calls itself.  Petro-pols can be found in abundance on both sides of the aisle in our House of Commons and they're growing Canada's problems not solving them.   Liberal, New Democrat or Conservative we don't have until eventually for them to come around.

Harper is "Truculent and Unreasonable." Who Knew? Apparently His Caucus Knew.

Consider him the "Iron Chancellor" without any of the leadership skills or unifying talent of Otto von Bismarck.   I guess that would make him the "Iron Dilettante" maybe. 

Anyway, the two-legged tantrum we call a prime minister, went over the top on the United Arab Emirates dispute, causing some of his caucus to turn on him.  From the Globe & Mail:

"The UAE has been seeking additional lucrative landing rights for two state-backed air carriers at Canadian airports, and Mr. MacKay was one of several ministers, including Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan, who had favoured doing more to help the Arab ally, a senior Conservative MP said.

The Prime Minister ultimately cut these ministers out of negotiations, the official said, favouring the forceful arguments against big concessions advanced earlier this year by former transport minister John Baird.

The loss of the base has left some cabinet members frustrated and angry at how Mr. Harper handled it.

“[It’s] all gone because of a fit of pique and a hard [core] position that is truculent and unreasonable against Canada’s short- and long-term interests,” the MP said.
Ottawa was ordered last week to vacate Camp Mirage within 30 days, but the UAE escalated the conflict even further on Monday, barring Mr. MacKay and Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk from even entering its airspace during a flight from Afghanistan. Prevented from landing at Camp Mirage, the pair were forced to reroute through Europe."

There's a man with some serious emotional problems.   Cutting your defence minister, agricultural minister and international trade minister out of negotiations with an Arab country that, for nine years, has allowed you to use their territory for a vital forward base?  Captain Queeg to the bridge.   Captain Queeg to the bridge.

Bernier Harper's Front Man on Dismantling Universal Health Care

According to NatPo, Maxie Bernier is going to carry the ball for Harper's plan to scuttle Canada's universal health care and gut the Canada Health Act.  It's enough to have Harper advisor Keith Beardsley questioning whether Bernier is a loose cannon or the Tories are on the brink of an enormous political blunder:

Does he propose that this be a unilateral move by the federal government? If yes, then that would make for an interesting federal-provincial relationship over the next few years. Max would also leave it up to each province to decide what to spend on health care and they could then decide what items to fund and provinces would be free to implement two-tier health care delivery if they so wished. The downside being that you end up with 10 completely different health care systems. Some folks might support that, especially if they live in the richer provinces, but what if you happen to live in one of the poorer provinces? Certainly he offers a simplistic solution at the federal level in that you get to move this debate away from Ottawa and out to 10 different provincial capitals.

...Max and his views may not represent the official party line, but he does offer the opposition an opportunity both now and in a future election to focus their attack on a Conservative “hidden agenda”. We spent years shutting down that line of attack, why open ourselves up to it again?

Coming on the heels of the Columbia University study showing that America's vaunted private healthcare system has left the U.S. 13th in a field of 13 industrialized countries in longevity - and all the other studies (mainly American) that consistently prove universal healthcare delivers substantially better health outcomes, this should be manna from heaven for the opposition.   Lead on MacDuff, er Maxie.

Hunting Witches in the 21st Century - Burn the Scientists

There is nothing the far Right fears more than knowledge, especially widely disseminated knowledge.   Any expression of objective reality - reasoned, studied logic - imperils their often superstitious narratives.   Knowledge erodes their stock in trade; fear, anger, and hatred.

America's Republicans offer living proof of the insidious plans of the far Right.   Climate scientist Michael Mann has sounded the alarm in the Washington Post.  I urge you to read his warning and realize this is indeed what we're up against on our side of the border also.

The 21st century witch hunt may be just months away.

Even the National Post Understands Harper Lost Canada's Security Council Bid

Once again Stephen Harper has embarrassed Canada.   Apparently leaving us in the gutter as a global warming pariah wasn't enough for Furious Leader.   Getting the heave-ho from our supposedly secret base in Dubai didn't help but for Canada to lose its bid for a seat on the U.N. Security Council - and to Portugal at that - really burst Harper's bubble.

Naturally the Prime Monster wasn't happy at pulling the plug on the UN bid and, true to form, he wasted no time in trying to pin the blame on anyone and everyone else, starting with Michael Ignatieff.    But even the National Post, Harper's in-house rag, wasn't able to swallow that one.   Columnist Don Martin didn't hesitate to give credit where credit's due - to Stephen Harper himself:

"To give two European countries the temporary seats and deny Canada its rightful claim to one of the two-year chairs is a vote of non-confidence in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign policy.



Candid and plugged-in diplomats will tell you the seat is meaningless unless you’ve got a clear agenda to advocate before the council. Other than Canada’s strong pro-Israel position, it lacks a clear vision about its role in the world beyond the Afghanistan deployment’s termination next summer.

...But to withdraw to Portugal? A bankrupt country of negligible impact on the international security stage? Whose officials thought Canada should win?

The government blame game will shift to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for his trash-talking of Canada’s bid, but that’s bogus finger-pointing.  For a myriad of reasons, each only known to the voting ambassador of the 190 ballot-box countries, the UN General Assembly decided Canada was not worthy of a coveted seat.

...[The]Harper government who thought it had strong foreign affairs credentials —  lost a global vote of confidence in its performance."