Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Putting Athabasca Back in Bitumen.

We - Canada, Alberta, the Oil Patch - are the sine qua non of the emissions that result from the production, transportation, refining, distribution and consumption of Athabasca bitumen.

Just because we find someone else to burn the crud doesn't matter.  We made it available for them to burn.  We marketed the stuff to those who burn it.  We transported it thousands of miles to their markets so they could burn it.  That's all on us, not them.

It doesn't matter that they burn the stuff thousands of miles distant.  The emissions still go into our atmosphere, the world's atmosphere, mankind's shared atmosphere.   Someone else may burn the stuff but the climate change impacts are felt the same way they would be if we set fire to it here.

Surely this is a distinction without a difference, right?  It doesn't really matter that the emissions go on some other country's books instead of Alberta's, does it?  Actually, I think it might.

Look at the process we go through to get that bitumen coursing through pipelines and into the bellies of supertankers to Asia.   It begins with tankers full of condensate, light oil diluent, that has to be imported and then sent via pipeline to Athabasca.  Somebody had to refine that stuff and transport it to those tankers so they could bring it across the sea that it could then be pumped through a pipeline to Athabasca.

Then we use the condensate to mix with the partly processed bitumen so that, with enough heat and pressure, the diluted bitumen or dilbit is capable of being pushed through pipelines to distant refineries or tankers.

Eventually somebody, somewhere else refines the dilbit.   They extract all the particulates including the high sulfur, granular coking coal, called petcoke, that's quietly sold for power generation.  What's left is synthetic crude products that can then be sold to end-users.

So, why does any of this matter?  Ask Steve Harper or Alison Redford.  Ask them why bitumen isn't refined into finished, synthetic crude products on site in Alberta?  Ask them why we don't dispense with having to import condensate from abroad and pump it to Athabasca with all the emissions from refining and transporting that stuff only to put it in another pipeline and pump it straight back out again?   Why do we need supertankers to bring condensate to Canada and far more supertankers plying our coasts to carry their mixed load of condensate, bitumen, petcoke and particulates thousands of miles away.  Shipping relatively clean and benign, fully-refined synthetic crude would require far fewer tankers and greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe to the British Columbia coast.  It would also keep those refining revenues and jobs in Alberta.  So why not?

The standard answer is there is surplus refining capacity elsewhere but I think that's a sop.  I just don't believe that's it.  I think Alberta and Ottawa don't want the emissions and other environmental impacts of refining bitumen on site in Athabasca on Alberta's and Canada's books.  They want it "out of sight, out of mind."   And, besides, as dilbit, Alberta gets to export its petcoke unnoticed.  It would have a hell of a time flogging that stuff openly if the bitumen was refined in Athabasca.

It's time Christy Clark and the other premiers called Harper and Redford on this.  Why should other provinces be Kalamazooed by ruptured dilbit pipelines when it's completely unnecessary.  It's time Harper and Redford got the message - clean up your crud and then we'll talk.

Forcillo was Eight for Nine

That Sammy Yatim was range practice for his executioner, constable James Forcillo, is apparent from the autopsy findings.  Forcillo emptied all nine-rounds from his gun.  Eight times his bullets found their target, Sammy Yatim's body.

Eight hits in the course of firing lasting 13-seconds.   You rarely see anyone firing that fast at a shooting range.  You also won't see shooters that close to their target at a firing range.  What's the point? 

Stationary shooter, stationary target, short range, eight for nine.  That's not suspect down.  It's suspect done.

The Lost Art of Knowing Stuff

The internet is reshaping our minds.  Reconfiguring might be a better word.  A recent study shows that we don't learn things the way we once did.  We don't accumulate knowledge as our ancestors did.

We don't have to commit information to memory as in the past.  The web functions as a replacement for memory.   If we need a fact we can use a search engine.  Google or Yahoo or Bing will pull it up, we can read it, use it and discard it.

There's a real frailty attached to this sort of information sourcing.  It's not the forgetting, it's the not remembering.  What does it mean to read something but not to commit it to memory?  We have outsourced part of our memory function to cyberspace.  How much of our memory function are we abandoning?  What parts are we losing, what parts are retained?

Surely it's retained memory that provides the context we need to make sense of daily experiences.  We encounter many situations and things of which we already have some knowledge or familiarity.  The less we know, the more mysterious or foreign the subject may seem, the more poorly we may interact with it.  Our minds are with us all the time, our computers usually aren't.  Our minds access knowledge instantly, automatically, often effortlessly.  Our computers require protocols, keywords, reading and typing and even then often don't yield what we want on the first or even second attempt.

I am reminded of Tim Flannery's observation in Here on Earth that we're becoming a species of idiots.  We're becoming increasingly expert at doing one or two things and increasingly incompetent at doing the great many things needed even for life itself.  As idiots we become increasingly reliant on systems and others to do the myriad things we cannot do for ourselves.

As we lose the art of knowing stuff surely that can only hasten the onset of Flannery's world of high-functioning idiots.   How can the robots not take over?

Tuesday Night Rock

Knopfler, Clapton, Sting and Phil Collins on the drums.  That's rock'n roll.





And, if Blues is your thing, tell me what's better than Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lightning.

 

The Stunningly Rapid Rise of the National Security State. This Shit is Beginning to Get Scary.

Big news on the Orwellian Front.  The ascendancy of the national security state is picking up steam and it's spreading into the upper echelons of the media.

First up, The Guardian.  The venerable newspaper reports receiving an ominous demand from the "centre" of the Cameron government to cough up any documents it received from whistleblower Edward Snowden.  The editors responded by destroying every hard drive in their possession containing any Snowden documents.

The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.

It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian's King's Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.

Job done?

 As they worked they were watched by technicians from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who took notes and photographs, but who left empty-handed.

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had earlier informed government officials that other copies of the files existed outside the country and that the Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward of the files leaked by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor. But the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered.

 Meanwhile, back in the United States, it's turning into Journalism's War on Journalism.  Here it's Time magazine's senior national  correspondent, Michael Grunwald, going on Twitter to announce how he "can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

From David Sirota in Salon.com:

it is yet more proof of the growing ranks of Journalists Against Journalism Club. Yes, here we have a reporter expressing excitement at the prospect of the government executing the publisher of information that became the basis for some of the most important journalism in the last decade.

Likewise, it is yet more proof that the nonchalant blood lust that pervades the National Security State also exists inside the establishment media that is supposed to be objectively covering that National Security State. Indeed, even after deleting his tweet, Grunwald was unrepentant about such blood lust, saying that he wasn’t sorry for effectively endorsing extrajudicial assassination, but merely for the fact that his tweet “gives Assange supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in.”

But, then, journalists hating on journalism and political reporters worshiping state-sponsored violence is no big reveal anymore. In that sense, Grunwald’s morbid fantasy is notable primarily because it summarized such realities in such uncharacteristically clear terms.

What is more revelatory is what the context of the Grunwald episode says about the intensifying debate over who is and who is not a true “journalist,”  and whether it is opinion or ideology that really disqualifies one from the legal privileges that are supposed to come with that label.

The journalist/non-journalist is a debate that has gone on for a while now. It is one that I have a bit of personal experience with since a 2007 fight when the gatekeepers in the congressional press gallery tried to deny me press credentials simply because I acknowledge my own political opinions/ideology. And it is a debate that has now flared back up since opinionated Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald began breaking the NSA stories back in June.

Oh, boy, maybe we'll soon be getting our new uniforms.  Remember, before Prada, there was Hugo Boss.


 

Hurricane Sandy Task Force or The Three Little Pigs

Little pig, little pig

Let me come in

Not by the hair on my chinny, chin, chin

Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in.

Obama's Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force has released a report urging Americans to be like the little pig who built his house of bricks, not the unfortunate little pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks.  The warning is the Big, Bad Wolf isn't done yet, not yearly.   He's coming back.

The 200-page report contains 69-recommendations for action, on a regional scale, to prepare for future natural disasters of increasing frequency and severity.  It focuses on improving government responses both in nature and timing and on encouraging reconstruction standards to better meet what's likely coming.

Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development who led the taskforce, said the strategy would "protect families, small businesses and communities across the region and the taxpayers' investment in them, from the risks posed by sea level rise and more extreme weather events – risks that are made worse by the reality of a changing climate."

Donovan said the strategy would serve as a model for communities across the US facing such risks. The report calls for more streamlined assistance for such communities, and explores how to advance energy infrastructure, to ward off outages and fuel shortages and better telecommunications in areas likely to be crippled by power failures.

In the past year alone, there have been 11 separate weather- and climate-related disasters across the US, with estimated losses at $1bn each, Donovan said. Sandy was the second costliest hurricane in US history, after Katrina, which in 2005 caused $108bn in damage, or $128bn adjusted to 2012 dollars, according to the National Hurricane Center report earlier this year.

"We know that every dollar we spend today on hazard mitigation saves us at least $4 in avoided costs if a disaster strikes again" said Donovan. "By building more resilient regions, we can save billions in taxpayer dollars."

Yes, John, America Has Lost All Credibility in the Middle East. Now Here's a Lovely Tuna Sandwich.

It's kind of embarrassing to watch an old man come to some realization, like suddenly noticing his zipper is undone.  It's a surprise to him and he assumes it's a surprise to everyone else.

John McCain is having a lot of those moments these days.   The latest is his realization that his United States has lost all credibility in the Middle East.

Yes, John.  Right you are, John.   Only Egypt had very, very little to do with it.   That's been going on since 1953.  Maybe you haven't read the papers, John, but your Central Intelligence Agency has just confessed what everyone else has known for decades - it orchestrated the 1953 coup to overthrow the democratically elected government in Iran.  Your country invited Pahlavi to sit on the Peacock Throne and ushered in decades of murderous brutality doled out lavishly by his secret police, the dreaded Savak (trained by Norman Schwartzkopf's dad) who made the Gestapo look like Girl Guides.   That might come as a surprise to you, John, but every Muslim has known all about it for - well, it's 60-years now.

And your role in enabling Israeli excesses for all those decades, that's undermined America's credibility too.  And your support for Mubarak, the House of Saud and every other tinpot despot in martial uniform or flowing robes, that hasn't helped much either.   And then Afghanistan and Iraq - those fiascoes pretty much were the icing on the cake of America's remaining credibility in that region.

At this point, John, Egypt is just a drop in the bucket.  America has played Sunni off against Shiite so many times and so incoherently that it's hard to keep track of which side you're backing, where and when.  And John, remember when you ran against Barack and couldn't tell a Shia from a Sunni or, for that matter, which side was al Qaeda's and which was Iran's?

So, John, stop embarrassing yourself.  It's time to head back to Arizona, pour yourself two fingers of single malt and kick back.  You're just not making sense any more.

Here, Mo, You Can Have Hosni's Cell

Any remaining shred of doubt that the Egyptian military is playing  major league hardball on this coup d'etat is gone.  It's not just the killings of Egyptian Islamists.  It's not the release of their own capo, Hosni Mubarak.   Now they're after Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal who served for exactly one month as vice-president briefly after the ouster of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood. 

ElBaradei, long-serving former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lawyer and diplomat, winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, is being accused by the Egyptian military of a variety of misdeeds arising out of his four-week tenure as Veep.

ElBaradei, who quit following last week's mass killing of protesters, "stands accused of failing to present any alternatives to dispersing two mass sit-ins in Cairo, as well as disregarding "terrorist crimes" committed by the Muslim Brotherhood there.

ElBaradei was a member of the National Salvation Front, part of the opposition to Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed by the army last month. He has been vilified in the Egyptian media since quitting. He has been called a "traitor" and caricatured stabbing Egypt in the back. The case is being brought by a professor of law, Sayeed Ateeq. ElBaradei is now in Austria with his family.

Ah, Austria, what a lovely place at this time of year.  I'm just guessing but Mo and family might be staying there for a while.

We Lose Americans

At least it's not a total loss. 

The big loss is the death of esteemed crime novelist, Elmore Leonard, of a stroke at age 87.  Among his 45 novels are Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma, and Rum Punch (remade by Tarantino as Jackie Brown). 

Canada also says goodbye - and good riddance - to U.S. Tea Party senator Ted Cruz who has announced his intention to renounce his Canadian citizenship.  Cruz says he's really got nothing against us or our country, it's just that people might talk if they knew he had foreigner status.

So it's farewell Elmore and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out, Ted.

Closing Ranks Behind Officer Forcillo

The right wingers seem to have settled on their talking points for Jimmy Forcillo, the Toronto cop who executed Sammy Yatim on a Toronto streetcar last month.

The first point is to contend that there's no justice in convicting Forcillo of the execution.

The second point is the claim that Yatim died in a "hail of gunfire."  It's a "hail" of fire, a blur, who can tell, who can judge?  Except that's a lie as anyone who has watched the videos knows.

The third point is that Forcillo is being thrown to the mob.  Public emotion is riding so high there's no way he can be treated fairly.  Hence the executioner is now the victim.

And it's all bollocks, especially the "hail of gunfire" linchpin on which this rests.




Forcillo took his time emptying his automatic's nine-round clip into Yatim.  It was no hail of gunfire.  He fired over a very extended 13-seconds, first round to last.

Forcillo dropped Yatim to the floor of the streetcar with his first, 3-round salvo that took all of two seconds.  Yatim went down, apparently with the first of those three rounds, never to get back up.  Call it the First Event.

What followed was a nearly 5-second long pause.  No movement, no gunfire.  No hail of any description.   Call that the Second Event.

The remaining almost six seconds were filled with the remaining rounds in Forcillo's handgun.  A salvo of four shots, a pause, the eighth shot, a pause, the ninth and final shot.   Call that the Third Event.

I saw these events.   You saw them.   So did Blatchford et al.  It's easy to say that the eyes play tricks on us.  Fortunately I didn't use my eyes to hear those gunshots.   I used my ears to hear them and my mind plus the YouTube counter to log them, to time the three events.

The right and its greasy minions like Blatchford are quietly coming to Forcillo's defence and it speaks volumes that they're bringing arguments based on lies.  It's people like Blatchford playing on emotions because of just one thing - Forcillo is a cop.  He's one of her tribe and he thus deserves the "hail of gunfire" defence.

It's Here - Earth Overshoot Day, This Year 20 August, 2013

Tuesday, August 20, marks Earth Overshoot Day for 2013.  This is not a record to celebrate.  It tells us that, in under eight months, mankind exhausts an entire annual supply of renewable resources.  After that, we're eating our seed corn.   Another way of looking at it is that, at current rates of biomass consumption we need 1.5 planet Earths.

Now you might be asking yourself how mankind could possibly be using up more renewable resources than the Earth can provide?  The answer is we're very good at it or very bad at it.

Biomass provides us the stuff we consume.  It also absorbs and cleans the contaminants we create.   On both counts we're running a rather huge environmental deficit.   This can be seen to the naked eye from the space station in forms such as desertification, the exhaustion of arable land and its transformation into sterile desert, and deforestation or the growing problem of agricultural runoff spilling from coastal estuaries causing ocean dead zones.  Satellites can detect surface subsidence caused by our rapacious depletion of groundwater resources - aquifers.  It's also manifested in collapsed global fisheries.   Less visible are the increasingly contaminated land, air and water resources.

There are just a few countries, a bare handful, that haven't yet crossed into ecological deficit.   Canada, thanks only to our relatively small population, is one of the few.  We have a chance to keep it that way but it will take a conscious decision, planning and perhaps some sacrifice to make that happen.  Time is not on our side.

If you want a clear idea of where Canada and the rest of the world stand on overshoot, go to the Global Footprint Network website.  While they're a scientific think tank, their research is presented for lay visitors.  Their goal isn't to scare you senseless.  That would be self-defeating.  What they seek is to make our planet's finite limits central to our planning and thereby regain our ability to live within those limits.  It's a laudable mission statement but it's an even bigger reach than the goal of decarbonizing our global economy. Still it's not "pie in the sky" to use this research to realize where Canada stands, what we stand amidst, and how we need to plan our future.

Overshoot is the harbinger of ecological collapse.   As the graph above depicts, consumption (the red line) continues to increase even as the Earth's carrying capacity, it's ability to replenish renewable resources, falls into decline.  Eventually consumption peaks due to the exhaustion of renewables and it plummets while overtaking even the diminished available carrying capacity.

Consumption today continues to increase.  The Earth's carrying capacity, signified by the advancing arrival of Overshoot Day, is already heavily in decline.   Just five or six years ago, Overshoot Day fell in October.   Now it's well within August.  With the expansion of middle class consumerism in India and China, where will Overshoot be five years from now?

Oregon GOP Ups the TinFoil Hat Ante

The Oregon Republican Party has elected a new chairman and they got themselves a guy with a PhD and everything.  He's Art Robinson and he's an idea man, big ideas - weird ideas.

On nuclear waste: "All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases." And: "If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law."

On public schools: "Public education (tax-financed socialism) has become the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States. Moreover, people who have been cut off at the knees by public education are so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization." (Robinson, a home-schooling activist, sells a DIY curriculum for $195.)

On AIDS: "There is a possibility that the entire 'war' on HIV and AIDS is in error. U.S. government AIDS programs are now receiving $6 billion per year and are based entirely upon the hypothesis that HIV virus causes AIDS. Yet, the articles referenced above and numerous additional publications by scientists who have become involved in this controversy state that: attempts to cause AIDS experimentally with HIV have completely failed; thousands of AIDS victims are HIV-free; and HIV shows none of the classical characteristics of a disease-producing organism. Moreover, AIDS is not a unique disease—it is an increased susceptibility to many ordinary diseases presumably as a result of depressed immune response. This depressed immunity can result from many other factors including those especially prevalent in the AIDS afflicted population—drug abuse and unhygienic exposure to very large numbers of different disease vectors. Moreover, large numbers of HIV carriers who are symptom-free are being treated by powerful life-threatening drugs that kill people in ways very similar to AIDS."

How Germany Made a Killing on the Euro-Crisis

Europe's fiscal crisis has hammered much of the E.U. from Ireland to Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and Greece.  Germany, however, has made out like a bandit.

The collapse of every nation around it made German debt much, much more attractive to investors looking for security.  So much more attractive that Germany saved 41-billion Euros in interest charges.  Sure, Germany put a lot of money into bailouts for countries like Greece but that totalled 599-million Euros to date.

0.6 billion they put out, 41-billion they saved.  That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? 

What Gave Him Away?

It only took them two decades to track him down, but Indian authorities claim to have captured the mastermind responsible for more than 40-bomb attacks in India.

No word yet on how Indian authorities spotted him.  Maybe it was the white hat. Oh wait, I know, he's missing his left arm from a bomb-making mishap decades ago.

What an Exodus Looks Like, Or Does It?

This image, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, is said to show an exodus of Syrian Kurds, escaping the brutal civil war to take refuge in the autonomous Kurdish territory in Iraq.

Is it real?  I'm not sure.  There's one fellow with a small travel bag but none of the others seem to be carrying even backpacks.  Usually refugees don't leave their most valuable items behind and they usually wear as much clothing as possible.  Also missing from this image is any sign of the usual family groups we associate with fleeing refugees - the kids, the parents, somebody helping grandma.  It seems to me that these are folks who aren't planning to be gone for long.

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish area, which shares a border with north-east Syria, threatened to intervene if Kurds came under further attack.

 

Mr Barzani, whose own well-armed forces fought for independence against Saddam Hussein, said that if Kurds were "under threat of death and terrorism" then Iraqi Kurdistan would be "prepared to defend them".

An estimated 154,000 Syrian refugees are already registered in Iraq. The latest influx appears to have been caused by the building of a new pontoon bridge over the Tigris.

"UN refugee agency staff at Sahela report what appears like a river of people coming towards the border," said Claire Bourgeois, the UNHCR's Iraq representative, referring to a border crossing in north Iraq.

 

Coastal Flooding - A Trillion Dollar a Year Problem by 2050

People who inhabit coastal areas don't waste much breath muttering about hoaxes or myths of climate change.   They leave that nonsense to petro-heads and other drylanders.

A new report warns that coastal cities could suffer flood damages of a trillion dollars a year by 2050.   And the news is particularly bad for the United States.

More than 40% of these prodigious costs could fall upon just four cities – New Orleans, Miami and New York in the US and Guangzhou in China.

Stephane Hallegatte of the World Bank in Washington and colleagues looked at the risks of future flood losses in the 136 largest of the world's coastal cities.

Any coastal city is always at some risk – by definition it is at sea level, and often on an estuary or floodplain, and very often began as a seaport.

But risks increase as the environment changes: some coastal cities are subsiding; sea levels are slowly but surely rising as the oceans warm and the glaciers melt; and for two decades researchers have repeatedly warned that what used to be "extreme" events such as once-in-a-century floods are likely to arrive considerably more often than once a century.

In 2005, average global flood losses are estimated to have reached $6 billion a year. This figure is expected to grow to $50 billion a year, and unless cities put money into better flood defences, losses could pass the $1 trillion mark.

To make their calculations, the authors matched average annual losses (and in a city like New Orleans, much of it already below sea level, this is estimated at $600 million) against a city's gross domestic product, to provide a measure of how much should be set aside to pay for such losses.

It's important to realize that these flood losses will be just one of any number of climate-change related impacts that countries like the U.S. will have to bear.  Droughts and inland flooding will also take a major toll as will severe storm events of increasing intensity and frequency.


This report presents a snapshot of what to expect by 2050, not in 2050.  The conditions being addressed are already building, they're already underway.  We're going from a few billion a year a decade ago, to tens of billions a year, to potentially a thousand billion a year by 2050.  That's close to one percent of global GDP for just one problem - flood damage to coastal cities.

Is Japan's Prime Minister's Mansion Actually Haunted?

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe won't set foot in the place.  In 2007, during a previous term in office, Abe left the prime minister's mansion and, despite being re-elected seven months ago, he shows no signs of wanting to go back.

Rather than move into the presidential home, Abe has preferred to make the 15-minute commute from his family's house to the office and has shown no indication that he is preparing to move into the art deco mansion in the heart of Nagatacho, the capital's political district, where he lived during his previous stint as prime minister in 2006-07.

While officials deny Abe has a fear of the supernatural – and there was no discussion of the matter in 2007 when he resigned from office due to ill health – rumours abound that the official residence is haunted by figures from Japan's bloody prewar history.

In 1932, a group of naval officers assassinated the then prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, at the residence during a failed coup. Four years later, it was the scene of another attempted coup by a radical faction of the imperial Japanese army.

Bullet holes and traces of fire damage near the entrance to the mansion property have left physical reminders of the coup attempts. But there have also been frequent reported sightings of men in military uniform in a nearby garden. Several former first ladies have refused to move into the building over fears it was haunted.

Japan was a pretty gory place to be a politician in the runup to WWII.   Many of the homicidal young officers, who liked to use their katana or samurai swords on their political masters, got off with a slap on the wrist because they were deemed to be acting misguidedly but with patriotic fervor.

You Know It's a Coup When

When you're an Egyptian, you know your uprising has actually been a military coup when the authorities release Hosni Mubarak.

It was unclear how Egyptians — particularly those who have welcomed the military action against Mr. Morsi — would respond to the release of a despised autocrat whose downfall united Mr. Mubarak’s secular and Islamist foes. News of the legal maneuvers came at a time of sustained bloodletting.

Just in the past 24 hours, the Egyptian government has acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody, while suspected militants were reported on Monday to have killed at least 24 police officers and wounded 3 others in an attack on their minibuses in the restive northern Sinai region.

Mr. Mubarak, 85, faces an array of legal challenges including allegations of corruption and a retrial on charges of complicity in the murder of protesters whose revolt forced his ouster in February, 2011.

Yatim's Killer Charged With Murder

The Execution of Sammy Yatim

Toronto constable James Forcillo has been charged with second degree murder in the execution of Sammy Yatim in a Toronto streetcar on July 27th.


Over a span of 13 seconds, Forcillo fired nine rounds from his sidearm at the young man who stood alone in the empty streetcar.

Within the first two seconds Forcillo fired three rounds sending Yatim to the floor from which he never rose.

Then followed a break of almost five seconds before Forcillo fired another four rounds then a pause and the eighth round, another pause, and the ninth round.

It was that initial, five-second pause that transforms this into two distinct shooting events.   However arguable the use of deadly force might have been at the outset when, in the first two seconds, Forcillo fired the first three rounds, there is no question that Yatim was down, seriously wounded, and no conceivable threat to Forcillo or the platoon of fellow cops at his side when the officer chose to fire his remaining six rounds into the prone and stationary body of this young man.

It's hard to imagine the authorities proceeding with the second-degree murder charge.  Watch for counsel to plea bargain this down to manslaughter with a very reduced sentence.

Charting America's (And Our Own) Descent Into Madness

He's one of the most under-celebrated sages of this era but that doesn't stop American Henry Giroux from dispensing invaluable pearls of wisdom and insight.  He currently is Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster.  Perhaps from Canada he's able to more clearly chart his native land's descent into madness.

America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.  The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.   Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.  Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible.  And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

...The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. There are no towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories interweave moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough.  Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it, overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of agency to the imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a permanent war economy.

...All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.” That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people.  Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they inflict on Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.  

It is genuinely painful to read this, mainly because it is so true and because the social contagions of America eventually spread north.   Our FinMin, Jimbo "The Gnome" Flaherty, entertains top Canadian CEOs at a retreat every summer where they deliver their wish lists that are invariably anchored on the notion of staying competitive with the Americans which is a twisted form of "keeping up with the Joneses."  If America shreds its social safety net, so too must Canada in the name of remaining competitive.  If America skews its tax code to the benefit of the richest of the rich, so too must Canada in the name of competitiveness.  If America tolerates rampant inequality, so too must Canada.   As long as it's masked in the guise of competitiveness it is just and right somehow.

We need to see it as a lung cancer patient persisting in a pack-a-day habit.  Should we then take up a pack-a-day habit  - in the name of competitiveness, of course?   Yet this is what appeals to our social darwinist prime minister's every instinct.  It is the rancid marrow that fills his bones.

Would that Henry Giroux was writing policy for Tom Mulcair or Trudeau the Lesser.   For we need minds like Giroux's to inform our political conscience, to rehabilitate our collective sensibilities. We need every Giroux we can find that we might finally wake up to the war that is being waged against us and understand what we can and must do to fight back.