Impeach the Prime Minister

Stephen Harper has lost the right to govern Canada.  He has deliberately exposed the country to great peril and left the nation and our people vulnerable to war and terror at a time of grave and looming dangers.

Allow me to explain.

ISIS and Putin, keep those two in your mind.

We're told that Vlad Putin presents an immediate and 'existential' threat to NATO.  That we believe it is apparent in our prime minister's decision to send the standard six-pack of CF-18 fighters to defend the airspace of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.  We're there with armed fighters on a war footing.  Threat One.

Canada is also confronting Putin over Ukraine.  We've levied sanctions against the Russians.  We've provided aid and non-lethal military equipment to the Kiev government.  We're considering requests for weapons supposedly needed to keep the pro-Russian rebels at bay.  Many observers believe NATO may be on the cusp of a shooting war with Russia, our first peer-on-peer war since we fought the Chinese in Korea.  Threat Two.

Having given up on defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, Canada is in a shooting (okay, bombing) war against ISIS in Iraq.  Again the now ubiquitous six-pack of CF-18s. Today the newly minted DefMin/seminarian Jason Kenney says Canada will consider taking the fight to ISIS in Syria and Libya.  We would need a lot more than two more six-packs for those gigs.  Threat Three and potential Threats Four and Five.

Putin is now quite fond of sending Russian bombers to cruise the perimeter of NATO airspace, including Canada's far north.  Make that Threat Six.

Putin is also getting pretty aggressive with his submarines, intruding into Swedish coastal waters and twice getting boats up to the approaches of Britain's submarine base at Faslane, Scotland.  How long will it be before we sight one of Russia's subs in Canadian waters, especially our vast, marginally undefended Arctic waters?  Threat Seven.

By the governments own contention, we're staring at serious threats up the wazoo.  We're not even talking China or North Korea.

With all these threats stacking up and growing, what is this government's focus? It's on balancing the budget in time for the 2015 election.  We're in a state of war, and a Cold War, and in what could become the mother of all peer wars, and our government wants to focus on balancing its budget.

The budget priority could be defensible if Canada had its military in good order to meet all these threats.  However the prime minister has gutted the defence budget.  In terms of GDP, Harper's defence budget is half what we had under Pierre Trudeau.

We have the longest coastline of any nation yet our navy is at its weakest since before WWII.  We can't send a task force to defend any of our three coasts because we don't have functioning provisioning ships nor do we have air defence destroyers to protect a fleet against the sophisticated threat that Russia could present.  Our submarines?  Best we leave that for another day.

Our CF-18s are exceedingly long in the tooth.  What remains of the considerable force Pierre Trudeau bought for Canada is not up to the tasks that we might have for it at home and abroad.  There's a reason why we send six-packs of CF-18s to the Baltics and Kuwait.  We'd love to send a squadron but we can't.

So, we've got a navy so neglected that it can't deploy a task force.  We've got an air force that has to send fighters in penny packets.  The army?  Much of their kit is worn out from our adventure in Kandahar and money isn't exactly pouring out of Harper's treasury to make good their needs either.

Stephen Harper is counting on the gullible segment of the population to return him to power out of fear of the Russian and Islamist threats.  He's also counting on them not to realize how much he's done to leave Canada unequipped and unprepared to defend against these threats.

Stephen Harper will kick the defence of Canada and the security of the Canadian people into the gutter before he'll give up on balancing the budget for the next election.

No one knows where this Putin business is heading but even the best informed observers won't rule out an inadvertent war with Russia.  That's where we're at today and yet we have a government obsessed with defunding our military and sapping what remains of our ability to defend our country.

Now you might think the opposition, staring at an election, knowing that Harper is going to gin up these threats to terrify the gullible into voting for him, would be beating Harper over the head with this like a Newfie on a baby harp seal but you would be wrong.  Trudeau and Mulcair - the best thing Harper has going for him.

Bangin' that Old War Drum, Again.

Maybe it's because they're still smarting from getting their asses handed to them in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe not.  Either way it's getting a bit embarrassing listening to Western military leaders banging the war drums over Russia.

NATO, especially, is sounding the alarm of an all-out shooting war with the Kremlin.  The Russians fly their bombers were we don't want to see them, that's a provocation, a threat, even if they're well inside international airspace.  The Russians send their subs into our territorial waters.  We can't find them anyway.

Now Britain's top general in NATO, Adrian Bradshaw, is warning that Russia poses an "existential threat to our whole being."

Gen Sir Adrian Bradshaw, deputy commander of Nato forces in Europe, said there was a danger Vladimir Putin could try to use his armies to invade and seize Nato territory, after calculating the alliance would be too afraid of escalating violence to respond.

His comments follow a clash between London and Moscow after the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, said there wasa "real and present danger" Mr Putin could try to destabilise the Baltic states with a campaign of subversion and irregular warfare.

The Kremlin called those comments “absolutely unacceptable".

Sir Adrian, one of the most senior generals in the British Army and a former director of special forces, went further and said there was also danger that Russia could use conventional forces and Soviet-era brinkmanship to seize Nato territory.

He said Russia had shown last year it could generate large conventional forces at short notice for snap exercises along its borders. There was a danger these could be used “not only for intimidation and coercion but potentially to seize Nato territory, after which the threat of escalation might be used to prevent re-establishment of territorial integrity. This use of so called escalation dominance was of course a classic Soviet technique.”

Curious, ain't it?  We drive NATO's military presence right up to Russia's borders and then get offended when Russia shows that it can "generate large conventional forces at short notice for snap exercises along its borders."  What would any country want to do if a powerful adversary showed up on its borders?

This may sound like so much hot air but the path of Cold War is heavily influenced by the parties' confidence.  If one side is relatively confident it's safe from hostilities from the other side, tensions abate.  That confidence is pretty fragile and can be readily, perhaps even irrevocably, undermined by provocative actions and pronouncements from the adversary, statements just like Sir Adrian's.

It's not that Vlad Putin isn't a dangerous thug.  He's all that and more.  It's just that a shooting war with Russia, of the very sort these NATO leaders are so quick to envision, could well be the end of everything and everyone, possibly even yourself.

Update - gasp.  Is general Adrian making the rounds of some German online dating site?

You'll Need More Than a Six-Pack for That Job.

Well, that was the idea anyway.

Brace yourselves.  In a move that could send chills down the spine of every member of ISIS, it's been revealed that Canada is 'considering' expanding its war effort to Syria and, gasp, Libya too.

Libya?  That's that place that Gaddafi guy used to run.  We bombed the hell out of him three or four years ago.  It was "mission accomplished" all around.  We even had a victory flypast over Ottawa brought to you by the ever-triumphalist Harper government.

I know we won because Steve and Mrs. Steve and Peter MacKay and that Army guy and Steve's ceremonial valet all gathered on the front steps of the Centre Block to bask in the glory of our great victory.

Except it turns out that the Canadian Armed Forces, under Steve's management, proclaim victory a lot more than they achieve it.  But how were they to know that, by dragging out the air war in Libya by a staggering 161-days, they would leave the place in a state of chaos just perfect for al Qaeda and, eventually, ISIS to get established in North Africa.

So now we're tossing the idea around of another grand victory in Libya, Syria too, in an expansion of "our" war against ISIS.  I know because our newly minted Defence Minister, the oh so martial Jason Kenny, said as much to CBC's Evan Soloman.

Not only that but our Closet Clausewitz says there's 2,000 other countries ready to stand up with us.

"Obviously there are practical limits to our ability to operate around the world, but we will look at our options to see where we can have the most impact, where we're most needed," he said. "That requires ongoing consultation with our allies. We don't just decide these things unilaterally."

"Obviously we're in Iraq at the invitation of that government in a mission of, I think, over 2,000 countries being coordinated by the United States. If we can help meaningfully in the fight against ISIL elsewhere we'll give that consideration," the minister said.

Jason, this one is for the luxury lawn furniture set and the Caribbean cruise. Name 500 of those 2,000 countries and their capitals. (psst - don't tell Wiki.  they think there's only 206 countries, the damned fools.)

Yes, Jason, you hit it on the head when you pointed out that, "there are practical limits to our ability to operate around the world."  Your government has slashed our defence budget to levels not seen in generations.  You have given Canada a navy smaller than at any time since prior to WWII.  Our aircraft and helicopters are old and worn out.  When we do go to defend the Baltics or bring the Hammers of Hell down on the heads of ISIS, we send a paltry six-pack of CF-18s because it's all we can afford. There are practical limits and your government's neglect has been setting most of them.

This is Canada. Of Course We Live In a Democracy. Right? Think Again.

Do you know the difference between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy? It can be a complex issue.  There are oodles of papers to read if you really want to get a handle on it but, for now, here's a somewhat useful explanation taken from Wiki.

An illiberal democracy, also called a pseudo democracy, partial democracy, low intensity democracy,empty democracy or hybrid regime,[1] is a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties. It is not an 'open society'. There are many countries "that are categorized as neither "free" nor "not free," but as "probably free," falling somewhere between democratic and nondemocratic regimes."[2] This may be because a constitution limiting government powers exists, but its liberties are ignored, or because an adequate legal constitutional framework of liberties does not exist.[3]

There's no neat definition, no universal litmus test, that reveals illiberal democracy but, make no mistake, it's spreading quite fast around the world and it will come to impact our everyday lives.  It intends to do just that. It may begin as a barely noticeable disorder, a political irritation leading to indignation, steadily worsening but only incrementally at worst, before it becomes established as a national, constitutional affliction.

The United States has, in many aspects, become an illiberal democracy.  Its dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress is a manifestation of this.  The United States Supreme Court with its outrageous rulings such as Citizens United is another telltale.  The influence of shady operators like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson leave little doubt that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has been reduced to a quaint and dispensable notion.

Bill C-51 is a tribute to illiberal democracy.  It's the very sort of stuff that defines illiberal democracy.  Here's another example from the morning papers:

Washington State has documents outlining emergency response plans for a Kinder Morgan pipeline – plans similar to those British Columbians have been told by Canada’s National Energy Board they’re not allowed to see due to security concerns.

The B.C. government lost a battle with the National Energy Board in January to have greater access to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline emergency response plan (ERP). Kinder Morgan had already provided B.C. with a version of the plan, but significant portions were blacked out.

The denied information included specific response times, valve locations, and evacuation zone maps. The government had argued it needed the entire plan to be able to understand Kinder Morgan’s ability to respond to an oil spill. The proposed $6.5-billion Trans Mountain expansion would twin the pipeline and triple the capacity for Alberta oil intended for Asian markets.

But in Washington State – where the pipeline would cross through to Puget Sound – Kinder Morgan has provided a more comprehensive response plan.

...The U.S. plan includes information on response timelines, the availability of emergency equipment near specific pipeline sections, and a list of companies that could help out after an oil spill.

In HarperLand, Washington State can compel disclosure from American pipeline operator, Kinder Morgan, but the utterly rigged, completely Harperian National Energy Board will block British Columbia from demanding that same information. That's the glaring, ugly face of illiberal democracy in Canada.  The dice are loaded, the deck is stacked - we haven't got a chance.

Yes, we still get to vote every now and then but, in the aftermath, government operates behind closed doors.  Harper was onto that from the get go, severing the public's and the media's access to the public service, the armed forces to boot, and thereby quietly transforming them into the prime minister's personal, partisan political agencies.  This veil of illiberal democracy descended over Canada upon Harper's first minority win and remains even stronger today.  The media whined and whimpered for a while but they've long been tamed.  Even our opposition parties, those who tell us they would like to run the country, go along with it.

I've never heard of a nation existing on the basis of going along to get along. Maybe that's because they tend to die off early.,

Even the Fraser Institute Can't Look the Other Way But It Can't Tell the Truth Either.

There's a bumper sticker line that could double for the provincial motto of Alberta:  Dear God, Please Give Us One More Oil Boom and, This Time, We Promise We Won't Piss It Away.

Now, with another boom gone bust, Alberta has fallen back into a raging deficit and even the uber-Right Fraser Institute can't bite its tongue although it can't face facts either.  Naturally, the neo-liberal Fraser Institute sees workers' wages, especially government workers' wages, as the culprit.

Ten years ago, before the boom started in earnest, Alberta spent $8,965 (in 2013 dollars) per person in program spending. This does not include capital spending on items like hospitals, schools and roads.

The report argues that had the province increased program spending in the following years at the rate of inflation plus population growth, it would have spent $295 billion on programs over the next nine years.

Instead it spent $345 billion, a $49-billion difference.

So where did the money go? Mark Milke says a lot went to public sector wage growth, which in some years grew at nearly twice the rate of inflation.

"When you take these wage deals and unreformed pensions and start to multiply them by 200,000 people in the provincial public sector in Alberta, then over time, you get these big numbers."

Between 2006 and 2008, Alberta contributed $4.5 billion to the Heritage Savings Trust Fund. Nothing has gone in since then, and the fund's total sits at $15 billion.

In Alaska, a minimum of 25 per cent of resource revenues are deposited into its Alaska Permanent Fund. The income generated from the fund can be used by the state government, but not the principal. As of June 2014, the fund stands at nearly $64 billion US.

In Norway, 100 per cent of net proceeds from resource revenue are supposed to flow into a fund. According to Milke, that doesn't happen every year, but Norway has gotten close to that ideal. The Norwegian Petroleum Fund sits at $759 billion as of Sept. 30, 2014.

Of course, being the consummate neo-liberal Hack Shop, the Fraser Institute steers well clear of facts that don't fit its 'blame the workers' narrative.  While the Fraser report extols the success of Norway, for example, the authors deceivingly avoid the heart of that story - that Norway negotiated far higher royalties for its oil; that the government wisely (and in keeping with Peter Lougheed's advice) did not take oil revenues to into current accounts but, instead, used hefty income taxes to support the generous services it provides to its people. 

Lougheed, perhaps the last sensate premier Alberta has seen, knew that taking oil royalties into general revenue would create a dangerous government dependency on an insecure source of funding.  When boom turned to bust the government and people of Alberta would be dropped into a stinking mess.  Lougheed also warned that injecting that windfall revenue into the economy would overheat the economy, cause real wealth to evaporate as prices soared, and leave the province already wounded when oil prices plummeted.

Everything Lougheed foretold has been demonstrably proven - by both Norway and Alberta.  Too bad the Fraser Institute is so intellectually compromised that it can't tell the simple truth.

Will the E.U. Again Pull the Rug Out From Under Harper's Feet?

The European Union's FQD, fuel quality directive, was once seen as a bitumen killer.  It's intended to encourage the use of lower-carbon oil and to kill off the European market for tar sand oil.

It had been reported that the Canadian government persuaded the Euros to drop the regulation, opening Europe to Athabasca exports.  Now it seems the FQD isn't dead after all.

The EU’s most senior energy official confirmed that the fuel quality directive (FQD) to encourage greener road fuels will not be scrapped at the end of the decade, as had been thought.

Asked by the Guardian whether that meant the FQD would continue after 2020, the EU’s vice president for energy union, Maroš Šefčovič, said: “My first reaction is yes. We just have to adjust it to all the lessons learned from biofuels, and all the [other] lessons learned from the previous time.”

The FQD has been a platform for measures intended to price tar sands out of the European market – and for targets to provide 10% of Europe’s transport fuel from low carbon sources,mostly biofuels, by 2020.

And the Next Nuclear Power in the Middle East Is....

You're probably thinking Iran.  What about Saudi Arabia, the bunch of radical Sunni extremists we consider our close ally?

Take it from The Times (of London, of course) where it's reported that the Saudis, with CIA approval, secretly aquired DF-21 ballistic missiles from China plus British-built cruise missiles, all with an eye to taking on Iran.

Saudi Arabia, once a reliable client state of the US, is busy putting distance between Washington and Riyadh.  China is in the running to sell armed drones to the Saudis.  Riyadh is also considering adding the Pakistani-Chinese JF-17 fighter to its arsenal.  Then there's the $15-billion worth of armoured fighting vehicles, LAV II, that the Saudis have ordered from Canada.

If the Saudis do introduce nuclear weapons it's possible they'll come from Pakistan, home to the "Islamic Bomb."

Oh, My God! What If We Got This One Completely Wrong?

A recent article in Aviation Week claims that senior officers in the Pentagon are beginning to evaluate whether counter-measures already developed by the two obvious adversaries of the F-35 have seriously compromised its effectiveness.

The article explains that what is going on is preparation for what the staff of the next president will have to wrestle with.

What's most interesting is the part that deals with the Pentagon's obsolescence policy.  These same people are trying to catalog all the very good technology within the F-35 so that they can be incorporated into the next warplane, the one to be built to correct all the F-35's mistakes. That's the history of the evolution of warplanes.  You progress from two wings to three to just one; from air-cooled to liquid-cooled engines to jets; from canvas covered surfaces to metal covered; from straight wing to swept; from rifles to machine guns to precision-guided bombs and radar-guided missiles.

Progress is a process.  You take what works and quickly find new ways to do what doesn't.  The point has been made all along.  This overdue, over-priced and under-performing warplane is very prototypical.  It's more a technology demonstrator than a well-rounded warplane.  Lockheed may boast that the F-35 is at the leading edge of 5th Generation fighter technology but, if that was true, it would have to be Generation 5.0 Beta.  They got some things very, very, brilliantly right.  They got as many things very, very wrong and they haven't distinguished themselves in how they've dealt with those shortcomings.

Before we, and our allies, get saddled with what might be a lame horse straight out of the gate, we need to get reliable intelligence on whether the F-35's vaunted stealth cloaking, for which it compromised speed, agility, range and payload, remains valid and for how long?  Lockheed isn't going to provide us with F-35s we can stage at Cold Lake along with all the other warplanes worth looking at so that we could have a legitimate fly-off.  Since we're not getting the option to kick the tires, at the very least we need to know if this hyper-expensive warplane has already been neutralized.  The Pentagon wants to know - and prepare for the possibility - and we should too.

With the sort of money it costs to build a modern fighter, you really can't afford to get it wrong.  Once you own it, it'll be a 'come as you are party' for the next 30+ years.

I have not lost such confidence in Canada to believe that, when the F-35's shortcomings are exposed, we will allow our aircrews to still use them as our front line, Swiss Army knife warplane.  We will, however, have to deal with a huge hole in our federal budget as we scrape up money to buy the next plane, the F-35's successor, the one that will have many of the best parts of the prototype but with the wrinkles ironed out.

The Harper government (Harper and MacKay especially) has spun so many lies about the F-35 that they no longer have any credibility.  They lied about cost. They lied by trying to claim there was a contract, one put in place by the Liberal government of Paul Martin.  The most preposterous of their lies is that the F-35 will be in front-line service with Canada for upwards of 50-years.

The Aviation Week article uses the term "cannibalize" to describe the process now underway.  Senior defense officials are looking to cannibalize the F-35 - to take from it all the best stuff and leave the rest on the hangar floor.  Yet we're expected to buy it warts and all.  What do you do if it turns out to be a flying wart?


Note - I've not been able to find the article online to link to it.  I can access it through a Zinio subscription.  It is published in the February 2 issue.
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The Running of the Hounds. Westminster KC 2015

I'm a dog fancier.  I love dogs, most types anyway.  Not so much the fru-fru dogs, those little furballs that some people tote around but 'real' dogs - terriers, setters, retrievers and, most of all, hound dogs.  I love the hounds.

For the past forty years I've been a beagle guy.  I've had a few.  All of them have been great - hounds.  I like to think of the beagle as the Steve McQueen of the canine world.  Never comfortable with authority, an animal that takes the world strictly on its own terms.  When a beagle receives a command from its owner it goes through a two-stage process.  First it receives the command.  Then it asks itself, "alright but what's in it for me?"

Most people know a beagle to see one but few understand what makes these hounds so unique.  They've been around for many centuries.  Some say they go back around 2,500 years.

There are those who say that a beagle cannot be trained.  That is untrue. Thousands of years of careful breeding has produced a hound that is actually self-training.  They train themselves in accordance with their own needs and values and, when their interests coincide with yours, you get to claim the credit for the result.  Those who sow doubt as to the beagle's trainability are simply incapable of recognizing perfection.

We had a "beagle moment" yesterday when a BC-bred hound, "Miss P" took Best in Show at the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club dog show.  Our British Columbia hound is the grand-niece of Uno, who, in 2008, became the first beagle ever to win the top honour at the Westminster dog show.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Miss P is a splendid looking hound and a deserving grand champion.  That said she really doesn't rise to the standard of my current hound, Buddy.  She's close, very close but she just doesn't have it all.  I would never put Buddy in the show ring lest it ruin the hopes and aspirations of all other breeders in a giant collapse of their collective morale.

Last night was Miss P's last competition.  She's 4-years old and she has a line to continue.  

The Way We Wage War, We Never See This Coming and Probably Never Will.

We absolutely luuuuv our air wars, whether it's over Serbia or Libya or Iraq. Load up those underwing hard points and let's go drop some bombs.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

We like air war because it's cheap and dirty.  It eliminates the need for benchmarks to distinguish victory from defeat.  It's like going on a big family picnic.  You send a six-pack of CF-18s and everyone else chips in with a handful of whatever they have that's still airworthy and the party's on.

Take Kosovo, remember that place?  In 2008 we bombed Milosevic's Serbia for weeks until old Slobodan agreed to let 'our' people go.  We liberated Kosovo for its Albanian Muslim population.  It must be blissful today, eh?  Not so much. Even the Kosovars don't like the place and they're beating feet for Europe, Germany in particular.  Why would they not when its economy is largely based on cigarette and cement smuggling and organized crime?

Then we had Libya in 2011, a dandy air war against the holdout forces of Muammar Gaddafi.  Some, such as this blogger, called for an Egyptian invasion to quickly topple Gaddafi and restore order to make way for a new, civilian government.  The Egyptians next door had masses of late-build American F-16 fighters and M-1A1 Abrams tanks and could have taken Tripoli in a matter of days.

Why did I advocate an Egyptian campaign against Gaddafi in February, 2011? Because al Qaeda announced - quite openly announced - that they intended to get into the Libyan civil war in order to establish a toe hold to spread throughout North Africa.  They were candid about having missed their opportunity to get established in Egypt during the uprising against Mubarak and were determined not to repeat that blunder in Libya.

Egypt, only Egypt, had the means to get to Tripoli fast and keep al Qaeda out.  It would have been a matter of a few days and it would have saved thousands of lives and years of utter chaos.

Gwynne Dyer also came out in favour of Egyptian intervention on March 15:

...What is actually needed is active military intervention on the ground and in the air by disciplined, well-trained Arab forces, sent by a revolutionary Arab government that is in sympathy with the Libyan rebels. So where is the Egyptian army when the Libyans need it?

Egypt has an open border with the rebel-controlled east of Libya, and just one brigade of the Egyptian army would be enough to stop Gaddafy’s ground forces in their tracks. The Egyptian air force could easily shoot down any of Gaddafy’s aircraft that dared to take off, especially if it had early warning from European or American AWACS aircraft

Then on March 23, Parliament unanimously endorsed Canadian participation in maintaining a "no fly zone" over Libya which led me to note:

Approval wasn't automatic. Questions were asked. According to the G&M, the opposition asked when the mission would end, what would constitute success and what the whole thing would cost. Apparently satisfied when the government couldn't answer even one of those questions, they all stood up on their hind legs, let out a manly "Hurrah" and voted to endorse the mission that, plainly, no one understands.

And so we wound up going through a NATO-centric bombing campaign against Gaddafi forces that dragged on for 160-days.  Gaddafi was captured, summarily executed and Harper staged a victory fly-past over Parliament Hill even as al Qaeda was consolidating its own victory back in Libya.

Flash forward from 2011 to 2015 and where are we?  Libya hovers on the cusp of becoming a failed state.  It is incapable of forming a democratic government as no one is really in effective control.  ISIS has followed al Qaeda in setting up shop in Libya.

Today's National Post (via Britain's Telegraph) reports that ISIS is planning to use its presence in Libya as a springboard for attacking into Europe.  

The group has already established Libyan-based cells, who on Sunday released a video showing a mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian guest workers. The video, which prompted Egypt to launch retaliatory bombing raids on ISIS positions in Libya, included footage of a khaki-clad militant pointing a bloodstained finger northward, declaring, “We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission.”

The ISIS propagandist [Abu al-Libim] describes Libya as having “immense potential” for the group. He points out with relish it is awash with weapons from the country’s civil war, when large quantities of Gadhafi’s arsenals were appropriated by rebels. Some of those weapons came from Britain, which supplied the Gaddafi regime with machine guns, sniper rifles and ammunition during his final years in power, when he was seen as an ally against Islamist terrorism.

Libim also points out Libya is less than 490 kilometres from parts of the nearest European mainland.

“It has a long coast and looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat,” he writes

“The number of trips known as ’illegal immigration’ from this coast, which are huge in number … if this was even partially exploited and developed strategically, pandemonium could be wrought in the southern European states and it is even possible that there could be a closure of shipping lines and targeting of Crusader ships and tankers.”

Harper will need a lot more than a six-pack of aging CF-18s to deal with this bunch.  Wait, I forgot, we've already had our triumphalist flypast to commemorate our amazing victory over Libya.  That file is closed.

Fortunately our current air war over Iraq will be a rousing success where our previous air wars flopped.  Or, maybe not.  Oh well it keeps a lot of people, especially the Liberal Loudmouth (TM), happy and, at a paltry million dollars a day, it's peanuts.

You don't win a war without a winning strategy and the necessary commitment and perseverence.  You need a clearly understood objective and a plan of what you need to achieve it.  If you choose to skip on the strategy and duck the planning business, you're setting out to avoid failure which pretty much ensures you'll fail.  We're already well into our second decade of whack-a-mole warfare and it has failed us at every turn.  Why stop now?

Tom Mulcair Weighs In on Bill C-51 Today - At Last, Finally, Maybe We Hope.

They're both trained lawyers, Tom Mulcair and Elizabeth May.  One of them knows right from wrong, the other waits awhile to see which way the wind's blowing.

Elizabeth May only had to read the Harper Cons bill C-51 to realize it was an assault on Canadian democracy.  The man who tells us he's fit to be prime minister of Canada wasn't so sure.  At first he was sort of for it, then he was sort of hesitant about it.  He needed time, a lot of time for someone who claims to be prime ministerial material, but - at long last - Mulcair has formulated a New Democrat position on this widely denounced legislation.

Oh please, Tom, what's it going to be?

UPDATE -  this just in.

Well, that's that then.  The NDP has given it much careful thought and concluded that it's probably safe enough to stand up against Bill C-51.   Why, Tom even called it "dangerous, vague and ineffective."  Good for you, Tom.  That didn't take long at all.  Very prime ministerial, very.

Harper's Ace in the Hole for Election Victory in 2015? - Thomas Mulcair

Coming from anyone but Murray Dobbin, this might have New Democrats up in arms, howling with indignation.  The decidedly progressive journalist, contributor to The Tyee and Rabble, diagnoses just what the Mulcair NDP could be about to inflict on Canada - the end of our progressive hopes.

Unless something changes, come election time there will be two battles: the Harper Conservatives will be running to win, and the NDP and Liberals will be fighting their own private war. It is a recipe for disaster for the country.

The conversations that lead the NDP to this apparent abandonment of the country's best interests clearly take place strictly within the confines of the party bureaucracy. Because if the party's brainiacs actually talked to its supporters, members and progressive Canadians in general, it would know just how terrified people are of the prospect of another Harper majority.

The divide between the NDP leadership's thinking and the political sentiment of its potential supporters has never been greater. This disturbing disconnect suggests that unlike the majority of Canadians who are almost paralyzed by fear and loathing regarding the future of their country, those who run the NDP simply aren't driven by the same fear. Effectively, they care more about their party than they do about their country. It begs the question of whether a progressive party can even make a legitimate claim to the title if the people who run it actually care less about their country than the average citizen does.

Of course the same and worse can be said of the Liberals but nothing more can be expected of them. They are a party of big business, committed to the (ever-worsening) status quo with a long history of appealing to Canadians progressive instincts during elections while dutifully serving the interests of the economic elite.

...These are decidedly not normal times. For the first time in our history we actually have a government that is committed to dismantling the best aspects of our country.

That cries out for an extraordinary response. And if the NDP can't propose an accord of some kind based on principle (let's see if the Liberals have the jam to refuse) then why not do it based on opportunism? It would hardly be a departure given its myriad compromises over the years (and its opportunistic defeat of the Liberals in 2006, handing Harper power). Oddly, the NDP claims to want power yet demonstrates with its intransigence on co-operation with the Liberals that it is not actually serious.

It is obvious to all progressive Canadians that if either the Liberals or the Conservatives win a majority the country is in deep trouble. The Liberals will not commit themselves to reversing all the damage done by Harper. They are interested in power for the sake of it and would happily administer the status quo inherited from the Conservatives.

Dobbin's remarks raise an important, albeit tangential question.  Is there any room for progressives within the Liberal tent as it stands today?  If there is, I can't see it.  In my view, Liberal progressivism is a hollow affectation.  That Liberal Party is a thing of the past and there's neither the interest or will to resurrect it.  Today's Liberal Party under Justin is not the Liberal Party of Pierre. It's a diminished thing, dried up and technocratic.

What I'd like to see is a Liberal-NDP coalition just strong enough to bring in some form of proportional representation.  One term, that's all we would need. After that they can go at each other hammer and tong while the rest of us can bring the Green Party to a position of effective influence.

A War of Empty Gestures

It began almost 14-years ago as a campaign to wipe out a bunch of terrorists in Afghanistan.  Or so we thought.

Today our once hopeful adventure in the Hindu Kush has metastasized into a conflict with radical Sunni fundamentalism that stretches from South Asia to western North Africa.  And even though we've got a dandy fleet of jet fighters lobbing bombs into Iraq, overall we're really falling behind.

ISIS, Daesh, call them whatever you like, they're on a bit of a roll.  They just staged a mass beheading in Libya of about 21 Coptic Egyptians they kidnapped some time earlier.

ISIS, it seems, operates a bit like an outlaw biker gang.  It spreads through chapters established in various countries, states and provinces.  You sign on, go through some sort of ritual, and - boom - you're in business.  So, when we unload our stuff on one chapter, the others are free to go about their business virtually unmolested.  Hmm, that so doesn't sound like a plan.

When you compound that dilemma by pointing out that we're only making a symbolic gesture anyway, (let's face it - six CF-18s does not an airwar make) it gets even worse. We're not really trying to put out a fire. We're just trying to keep the smoke down a bit.

I don't know how you fight a plague like ISIS with symbolic gestures.  They're dandy for making voters believe you're doing something just so long as they don't dwell on what that 'something' really is and what it isn't.

We've already got nearly 15-years in on this and precious little to show for it. What are we going to do, another 15?  The people we're going after seem perfectly willing to keep it going as long as we like.

We don't have an exit strategy.  We don't even know what 'victory' against these guys looks like or how to achieve it.  We've set the bar so astonishingly low for ourselves that we don't even know what failure looks like any more.  That last one?  That's bad.

Calling Bryce Mackasey

Canada Post calls it the biggest and largest denomination stamp in Canadian history.  It's the $10 blue whale stamp.  It's so tricked out that, when you put it under UV light the diver and the krill pop out.  Neat, eh?

I can't look at this tenner without thinking of a press conference back in 74 or 75 when then Postmaster General, Bryce Mackasey, announced that a first class stamp was going from 15 to 17 cents but vowed that it would never increase again until Canada Post service improved.  Yeah, right.  And so, kids, that's how we wound up with a $10 stamp a mere 40-years later.

Save Yourself, Smoke Weed. This Guy Did and He Became Governor of California.

Some pretty eye-opening claims for the medical properties of marijuana.  Four claims in total.  Here's the rundown.  Cannabis actually facilitates the growth of new brain cells.  Next, cannabis prevents Alzheimer's.  The third claim is that cannabis can prevent brain damage after strokes and trauma.  Finally, cannabis extracts have been shown to fight brain cancer.

A cautionary note.  The AlterNet article is written by Dana Larsen who leads a group trying to garner enough support to force the BC government to put marijuana legalization to a referendum.

Still and all, the article does have hyperlinks to studies or reports that seem to bear out his claims.  I think Mr. Larsen's best bet is to focus on this Alzheimer's thing.  We're all terrified of getting it and I expect a good many people would go for something they believed might, just might ward it off.

A Timely Scottish Warning for the New Democrats

There's a price you pay for abandoning the Left.  The latest party to learn that lesson is Scotland's Labour Party.  The "Blairification" of the Labour Party has sent a good part of Labour's base in Scotland over to the SNP.

Scottish Labour is suffering from a ...to some extent self-inflicted – process of attrition. The process began in the mid-1990s, as Blair and Brown exchanged Labour's post-war interventionism for a programme of liberalised markets and finance-led growth. In response, Salmond carefully manoeuvred the SNP into the vacant left-of-centre space. The strategy worked. Research from the period confirms that Scots started to view the SNP as a progressive alternative to Blairism.

The first big break came at the 2003 Holyrood election: Labour lost 250,000 constituency and 225,000 list votes, the single biggest fall in its vote share at any point over the devolutionary era. Left-leaning voters – notably Catholics, trade unionists and public sectors – bled-away from Labour, moving first towards smaller, more radical parties such as the Greens and the SSP, and then towards the SNP, resulting in ever-larger electoral gains for Salmond.

The decisive rupture occurred last year, when traditional Labour strongholds such as Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and Dundee rejected the party line and voted in favour of independence. Appalled by the flaccid conservatism of the Better Together campaign, large numbers of working-class Scots (although by no means all) embraced constitutional radicalism. On 18 September, Scottish Labour won the referendum and saved the Union, but it did so at the cost of Labour Scotland.

The only appropriate term for what is happening to Scottish Labour is "Pasokification". Just as Greek voters abandoned PASOK, the established party of Greek social democracy, for Syriza, so Scottish voters are abandoning Labour for the SNP (albeit more gradually and under less acute conditions). Clearly, neither Salmond nor Sturgeon is Alexis Tsipras, and the current Scottish government can be frustratingly cautious in its approach to reform. But the overarching trend is unmistakable: in Scotland, the old left hegemony is breaking down and a new one forming in its place.

So play silly bugger centrist all you like, Mulcair, but keep an eye over your shoulder - the left one.

There's No Place for Nasty Unions in HarperLand

Tomorrow morning, first thing, the Harper government intends to legislate striking CP Rail employees back to work.  Quelle f__king surprise!

It's a union that unhappily falls under federal jurisdiction which renders collective bargaining unacceptable. It may be an integral part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but just not here in oh so neoliberal Canada.

We Really Must Stop Looking at the Challenge the Wrong Way

The climate change argument (there's no 'debate') has recently shifted to whether it's worth it.  While climate science was hunkered down fending off the deep-pocketed denialists, they allowed the other side to get control of the narrative - always a fatal mistake.

We now discuss emissions reductions in the context of the burden to society and our economy.  It's a burden, it's bad.  It's going to cost this much or that and this bunch or that will be at risk of losing their jobs and our cars won't run and our houses will freeze and we'll be left to thaw frozen mud for dinner.  Woe is us.

That discussion is preventing us from the discussion we need to have.  We need to discuss emissions reductions in the context of opportunity.  We still have an opportunity to avail ourselves of a variety of options that will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions while building a green economy.  That opportunity, however, grows more distant with each passing day.  One by one our best options will be foreclosed.  The best options slipped through our fingers in the 70s when we really didn't know any better.

The longer we remain snarled in a discussion of emissions reductions as a burden, the harder it will be for us to turn that into a discussion of opportunity.

You may not have noticed it but, over the past few months, there's been a lot more focus on geo-engineering our way out of catastrophic climate change (at least for the lucky ones - us).  That focus is tinged with resignation.  It's akin to saying, "look, let's face reality.  we're not going to deal with our emissions effectively so we have to accept the thermonuclear option, geo-engineering." Seriously, that's nearing the point of capitulation.

Unfortunately, people in high places in Canada's political and commercial caste, are keeping the focus entirely on burden and they're staying mute on opportunity. They realize they've lost their faux 'debate' on climate change but that doesn't matter much so long as they can fend off any demand for effective change.  And the longer they can control the narrative and keep the focus on burden instead of opportunity, the longer they can hold out.

C'Mon, Be Honest. Are You Jonesin' for a 'Sun News' Fix?

Didn't think so.  Me neither.

I do wonder how much notice management gave the employees of their decision to pull the pin.  According to HuffPo, Sun staffers were officially notified on Friday after the network had shut down.  That must have triggered a stampede of job seekers.

Parent company Quebecor Media had been in talks to sell the network to media mogul Moses Znaimer's Zoomer Media, which also owns specialty TV channels, radio stations, Zoomer magazine and digital properties, according to several reports.

But that deal has apparently fallen through.

The Canadaland media blog reported the network was on a “death watch” in late January, citing employees who said Quebecor could choose to dissolve the network within two months if the sale failed.

Canadaland reported the deal failed because the two sides could not reach an agreement over severance packages for Sun executives.

Did you get that?  Apparently Sun faded to black and its employees were put out on the street because Sun executives didn't like their severance packages. Well I guess this summer's Sun News alumni picnic won't be all that jovial - or particularly well attended.

Climate Wars - No Really, Climate as a Weapon Because We Can't Find Enough Ways to Kill Each Other

The military use of climate modification has been verboten since 1976 but one Rutgers professor is getting antsy about America's spy agencies' interests in geo-engineering.

Climate scientist Alan Robock, "has called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate."

The US National Academy of Science released a two-volume report last week on the science of geo-engineering.  The report warned about the potential consequences of man-made climate technology and instead urged quick and massive reductions in carbon emissions.

Robock worries that the NAS report was heavily funded by his nation's spy agencies which may be pursuing an undisclosed agenda.

“The CIA was a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control,” he said. Other funders included Nasa, the US Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The CIA established the Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, a decision that drew fierce criticism from some Republicans who viewed it as a distraction from more pressing terrorist concerns. The centre was closed down in 2012, but the agency said it would continue to monitor the humanitarian consequences of climate change and the impact on US economic security, albeit not from a dedicated office.

Robock said he became suspicious about the intelligence agencies’ involvement in climate change science after receiving a call from two men who claimed to be CIA consultants three years ago. “They said: ‘We are working for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we be able to detect it?’ I think they were also thinking in the back of their minds: ‘If we wanted to control somebody else’s climate could they detect it?’”

I think the professor is hopelessly naive if he didn't expect his nation's intelligence services to be deeply involved in monitoring all aspects of climate change including geo-engineering.  The Pentagon has been addressing these issues for years, constantly elevating the threats in its last two Quadrennial Defense Reviews.  The military's analysis shows climate change to be a major threat multiplier that will worsen instability and conflict worldwide.  There's also a real risk that a major power might unilaterally resort to geo-engineering to achieve a local benefit that would cause great harm elsewhere in the world.  

Using geo-engineering specifically for military purposes seems unimaginable. Weaponizing the climate?  That's a genie you could never put back in the bottle.

*** - the UC Berkeley study relating to this graphic can be found here.