Well, That's a Relief!

Israel has officially absolved itself of any wrongdoing in the murder of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach last summer.

The kids - they were children - had a soccer ball in play when an Israeli patrol boat opened fire on them with explosive shells. Unfortunately, for the Israelis, foreign journalists witnessed the slaughter.

The New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Tyler Hicks, who witnessed the incident, though from a different angle to the Guardian, wrote in a blog at the time: “A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants, the Israel Defence Forces’ intended targets.

“Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, doesn’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.” 

Oh well, it was only four kids and, besides, they were Palestinian kids, worse yet they were Gazans.  All three Canadian parties supported Israel's "Dahiyeh" campaign against Gaza that saw civilians butchered by the hundreds so what's four kids in the greater scheme of things?

And, yes, those are news photos of those kids (the three who survived the first round) running for safety just seconds before they too were killed.  

Rona Leaps From the High Board Only to Discover Someone Drained the Pool - Again

And people think I'M stupid!  Where did Harper find her?

The Supreme Court of Canada seems to have given health minister Rona Ambrose yet another concussive head injury.  Ragin' Rona went off on a tizzy over the court's decision that medical marijuana didn't have to be smoked but could be consumed in cookies or tea or the ever popular pot brownies, giving official sanction to "wake and bake."

Health Minister Rona Ambrose, speaking to reporters, said she is “outraged” by the ruling, and she accused the Supreme Court of steering young people toward marijuana use in the same fashion as Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who has proposed decriminalizing the drug. She said it should not be judges but medical experts at Health Canada who set the rules.

“This expansion of a pre-existing court-imposed program to now include cookies and candies makes marijuana more attractive and accessible to youth and reflects Justin Trudeau’s campaign to legalize and normalize marijuana,” she said in a prepared statement.

Outraged, she is.  You could practically hear the wiring in her skull arcing and sparking, wafts of smoke emerging from her ears,  as she denounced the "pre-existing court-imposed program."  Just for the record, Turd Blossom (Karl Rove doesn't deserve the title any longer), the court imposed nothing.  And medical experts have weighed in on this at length, just not your trained chimps at Health Canada.

Listen up, airhead.  You lost.  Your government lost before the British Columbia Supreme Court.  You took that loss on appeal to the British Columbia Court of Appeal and, gosh, you lost again.  The Supreme Court of Canada got involved only when your government chose to try, try, try again and appealed the Court of Appeal's decision.  You lost, seven-nothing.  That's nothing as in zero, Rona. There's a message in that and it concerns the complete lack of merits of your government's position. Three courts handed you your ass and still you can't seem to find it with both hands.

Look, Rona, Democracy 101.  There's this thing called "the rule of law." Without it there can be no viable democracy. You're supposed to respect the courts, not attack them when you don't get your way because you're wrong.  You need to respect the courts because, without them, you've thrown away the last remaining shards of your own government's legitimacy.  So, Rona, grow up. Try to act like an adult. Once you've mastered that you might move on to learning to act like a cabinet minister.  

Here's your hat, what's your hurry? Don't let the door hit your ass on your way out.

10 minutes?  That's not an audience with the Pope.  It's a drive by.  Yet Canada's world renowned prime minister was ushered in - and out - of the Pope's chambers in what must be a record for brevity, a scant ten minutes.

Maybe the Pope just knows the Devil when he sees him.  Old Beelzebub after all doesn't have a whole lot in common with Pope Francis.  The Pope is focused on climate change and the threat it poses to our civilization, especially the poor and vulnerable.  In another week the Vatican will release the Pope's encyclical calling on Catholics to act.  Steve, however, isn't Catholic and his climate change focus is on making life a living hell for those same poor and vulnerable.  At least he didn't get the Pope's door slammed in his face.

Even the obligatory photo op was a bust.  Francis is the pope who always seems to be smiling.  Not this time.  The picture is a bit cringeworthy, right down to Sideshow Steve's forced smile.

A Couple of Thoughts About the Precariat.

We should all read Brian Stewart's essay yesterday on "the rise of the precariat." Everything he reports has been thoroughly analyzed and disclosed over the past few years.

Most of us with 30-something children know the losing struggle that many of them face - lousy jobs, lousy pay, dubious benefits, little if any security.  They remain in a precarious state of financial insecurity.

I believe it was Citibank that coined the term "precariat" and former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan who actually endorsed it as good for the American economy.  Greenspan's thinking, which he quickly retreated from when outed, was that people who are economically insecure are willing to work more, work harder, and demand ever less.  Welcome to Red State America.

Here's the thing.  If you don't want your kids to endure life in the precariat you have to turn to the people who made it possible.  You know them.  You elected them.  It was all legislated by governments worldwide who chose corporate interests instead of the welfare of their people.

They made it.  They can clean it up.  But if you want that cleaned up, if you want the sort of healthy, robust middle class we knew in the postwar decades, you're going to have to force their hand.

That's not going to be easy.  What had been the Left in Canada has closed up shop and moved to a seemingly more advantageous perch in the center.  They've signed on to the neoliberal, market fundamentalist, corporatist agenda.  If you want change, you're going to have to knock them off that perch.

Look at what's happened in the States and realize that's where we're headed too if we continue to lay on these tracks waiting for the train.

If you want to get up off those tracks, you had better do it soon.  What do you really know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP?  Personally I don't know that much about it but I know someone who does, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, and he's written a dandy warning for all of us in The New York Times.

Read his warning.  Then read his book, "The Price of Inequality."  Learn what we're up against, what awaits us and our kids, and who is really responsible for making servitude our reality.  Then, when you've had your fill, go to your stooge of choice - Tommy Boy or Junior - and ask them how they're going to undo this national headache before it becomes a full blown and permanent migraine.

If they won't act, don't vote for them.  If you do, don't complain about what you've got coming.

Best Not Ask

An autopsy report concludes that Michael Zihaf-Bibeau, the Hill gunman, received 31 bullet wounds, all sustained within the Centre Block.  The all seeing, all knowing coroner also found that the gunman died from the 31st round, a shot to the back of his head.  In other words, after being riddled with 30 wounds, Zihaf-Bibeau remained a threat and warranted being dispatched by a coupe de grace shot.

How do you make sense of 31-bullet wounds?  Well you might be familiar with the end of American bandits, Bonnie and Clyde.  They were ambushed in their car.  There were six officers waiting on the pair, each armed with a pistol, a shotgun and an automatic Thompson "tommy gun" submachine gun.  As Clyde slowed the car, all six opened up with their submachine guns, pouring 150-rounds into the front seat of Barrow's car.

"Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols. We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns ... There was smoke coming from the car, and it looked like it was on fire. After shooting the shotguns, we emptied the pistols at the car, which had passed us and ran into a ditch about 50 yards on down the road. It almost turned over. We kept shooting at the car even after it stopped. We weren't taking any chances."

The coroner found Clyde Barrow's body was hit 17-times, Bonnie's 25-times. That's a shooting gallery at nearly point blank range against two stationary targets.

Makes you wonder how many rounds had to be fired to get 31-slugs into the body of Zihaf-Bibeau?  It wasn't a staged shooting.  There was a great deal of panic, lots of running - and ducking.  The guys on the Hill were after an active shooter quite ready, apparently, to take them out.

I'm guessing that 31-rounds would have brought down Hercules with enough left over to take down Hector and Lysander to boot.  And I'm guessing that this kid was "hors de combat" long before that 31st and "final" shot to the back of his head.

Word is that the cops won't be releasing video that shows the shootout in the Centre Block.  That's probably for the best. It might raise too many questions.          

Meanwhile, In Our Vast, Undefended North...

The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine is devoted to espionage, spying, and the magazine reports that today's Ground Zero of spying is the Arctic.

For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—
Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.

While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.

If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”

...Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.”

...Over the past few decades, [Arctic countries] have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.


...Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.

Greetings, Comrade!

More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”

...Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.

With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast-
attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.

One evening in November 2014, U.S. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.

Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.

If Harper is planning to blunt Putin's sharp elbows he's going about it in a curious way - defunding the armed forces, degrading the readiness of the navy, air force and army alike.  Canada's military budget has plummeted to just 0.89% of GDP and our 'missions' to the Baltics and the ISIS air war eat up a good chuck of that.

Who?  Harper?  Nyet!

In other words it's Vlad Putin's military muscle versus Harper's hot air. Harper was on the money when he said that we have to exercise our sovereignty in the north or risk losing it.  That, however, was 2007, before the Great Recession. Harper was presiding over a government he inherited from the Libs with a balanced budget and money in the bank.  That was before he began defunding the government and degrading the readiness of all of our military forces - army, navy and air force.  Today his focus is on pipelines and jury-rigging government revenues and expenses to create the illusion of a balanced budget before Canadians choose their next government.

When NATO stages Arctic air exercises and Canada is a "no show", we're running on fumes which is music to the ears of a guy like Putin.

Sometimes Life is Unbelievably Not Fair

On December 18, 1972, vice president Joe Biden's son, Beau, somehow survived a massive collision between his mother's station wagon and a tractor-trailer truck. There were two not so fortunate - Mrs. Biden and their daughter, Naomi.

Now, more than 40-years later, Joe Biden must bury another of his own, his son, Beau.

Read about it here and, if you do, you might get an idea of what America was like, how great it was, a half century ago.  Even we don't have many people of their kind these days.

Baghdad, 2009

In Denver seven years ago, Beau Biden told the tragic family story that became the emotional foundation for his father’s 36 years of service in the Senate and the past six-and-a-half years as vice president. Shortly after winning his Senate race, in December 1972, Joe Biden received a call while in Washington interviewing staff.

His wife, Neilla, and three children had been in a horrible car crash on the way home from purchasing the family Christmas tree. His wife and daughter had died, and his two sons, Beau and Hunter, were clinging to their life. Having just turned 30, Biden raced home to Wilmington and considered never taking the oath of office.

Through the support of other senators, Biden agreed to be sworn in the next month, at the hospital bedside of Beau and Hunter. Eventually venturing to Washington, Biden decided that he would take the train every morning from Wilmington and return every night.

“As a single parent, he decided to be there to put us to bed, to be there when we woke from a bad dream, to make us breakfast, so he’d travel to and from Washington, four hours a day,” Beau Biden told the Denver crowd on Aug. 27, 2008, an emotional speech that introduced the world to a story that his father had told many times.

In recent weeks, the vice president’s public schedule had declined as he regularly visited his son. Two weeks ago, during Yale University’s graduation ceremonies, he delivered a deeply personal speech to thousands of students and parents who had no idea what the vice president was personally enduring.

Close advisers viewed it as the closest Joe Biden ever came to fully explaining how much his personal life and tragedy informed his own career. Of his Amtrak ride home every night to see his two sons, he said it wasn’t for them.

“The real reason I went home every night was that I needed my children more than they needed me,” he told the Yale crowd.

This is What Happens When You Play With Children With Guns

What happens is that you get dragged into futile combat missions in distant corners of the world with what are almost always lousy outcomes.

America's foreign policy in the Middle East/South Asia isn't confused, it's delirious.  It simply makes no sense.  It defies reality.  It's taken a variety of forms - the invasion of Afghanistan, the conquest of Iraq, the bombing campaign to achieve regime change in Libya.  Each and every time it's ended in failure to accomplish anything remotely worthwhile.

Afghanistan remains one of the world's very worst failed states, a criminal enterprise beset by warlordism and tribalism and plagued by insurgency (the Taliban) and terrorism (al Qaeda and now ISIS).  It's gotten so bad that the Taliban are now seeking help from Shiite Iran to tackle their new rival, ISIS. The Afghan Hazara (Shiite) must find that hilarious.

Libya?  Well we did help the opposition defeat Gaddafi's forces.  Yet it took so long to get the result and so confused was the fighting that al Qaeda had ample opportunity to set up shop in North Africa.  Now, ISIS has jumped aboard. Oopsie.

Then there's Iraq, the birthplace of ISIS.  You could say that the radical Sunni Islamist movement was spawned by the very government that the United States helped create, the Shiite regime in Baghdad.  Nouri al Maliki laid the groundwork for revolt by refusing to share power with Iraq's Sunnis who formerly ruled the place.  These former Baathists were Saddam's people and included the guys who commanded Iraq's once powerful army.  Those same guys are now commanding ISIS.  Along the way they had a lot of help from the anti-Shiite, anti-Iran Sunni princes and sheikhs of the Gulf States, especially the House of Saud.

So now we're over yonder again, this time waging an air war against ISIS.  In the course of our martial exercise programme we're loosely allied with Syria's ruling Assad regime and with the Shiite militias of Iran.  I wonder how that's going to turn out.

To complicate matters, the Iranian forces in Iraq seem to be better, by an order of light years, in fighting the Sunni Islamist ISIS forces than the Iraqi army itself. The US defense secretary recently lambasted the Iraqi army for refusing to fight.

Ours is a curious war.  We've smartened up a bit over the past 10 plus years. This time we're not fighting for democracy or human rights or any of that noble stuff we so singularly failed to achieve the first, second and third time around.  This time we're simply out to "reduce" the effectiveness of ISIS forces.  Dropping a bomb within twenty yards of an ISIS pickup truck accomplishes that.  Yippee, a war we almost can't lose because we're not even pretending we're hoping to win. When it comes to war you can't set the bar any lower without gathering your generals in a railway car to sign instruments of capitulation.  Does that make any sense to you?

There may be a way out.  It would come at a cost.  We would have to give up our post-war commitment to the inviolable territorial integrity of nation states.  In other words partition Iraq.  A Shiite state in the south.  A Sunni state in the middle.  A Kurdish state in the north.  Give the guys who are so successfully running ISIS a country to run, oil resources to manage, all that good stuff.  See how long they cling to this "caliphate" nonsense if they're offered a sovereignty deal.

You see Iraq never made any sense except to the Brits and French in the wake of WWI.  The spoils of that nightmarish bloodbath included all the territories that once were the domain of the Ottoman Empire which had imprudently backed the Kaiser.  New countries were created by the drawing of lines on a map to reflect British and French interests, lines that ignored ethnic and religious realities in the region.

The fanciful notion of the territorial integrity of Iraq is based on perpetuating the sins perpetrated on the region by the victorious Brits and French almost a century ago.  After all, Iraq functioned as a state only by the brutal repression of the majority Shia population by the minority Sunni forces that became the Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein.  What's not to like with that?

We didn't let territorial integrity stand in the way when we carved off the ethnic Albanian state of Kosovo from Serbia just as we allowed, even facilitated, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia into its constituencies.

Why then do we so stubbornly reject the partition of Iraq?  Is it because Iraq has vast reserves of oil that we want under unified management more or less beholden to us for its security?

After Afghanistan and Libya, Canada should use this adventure in bombing Iraq and Syria as an object lesson of the perils of enlisting in America's Foreign Legion.  Lesson Number One - just because you have all the King's Men and all the King's Horses doesn't mean you're going to win without plenty of statesmanship and good political and military leadership.

Lesson Number Two - America is currently in a very weird place as its brief unipolar dominance is eroded by the ascendancy of new states, the BRICS. History shows this sort of transition can be (usually is) destabilizing and very dangerous.  We're now at risk of major war breaking out, even if inadvertently, with Russia or, more likely, China.

Lesson Number Three - the world is caught up in several, high-risk arms races. The biggies are in Russia which is rearming against the West - new missiles, new warheads, new subs, new ultra long-range cruise missiles, new bombers, new stealth fighters; China with its new missiles and cyber technologies, new stealth warplanes and rapidly expanding 'blue water' navy for repelling (area denial) American intimidation,  countering the rise of India and expanding its domination (sphere of influence) of southeast and east Asia; and the Middle East which has collectively become the largest importer of Western and Russian armaments and may soon host a nuclear arms race.  This is not a good time to be tied too tightly to a nation that seems too ready to get into wars it's not prepared to win.

Lesson Number Four - we need to focus on our domestic defence needs, sovereignty and security, rather than squandering our forces and treasure on pointless and ineffective adventures on the far side of the planet.  This Foreign Legion role merely drains our resources and leaves us defenceless.  Under Harper our defence budget has fallen to just 0.89% of GDP while, on his watch, every branch of our armed forces has become operationally degraded.

We may be selling $15-billion worth of armoured fighting vehicles to Saudi Arabia for the looming religious holy war but our own army's kit is worn out from our failed mission in Afghanistan.  Our navy is at its lowest state of readiness since pre-WWII and we cannot sail even one task force to defend any of our three coastlines.  Our air force is completely misaligned with the task of securing our vast, sparsely populated north while Putin is vigorously remilitarizing Russia's north in anticipation of his nation's dispute of our territorial claims to the Arctic seabed.  Did we learn nothing from Georgia/Ossetia or Ukraine?  This guy can smell weakness and he's ruthless when it comes to exploiting it.  Harper has reduced Canada to Putin's lawful prey.

Harper may like to play warrior by sending penny packets of jet fighters to carve holes in the sky over the Baltics (now outdated warplanes that would last perhaps 10-minutes against Su-35s) or to drop bombs on ISIS units in Iraq and Syria but with every patrol, every bombing mission he's squandering money badly needed by a defence establishment whose funding he's choking into unconsciousness.  That's what happens when you play with children with guns.

Conspicuous By Our Absence

I'm posting this because: 1) I just know nobody else will, and 2) it's important.

There are two military exercises underway in the Arctic right now.  Putin decided to stage his polar war follies and the West hastily responded.

The Russians are putting on the whole land/sea/air package in Siberia and elsewhere in their north.  Our side is staging air exercises, perhaps to show Putin we're ready and willing on short notice to push back if the Moscow strongman gets uppity.

Ready and willing, eh?  Well not entirely.

We've got an impressive coalition (isn't that what we call these things now) comprising NATO stalwarts - America, Germany, Britain, France, Norway and the Netherlands.  Sweden, Finland and even Switzerland are lending their aerial muscle also.  We're showing Putin that he'll not run roughshod over the Arctic on our watch.

Impressive as our coalition may be, there's one country missing and it just happens to be the nation that has far more Arctic coastline than any other.  That's right, the no-show is Canada.

Why?  Good question.  Who's asking?  Is Mulcair asking?  How about Junior? No, apparently not.

Yet it's a question that has enormous significance.  Are we the glaring no show for some reason?  Is it because, with our air deployments to Latvia and Kuwait, we're tapped out?  That's my guess.  I think we're running on empty, simply unable to muster the extra fighters and refueling tankers and support aircraft to join our allies in the collective defence of our True North.

This is on Harper's shoulders and his alone.  Putin is wasting no time re-militarizing the Arctic.  He's pressing claims to the Arctic seabed and he's very aggressive about it.  There are some important people in Moscow who have said that Russia should ignore the niceties of international law and just take whatever it wants on the Arctic sea floor.  We'd be reduced to Polar Palestinians.

Even China has stated that it has legitimate claims to Arctic resources and China is building the largest non-nuclear ice-breakers in the world and they're armed.

Canada has the most at stake, the most to lose.  As Putin has shown elsewhere - Georgia/Ossetia, Ukraine - if he considers Russia has a claim, he's not adverse to simply taking it by force.  When you're in a pissing match with Vlad Putin, military weakness is like blood in the water to a bull shark.

Harper has cut Canada's defence budget to barely 1% of GDP at the same time as the armed forces are running out of kit.  The army's gear is clapped out after a decade of pseudo-war waging in Afghanistan.  The navy has no anti-aircraft destroyers, no replenishment ships and an antiquated submarine force that's unfit to sail into combat.  As a result, Canada's navy is in a degraded condition that hasn't been seen since prior to WWII.  We can't deploy a single task force to defend even one of our three coasts.  The air force?  They're skint too.  If he had his way, Harper would buy the F-35 light attack bomber in small numbers that would be hopelessly unsuited to defending Canada's vast and now imperilled far north.

When it comes to the rough and tumble quest for Arctic resources, Canada is the prime target.  And, thanks to Harper, we stand empty-handed.  Even neutral Switzerland is willing to take part in Arctic defence exercises.  We're not.  That speaks volumes.

Remember that old saw about he who would have peace must prepare for war?   Maybe Justin and Tommy are oblivious to what's going on.  I know one guy who isn't.

Update ----

All of which reminds me of another point that we overlook at our peril.  The Norwegians, the Finns and even the Brits have reported the intrusion of what are believed to be Russian submarines in their home waters.  The Brits even detected subs in the approaches to their own nuclear submarine base at Faslane, Scotland. Meanwhile many NATO states are reporting surveillance flights by Russian warplanes nearing their own national airspace.

Curiously, given that we're Putin's prime target for his Arctic seabed resource ambitions, we've heard nothing about similar Russian activities in our territorial waters or at the fringes of our airspace.  Does that mean they're not happening, that there's nothing to report?  Are our frontiers secure?

Here's the problem.  Harperland is a place of total information lockdown.  The public service, even the armed forces are gagged.  We hear from them precisely as much or as little as Harper's Stalinist PMO wants us to hear.

If, for example, our armed forces did detect the presence of unidentified submarines in our waters, we will know nothing of it unless it serves Steve's political purposes that we should know of it and, even then, the information is likely to be tailored or incomplete or in any of several ways unreliable.

When Steve is slashing defence spending in pursuit of a Potemkin 'balanced budget' it stands to reason that the last thing he'd want on voters' minds would be threats or challenges to our national sovereignty.  I'd wager Putin could sail his entire sub fleet into Hudson Bay and we'd never hear a word about it.

That's a government that uses information control, secrecy and deception as a weapon against its own people - you and me.

Just Stopped By to Say "Hi"

I haven't posted anything lately and it's been a welcome respite one that may continue save for the occasional interruption.  I'd like to explain what this is about.

Not much has changed, save for the suspension of these posts.  I still devour the online newspapers, my favourite magazines, think tank web sites and so on.  I'm still churning through online courses - war studies, global food security, over-consumption and population challenges, foreign policy, environmental decline, stuff like that.

I just don't know what there is to say about a world coming apart at the seams; societies and governments increasingly detached from reality.

When I joined Dark Mountain a while ago I was drawn to this collective of artists, writers and thinkers who have "stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself."  We feed ourselves nonsense and fairy tales because it's the only way we can keep this delusion of a civilization going.

I instinctively recoil from the word "manifesto" yet I encourage you to read the Dark Mountain Manifesto, which serves as the group's statement of purpose. While there is no end of research and literature and commentary about the myriad of challenges that will befall our civilization through this century, scant attention is paid to our resilience to meet them and almost none to our utter fragility.  Here are a few paragraphs from the opening of the Manifesto:

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’

...It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

As a species organized into a civilization of sorts, beneath the surface we're chaotic and rudderless.  The failure of our leadership and our institutions allows this fragility to surface and become our reality.

Canadians can and should see the signs of this decline in the rise of our increasingly illiberal democracy.  If you put your faith in Tom Mulcair or Justin Trudeau, you've largely written the place off even if you can't grasp it.

I don't know what I can contribute to a group who appear to believe that simply electing a different flavour of neoliberal government can do any significant good for our people and our country in a moment of such great need and looming danger.  It's like we're reading from different and irreconcilable texts.

----

The photograph is of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who set himself ablaze on a Saigon street in June, 1963 in protest of the persecution of his order by the South Vietnamese government.  It was an act of futility that was followed by a dozen more self-immolations before the Diem government fell to a coup engineered in collaboration with Washington.  While this photograph shocked the world, we became inured to this sort of thing.  During the American war, 13-monks burned themselves to death in a single week and it went largely unnoticed.

As Expected, Harper's Canada is Number Last

Stevie-Joe Harper's lame target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts - 30% from 2005 levels by 2030 - secures Canada's hold on dead last place among the developed nations.  Last, and by a good measure.  Dead last.

That is a far weaker target than the European Union or the US. The European Union pledged to reduce emissions by at least 40% from 1990 levels, and the US committed to cut emissions to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

The target is also less ambitious than the one Canada set in 2009 – and which it is unlikely to meet because of the vast expansion of Alberta tar sands production under the prime minister, Stephen Harper.

The environment minister, Leona Aglukkaq, who made the announcement in Winnipeg, said the new goals were in keeping with Canada’s economic conditions.

...Keith Stewart, climate campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, said the weak target made Canada an outlier in the international climate negotiations.

“The Harper government has not only ignored its existing reduction target, but the pro-tar sands policies it has adopted are taking us in the opposite direction,” he said.

But, hey, let's not get worked up. Sure they're meager targets, the worst of what's actually a bad lot, but let's not go overboard. Harper has no intention of meeting those targets anyway. If the premiers want to do it then good for them. By now we should all be used to classic Harper bait & switch - say anything that you figure people want to hear, do nothing. Even his old pal and mentor, Tom Flanagan, doesn't hesitate to label Harper an opportunistic and chronic liar. 

30 By 30 - Rachel, You've Got Some Catching Up To Do.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry but the feds have finally proclaimed Canada's target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts.  The figure is a 30% reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

Harper & Co. are playing this true to form.  They're trying to take credit from the provinces that have taken action with precious little help from Ottawa.

As for Harper's pet, the Tar Sands, the feds are introducing regulations on methane emissions but have fallen strangely silent on CO2 emissions.  Did I say "strangely"?  I meant "predictably."

Yes, Yes! Scottish Independence, Round Two. Maybe Cameron Won't Bring Them to Kneel, Too.

It won't be the first time the Scots have saved the Brits from themselves.

David Cameron may be enjoying his fiendish (minority vote/majority seat) majority only to preside over the end - yes, the end - of the United Kingdom.

The arrogant bastard (Jeebus, there's no one as arrogant as a Tory with a majority) has not even given his supporters time to reflect and repent for what they have done before he launched a "Pearl Harbour" on his nation's Human Rights Act and set in motion, via his cabinet appointments, the machinery to shred Britain's social safety net.  This guy may be out to make Margaret Thatcher look like a pussy.

Yeah, well - there's one bunch of people who may not be "on" for this, the same bunch who regularly kicked English backsides and made possible this country into which I, my parents and ancestors going back several generations, my kids and theirs were (will be) born.

The Scottish National Party, in terms of raw numbers the biggest winner of them all in the latest elections, says they won't feel bound to get Cameron's consent to another independence referendum.  Nor bloody well should they.

If Cameron loses - or essentially forfeits - the Union in the early pursuit of his radical ideology, it could wipe out crippling conservatism going back to Thatcher.  The Scots could hand him a double defeat, a legacy twice besmirched.

A very sizeable percentage of Scots expressed 'buyers' remorse' after having defeated the first sovereignty referendum.  In the months afterward an enormous majority of Scots wanted another vote - for independence.

No, No - No. The King is Dead. B.B. Riley King, Dead at 89.

When he announced last week that he was out of hospital but in hospice care at home it was fair warning that the life of Riley B. King had come down to a matter of weeks, maybe a few months.  12 days later this legendary bluesman is gone.  That's a void that will take some time and some amazing talent to fill.

Yet that's the thing about blues.  It builds, legend upon legend.  Here's one for Mr. King, from 1964, Howlin' Wolf and Smokestack Lightning.


 

In case you didn't notice, the Wolf is about 6 feet wide and just over 9 feet tall and those hands?  They're the size of catchers' mitts.

Here, from The Telegraph about six years back, B.B. King, the last of the legendary bluesmen.

And this:



Last of the great bluesmen?  No, I don't believe it.  There'll be new talent, it's already there, and it will build on everything before it.  Just about every form of pop/rock can evaporate to nothingness but whatever lasts longest is what's closest to real blues.

This stuff goes straight to the slave south.  It was introduced to white culture during my adolescence by Brit bands, especially the Stones.  They got a generation of young people "discovering" Delta and Chicago blues.  Hell, we'd been brought up on Pat Boone and what was whitebread copies of "race music." Then, quite abruptly, we heard this music from The Beatles, the Stones (especially Richards/Jagger) and saw this whole new musical path that took us so far past but also forward.

No They Didn't. Oh Yes They Did.

The clown car that is today's NATO just upstaged itself.   After US State Secretary John Kerry had left the NATO ministers' meeting in Turkey for talks with Vlad Putin, the remaining ministers were left with nothing particularly useful to do so they instead broke into song - their rendition of "We Are the World."

Brace yourselves.



In High German there's a word for this - Gerfukt!

Groovy.

Beijing Benny Hill

Supposedly this is legit.  Chinese police stop a 6-person mini-van only to find there are 50-people riding in it.  I sure wish there was video of the other side of the van.

Sure, It's Satire, Yet It Sounds So Familiar

From the pen of The New Yorker's Andy Borowitz:



Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain. “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified,” Logsdon said.

While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.

What'll He Do Next, Bring Back the Work House?

You could say that Britain's newly minted Conservative majority prime minister, Dapper Dave Cameron, is on a rampage.  With his axing of Britain's Human Rights Act, Cameron seems ready and willing to purge the Kingdom of the untidy vestiges of liberal democracy.  In its place he seems intent on building a decidedly illiberal democracy, one that harkens back to the dark days captured in Dickens' novels.

Take new Cameron cabinet minister Justin Tomlinson.  He's the government's new 'disabilities minister.'  It's a job that's mainly focused on slashing 12-billion pounds from benefits spending.

Mr Tomlinson has a record of voting against provisions that would see more support directed to the disabled and sick.

In parliamentary votes he has supported letting contribution-based Employment and Support Allowance expire for those undergoing cancer treatment.

In a separate vote regarding the new universal credit system he voted against a minimum floor on the amount of money that could be given to disabled children.

According to the department’s website Mr Tomlinson will have responsibility for child poverty and other cross government disability issues.

Scotland, be brave.  This might be the time to take the cross of St. Andrew back out of the Union Jack.  Besides, there are indications that the good folk of northern England would like to join Scotland.

Did I say "rampage"?  Well, here are 7-laws Cameron was unable to enact before when he was dependent on coaltion partner, the Liberal Dems.

And, in case you still haven't had enough of all things Cameron, take a quick peek at some of the other gems in his cabinet. It's enough to make Harper damp with envy.

Channeling Robin Williams

Stevie-Joe Harper's pursuit of Omar Khadr is getting positively obsessive.  Now the feds are off to the Supreme Court of Canada over Khadr - yet again - this time to have him declared an adult offender for the supposed crimes he committed as a 15-year old.

The late Robin Williams put it best.

Update: I'm sure they used different words or even danced around Harper's affliction entirely but the Supreme Court of Canada once again kicked his sorry Tory ass right to the curb.

Did He Really Just Say This? Calling George Orwell. Come In Please.

'Screw the Plebs'

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'.”

That warning from Britain's newly minted Conservative majority prime minister, David Cameron, in announcing his government's plan to ditch Britain's Human Rights Act.

And why not?  If you're planning on reducing the law abiding, civilian population to a state of political servility, why not come out and shove it straight in their faces?