The Real Harper Derangement Syndrome - the Conservatives' Mirage Surplus

It smelled from the get to. The economy was wallowing on the cusp of recession. World oil prices had tanked. Yet Shifty Steve Harper went into the last election telling Canadians that after a half-dozen consecutive budget deficits, his government had finally turned a corner and engineered a budget surplus - the first, he assured Tory Gullabillies, of an endless streak of surpluses to come.

Only he was lying his ass off.

The new government has had a look at the federal books - not the cooked set but the raw data - and the crushing weight of reality transforms Harper's surplus into a $3-billion federal deficit.


The last Conservative budget forecasted a $2.3-billion surplus for this year, but Finance Canada now says it's more likely the year will end with a $3-billion deficit — and that's before Liberal campaign promises are costed in.

Finance Canada still predicts the economy will eke out growth in 2015 — but only at an average of 1.2 per cent. The April budget by the Conservatives had predicted two per cent growth for the year.

Ottawa is also now assuming a weaker loonie, too. In April, the budget was forecasting an 83-cent loonie, on average, between now and 2019. Friday's fiscal update downgrades that to 79 cents US.

The loonie is currently trading hands at around 75 cents US.

All in all, it's a fitting fare-thee-well from the most manipulative, secretive and duplicitous government in Canadian history. When one speaks of Harper Derangement Syndrome it was an affliction not of Harper's critics but a corrosive infestation inside the man himself. 

Duffy? Duffy Who?

Yeah, so the trial of the Cavendish Cottager has resumed. Who cares? Now with Stephen Harper sent packing and a new party with a secure-term majority, it doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as it did over the summer before it adjourned.

Where's the high drama now? The Crown seems intent on closing with a fizzle, focusing on petty cash/sticky fingers issues. The bribery case, the sine qua non of the prosecution, appears to have collapsed. It had been thought the Court might hear from Tory senators LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen and maybe even party counsel Hamilton, just possibly Harper himself. Defence counsel Don Bayne might subpoena those folks but if he thinks the bribery charge has cratered he probably won't. What would be the point?

In other words we may be left with just the "hand in the cookie jar" charges and there's a bit of a problem with that. Some of the light-fingering referred to in the charges was pretty commonplace among a good segment of the Senate, I'm hearing about half.  So, if Duffy is prosecuted, possibly convicted, and the rest of his fellow senatorial miscreants are left off the hook, how does that look? Suddenly it takes on the trappings of a political inquisition dressed up as a criminal trial.

This saga began with some nasty, underhanded business. It might just end the same way.

U.S. Yells "Uncle" on F-35

When American military commanders run out of money, you know something is very wrong.

U.S. defence planners have run the numbers and figure there'll be no 60 or 80-a year buy of F-35's as once planned.  Putting it bluntly they said the USAF will be "struggling to afford 48 F-35s a year."

So what's a girl to do when she runs out of mad money?

The U.S. Air Force may solicit bids for 72 new Boeing F-15s,Lockheed Martin F-16s or even Boeing F/A-18E/Fs as budget issues put planned production rates for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter out of reach, according to senior service and industry officials at the Defense IQ International Fighter Conference [in London].

In the typical Dr. Strangelove lexicon, air force officials said modernized F-15s would be used to "augment the F-35 and F-22 in a high-end fight." Now, in case you're not up on US Air Force lingo, "high-end fight" means a peer-on-peer air war which itself is code for war on Russia or China or, almost certainly, both.

The U.S. Air Force activity parallels U.S. Navy fleet planning; the Navy, likewise, is considering reductions in the planned F-35C production rate to fund life-extension efforts for the Super Hornet.

Okay, what does all that mean for Canada and other F-35 partner nations? A reduced American buy means only one thing - higher unit costs for everyone. Lockheed's pricing is built on a projected US military buy in big numbers. As those US Navy and US Air Force numbers get whittled down, the price per aircraft goes up for everyone, including foreign customers. That's very bad news for an aircraft that is still plagued with delays, cost overruns, performance issues and a "perishable" stealth technology.

Even the air force guy running the programme, General Christopher Bogdan, has alluded to the F-35's pricing problems in the context of a "death spiral" in which, as orders are trimmed or canceled and, in the result, prices soar, the warplane becomes increasingly unviable.

For Canada there's a potential silver lining in all of this. Boeing has designed major upgrades for both the F-18 and F-15 that make them more capable and even somewhat stealthy. Either of those aircraft would probably outperform the F-35 for Canada's home defence needs and by a wide margin.

Until recently it seemed the Boeing's F-18 and F-15 production lines would soon be shut down, eliminating those options for Canada. Now it seems the US military may just be keeping them open. At this point what matters most - being invited to the opening strikes of some "high end" attack on Russia and China or being able to patrol and defend Canada's vulnerable airspace in the far north?

By the way, the Russians are using their air war in Syria for some live fire practice using Backfire bombers to launch medium-range (1,700 km.) cruise missiles at ground targets. They're not using those aircraft and those costly weapons to take out a few inconsequential targets in Syria. They're just training in case they need to use them against some other country, perhaps our own.

Climate Change Makes the Case for Renewable Energy Alternatives

Charleston, S.C., October, 2015

In America's southeastern states they call it "sunny day flooding." That's when coastal towns experience flooding caused only by high tides and sea level rise. That's distinct from the flooding triggered by high tides, sea level rise, hurricane force storm surges and deluge rainfalls - the real buggers that reshape coastlines and the houses that line them.

Coastal communities in America's southeast are just becoming accustomed to sunny day flooding, a.k.a. "nuisance flooding."  The population of Charleston is waking up to a problem that's only going to get much worse and sooner than had been imagined.

It's becoming more and more difficult to beat back the tides in Charleston. Not a month goes by now without city streets being washed out and closed off until the water recedes. Whether you call it nuisance flooding or a major threat may depend on whether you've had to abandon your car after stalling out in knee-high water. Either way, Charleston's flood problems are just getting started.

"Right now in Charleston, you get somewhere around 20 or 24 tidal flooding events per year, and that is really just when the tides get so high because you've got high tide on top of sea-level rise, they cause flooding, even on sunny days. Then when it rains, it just makes it much worse," says Nicole Hernandez Hammer, Southeast climate advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "With the mid-range sea-level rise projections, you'll probably get around 78 of those events by the year 2030, and you're going to be looking at 187 of those events per year by the year 2045. As problematic as it seems now, this is the beginning of living with sea-level rise impact."

Hammer says her home state, Florida, is in more dire straits.

"What we're doing here in Florida is we're putting in pumps and we're putting in barriers and sandbags, not very sophisticated stuff, and that's in the high-end places. The areas with very few resources, they're getting nothing," Hammer says. "The city of Miami Beach, which is just 18 square miles, a very tiny piece of Florida and Miami-Dade County, is spending half a billion dollars to deal with sunny-day flooding, and that really just amounts to pumps, raising roads, and those are the two kinds of things that are being done. You can imagine the costs associated with adapting an area if those are the figures you're looking at for a small stretch of Miami."

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that a great deal of the power infrastructure and grid is susceptible to storm surge inundation, which, it claims makes the argument for alternative, clean energy.

"You reduce the importance of any one asset on the grid the further you get away from a centralized system, and I think one of the great things about resilient, renewable resources beyond them being clean is that they can generate money for you even if the power hasn't gone out," says [UCS researcher Julie] McNamara. "You can still be making money off of your solar panels when everything is fine. You can't say that for diesel generators. It's been widely reported that during Hurricane Sandy some 50 percent of diesel generators failed in New York City. When you aren't running them very often, you have a higher rate of failure just because of inactivity or failed maintenance."

While Paris Mourns, Netanyahu Makes His Move

With all eyes weary from trying to follow the Paris attacks, the G20 and APEC summits, our favourite peace lover, Benjamin Netanyahu, marked the occassion by "authorizing the marketing of (stolen Palestinian) land for the construction of 454 homes in occupied East Jerusalem."

That'll teach ISIS, right Binny? Or maybe it'll just give them more fodder for recruiting and raising funds.

Well played, Benjamin, you're all class.

Well That Wasn't Very Polite. Putin Outs ISIS Supporters.

This is certainly awkward. The West's favourite Bad Boy, Vlad Putin, brought some interesting info to the G20 summit. He brought intelligence data naming what he claims are the 40-countries that are funding or aiding ISIS. Some of them, according to Vlad, are members of the G20. Oh, yes, I think I see one right over there.



What's so infuriating is that Putin didn't let any cats out of the bag. We, the Five Eyes nations, also know full well many of those countries backing ISIS and we haven't done a damn thing about it. We would rather wage wars of gestures, dropping bombs on pickup trucks out in the desert.

Stephen Harper knew and yet he still greased the deal to sell $15-billion worth of Canadian built armoured fighting vehicles to one of the ISIS patrons. It's beyond hypocrisy. In my opinion it's borderline treason.

Update: I thought I'd cruise the mainstream media sites for their accounts of Putin's G20 presentation. Can't find it. Ain't there. Putin outs G20 members and two score of nations in total that are facilitating the flow of under the table money to ISIS and our editors spike the story. Hmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be that we'd rather not dwell on those Gulf State sheikhs and princes propping up murderous Sunni Muslim extremists? Could it be that we're afraid of opening a political can of worms by observing ISIS is being commanded by a number of ex-Iraqi army generals the Americans threw out of their jobs? Do we have some reason for not interdicting truck convoys by which ISIS exports their stolen oil?

Muslim, Jew, Doesn't Make Much Difference. We Don't Like Them When They Come Looking for Help.

A timely reminder from the Washington Post about how compassionate we are to refugees fleeing murderous persecution. It comes in the form of a flashback to
1938 when European Jews tried to escape Nazi controlled Europe. Some things, it seems, don't change.

He's Here!

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has released their latest projections for el Nino.  At the bottom of this chart you'll see a band of dark red that stretches across the Pacific. That's el Nino and it could be a record breaker.

The dark patches west of Vancouver Island, off the Washington/Oregon border and from southern California to Cabo san Lucas - that's "the blob" that we've been dealing with since at least last spring. It looks like something similar is underway along America's eastern seaboard extending into the Maritimes.

The RedHead Girl in the Back of the Chevrolet

I've been writing some, no, a lot, of pretty grim essays lately. Sorry but that's how I see what's unfolding around us.

This stuff gets to me too, maybe even more than some others. Still I write but what keeps me going is reliving moments even as whimsical as this:




"Drank a lot of take-home pay.." yeah, fair enough. But there was an intensely progressive side to Billy Joel:



And the title track from his last album, 1993 - it's been that long.

Dear "Fair Vote Canada" - Back the Hell Off

Fair Vote Canada has launched a campaign seeking volunteers to circulate petitions demanding the Liberal government implement proportional representation. They're piggybacking their preferred option, proportional rep., on the back of Justin Trudeau's promise to introduce some sort of electoral reform.

I'm more than a bit leery of Fair Vote Canada and their campaign for pro-rep. Part of that is because I don't know enough about proportional representation or any of the other options such as the single, transferable ballots and all of their permutations. I have read that the option FVC is pushing would favour the NDP while the weighted ballot might favour the Libs.  I don't know but I'd sure like to understand the ramifications of all the options before I throw in with any one of them despite Fair Vote Canada's strident urgings.

At the end of the day I want Canadians to have their say and I'll live with that. We should all get a democratic voice something we won't have if we give in to the squeaky wheels.

First past the post is a deeply flawed system in any multi-party Parliament. Convincing voters of the obvious failures of FPTP shouldn't be difficult. Giving them full information and a suitable slate of alternatives also should not be difficult. If you can't sell that at this point you never will but if Canadians choose FPTP then that's their will and you can't further democracy by defying their democratic choice.

My difficulty with proportional representation is that it provides for political parties to appoint MPs who have never faced the electorate. To whom are these people accountable. How can we have a Parliament with two classes of members, those chosen by voters and others chosen by party hacks in backrooms? By what moral right are these unelected place holders to vote on issues affecting my life and my children's? There's something unsavory to that.

I take the new prime minister at his word that he will deal with this during his term of office. The squeaky wheels of Fair Vote Canada can get by squeaking a little longer.

Here's a Thought.

An observation this morning from regular commenter, Toby:

At the barber shop this morning I got an earful of nonsense about the Paris attacks, about Trudeau doing everything wrong, about awful immigrants (Syrian, East Indian) gang warfare and how Harper did such a good job. Very little actual facts. One wonders how the eternal gabfest creates the fantasy.

One thing is obvious: if the Paris attacks had happened two days before the Canadian election Harper would have another majority.

Let that sink in for a couple of minutes and then breathe a deep sigh of relief.

The Moral War

I'm deeply confused by the outpouring of sentiment over the Paris terrorist attacks, especially the resounding clamour for prime minister Trudeau to reverse his decision on withdrawing Canada's six-pack of CF-18s from the air campaign in Iraq and Syria.  This is a sentiment that seems widely shared among Liberals and Conservatives alike although the Tories, true to form, are decidedly uglier and more racist in their criticisms.

Most of this stuff I just dismiss as the sort of emotionalism that always follows atrocity, excepting instances where our side is at fault (ask Medicins sans Frontieres if you need clarification). That goes for most of our populist journos also. The Star's Rosie Dimanno is a perfect example along with the editorial staff of the Globe and PostMedia.

I tend to make an exception for people like the CBC's Neil Macdonald who, in my opinion, seems to bring a bit more reason and balance to his punditry. When it comes to our hapless air campaign, Macdonald boils down the West's options as just keep going (i.e. bombing) indefinitely or leave.

"Everyone knows airstrikes will not decide this fight. And the U.S.-led campaign to arm and train "moderate" rebels in Syria and troops in Iraq has been an embarrassment, to put it mildly.

"Generally, whenever ISIS or its affiliated extremists have shown up, America's proxies have cut and run, often leaving their U.S.-provided guns and hardware for the enemy to scoop up.

"But disengaging and letting the Middle East sort itself out would involve a hideous price for the populations on the ground.

"ISIS operates by its own grotesque set of the Hama rules, and the massacres that would without question follow an ISIS expansion would validate Pope Francis's observation that what we are seeing today is a piecemeal version of World War III.

"For Washington and Paris and London and Ottawa and all the other coalition members, this is a horrible set of options.

"There is no Solomonic solution available, and, to make it worse, the brutal truth is that America's so-called coalition of the willing, which invaded Iraq on a false pretext, effectively created ISIS (which, unsurprisingly, has several of Saddam Hussein's former generals among its commanders).

"The West sowed dragons' teeth, which grew into armed fanatics now bent on taking the battle back to the West. And ahead of them, massive rivers of miserable refugees are trudging toward Western soil.

"We can pray for Paris to our hearts' content, and light up monuments in the colours of the French flag, and trade peace sign memes of the Eiffel Tower. But what Western militarism created cannot be sung or wished away.

"Hafez al-Assad and his Baathist colleague Saddam Hussein were both monsters. But compared to what the West unleashed on itself, they seem, in retrospect, like incarnations of stability."

Macdonald cites the "Hama Rules." The name comes from a campaign waged by Bashar's dad, Hafez.

"After surviving an assassination attempt by the militant Muslim Brotherhood, Assad sent out death squads with orders to slaughter every Brotherhood member held in Syria's prisons, of which there were hundreds.

"And he was just getting started. His security forces initiated a lethal crackdown that culminated in February 1982 when Syrian tanks and artillery units arrived in Hama, a Brotherhood stronghold.

"Over the next few weeks, the army destroyed entire sections of the city, killed tens of thousands of people, and bulldozed the rubble flat.

"Hafez al-Assad never had another problem with the Brotherhood."

Such may be the tactical lingua franca of the battle against Islamist radicals. If you want to win you must be prepared to resort to barbarism an order of magnitude greater than your adversary. You must not hesitate to kill innocents as well as your enemies. Of course it's one thing when it's Muslim on Muslim butchery.  

Which brings us to the strategy currently in vogue with Israel's political and military leadership, Dahiyeh. It's a policy of deliberately targeting civilian populations instead of military units or installations that was widely practiced on all sides during WWII (i.e. carpet bombing, firestorms and, of course, nuclear attack) but which was thereafter outlawed as inhumane. The thinking is that those civilians provide support to the enemy and whether that's voluntary or under compulsion is irrelevant.

This is all well and good except we have forsworn that sort of barbarism and readily condemn it in others (except our ally, Israel, of course). Besides, it's one thing in the Muslim on Muslim context, quite another when it becomes Infidel on Muslim. That might reverberate for a while with unwelcome results.

It would help if we could come to a working understanding of what warfare has become in the 21st century. We go to these affairs prepared to engage in "old war" - the state-on-state stuff with standing armies vying for victory ending in peace on one side's terms. Instead we're embroiled in "new war" in which there's a confusing mix of state and non-state actors, pursuing what are often distinct agendas leading to drawn out conflicts in which there is neither victory nor peace to be had at the conclusion.  The age of unwinnable war without end may be upon us. All the King's horses and all the King's men can't be relied upon to produce favourable outcomes.

What is the moral dimension of waging war without end? Where is the morality in going to war until the voters at home finally grow bored with it and the political caste finds it necessary to call the whole thing off? What is our moral obligation to the defenceless hordes we leave in our wake as we depart? How do we deny them sanctuary as refugees?

Is this a function of original sin? You lied your way into this war and now the Pottery Barn rule applies (you broke it, you own it).

I'm hopelessly confused and yet I have studied this "new war" theory and have some grasp on what it portends. It's one of those things that the more you explore it the murkier it becomes. All I've garnered out of those studies has led me to formulate a precautionary rule. Don't get into wars that you're not willing to win and, even then, not without knowing how you will win, how long that will take, at what cost, how you will know if you've won and if you've lost, and how you will get out. Those preconditions all sound so reasonable and yet, if applied to our military adventures in the Muslim world since the turn of this century, we would have stayed home.

Forget this bullshit about moral wars for it's the most heinous, most barbaric side that sets that morality bar in these new wars. There's no moral consolation prize that doesn't leave mountains of suffering and dead in its wake.

A Must-See. The Charlie Hebdo Cartoons

The Independent has reprinted the cartoon responses of  Charlie Hebdo's Joann Sfar. They're really inspirational. A lot of us can use a bit of this wisdom.

The Sea is Coming. Vancouver is Fighting Back with Sand Bags - For Now.

Take pity on the multi-millionaires whose homes line the waterfront in Vancouver's West Point Grey neighbourhood. Those magnificent homes are generally low lying and the rising sea is closing the gap.

Rising sea level, high tides and the threat of storm surge recently had Vancouver municipal crews out sandbagging beautiful Locarno Beach.

It held, this time.

But sandbags won't hold the sea back forever and, as seen from these photos, the beach itself wasn't defended from inundation and erosion. It's the erosion from successive and worsening events, not flooding, that causes the real and lasting damage. It's the erosion that sculpts the shoreline.

It could be worse. Think of all those stars in Malibu who built their incredible mansions along the once spectacular beaches.

Those beaches are now gone, taken by the rising sea.

Now the seas reach out to the concrete barricades at the edge of their lawns. In some areas the sea has taken the lawns as well. Not hard to figure out what's next.

It's hard to imagine what the salt spray is doing to their houses. I live a block from the sea and I have to deal with a bit of corrosion. These places in the picture above, they'll have saltwater corrosion everywhere inside their homes and out. Their window glass must be horribly etched.

It's a curious thing to observe. We have a neighbourhood of fine but low-lying waterfront homes at the south end of town and a row of far bigger but also quite exposed and low-lying "McMansions" just north of me. The homeowners to the south are in a jam. Once or twice every year a high tide worsened by a storm surge and a mountain river overflowing its banks leaves them inundated and cut off. The municipality won't grant a permit for any construction in that area, not so much as a garden shed. And, if your house burns down or eventually succumbs to the effects of repeated flooding, your only option is to leave. Doesn't do much for the property values.

There's an article in the Toronto Star about the American experience. That's where you see living, breathing socialism for the rich in action in the Carolinas.
Another report in the series lightly explores the reality of sea level rise in Canada.

Provincial and local governments are still working from the now very old estimate of 1-metre of sea level rise this century. One municipal engineer I discussed this with said it's probably going to be 2-metres, perhaps even 3, but no one wants to go there because preparing for 1-metre is more than we're prepared to tackle.

Cognitive dissonance? Sure, especially in places like Miami where they're building condos and shopping malls with abandon even as sea level rise threatens to take down the local sewer and water systems. We're somewhat better but not very much.

People don't want to pay taxes to build systems that may protect some rich dude's waterfront property twenty years from now. Politicians, looking at their finite terms in office, don't have much incentive to bring down upon themselves the wrath of reluctant taxpayers just to "do the right thing."

It takes a good while for reality to set in. The Dutch struggled for decades to hold back the sea from land they had reclaimed in the past. Only recently have they begun to accept that parts of their coast will have to be surrendered to the sea. That is notional wealth lost, destroyed. There is no salvage. Folks have to write off their assets and start over. Governments aren't going to be able to cover their losses, not for very long.

It's already begun. Sea level rise is beginning to exact its toll and next year's sea levels will be higher again and on and on and on. This is yet another example of how anthropogenic global warming is changing the world beneath our feet. We're little more than reluctant spectators at this point.

Of Courage and Cowardice

I'm beginning to fear that our society is more seriously, intractably divided than I had imagined.

The Harper Decade of Darkness was spent focusing on the dark art of wedge politics  with fear mongering and appeals to base instincts and biases. These are the tools Harper employed on his supporters. He made them fear the "other" lurking about waiting to pounce on rightwing righteousness.

Harper knew that he didn't have to get that many voters to claim power, even an outright majority. He knew that, with the fearful and the bigots, he was a shoo-in.

In the wake of the Paris bombings I've read a lot of rightwing reaction to Justin Trudeau's decision to end Canada's participation in America's hapless bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. They uniformly slam Trudeau for cowardice.

Cowardice? What is that but a fear reaction in the face of some threat of death or bodily harm? If withdrawing those six CF-18s is cowardice then sending them must somehow be courageous. When it came to Harper I never saw any sign of courage. In fact the only event I can remember is when Harper bolted into the janitor's closet leaving his caucus to possibly face the gunman firing outside. That was cowardice. Ordering a little dollop of jet fighters hither and yon isn't courageous, it's politically expedient.

Yet as I read these remarks there was something almost Tea Partyish to them. They seemed disconnected from fact. I began to sense that Harper may have actually radicalized at least a good segment of the rightwing base which may ensure that we'll remain a sharply divided society. These types are quite venomous. We've had their kind on the Left also but we didn't really tolerate them much less cultivate them. The Right, however, may see these radicals as the building blocks for their restoration and I think that should worry all of us.

The presence of a radical right could well surface if the moderates seek to reclaim the Conservative Party from its Reform wing. We'll just have to wait as the leadership candidates emerge.  If the radical right is cultivated, mobilized for the leadership contest, then I think we're looking at the continuation of a sharply divided society for years to come and just at a time when we need social cohesion more than ever.

A divided society is not simply unpleasant. It's a weakened society, one that invites, even rewards, somewhat more extreme political ideologies. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to find the common ground that unites all of us. Politics becomes a feud. I so hope we don't succumb to that.

Cross your fingers.

The Paris Attacks Weren't Caused by a Want of Bombs

It didn't take long for the usual suspects to demand that Justin Trudeau reverse his decision to withdraw Canada's penny packet of CF-18s from the hapless bombing campaign against ISIS.

Linking the two is beyond puerile, it's well into the realm of sophistry. It suggests that the Paris bombings were somehow connected with the bombing campaign underway in Iraq and Syria or perhaps even that our decision to withdraw our minuscule contribution might have had some bearing on it. Now, they argue, we must return and bomb some more.

Okay, this is the stuff of belief-driven politics, the sort of thing we thought we had freed ourselves from by ousting Harper.  Bombing Muslims, civilian and insurgent alike, has achieved precisely what? Oh, sorry, that would be evidence-based thinking. That sort of thing isn't in vogue especially when it comes to Western adventures in the Middle East.

About the only rational argument I can come up with for a bombing campaign is one that strikes at the snake in the only place it really matters - the head. Off with its head.

That would mean finally admitting we have an intractable problem with the leadership of the Sunni states: the generals, sheikhs and princes from Egypt all the way to the farthest reaches of the Persian Gulf.

Go to the catalogue of our grievances. Begin with the embassy bombings and right through to the attack on the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center attack, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the attack on London, both attacks on Paris; and let's toss in al Qaeda and ISIS for good measure. What do all of those have in common? They're all rooted in Sunni Islam and the worst of them embrace the radical Islamism practiced by the House of Saud, our ally. Sure ISIS beheads captives. So do the Saudis. Sure ISIS tortures victims. The Saudis cherish crucifixion.

Osama bin Laden? He's from a Saudi Sunni family that originated in Sunni Yemen. The 9/11 attackers? They were mainly Saudi with a few Yemeni tossed in. al Qaeda - yeah, Saudi. ISIS, well they're a little more eclectic now that recruiting has become easier but where did they get their start, their financing? Yeah, it was all those sheiks and princes of the Gulf States, our allies.

Notice who is not in on any of this? It's that awful "state sponsor of terrorism" Iran.

But the Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar and the others were with us in our air war on ISIS, right? Well, not so much. Very quietly, and without a murmur of protest from us, they hightailed it home. Now they're busy bombing Houthi civilians and rebels in Yemen, the same Houthi who are battling ISIS and al Qaeda forces in their homeland. The Saudis are essentially flying air support missions for ISIS in Yemen. And we're okay with that.

Our bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria isn't a SNAFU. No, it's well beyond that. It's a FUBAR - F__ked Up Beyond All Recognition. We're not making a dent against ISIS. We have no idea how to defeat them nor do we have the will even if we had the means. And the people pulling the strings? Well they've gone home where they're safe and sound.

Trudeau's right. This is a mug's game. Too bad there are some self-identified Liberals who don't get that.

Trudeau Axes Northern Gateway

The prime minister has ordered a moratorium on oil tanker traffic along British Columbia's northern coast. No tankers, no pipeline - this appears to be the end of the Northern Gateway fiasco.

What Mr. Trudeau may have overlooked is that this will draw the focus of dilbit opponents to the Kinder Morgan southern pipeline. That's for another day.

A "Whole of Government" Effort on Climate Change Challenges

It's amazing how many voices are coming out of the woodwork demanding that Justin Trudeau do this or do that and damned smartly too. Jesus, I didn't think the Dippers would take their entirely self-inflicted election drubbing that hard but apparently I was wrong. I know this won't quiet them but they should really give it a rest.

You see, C-51 isn't the pressing issue of the day. Neither, in fairness, is the TPP. What matters right now, to the virtual exclusion of anything short of an existential threat to Canada, is climate change. That is what matters right now.

Next month world leaders will convene in Paris for what many experts consider mankind's last best chance to reach an effective pact on a mitigation/adaptation plan that could avert runaway global warming. We're hoping to give ourselves a reasonable chance of not pulling the trigger on natural feedback loops that will cause uncontrollable, unsurvivable global warming and a host of equally cataclysmic events such as ocean acidification.

Harper revealed the nihilistic face of neoliberalism through his efforts to thwart any meaningful action on climate change during Canada's decade of darkness. He didn't give a shit how abbreviated your grandkids' lifespans might be.

Good news. Harper is gone. Trudeau is in and the new prime minister is making climate change this government's top priority.

All Liberal cabinet ministers have been charged with ensuring the success of thenew government’s commitments on climate change, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said in an interview Wednesday as he prepares to engage the country’s diplomatic corps in the international fight against global warming.

...Mr. Dion said that the effort will be much broader, suggesting all major economic decisions will face a climate-change test.

“The old system was to give the file of the environment to the minister of environment and say to her or him, ‘Deal with it, be the hero of the environmental groups but don’t bother us because we have jobs to create and an economy to grow,’” he said. “That will not work. … [Ms. McKenna] will succeed only if all of us [in cabinet] have a green orientation and sensitivity.”

Mr. Dion served as environment minister under former prime minister Paul Martin, and he controversially campaigned on a proposed carbon tax when he was Liberal leader in the 2008 election in which the Conservatives secured their second minority government. He is clearly thrilled to be back in a position where he can pursue an environmental agenda.

“The reason we worked so hard is because we have a plan for the country and we wanted an opportunity to implement it. And for that, we needed a mandate,” he said. “Within this mandate, you have the ability for Canada to be part of the solution to climate change and not only part of the problem. And that’s fantastic.”

To succeed in a world battered by global warming, he said Canada needs to adopt more energy-efficient lifestyles and business approaches, switch from fossil fuels to renewables and adapt to more extreme weather events that cause flooding and other damage. And that requires not only a federal effort, he said, but provinces, municipalities, corporations and individuals taking action.

Mr. Dion pledged that Canada will work for an ambitious agreement in Paris, likely to be reviewed after five years to ensure the world is on track. He said Ottawa will pursue a North American climate and energy accord with the United States and Mexico. And he said the country’s diplomatic and aid effort will focus on the instability and human tragedy that will result from the growing climate crisis.

Think for a minute that Mulcair would have done half as much? If you do, you're delusional.

In Defence of Constitutional, Liberal Democracy. There's Not Much Time to Spare.

None of us has (or can have for that matter) a reliable vision of what awaits our society and every other in the decades ahead. We're very nearly at the cliff's edge. We either must find new modes of organization - economic, social and political (domestic and international) - or the inertia of the old models will drag us over the side.  The promise of globalization has proved hollow and the political and economic ideologies it spawned or allowed to find traction are backfiring in many ways. As Conan Doyle would put it, "the game's afoot."

I think many of us sense that things aren't working. Just as we stare into an array of looming, potentially existential threats the models we fashioned in the assumption they would serve and protect us are failing. The Golden Age from the 50s through the 80s are now a fading memory.

Some contend even Canadians have a "pretend/quasi democracy" which mirrors the transition to less liberal democracies underway worldwide. How much of the elation you felt in the wake of the last election came from the ouster of Harper, how much from the installation of Trudeau and his (so far) seeming intent to stage a progressive restoration? Both factors were present and seemingly inseparable but I suspect that each was somewhat distinct of the other. Taken together, however, they reflected a righting of the political keel in a nation that had, for a decade, listed sharply toward illiberal democracy.

The politics of fear and division were the stock in trade of Stephen Harper. Curiously (and despicably) enough these were tools or weapons he employed to greatest effect on his own supporters. He corralled his base with visions of the dangerous incompetence of his rivals; their amoral, godless ways; the risk of the nation falling into the control of the "other" and, to be honest, by appeals to his supporters' basest instincts and biases. If you were a bigot, it was music to your ears. 

It was fascinating to watch how, in trouncing first Dion and then Ignatieff, Harper quite deliberately avoided having to run on either his record or his vision. He turned both campaigns into referenda on the opposition leader and merely offered the public a pretence of "competent management" in lieu of any actual platform. That was about as close as we got to honesty from Harper. He didn't propose to lead but only to manage, administer, rule.

In Harper's approach was the essence of illiberal democracy. You still get to vote but your vote doesn't matter much except to decide by whom you'll be ruled, the decision-making process in turn shaped by a corporate media peddling messaging that rendered the electorate misinformed, conditioned, almost powerless. Once installed, Harper corrupted the institutions of government, transforming them into his partisan, political agencies which required that they be sequestered, gagged, cut off from the public. This polluted democracy isolates the governed from those who rule, a gap wide enough to accommodate the influence of new interests - corporatism. This is the inevitable outcome of neoliberalism indulged, even nurtured. In the States it's called "political capture" which is so evident in Republican hopefuls courting the billionaires - the Kochs, the Coors family, Sheldon Adelson - whose money largely determines the leadership contests.

Illiberal democracy quickly becomes the engine of mass political disenfranchisement that extends into problems such as inequality; the collapse of social mobility; the economic and then political hollowing out of the middle class; and the host of social ills that flourish in its wake.

Illiberal democracy enshrines the religion of neoliberalism - free market fundamentalism and the mystical governance of the "invisible hand." It is religion. It is not evidence-based. It is faith based and plucked out of a host of competing, equally faith based ideologies. Radical Islam with its Sharia law does not hold a candle to this ideology. Radical Islam won't enslave you, neoliberalism already has.



I posted this discussion between Chris Hedges and John Ralston Saul last week but if you missed it you should watch it now. We all need to understand how our entire political apparatus - Tory, Liberal and New Democrat - has succumbed to this ideology and how, through them, that entraps all of us including you and yours. Only when you see how it is structured, how it operates and all the contradictions and fallacies that it conceals, can you understand how it has arisen and why we must break its hold on our politics and our society. You will also see how Harper rode the ideology of technocracy to claim the highest seat of power.  After that it was simply a matter of manipulating a minority of the public to seize absolute political control over all of us.

I recall when this free market fundamentalism, deregulated capitalism on steroids, came into vogue. I knew of Adam Smith from undergrad economics but I hadn't really read his works especially his seminal work, the 1776 "The Wealth of Nations" that the neoliberals cited as their gospel. So I bought it and I read it and, as Ralston Saul observes in this interview, it was obvious that Smith had very different thoughts than what they claimed.  Only those who hadn't read Smith could swallow the words and thoughts they were attributing to him. And again, the same thing with Edmund Burke, the supposed founding father of conservatism. As I read Burke it became inescapable that these modern prophets of conservatism were not conservative at all. They were something alien to conservatism as expressed by Burke and practised by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

These people are quacks in the same way as Christian fundamentalists serve up a perverted excuse for Christianity that at once suppresses the teachings of Christ and thereby creates theocratic voids that they can fill with really nasty shit plucked out of the Old Testament. They proclaim Biblical inerrancy, heavily and conveniently edited to suit their purposes of course.

We need to begin thinking of neoliberalism as a contagion, something to be identified and purged from our body politic, a shackle on our nation and our people that must be broken. That will be a truly Herculean task that will have to be meticulously undertaken if we're to avoid simply replacing one false ideology with another of our choosing.

I would suggest a couple of starting points. One is with democratic reform, a process that must begin with the restoration of an informed electorate which necessitates the dismantling of the corporate media cartel and its replacement with a genuinely free press.  The other is the reclaiming of those incidents of state sovereignty often surrendered, thrown away for no good reason through neoliberal trade agreements. 

If we don't breathe new life into our democracy we risk losing it to the rising power of authoritarianism. That's already upon us and it has to be beaten back.

Let's do this thing.

Happy Remembrance Day, Everybody !!

Remembrance Day, ah yes, the autumnal ritual in which we sleep in late, getting up just in time, maybe, to turn on the set and watch better people in their winter finery turn out to throng statues, take in a prayer or two and the odd poem, maybe a fly past overhead as a wreath is laid and, for the really lucky, perhaps even a cannonade. Bagpipes and bugles galore and beret-capped old men in overstuffed blazers and grey flannels in their ranks and files standing at attention and saluting absent friends.

I feel for those old guys. For them it's an actual rite of remembrance, a mix of their own horrors or wartime boredom and the young guys they grew up with who never grew old.

The rest? Well they show up for any number of reasons. For some it's the politically correct thing to do. Some turn out mainly to be seen turning up. For others it may be the allure of group participation.  Remembrance. Remember what? Remember the dead. What dead? Who? Name them. Where did they die, how, why? What about their death do you venerate other than the fact that they stopped living?

Of course, it's their sacrifice to which we pay our humble respect. Interesting word "sacrifice." Verb and a noun. Did they sacrifice their lives or did we sacrifice them? Not many went out to sacrifice their lives. They didn't set out to die. They set out to kill the other guy but it just didn't work out that way. They did, however, follow orders under which they could and often were sacrificed - for "the cause," the greater good of course.

We fed them - by their squads, platoons, companies and regiments - into wars of attrition, the "last man standing" sort of warfare. There's sacrifice for you, lambs to slaughter.

But there's always "Lest We Forget." We mustn't forget because... oh, I know! Those who forget their history are bound to repeat it. If we forget we're going to wind up in another war. So we remember.

This all began after the Great War. We had to remember their sacrifice so we didn't ever get dragged into another global meat grinder. Only 20-years later we were at it again and I don't think it was for want of remembrance in the interval. There was even more sacrifice in that one, especially those millions of civilians - kids, women - who got to make the "ultimate sacrifice" too. They're just as dead but we don't venerate them do we, no sorry.

Up until the 20th century, deaths from war were pretty steady at 80% military, 20% civilian. That all got reversed in the 20th century. WWII was 20% military, 80% civilians and it speaks to our twisted morality that we consider four out of five of the dead as "collateral" casualties, mortal detritus, human cordwood.

There'll be no wreaths for them, no bagpipes, no solemn poems - nothing. I suppose it wouldn't be in keeping with the martial theme of the event. Besides we gotta wrap this up, the malls open at 1p.m.