February 2007
Monthly Archive
February 28, 2007
Okay, it looks like we’re getting pretty much everyone onside about the reality of Global Warming. It’s real, it’s happening and it’s going to get worse. It isn’t going to get any better in our lifetimes, our kids’ or their kids’ either. The best we can do at this point is whatever is in our power to prevent it from getting any worse than necessary while we work on reversing the causes of this climate change and even that modest goal is going to be a herculean task.
We’re going to have to learn to do things differently. Part of that means we’re going to have to get smaller, consume less. Sooner or later that’s going to mean carbon-rationing. That will mean no more unnecessary gas guzzlers (some, a few, will still be needed); smaller houses (no more heating empty three-car garages), more efficient energy use (flourescents, etc.) and some restructuring in the way we produce and deliver goods and services. A lot of these things mean sacrifices we aren’t going to like but quite a few of them aren’t really going to bother us or deprive us nearly as much as we might first imagine.
An inernational research team released a report today on what can be done to mitigate global warming – to fend off the worst effects. From the LA Times:
“The scientists from 11 countries urged sweeping conservation measures to hold the expected increase in temperatures to no more than an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — less than half the expected increase if emissions of greenhouse gas and soot continue unabated.
“Based on two years of study, the scientists called for bold actions, including carbon taxes, a ban on conventional coal-fired power plants and an end to beachfront construction worldwide.
“The researchers were financed by the nonprofit United Nations Foundation and the 60,000-member research society Sigma Xi.
“With its emphasis on policy recommendations, the panel’s effort marks a shift in the international politics of pollution and climate change, analysts said. Researchers are no longer debating whether human-induced global warming is genuine, but have begun the painstaking process of negotiating international agreement on what to do about it.
“They urged stricter fuel efficiency standards, as well as fuel taxes, registration fees and rebates that favor more efficient transportation, which today is responsible for 40% of the world’s carbon emissions.
“A 20-fold improvement in car efficiency is well within existing technology, they said. Moving freight by rail instead of truck could also cut emissions substantially.
“The researchers also recommended the expanded use of biofuels to reduce dependence on the oil that accounts for one-quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions. They endorsed broader use of nuclear power, if it can be made safer. Energy research budgets worldwide ought to triple, they said.
“In addition, the scientists called for improved designs of energy-efficient appliances, office equipment and “greener” commercial and residential buildings. Taken together, the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings accounts for about 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.Most tellingly, the panel called for a ban on any new coal-fired power plants that cannot be equipped to capture and store the carbon dioxide they emit.
“All told, the U.S., China and India plan to build about 850 coal-fired plants over the next decade, which by environmentalists’ calculations would pump as much as five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than international control measures aim to eliminate.
“No matter what people do to reduce soot or curtail emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the world will continue to warm somewhat, and people will have to adapt, the researchers said.
“To minimize the hazards of rising sea levels and more powerful storms, the group called for a worldwide ban on beachfront construction near existing high-tide lines.
“To reduce the effects of climate-related disasters, such as floods or prolonged droughts, the panel urged better international emergency response measures, warning that there may be as many as 50 million environmental refugees by 2010.”
February 28, 2007
The Bush administration may be inept at everything else but it has shown itself the ultimate master of fearmongering. At their peak, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice even Powell had the American people and their Congress so terrified that the administration was able to write its own ticket utterly liberated from America’s vaunted system of “checks and balances.”
While all this was going on, our own Harpo watched his American Idols in utter fascination. He absorbed every lesson about spin and deception, the tricks of sleight of hand, and, above all, the power and political advantage to be had from fearmongering.
Harpo has even learned the language of George Bush, right down to “cut and run” and “stay the course” and “support the troops.”
In the recent battle to extend extraordinary police powers to fight terrorism, our Furious Leader didn’t hesitate to resort to the ultimate scumbag tactic of smearing the opposition as soft on terrorism for insisting these measures lapse. You have to be a bit of a degenerate to stoop that low.
What about these extraordinary police powers? Have the Libs now left Canadians exposed to terrorism, their police stripped of an essential weapon in the fight against Islamist extremism?
That certainly is the pitch of the fearmonger Harpo but Jeff Sallot, writing in today’s Globe and Mail, shows the prime monster was merely blowing smoke:
“What’s changed in five years? Even immediately after the 9/11 attacks, many MPs were never convinced that authorities needed the extraordinary powers of preventive arrest and investigative hearings.
“Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, a law professor and civil-liberties crusader, says he swung back and forth on the issue. It was one of those questions on which people of good will could honestly disagree.
“‘It’s a judgment call,’ he said.
“He and many other MPs insisted on building procedural safeguards into the Anti-Terrorism Act. The extraordinary powers, for example, could be used only with the explicit approval of a federal or provincial attorney-general. Police and judges couldn’t go off willy-nilly on their own, holding people and interrogating them.
“Even with these safeguards, many MPs worried that once the powers were on the books, it might be impossible to get rid of them even if experience showed that they were never needed. Thus, a five-year sunset provision was included in the legislation, specifying that the powers would lapse unless the House and the Senate renewed them with a parliamentary resolution.
“As it turns out, the powers were never invoked in the past five years. The RCMP report they have quietly disrupted several terrorism plots in that time without ever arresting anyone.
“However, two other terrorism cases have attracted attention. An Ottawa man, Momin Khawaja, was arrested here and charged with conspiracy in a plot that was being hatched in Britain. He is alleged to have offered to build a bomb trigger for the British conspirators.
“The other high-profile terrorism allegations — also still before the Ontario courts — involve 18 men. Last year, police rounded them up in the Toronto area and charged them.
“If the police and security agencies are correct, they’ve successfully foiled more than a dozen plots without ever resorting to the extraordinary arrest and investigative powers.”
I’m sure Harpo and his far-right government would love to turn Canada into a police state but now that’s not going to happen. Unlike the Democrats in the US, the Liberals took a stand and held their ground against Harpo’s smear campaign to label them soft on terrorism and unwilling to protect Canadians.
If you’re not sure what kind of a lifeform Harper is, this little episode speaks volumes. He’s a fearmongerer, completely uninhibited when it comes to manipulating his own people and preying on their vulnerabilities.
February 28, 2007
This is another story about “the myth of Canadian peacekeeping.” Those who won’t be happy unless Canada’s soldiers are shooting at somebody and getting shot at in return – the red meat gang – like to point to Canadian peacekeeping doldrums of the past decade to prove their own myth, that the image of the Canadian peacekeeper was never more than a myth anyway.
What really lay behind Canada’s decade of military slumber? Oh yeah, that’s right, it was a national emergency. Don’t remember that? Try to go back to Canada as it was when Jean Chretien took over from Brian “Big Pockets” Muldoon. We were broke and getting even broker faster than the country, our country, could stand.
The Canada we have today is in many ways a much better country than the Canada left by the previous conservative government. It’s so much better that, today, Harpo can splash money around in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He cavorts bare arsed, rolling in the legacy of a guy named Paul Martin.
Despite General Rick Hillier’s griping about a decade of darkness, the Canadian Armed Forces, like the rest of Canada, had to make do without while the Liberals pulled the country’s fat out of the fire. It wasn’t Hillier or MacKenzie or any other damned general that rescued Canada from that emergency and they were smart enough while that rescue mission was underway to keep their mealy mouths shut.
We had to put the military- and just about everything else – on the back burner for that decade so that we could restore the country, including the military, sooner rather than later. Lord knows if we’d just carried on in the Mulroney tradition, Hillier might be collecting shopping carts in some mall parking lot today.
So, yes, Canada did undergo a hiatus in its peacekeeping efforts and for longer than we should have but that hardly makes the country’s tradition a myth. Now it’s time to shatter the myth about the myth. We can save a lot more lives and do a lot more good in other spots around the world than we’ll ever achieve in Afghanistan.
Here’s another myth that needs to be shattered, the myth that we’re all partners in America’s “war on terror.” At best, NATO has become America’s Foreign Legion, enablers of its dysfunctional foreign policy and incompetent military adventurism. Why are so many NATO countries so reluctant to get dragged into Washington’s 5+ year Afghanistan screw-up? Could it be because they see what Ottawa isn’t willing to see?
It’s time for a thorough debate on the future role to be played by Canada’s military. If we’re going to be America’s water boy let’s be honest about it and equip our forces properly so they can be the best water boys around. If we want our forces to maximize the good they can achieve, let’s explore those options also. Before we consign it to the dustbin, let’s go back and take a hard look at the peacekeeping option again.
February 28, 2007
If you’re one of those people who likes custom ringtones for your cell you might want to try something new. Go to
www.biologicaldiversity.org . They have free ringtones of endangered and rare species. They’ve got 40 ringtones to choose from and they run the gamut from owls and macaws to wolves, toads and beluga whales. Imagine what your friends will think when they hear a toad croaking in your pocket. And they are free.
February 28, 2007
Dick Cheney has completed his whirlwind trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was an odd trip, one in which the media were sworn to secrecy until Cheney left Pakistan. Major American news services knew where Cheney was and where he was going, they even had reporters on Cheney’s flight. They just couldn’t let out so much as a hint that the veep was going to Pakistan.
That, however, wasn’t the really weird part. It came from a briefing on Cheney’s plane on which the official who briefed reporters may only be called a “senior administration official.”
The senior administration official, whose identity is not to be divulged, was, of course, the Dickster himself, something obvious from the remarks he made:
“‘Let me just make one editorial comment here,’ the official said. ‘I’ve seen some press reporting says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.’ That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.
‘I would describe my sessions both in Pakistan and Afghanistan as very productive. We’ve had notable successes in both places. I’ve often said before and I believe it’s still true that we’ve captured and killed more al-Qaida in Pakistan than anyplace else. And I think we’re making progress in Afghanistan.'”
Has Dick Cheney lost his mind? Reporters can’t mention his name but he gives his identity away quite freely in his remarks. Maybe the Dickster has gone off the deep end.
February 28, 2007
El Nino is over, fini, or at least so we’re told by officials of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. The El Nino weather pattern is associated with unusual warming in the eastern area of the mid-Pacific. La Nina, the ugly stepsister, is triggered by cooling of the equatorial Pacific region.
La Nina spells possible trouble, particularly to southern parts of the US. It typically means more hurricanes in the Atlantic, fewer in the Pacific, less rain and more heat for the already drought-stricken South, and a milder spring and summer in the north, Lautenbacher said. The central plains of the United States tend be drier in the fall during La Ninas, while the Pacific Northwest tends to be wetter in the late fall and early winter.
La Nina conditions are typically milder than El Nino’s heavy rainfalls and landslides.
February 28, 2007
I don’t like round numbers very much, especially when a politician pulls one out of the hat that’s followed by seven or eight zeroes. Once you get into that many zeroes it’s pretty obvious that the number you’re being given is a political number not a factual number.
Take the number 200,000,000 or two hundred million. That’s the amount Stephen Harper has come up with to fund six or seven priorities for Afghanistan. Now, what do you think the chances are of costing out six or seven things, adding up those costs and coming out with a 2 and 8 zeroes?
No, $200,000,000 is a number picked out of the air, plain and simple, and that’s a political number. Once you start rounding off figures in the tens of millions of dollars, you’re talking political numbers. This isn’t even rounded off to the nearest million. Let’s hope it’s rounded off to the nearest ten million. If not, it’s even a bigger political number than I’d feared.
Spending that’s not defined by actual cost projections is one thing but priorities that are shaped by political numbers awash in zeroes make me wonder whose purposes are actually being served. Anything with eight zeroes in it is a grandstanding number, a photo-op number, and there’s nothing that Harpo likes more than a good photo-op where he can grandstand.
I think Harpo may be getting the Kabul Virus. It’s an infection that swells the organs north of the eyebrows. The symptoms are inconsistency of purpose, incoherent policy, myopia and a thorough state of confusion. It’s not just Harpo who’s been stricken. This is contagious.
In the past year the NATO forces have had – what – four commanders? A Canadian, then a Dutch General, then a Brit and now an American. Each has arrived with his own playbook. Some want to fight. Some want to emphasize reconstruction. Some want to negotiate local ceasefires. Each comes in with a “fresh” approach.
Four conflicting approaches and the worst – or best part of it is that they’re all right, every one of them. We have to fight. We have to rebuild. We have to negotiate. Each of those guys is correct and because they’re all right we come to the hidden truth – we can’t do all these things because we only have a small fraction of the troops necessary for the challenge we’ve taken on.
You can’t have coherent policy without the resources required for coherence. Absent those resources, commanders have to pick and choose what their priority will be and that leads to inconsistency which, in turn, leads to incoherence, myopia and confusion.
Confusion? You bet. We’re still getting all the nonsense about how we’re liberating Afghan women when, in reality, the guys we’re propping up want the country to return to medieval feudalism – when just down the road from the Canadian base, girls as young as 12 are in prison because they refused to let their fathers sell them to other old men, when women legislators are threatened with rape inside parliament and can only visit their constituencies concealed in burqas lest they be killed.
We’re still getting the crap about how we’re protecting the people when it’s the government’s security services that are their main predator and when the people distrust their government so much that they take their complaints and disputes to the Taliban insurgents for judgment and justice.
We’re still getting the garbage about democracy when the Karzai government has been infested with warlords and thugs who grant themselves amnesty for their atrocities, take all the plum posts and rake enormous profit from the land they impoverish.
We’re barely able to keep the insurgents from toppling the rotten government in Kabul. We went over there to take the fight to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Wouldn’t it be terrific if that’s all we really had to do to save Afghanistan? But we can’t save the women and girls of Afghanistan from their menfolk. We can’t save the peasants and farmers from their police and the warlords and drug lords. We can’t save Hamid Karzai from the thugs and butchers who have insinuated themselves into his government and have spread their control and influence like a rampant malignancy.
What, then, is there left to save? Is it any wonder that all we can come up with are political numbers?
February 27, 2007
Many of us see Britain as the birthplace of our modern civil rights and freedoms. It all began with Magna Carta Libertatum, the great charter of 1215, that first provided the King could be subject to the Rule of Law. From that evolved the English Common Law that most of the English-speaking world, America included, embraces today.
The first decade of the third millenia may eventually become known as the retreat from civil liberties, civil rights. Notions such as secret surveillance, indefinite detention without charge or trial, and the demise of habeus corpus mark the evolution of a relationship between governments and their peoples that would have been considered outrageous just a decade ago. Australia, Britain, the United States and even Canada have used the war on terror as a pretext to strip away the constraints on government.
Now the Brits are toying with the idea of abandoning the principle of “reasonable cause” to allow UK police to stop motorists at random to demand breath samples. This would gut both the right to privacy and the right to be protected against unreasonable searches by the state.
Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety director Rob Gifford said the move would be a deterrent. “Giving police this power will make many people think they have a greater chance of being caught.”
This smacks of trampling on historic and fundamental rights for the sake of convenience. Rights out never to be abridged except when that is absolutely necessary to achieve a critical purpose and there is no other solution.
February 27, 2007
Peter Brookes, Times online
February 27, 2007
The Telegraph has reported that the poppy eradication programme in Helmand province is collapsing under the weight of corruption:
“A 500-man Afghan police force backed by American private security contractors and two helicopter gunships began work in the drug heartlands two weeks ago aiming to destroy 22,000 hectares before April’s harvest. In two weeks, only 1,200 have been ploughed.
“A policeman provided a detailed account of systematic corruption within the force. ‘The only people [whose crops are] being eradicated are those without money or connections,’ said the man, who cannot be named for his own safety. ‘On the eradication force, this is being called ‘the season to make money’.”
“Powerful local landowners were bribing officials at a rate of about £500 per hectare. A hectare produces about £3,500 worth of opium.
“This year’s effort is regarded as a crucial test of the Kabul government’s ability to tackle the drug problem after previous years ended in disaster amid similar tales of corruption.
“If the campaign fails in Helmand, which produced 40 per cent of the country’s opium last year, then British officials admit that US-led pressure for a radical campaign of aerial spraying of poppy next year will become irresistible.
“‘The local police are worse than us at taking bribes,’ said the police officer, who was recruited in Kabul. ‘But every officer from the highest to the lowest is doing their best to take bribes.'”
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