July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 31, 2007
With the Iraqi parliament on holidays for the month, none of its benchmark legislation passed, and the September deadline for assessment of the “surge” by US lawmakers, the neo-cons are coming out in full force, churning out glowing op-ed pieces for any newspaper that’ll print them.
The surge is working, they proclaim. We’re winning this one. Just another year, wait, make that two, maybe three. Victory is just around the corner.
So what is this success supposed to look like? Well, don’t look at the dysfunctional Baghdad government, that’s no success. Forget about the roughly four million displaced Iraqis either. Don’t dwell on the soon-to-be breakaway Kurdish state in the north. Forget about the fuel shortages in this nation awash in oil or the lack of electricity of other essential utilities. And then there’s the third of Iraq’s population that Oxfam now deems in urgent need of emergency aid. That, then is the face of success in Iraq.
Oxfam reports that, with unemployment hovering at 50%, 43% of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty.” Here are a few other clear signs of success:
70% of Iraqis lack adequate water supplies
80% lack effective sanitation
92% of Iraqi children show learning problems related to the pervasive sense of fear
800,000 Iraqi kids have dropped out of school
40% of Iraq’s doctors, teachers, water engineers and other professionals have fled the country.
So, when you start reading all the “think tank” articles about how Iraq is turning the corner, remember these numbers. They won’t be getting any better between now and September.
July 31, 2007
There’s speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin may seek re-election. Not this year. That’s when his second term expires and Russia has a 2-term limit – sort of.
It seems the Russian constitution limits the presidency to two consecutive terms. That would let Prince Vlad sit the next one out and then come back again in 2012.
“As long as the president has decided not to run for a third term, our party will be ready to nominate Vladimir Putin for president in 2012,” Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Mironov, leader of the loyal Fair Russia party, as saying during a visit to Russia’s Bakhkortostan region at the southern Urals.
Putin, criticised by the West and disparate opposition groups at home of backtracking on democracy, has said he will present a candidate of his choice to succeed him in an election.
Despite the fact that he cannot run for a third term, around two thirds of Russians would have voted for Putin if an election was held last Sunday, according to the latest survey by pollster VTsIOM.
July 31, 2007
I’m a genuine Leftie. I’m a sinistral – a left-hander. Now, according to stuff I’ve found on the BBC website, it turns out there are a lot of plusses (and a few minuses) to being left-handed.
BBC reports that an Oxford team has found a gene that increases the likelihood of being left-handed. It turns out the same gene also increases the likelihood of developing psychotic illness such as schizophrenia.
But – on the plus side. It turns out the 10% of us who aren’t right have a lot of real advantages. For example, we think more quickly. That’s right, unlike you dullards, scientists have found that signals move decidedly faster between the hemispheres of our brains.
Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.
The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.
Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily.
Chartered psychologist, Dr Steve Williams said left-handed people tended to be better at using both sides of the brain.
“This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language – that they are more bicerebral. They get faster at it because they’re having to use both sides of the brain more.”
“In football, being able to shoot with either foot is a huge asset (each foot like each hand is under opposite-side control) and I’ve heard that left-handers tend to have better backhands in tennis,” he added.
But wait, there’s more. We’re better in fights:
The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases.
But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat.
A study of eight aboriginal societies found homicide rates increased significantly with the incidence of left-handedness. Oops!
Not only that, but being left-handed makes me – sort of – Churchillian! Yes, Winston was one of us. Then again, so was Hitler. Yeah, but so is Clapton!
July 31, 2007
This is good. The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee has given the White House 18-hours to come clean over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The ultimatum is in the form of a demand by Arlen Specter that the White House issue a letter by noon tomorrow addressing the question of Gonzales’ “veracity.”
“Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question [of Gonzales’ veracity] from the administration … by noon tomorrow, which will be made available to the news media,” Specter wrote in the statement. “The administration has committed to producing such a letter.”
Some observers believe Specter will take off the gloves tomorrow, possibly joining the Democrats in a bid to unseat Gonzales.
July 31, 2007
Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor has been a complete dud. He contradicts himself, he contradicts his military staff, he often seems confused or ill-informed. He’s a dud and for Stephen Harper, Gord is becoming a real liability.
“It strikes me as unusual to have the minister and the chief of the defence staff saying different things,” said Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and a close Harper friend. “All I can say is that it looks odd. It makes you wonder what’s going on.”
O’Connor isn’t getting any help from his Chief of Defence Staff, Hillier. A number of times O’Connor has stated some policy or view only to have it undermined and contradicted by Hillier.
July 31, 2007
It’s something we associate with tin pot dictators not parliamentary democracy. Yet Canada is living with our very own version of Strongman Rule in Stephen Harper.
Harper doesn’t just lead the Conservative government, he is the government or thinks he is. When there’s an announcement to be made, Stevie is the one before the cameras. He micromanages his government which means when something falls off Harper’s radar screen it all but disappears.
Tomorrow the Tories will gather in Charlottetown for a 3-day policy session. Stuck in the mud, the party needs to come out with some fresh ideas to increase its popular support. MPs and Senators may toss ideas around but most expect will be more of Harpo’s “top down” control-freak management.
This may be a critical year for Stephen Harper, a year that will determine whether he has taken his party as far as he can. Unless he pulls off some sort of breakthrough Harpo may find out what lies in store for autocrats who let down their own side.
July 31, 2007
Former Bre-X geologist John Felderhof has been acquitted of all 8-charges of insider trading.
Felderhof was accused by the Ontario Securities Commission of selling $84 million worth of Bre-X stock between April and October 1996, while having information that was not disclosed to investors.
Despite the acquittals by the Ontario Superior Court, Felderhof remains beset by civil litigation.
July 31, 2007
Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, just look how well all our high-tech Western military muscle has done in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re actually creating our own enemies and we’re doing it faster than we’re killing off the existing foe. Do the math.
Wired editor, Nicholas Thompson, believes we have the means to defeat Islamist extremism in the proven wisdom of one George Keenan who gave birth to the strategy known as “containment”:
In the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan, who was then the State Department’s policy planning chief, gave American strategy a name, but not much else. He argued that we didn’t have to actively defeat the Soviet Union, only outlast it. Communism held inside itself “the seeds of its own decay.” The United States should refrain from provoking Moscow, whether through confrontation or histrionics. Patience would lead to success.
Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.
The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”
Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.
Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.
“Let us find health and vigor and hope, and the diseased portion of the earth will fall behind of its own doing. For that we need no aggressive strategic plans, no provocation of military hostilities, no showdowns.”
July 31, 2007
For years Brazil has viewed global warming and greenhouse gas emissions as a Northern hemisphere problem, something to be resolved by the Western world. That’s now changing as Brazil comes to realize that it can no longer defy gravity.
Most scientists see Brazil as the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Those emissions come not from vast seas of fossil-fuel burning cars or from heavy industry or coal-fired power plants. They come from deforestation – the clearing and burning of the Amazon rainforest.
As recently as last June, Brazil joined with India and China to tell the developed world to mind its own business on GHG reductions. It was a stupid, juvenile response and one that was quickly overrun by events even the West cannot control. From the New York Times:
A number of recent events have led political leaders and ordinary Brazilians to conclude that they are not immune to climate change. First and foremost was a disastrous 2005 drought in the Amazon that killed crops, kindled forest fires, dried up transportation routes, caused disease and wreaked economic havoc.
Brazil sees itself as an emerging agricultural and industrial power, and global warming could have a disastrous impact on those aspirations. Scientists note that Brazil’s southern breadbasket flourishes largely because of rainfall patterns in the Amazon that are likely to be altered if droughts recur or climate change accelerates.
“Once they really register that the Amazon rain machine is very important to the south of Brazil, they are going to be much more interested in avoiding deforestation,” said Thomas Lovejoy, president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. “You don’t have to be interested in biodiversity to want rain to keep that amazing agricultural system going.”
Brazil also envisions constructing a large network of dams throughout the Amazon over the next several decades to supply electricity to its industrial heartland in São Paulo, 2,000 miles south of here. But those plans depend on water flows in the region’s vast rivers not drying up.
In addition, in 2004 a hurricane formed in the South Atlantic for the first time since weather records began being kept. The storm came ashore in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, which was not prepared for it, and destroyed houses and forced thousands to flee.
“There was no previous registry of this happening, not even in the literature of colonial times,” said Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s most prominent climate scientist, who works at the National Institute for Space Research.
The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, has added to concerns here. “By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia,” it predicted, while also warning that “crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases” in tropical areas, “which would increase risk of hunger.”
Among climatologists who study the Amazon, the buzz words these days are “tipping point” — the moment at which damage to the environment is so severe and widespread that it pushes the ecosystem into an irreversible cycle of self-destruction.
Whether it’s China or India or Brazil, climate change is as real as gravity. Put another way, you don’t have to “get” global warming, it’ll come to you.
July 31, 2007
Most of us see Japan as we came to know it during the last quarter of the past century. We see it that way because we like it that way. We don’t see Japan as it was from the 1920’s until the end of WWII. We don’t like to look at the ugly face of Japan – its brutal, barbaric, martial face.
Half a century later Japan is evolving to take its proper place in the community of nations. There’s nothing wrong with that, in itself. What is troubling is the lengths to which Japan’s ruling right-wingers have been going to erase the country’s hideous past.
The Japanese government has plunged into a furious campaign of denial. They deny that Japanese kidnapped many thousands of Asian women, a lot of them Korean, and forced them into sexual slavery for their troops abroad. Even more atrocious has been their utter denial of what is known as the “Rape of Nanking” where invading Japanese troops indulged themselves in an orgy of rape and mass murder which was well documented by Westerners living in the city back then.
The US Congress has passed a resolution calling on Japan to apologize for its wartime sexual slavery of Asian women. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has rejected the resolution, calling it “regrettable.” From the New York Times:
Some of the aging former sex slaves, known euphemistically in Japan as comfort women, and their advocates welcomed the resolution. But they reacted angrily at Mr. Abe’s response. “Abe denies that they were the ones who violated the women,” said Jan Ruff O’Herne, 84, a Dutch woman who was forced into sex slavery in Indonesia.
“I didn’t expect anything better from him than that,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Adelaide, Australia. “But this resolution puts enormous pressure on the Japanese government. I’m still hoping that something will happen because the women are getting old, and we deserve a proper apology.”
Japan absolutely must own its own history. We have to see to that.
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