The Mound of Sound

The highest court in any democratic state ought to be the preserve of the best legal minds in the country. It is the court of last resort. It is the court that has to weigh constitutional questions and define statutory enactments.

American presidents, it seems, have been pretty lax in their duty to select proper material for the nation’s Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia is one clear example.

Scalia is the guy who goes duck hunting with Dick Cheney while a case against Halliburton is before him.

Now he’s shown the depth of his juridical prowess by his asinine arguments that Guantanimo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts. In the case of Boumediene v. Bush, Scalia wrote, “At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield.”

Now just where did Mr. Justice Scalia get that pearl of factual wisdom? The Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research answers that:

So, if it comes straight from the mouth of Wolf Blitzer, Scalia is able to take judicial notice of it, to treat it as fact upon which to base a judgment? This guy is a never ending disgrace to his bench and yet he just keeps going on like that battery bunny. If he had a shred of integrity he’d resign because he’s repeatedly shown himself unfit to serve.

Our Furious Leader, little Stevie Harper, may have to think twice about spurning Stephane Dion’s challenge for an “adult debate” on the Liberal Green Shift proposal.

A Toronto Star/Angus Reid poll found 70% of respondents absolutely keen on the debate idea.

The Big Greasy Splotch is going to have to tread carefully through this one. If he doesn’t debate, he won’t look good to most Canadians. If he does debate, he runs even greater risks. He might just give Dion the opportunity to show he’s not a wimp. Worse yet, he might give Dion a forum to showcase the real merits and limited downside effects of the tax shift proposal.

Poor old Lardo. He’s great at sniping from the weeds but now he’s being called out – by the Canadian people.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Aslaska’s Prince William Sound. The tanker Valdez struck a rock, causing the worst oil spill in American history. The effects are still being felt.

In 1994 a jury awarded the state and affected parties a $5-billion judgment against Exxon. An Alaska appeals court then trimmed that – by half – down to $2.5-billion.

Today the Bush court voted 5-3 to transform Exxon’s smackdown into a pat on the bottom, lowering the punitive damages award to $500-million. That’s trimming 90% off the punitive damages the jury sought to impose. That works out to just under $50 per gallon of spilled oil in punitives.

The US Conference of Mayors annual meeting came up with a great idea – tracking the “life cycle impact” of various fossil fuels. They also passed a resolution urging member municipalities to stop using unconventional fuels with lage carbon footprints. The resolution specifically referenced Canada’s Tar Sands:

“The production of tarsands oil from Canada emits approximately three times the carbon dioxide pollution per barrel as does conventional oil production and significantly damages Canada’s Boreal forest ecosystem – the world’s largest carbon storehouse.”

You see, once you factor in the carbon footprint of various fossil fuels – assign a number to them – it’s an easy process to translate that into any of several forms of carbon tariffs.

Alberta’s Tar Sands have always benefitted from the “out of sight/out of mind” syndrome. They’re way up north where few Albertans live. People don’t have to see them if they don’t want to. That, I suspect, is a key reason why Big Oil and the Alberta government have been able to get away with the environmental destruction the Tar Sands necessitate. Whenever someone does complain they’re rebuffed with the same old assurances about new technologies being just around the corner, an excuse that’s then put back in the bottom drawer until the next time it’s needed.

A carbon tariff by end user markets might give Big Oil and the Alberta government the big, swift kick in the ass they’ve needed to actually make those promised new technologies a reality. You simply make it more expensive for them not to clean themselves up. They say they can do it. It’s time they did.

Kudos to the US Conference of Mayors. They just might have pointed to the right path to curbing tar sands pollution.

Transparency International reports that 18 of 34 OECD countries get failing grades on enforcement of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2007 Anti-Bribery Convention.

Countries cited for having “little or no enforcement” of the convention included Britain, Japan and Canada. From The Guardian:

The UK and Japan were two of three G7 countries “showing a lack of sufficient commitment”. The third was Canada.

TI said Canada had an “inadequate definition of foreign bribery”. It recommended “greater efforts within government agencies involved in foreign countries or with foreign trade initiatives to report up the line and ultimately to enforcement agencies about allegations of bribery”.

The full list of countries showing little or no enforcement was: Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

I hope the next time Americans elect a president they try to get one from planet Earth. Those that come from beyond, places like planet Bush, don’t do too well down here. Maybe it’s the whole gravity thing. They get weighted down and sluggish and their minds turn really dull. They can’t seem to get a sentence out right. Maybe it’s too much oxygen in the atmosphere that exaggerates their alternate reality from beyond.

Don’t believe me? Here, take a look. Bush says, probably believes, he cares about the environment. But, in his alternate reality, that means blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia, drilling wells and running pipelines through wilderness preserves, and doing everything he can to thwart action on slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush says he wants to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East and I guess he must believe that. But he supports brutal tyrants in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and practically has a fit when people democratically elect Hezbollah to seats in Lebanon’s parliament or vote in Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

The man from planet Bush says he wants to build a strong, safe America and he might even believe that too. But he wages an insanely expensive war without end and does it on borrowed money, putting the fiscal equivalent of a burning tire around the necks of future generations and leaving the country to look forward to unnecessary decline. Better yet, he’s transformed war itself into a big business with mercenary contractors already matching or exceeding troop levels in Iraq.

Now the government’s own General Accounting Office shows that Bush’s alternate reality has done it again, this time on his claims about progress in Iraq. From the New York Times:

So the guy isn’t well-grounded, so what? His time on planet Earth is coming to an end and just months from now he’ll take wing and head back to planet Bush. Maybe next time Americans will do better.

One of the world’s top climate scientists, American James Hansen, thinks Big Oil executives ought to be put on trial for crimes against humanity for deliberately and maliciously waging a campaign to spread doubt about the reality of global warming.

For some time I’ve thought exactly the same thing. Let me explain. Every law student learns of the case where a guy yelled “fire” in a movie theatre. The crowd panicked, there was a rush for the door, people got trampled and some died. Now the jerk hadn’t trampled any of the victims, he had no direct part in their deaths. Yet he was tried for and convicted of their killings as surely as if he’d used a gun to shoot them in their seats. Why? Because the law presumes us to intend the logical consequences of our acts. You yourself don’t necessarily have to foresee the tragic result as long as it would be foreseeable to the average person. The defendant knew or ought to have known that yelling “fire” would trigger panic that could lead to a lethal stampede. Guilty as charged.

Now let’s say I’m the head of Exxon. I’m no dummy, I know the reality of global warming and the suffering and death it’s bound to cause. I’m no dummy but I’m willing to bet that plenty of others are and that they can be easily duped. What I have to do is pay some jerks – why not use the same gang RJ Reynolds used to sow doubts about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer? – to do the same thing to the obvious link between fossil fuels and global warming. Why not just get them to deny global warming is even real? That way I can forestall, possibly for years, meaningful action that might hurt my company. That way my company stands to rake in maximum profits until the public finally catch on and demand government intervention.

If the logical consequence of sowing doubt about global warming is to worsen the problem and that can’t help but cause additional suffering and death, am I not responsible for the results caused by my actions? Of course, my victims aren’t a theatre full of moviegoers but all of humanity and just about every other lifeform on this planet. Therefore, can I really argue that I haven’t committed a crime against humanity?

And what of Big Oil’s paid collaborators, the pseudo-scientists who earn big bucks by spinning nonsense to the public? They should have been taken off the streets after running the Big Tobacco scam but we left them at large to come back and beset our societies all over again.

Hansen, who will testify before Congress today, spoke with The Guardian:

“When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.”

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen’s speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public’s attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding “it is time to stop waffling”.

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

George is gone. If that sounds callous, I really don’t believe he’d have the slightest problem with my tagline above. If there were a few things Carlin believed it was that your Karma would catch up with you eventually. He embraced the sinner except more to partake than forgive.

71? I guess it sounds early but maybe we should first ask Keith Richards.

There always was a dark spark inside that guy, try as he might disguise it in the “commerical era” of his career.