The Mound of Sound

I’ve thought it over. Red Tory is entirely justified in demanding that Lib4evr be dumped from Liblogs. The only thing remotely liberal in that blog is the first three letters of its title. This character has gone well over the line in comments about RT he allowed to be posted to his blog.

So, if Red’s out, I’m out too. And I would urge others to take a stand against this sort of nonsense too.

This is my last post until Lib4evr is gone. Bye.

It never pays to get complacent when you’ve heard nothing about Dick Cheney for a while. The man, who is perhaps the least popular politician to Americans since the Nuremberg trials, still draws breath – sort of.

While Bush spends the last weekend before the US election cloistered away at Camp David, Cheney is planning to attend a “get out the vote” rally in Wyoming where McCain holds a 20-point lead. On election day itself, Cheney will be out shooting something – or someone – to death.

No word yet on whether the Dickster has agreed to hand over his book of spells to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice should McCain carry her to veepdom on Tuesday.

This should hardly come as a surprise to anyone but the fundamentalism-blinded governor of America’s only Arctic state. A new study by climate scientists has concluded that man-made production of greenhouse gases is definitively linked to warming in the Arctic and Antartic regions. From the Toronto Star:

“Nathan Gillett, who co-wrote the study appearing Thursday in the online journal Nature Geoscience, said they compared four different models using man-made versus naturally occurring factors on temperatures.
“Their stark discovery was that only with the influence of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, could they simulate the warming trend in parts of the remote regions.

“It makes clear that the warming that we’re seeing definitely can be linked to human influence in the Arctic and the Antarctic,” said Nathan Gillett of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at Environment Canada in Victoria.

“We could only explain the warming when we included greenhouse gases and human climate influences.”

The carbon lobby immediately countered with – nothing, just as they have for year after year. With supporters as wilfully naive as theirs, the denialists’ persistent lack of any credible, peer reviewed research to counter the almost-daily, entirely legitimate research proving global warming isn’t embarrassing in the slightest. If should be, but it’s not.

It’s too bad it only reaches people who read, but the Washington Post has roundly denounced John “Lowball” McCain’s latest attempt to smear Barack Obama over his acquaintance with Rashid Khalidi.

Although Khalidi is a native born American, graduate of Yale and long time professor at the University of Chicago, McCain and his wretched sidekick, are using the incredible power of the bigotry of their supporters to allege that, once again, Obama has been caught palling around with terrorists. Of course it’s a lie, of course they know it, and, of course, it works with the two-legged malignancies who crave this garbage.

“We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

“Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was “deeply flawed” but conceded there were also “flaws in the alternatives.” Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging — as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he “offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

“Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable — especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults.

“…We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks.”

It’s sad really. John McCain, a man whose stock in trade for decades has been his supposed nobility, chucking it all away to wallow in slime.

Do you want to find out?

Here’s a link to some tests that may show just how likely or unlikely you would be to vote for a guy who looks like Barack Obama.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo

John McCain’s blunder, also known as his veep running mate, Sarah Palin, is dragging the Old Geezer down, quite possibly permanently. The Alaska governor hasn’t travelled well (as the wine folk say) and the more Americans have come to know her the less they see to like.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found 59% of respondents now consider Sarah Palin unfit to serve as vice-president. That’s not good news with the election just six days away.

“In a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said that they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people to serve in his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

“The survey suggested that the historic candidacy of Mr. Obama, who would be the first African-American president if elected, has changed some perceptions of race in America. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said that white and black people have an equal chance of getting ahead in today’s society, up from the half who said that they thought so in July. And while 14 percent still said that most people they know would not vote for a black presidential candidate, a question pollsters often ask to try to gauge bias, the number has dropped considerably since the campaign began. “

You know, he might just smash his way through the racist vote and actually win this thing.

A survey by TD Securities claims to have found that Canada is considered the most solvent country in the world. Pretty cool, eh? From The Globe & Mail:

Chief strategist Eric Lascelles examined credit default swap data for 25 countries, and found markets believe there is only the slimmest of chances that Canada would ever default on its obligations.

“Canada is now regarded as quite possibly the world’s safest sovereign country in terms of the solvency of the country’s government,” Mr. Lascelles said in a research note.

“Since it is the government that is generally called upon to fix major problems that crop up, this suggests that the market does not expect major problems out of the broader Canadian economy and financial sector.”

Sovereign credit default swaps are the market’s way of putting a number on the chances of a government defaulting on its debt. Canada’s five-year CDS levels are at 13 basis points, which is less than half the rating given to second-place Germany, at 33 points. The United States is at 38 points, while Spain is at 93 and Korea is at 561.

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081030.wswaps1030/BNStory/Business/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

And to think all of us, even Stephen Harper, owe it all to Mr. Dithers, Paul Martin.

That was my initial reaction when I read Murray Brewster’s piece on Afghanistan, “Taliban Jack” No Longer Alone.

After effusively praising Jack Layton for introducing the entire planet to the idea of negotiating with the Taliban even though both the Brits and Karzai were parlaying with the insurgency before Jack ever breathed a word of it, Brewster went on to make some remarkable claims about the mission.

He talked about a “battlefield strategy” that is “part of an evolving counter-insurgency doctrine” by Western military leaders in Afghanistan. Strategy? That’s rich. And it’s heartwarming to realize that we actually have a “counter-insurgency doctrine” where none has been evident before. Is everyone rushing off for talks with the Taliban a counter-insurgency doctrine? Well, there’s nothing else so I guess, to Mr. Brewster, that must be it.

The scary thing is what if Brewster’s right? What if this is our battlefield strategy, our counter-insurgency doctrine? Oh dear.

If Barack Obama doesn’t win next Tuesday, I’ll be okay with that. I’ll take it for what it is and, to me, that’s at least another eight to twelve years in darkness. America and the world will have a president who’s lost his marbles and a veep who was never very heavy on that score to begin with.

We, as in all of us, haven’t got an awful lot of time left to see some traction on the really pressing issues of the day and you can be damned sure that the “drill, baby, drill” camp isn’t going to make anything happen. Whatever cojones McCain had going into this campaign are now neatly preserved in the same jar as the cojones of the pre-Palin mayor of Wassila and the pre-Palin governor of Alaska, both of whom learned the hard way the lesson about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

I believe that our planet absolutely needs progressive leadership in Washington of a very high order. We, the world, need America fully engaged in the pressing issues of the day, all of them, not one here and one there. We face critical security issues. We face critical environmental issues, a lot of them and not limited to just global warming. We face critical energy issues. We face critical population issues and critical food supply issues. We face critical economic and social issues.

We face such an array of issues, all of them critical, all demanding effective response, that it would make any leader’s head spin if they were tackled individually. But they’re all to some degree, often to a remarkably large degree, interrelated and in that may just lie the answer.

Precisely because there’s so much overlap, such a degree of commonality and interrelation in these problems, it may be possible to define a set of core principles to guide the resolution of each in a manner that is coherent, complimentary and even synergistic to all the others. In other words, if we have a solution to problem “A”, the answer to problem “B” may be sufficiently similar in principle as to be mutually reinforcing with the “A” answer. The operative word there is, of course, “principle.”

One of the main reasons we’ve landed ourselves in this mess is our reluctance during the “greed is good” era to accept principles of broad, even mass application to guide us not just for a year or two but for decades, generations even. That’s precisely how we now find ourselves beset on all sides by generational problems, challenges for which effective responses will have to be generational in scope.

Let me explain. In much of the world we’ve fished out the oceans. We have so overfished as to bring stocks to exhaustion, in some cases to the verge of extinction. It’s a problem of enormous proportions that impacts adversely on other problems we’re facing and it admits of just two responses. One option is to do nothing which will pretty much complete the devastation now so far advanced. The other option is to enact policies to sharply limit our predation of endangered stocks and permit their recovery. That just doesn’t happen in a few years or even in a decade. It’s a generational challenge that’s chock full of problems and pitfalls that will have to be overcome.

We need policies that acknowledge the problem and identify the resolution, the objective to be achieved. From that can flow a series of principles that will, for generations, shape policy and the inevitable changes in policy that occur over time. Principles that encompass both adaptive and remedial measures.

We might prefer a steak or chicken, but large swathes of the world are utterly dependent on fish as their source of protein. Unless you want them camping in your backyard, you have to recognize their needs, their reality and make it part of your own. We have to find ways to get more fish to these people and there’s a lot we can do right now. We can stop enormously destructive bottom trawls. We can begin to tackle the by-catch problem. It’s no longer acceptable to rely on fishery techniques that waste a ton of fish in order to catch a hundred pounds of an allowable species.

Look at the arms races underway right now – in China, in India, Russia and America. Do we really think that China and India can’t find a better use for the resources they’re pouring into new submarines, aircraft carriers, combat aircraft, nuclear weaponry and missiles? Do we really think that advancing our interests by setting countries up as strategic, military rivals is somehow going to enhance our ability to get the essential cooperation we need from them on challenges such as overpopulation and global warming? Are we mad? Did we learn nothing from the past half century about the risks, dangers and profligate waste of resources inevitable in arms races and cold wars?

What about Islamist extremism? Is it better to just keep swatting away at something we’re not going to defeat or, instead, to find out what’s driving moderate Muslims to give the extremists the support without which they cannot function? Why do we support oppressive, undemocratic regimes like Mubarak’s in Egypt that drive moderates in frustration into the arms of their only alternative, the Islamists? Are we stupid? Do we not want to solve this problem or at least shrink it where we can? What do we get out of it by not yanking the rug out from beneath the feet of terrorists? Believe it or not, there is an answer to that.

It’s pretty clear to me that we have to resuscitate some of the values our great grandparents understood, values that somehow got discarded as quaint and ridiculous. Foremost among them is posterity, shaping the world today for the benefit of generations to follow. We’ve done an astonishing job at making the future worse, wouldn’t it be grand (my long-departed granny’s favourite word) if we focused instead on making the future better, of at least undoing some of the damage we’ve bequeathed to those generations to come?

I sure hope Obama wins on Tuesday and I sure hope that he is the leader that America, and the world, so badly need right now.