The Mound of Sound

This has nothing to do with national or international politics, military shenanigans, environmental catastrophes or any of that good stuff.

It’s all about how far back you go.

I’m lucky. My name is relatively uncommon, it comes with a thoroughly understood and numerically limited number of variations and spellings. There aren’t enough anomalies to make tracing tedious, much less really difficult.

I’m lucky to have a distant relative, a retired US Air Force Colonel who set about to use all the very latest technology to research, catalogue and delineate our line, even to the point of DNA verification.

Thanks to Cousin Jim, I now know each and every generation of my past right back to a Teutonic knight on the Island of Gottland, just off Sweden circa 1275. I know who he married, their children and every descendant leading straight to my family ever since. It’s a direct, unbroken line – full of registry information such as births, weddings, deaths, and burials.

From an item I read two weeks ago, the concept that Cousin Jim and others pioneered will soon show up on mainstream, nearly fully automated.

But, in the meantime, I’d like to have some fun. If you read this and know about your genealogy, just how far back can you trace your family tree?

We lost the damned election. We got our sails properly trimmed. We ought to consider ourselves lucky that we held on to Stornoway because I, for one, am not all that sure we deserved it.

Many are running around with the standard, Republican-machine myth that Dion was “stabbed in the back.” That’s how the Repugs blamed away Viet Nam and it’s how they’re trying to rid themselves of responsibility for everything from Iraq to Wall Street to Afghanistan.

Steph didn’t need anyone to stab him in the back. He was too busy committing Seppuku all on his own.

We entrusted Mr. Dion to lead the party into the next election. That’s something of a blank cheque – so long as you win and not a month longer. He was the leader and a lot of us, me included, made that so.

But, in taking on that authority (power he’d asked all of us to entrust to him), Mr. Dion took on a heavy burden of obligation. We weren’t saying to him to lead us but to lead us back to power, to government. We trusted Stephane Dion to do the math and steer our party onto the path back.

Mr. Dion accepted that undertaking and he failed us. Yes, he failed us. As reported in today’s Toronto Star, Dion was warned by the party’s pollster – seven weeks before the election – that a green shift campaign would backfire. It would bring us down. It would cost us seats. I don’t need to tell you what he did. We all watched what followed.

You Dionistas act as though this is of no moment. Anything but. Rarely do we get the opportunity to judge the qualities of our own candidate as we did this time. And yet the closer we looked at him, the less there was to support.

Leaving the Green Shift out of this entirely, Dion showed he wasn’t fit to lead when he vacillated, prevaricated and. finally, capitulated on Afghanistan. No one who had read his early pronouncements and then witnessed his awful retreat from them could help but see the limits of Mr. Dion’s integrity.

You know, there’s a reason why the Liberal Party became known as Canada’s Natural Governing Party. That’s because the party was once a party of Keith Davey liberals who knew that retaining power was the only path to gradual but effective reform.

The LPC and the Canadian voter once shared a common chord. I think Mr. Dion tried and failed to contact that populace. At the end of the day, he allowed “Liberals” to become seen as outsiders.

I believe Stephane Dion may have damaged the Liberal Party more than we’ll know for a year or two to come. That’s the way these things go. But, in the meantime, both sides need to put the finger pointing and condemnation away and get on with the job of rebuilding what we both ultimately want. The party needs all of us to, for a while, put it first.

Forget Acorn and a few workers who made up false voter registrations. The operative word is a “few.” Here’s a BBC News account by Greg Palast showing how Republicans are working overtime to steal the 2008 election

And this is supposed to be the “greatest democracy” on the planet? Maybe it should work on making itself just an ordinary democracy again.

This is nothing short of obscene. Despite pillaging the American taxpayers for more than a trillion dollars in bailouts, Wall Street still plans to pay out $70-billion in pay deals, including bonuses, to its top personnel.

Read the disgusting details in The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/executivesalaries-banking

This is a glass half full sort of story, the kind you don’t see on this blog very often. Here’s the premise – maybe a South Asian Cold War wouldn’t be all that bad.

Pakistan is in a shambles. It needs a big power patron to get it through the tough times it’s now in. The US has already gone with India and has now fallen into its own economic abyss. Maybe we’d all be better off if China stepped in.

Just how bad are things in Pakistan today? That’s pretty much answered in today’s Guardian:

…A special session of parliament called by the government to forge a political consensus on the “war on terror” has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and Nato rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.

…Critics of the government, which is led by controversial president Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is “on the edge”. A US official was quoted summing up the assessment as “no money, no energy, no government“.

The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts fear, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively religious curriculum. Inflation is running at 25%, or up to 100% for many staple food items, and unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30% of its value so far this year.

“The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute,” said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister.

“It’s not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred,” he said.

“The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that,” said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition. “At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People’s party.”

Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. “They [the US] are showing a lot more flexibility on their side of the border,” said Khurram Dastagir, a member of parliament for Sharif’s party. “The US are trying to externalise their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us.”

The rising spread of anti-American and anti-NATO anger among the Pakistani people and their leaders is bloody awful for those of us with troops stuck in next door Afghanistan. It seems that the more we push Pakistan, the worse our position becomes.

So, it’s becoming painfully clear that we really can’t deal with Pakistan and we’d be fools to keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we’d all be better off with Pakistan stabilized under Chinese hegemony. At least we know we have some ability to deal with the Chinese.

Don’t get angry about this, it’s our own damned fault. Back in the days of Bush I, we came to treat the end of the Cold War as the end of our problems. We refused to see the obvious, that the decline of Soviet hegemony would actually make the world a more dangerous place, spawning a whole nest of failed and rogue states.

There was an enormous opportunity to create a Marshall Plan for the most critical Third World states to stabilize them politically and economically but it was a window of opportunity that we neglected. If you don’t understand that, look at Afghanistan. There was an enormous opportunity but no one was in the mood to commit the vast resources it would have taken to promote such an initiative, and so we let too much slide and we’re paying for that today.

Maybe a return to Cold War hegemony wouldn’t be entirely bad. For starters, it’s already underway, it’s happening whether we like it or not. Powerful nations inevitably seek to establish spheres of influence in their neighbouring states. We take ours for granted but imagine what Washington would do if it found Russian weaponry deployed along the Rio Grande?

As China borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan it has an inevitable vested interest in the spread of its sphere of influence into these countries. Likewise Russia has a strategic interest in maintaining its sphere of influence in the Cacasus and Eastern Europe. That doesn’t mean subjugation as much as co-operation and doing what’s necessary to achieve stability in these regions.

Maybe it’s time we stopped running around trying to poke rivals in the eye with a sharp stick. It might be time to work with the Chinese to see if they can accomplish in Pakistan what we can’t achieve. That might mean handing over a hunk of geo-political interest but that much seems inevitable in any case so perhaps we ought to see what we can get for it through negotiation first.