While here, between accomplishing some outside chores in the 90+F (32+C) heat and matching humidity, I dash in to the air-conditioned comfort of the house for a break periodically. I flip the TV on to check on the local news, weather, etc. Typically, the ads on TV here are mainly promoting the wonder drug du jour to fix your restless leg, fungus-infected toe nail or limp penis. To my surprise (?) the past couple of days the local television station has been running nearly non-stop advertisements for the "Gun and Knife Show"that is to be held this weekend. Please note how they cater to the "ladies."
Meanwhile, back in the American heartland, in the shining city on a hill, there is good news as the the latest minimum wage increase kicked in last week. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 per hour (about $15,000 a year based on a 40 hr week) Of course some states don't even have minimum wage laws. About 13 percent of the population of the United States lives below the poverty line (set in 2001 at $18,000/year for a family of four).
There are about 45 million americans without health insurance of any kind and millions more with wholly inadequate insurance. Kids are dying of toothache because their family doesn't have the money to take them to a doctor. The current health care proposal in front of congress now is estimated to cost $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over the next ten years and some people oppose it because it would be funded by a one percent increase in income taxes for people making more than $200,000 a year. That's in addition to the roughly 3% income tax hike Obama already has proposed for the top tax bracket, bringing their tax rate to 38%.
Handing over 38% of your taxable income to the government sounds like a lot until I see stories like this:
Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year -- including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees -- despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. (snip) Wall Street has shown little sign of slowing down the pay train this year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley recently disclosed that they have set aside $11 billion and $6 billion in compensation and benefits, respectively, for their employees so far this year. Goldman's second quarter was among its best ever. Morgan Stanley lost money for its third straight quarter.Goldman and Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the report.Meanwhile, some big banks that received government bailouts, including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., are offering handsome pay packages to lure stars. Citigroup -- which received about 25% of the aid going to the nine banks -- has the No. 1 pay recipient. Andrew Hall, who heads Citigroup's energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, received $98.9 million in 2008, according to a government official. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, by comparison, received more than $38 million last year."
Poor Vikram, he's the CEO and he has to struggle along on a paltry $38 million a year.
The U.S. government in the past year has spent about $1.8 trillion on bailing out and proping up the banking industry: $31.1 billion on bank takeovers, $117.9 billion on bailing out AIG, $1.4 trillion on Fed financial rescue efforts including the Bear Stearns bailout effort, $40 on the capital investment in Citigroup and Bank of America, $20.4 billion on the Capital Purchase Program to bail out banks, and another $5 billion in assest guarantees for BoA and Citi. This is money spent, not just money committed or earmarked for bailout programs - those numbers are even higher. And it doesn't include the more than $1 trillion spent on the GM bailout or the stimulus plan or the money spent on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and mortage relief for homeowner facing foreclose. Nope, that $1.8 trillion is just what has been forked over to shore up the banking industry. (figures from here)
People often wonder why the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were so brutal. How could ordinary French peasants and townsfolk cheer to see people they formerly respected as their "social betters" being marched to guillotine? How could the Bolsheviks be so hardhearted as to machine-gun to death the Tsar and his family, even the young children?
The idea that we could produce self-sufficiency in hydro-electric power gets whacked?
Stunning.
Except, as our own Alison explains, it had diddly squat to do with self-sufficiency.
Oh yes, you thought "run-of-river" hydro power was a little flume-stock on a creek. Not likely. This is a major dam, on a major river, and if they don't get the water they need, they hold it back.
The graphic above is a run-of-river project. Omigod! That looks like a dam!
Petey "Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates" MacKay was making bold with his announcement of 50, that's right count 'em, fifty ships to be built in Canada by the Canadian shipbuilding industry.
Canada's shipbuilders have agreed to a radical change in the way contracts will be doled out by the federal government.
Good. Because the current system, the one streamlined by the Harper government, quite frankly, sucks. The Harper government has cancelled or shelved every single ship procurement contract on the books and have seriously jeopardized the frigate mid-life modernization.
The government plans to spend $40 billion over the next 30 years to build as many as 50 large ships, in addition to 70 ships under 1,000 tonnes that have been earmarked for revamps.
Let's start with the "50 large" number. On the shelf are naval requirements for three Joint Support Ships and six to eight Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels. That's it. The former project was cancelled and the latter is on hold after being seriously watered down. (Let's not play the eight number. If these things ever materialize, six will be the maximum number.)
There are no other actual new construction projects in play - not even on hold.
The Coast Guard Mid-Shore Patrol Vessel project and Off-Shore Fisheries Research Vessel project were both dropped at the same time as the Navy's JSS project. You might not have heard it because it was mumbled out of the side of some boffin's mouth. Whether these are included in the "50" raises a question. The proposed size of the MSPV (37 - 42) meters sounds very much like an under-1000 tonner to me. It doesn't qualify under MacKay's announcement. And nobody really knows if the OFRV was larger or just another version of the MSPV. Let's pretend that it was intended to be over 1000 tonnes.
That makes 11 total possible ships with project status, even though the Harper government dropped all of them. (After big, loud promises to build them and, yes, even more!)
Now let's look at another number. The "30" years.
That presumes that the same government will be in power for the next 30 years because, as anyone in the ship procurement business can tell you, when governments change, so do plans.
The Harper Conservatives have a best-before-date that won't give them 30 more weeks without having to go to the voters and the shipbuilders know that.
"There is going to be enough work with 50 ships on order for every shipyard in the country to be going full steam, and that's good news in terms of the economy," said Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
I'm calling bullshit on MacKay. There will never be 50 ships on order. MacKay is playing with words and numbers that would make a dishonest accountant blush. Notice, the absence of "over 30 years" in his pronouncement.
... a new process that theoretically will allow the government to pick and choose in a more direct way which Canadian shipyards will build which ships. The agreement is meant to end the often intense bickering that has killed some government contracts.
Which is hardly the "conservative" way. What happened to the good old conservative maxim of "let the market reign"? This sounds like government controlled, government subsidized shipyards.
The agreement itself still requires scores of questions to be answered and many details to be ironed out.
Bingo! And one of the details is, what happens Peter, old boy, when you get turfed out of office and the "50" number changes? What happens if over 30 years requirements change?
Enact legislation making it mandatory? Give it a try.
Alan Williams, former head of procurement for the Defence Department, called the deal historic.
"I think the notion for revisiting the government's shipbuilding policy makes good sense," he said.
However, he added that if the program is not managed properly it could become a disaster. He said the government needs to make the process transparent to ensure that tax dollars are spent wisely.
That seals the fate of any deal with Harper's hillbilly government. I shouldn't have to say this, but if I were a shipbuilding company or a head of procurement basing a decision on the need for good management, one look at the Harper government track record would send shivers down the spine of any rational individual.
It would be too limiting to call this announcement nothing but smoke and mirrors. It is, in actual fact, complete bullshit and MacKay is an empty shirt.
THE NEW YORK TIMES has a very interesting article by Benedict Carey, "In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable". It's a look at the experiences of the U.S. Army and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how a small segment of them are much more adept at finding and avoiding IED's and ambushes.
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
So, now, they're trying to find out more:
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.
Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.
Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.
• • • • •
The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.
As reports of gratuitous TASER™ abuse by police pile up daily, here at The Beav we are pleased to provide this handy template to the media for all future TASER™ stories :
Officers who used a Taser on a ___ in a ___ found out only later he was ____ and didn't understand ____, police said Tuesday. A spokesman for the Police Department said the officers' actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon -- a ____
In this story the blanks featured "man", "store bathroom where he worked", "deaf and mentally disabled", "what they wanted him to do" and "umbrella".
Previous options have included : Blank A : new immigrant, young woman, 83 year old man, fare dodger, handcuffed child. Blank B : airport, wedding party, hospital bed, Skytrain, jail cell Blank C : distraught, pregnant, ill with pneumonia, mentally disabled, terrified Blank D : English, what was being asked of them, ditto, ditto, ditto Blank E : stapler, nothing, 3" knife, nothing, nothing.
There is apparently almost no situation that can't be further fucked up by a little escalation of farce. At Taser International's annual bunfest this month, CEO Rick Smith explained:
"We are the new technology – it's splashy because of the electricity, you can make it scary."
Somehow?! Stewart did it with maneouvre and exceptional skill. Kristol was, as usual, totally unarmed and unable to defend his ridiculous position.
Ridiculous? Yeah. Because if any American believes, based on the ruminations of the likes of a highly priviledged William Kristol, that single-payer health care doesn't deliver is listening to the wrong people.
Stewart didn't go where others had gone and attempt to defend the eleven different systems that exist under the Canadian scheme of health care. No, he took a road closer to home and pointed at the US, government-operated, military health care system. He dangled it in front of Kristol who was only too happy bite... until he realized there was a gigantic barbed hook attached and Stewart was ripping his gill plates out.
“So no public option, even though that’s good enough for the military — not good enough for the people of America?” Stewart asked.
“They do not deserve the same quality of health care the soldiers fighting deserve, and they [the soldiers] need all kinds of things we don’t need,” Kristol said.
“Are you saying that the American public shouldn’t have access to the same quality of health care that we give to our better citizens?” Stewart asked.
“To our soldiers? Yes, absolutely,” Kristol responded, to a chorus of boos from the audience.
An incredulous Stewart asked: “Really?”
Moments later, Kristol added that “one of the ways we make it up” to soldiers that they receive relatively low pay is by “giving them first class health care. The rest of us can go out and buy insurance.”
That’s when Stewart struck.
“Bill Kristol just said … that the government can run a first-class health care system and a government-run health care system is better than the private health care system.”
“You trapped me somehow,” a visibly uncomfortable Kristol responded.
Little Kory sees an election being triggered this Fall. He's looked at the polling numbers and the "best scenario" stuff. He's been the front-man for a series of attack ads which have put this country into an endless election campaign. Canadians see the Conservatives as a pack of mean-spirited, lying, pricks who are unable to restrain themselves - even on the international stage.
Kory figures, one way or the other, he's going to lose his job before Christmas.
Better to tell lies for the ethanol producers and the oil industry.
Right now, in British Columbia, it's hotter than the right element of my barbeque. When the temperature difference in Victoria is a mere 2 degrees C lower than a typically hot Kamloops, things are cooking. In fact, inland Vancouver Island is actually hotter at the time of writing than the BC southern interior.
Not that such a thing indicates anything truly abnormal. Meteorologically, this is a spot condition brought on by the existence of a strong high pressure ridge. Using this "heat wave" (by definition it doesn't yet qualify) as evidence of anything except a short term met anomaly would be wrong and, more extensively, dishonest.
If I were to engage in the typical head-in-the-sand, dumb-ass Rex Murphy approach, I could blast away that the ability to grease the sidewalk and fry an egg, in a place where that would usually be impossible, is proof of global warming. It isn't.
Meteorology differs from climatology in a number of different ways but, since I am rather involved in both, an easy demonstration is to look at the length of forecast.
To a meteorologist five days is a long time and the sustainability of a long-range forecast is difficult. Too much changes too fast to achieve a high level of accuracy over that "long term".
To a climatologist, three months is a very short time. Too short a time, in fact, on which to base any assumptions or arrive at any conclusions. Three years is better and a solid gauge is three centuries of data from which one might be able to forecast the next 20 years. That would be an ideal situation - if we could afford the time. The truth is, in terms of good data and verification of climate models, we have about 20 years worth of model hindcasting with which to make forecasts.
Stupidity enters the picture when some climate denier (self-labelled "skeptics") puts a finger on any given point of a climate model result and says "That didn't happen." True enough, but that's a "user" view of a weather forecast. Take a step back and look at the longer model result and the accuracy is remarkable. Further, when one of these clowns points at a model forecast "spike" event which occured either later or sooner than forecast they commit a heinous sin - they ignore the obvious trend which is a consistent rise in global temperature and the fact that, while the model might have gotten the precise date wrong, the event actually did occur.
This video, produced by Peter Sinclair provides information on the how and when of one particular model.
The problem of the swatting off of climate deniers is further exacerbated by their pointing at one portion of a larger event. The latest one being that "Arctic ice is increasing; not decreasing". That's cherry-picking of the highest order. The truth is quite different and the scientists explain.
Things become even more egregious when complete knobs like Mark Steyn enter the debate. Instead of anything resembling research or, for that matter, the lay reading of the research of others, Steyn offers this bit of dross.
Lowell Ponte (who I believe is an expert climatologist and, therefore, should have been heeded) wrote his bestseller, The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?
Yeah, well, as Paul Wells will happily point out, Steyn is "fact challenged" on almost any subject you want to name. But to suggest Lowell Ponte is an "expert climatologist" is a demonstration of where Steyn belongs when it comes to discussions on anthropogenic induced global warming: back in school. Lowell Ponte has never published anything scientific in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Anything. That's because he's not a scientist. His formal education is in English and Journalism with an equivalent in International Relations. For Steyn to suggest otherwise is either just plain dishonest or, (and I tend towards this), he's just plain too stupid and too lazy to actually check facts.
Steyn then goes on to quote University of Adelaide professor, Ian Pilmer. That's nice. I like Pilmer, in an abstract sort of way. He's probably an excellent geologist. His contribution to climate change research is considerably less collaborative than those closer to the coal face and his criticism of climate models brought a sharp rebuke from the scientific community at large. His suggestion that natural forces were not included in models is quite frankly not true. The first video above demonstrates that.
Enough of Steyn though. The prince of the deniers is Anthony Watts who created his surfacestations survey. What Watt's never tells you is that his supposedly damning survey actually has climate collection data from surface stations falling within the NOAA margin of error. A video was produced which essentially annihilated Watts' digital-camera theory and lo-and-behold, Watts executes a DMCA take-down.
Well, the video must have been really on target -- it stung Anthony Watts so badly that he initiated a DMCA "takedown" action and got the "Watts Up With Watts" video removed from youtube.com!
That's an assumption, but one can see how it is easily made.
So, no, this little spell of hot weather doesn't prove anything... except that it's hot at the moment. This, however, is something I watch closely. And despite the warped station data mythology issued by the likes of Watts, the data collection is carried out by satellites and ocean buoys. (I'm sure someone will produce a picture of an air conditioner exhausting onto a few of those eventually.)
Still, it should be fun to sit in the local Tim Horton's and listen to all the ball-cap and mullet festooned idiots who were pointing at last winter's snowfall as proof of global cooling attempt to explain why, on the northwest sea coast, the air conditioning can't keep up with the heat.
A little point: All these journalists and out-of-field contributors to the community of vocal deniers of scientific research need to get a definition straight. They are climate deniers - not skeptics. I am a skeptic. I expect several points of proof before I will allow myself to be sent down a road, and I always accept that I may encounter a dead end - when another bona fide researcher produces it. Attempting to gentrify your position only serves to strengthen mine given that you think denying the effects of global warming is somehow shameful. Wear it with pride and continue to believe - even if your heroes knew better and were intentionally lying to you.
When the Border Commissions of Cyril Radcliffe decided on the border between Pakistan and India in 1947, he and his group of lawyers proceeded in true British colonial fashion - without a thought or care for the actual outcome.
The commission was comprised of lawyers, not boundary experts; the commission took no consultation from any previous boundary exercise; the commission had no survey information on which to base their final decision. Radcliffe had never even been to India before and, after finding the climate a bit tough, rushed to a decision in order to scurry back to England. Before he left, he destroyed all papers which might have provided a historical look into the considerations (if there were any) which led to the final lines drawn on the map.
In the end, one border crossing existed between Pakistan and India, at Wagah. The Grand Trunk Road passes through the village which is split by the border and is the only road crossing between the two countries.
Hostilities exist between India and Pakistan today. There are frequent border skirmishes and incessant nuclear sabre-rattling.
And there is a ceremony at Wagah. Something which demonstrates the animosity... right until the end, when a small bit of humanity creeps in.
It's a great book with a look at US militarism and global monetary manipulation and their repercussions both at home and abroad. The author's explanation and history of the Pentagon's influence on US government policies is eye-opening for the those not familiar in the ways of Washington. Written in 2004, some of his references are uncanny in their relevance today.
Some excerpts follow as a teaser for you:
After the 1992 election, Cheney left the Defense Department, and between 1995 and 2000 he was the chief executive officer of Halliburton. Under his leadership, Brown & Root took in $2.3 billion in government contracts, almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before Cheney arrived. Halliburton rebuilt Saddam Hussein's war-damaged oil fields for some $23.8 million, even though Cheney, secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, had been instrumental in destroying them. By 1999, Halliburton had become the biggest nonunion employer in the United States, although Wal-Mart soon replaced it. Cheney also appointed Dave Gibben, his chief of staff when he was at the Pentagon, as one of Halliburton's leading lobbyists. In 2001, Cheney returned to Washington as vice president, and Brown & Root continued to build, maintain, and protect bases from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf.
During Cheney's term as Halliburton's CEO, the company advanced from seventy-third to eighteenth on the Pentagon's list of top contractors. Its number of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens also increased from nine to forty-four. As a result, Halliburton went from paying $302 million in company taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999.
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In other words, feed at the taxpayer's trough, but never replenish it. Perish the thought, that would be un-American! “Profit=Good, Taxes=Bad” . . . .
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Dick Cheney, Bush Senior's secretary of defense and Bush Junior's vice president, helped broker the deal, while out of office, between Chevron and Kazakhstan as a member of Kazakhstan's Oil Advisory Board. James A. Baker III, former secretary of state, mastermind of the scheme to get the Supreme Court to appoint bush Junior president in 2001, and senior partner of the Houston and Washington law firm of Baker Botts, had a hand in the negotiations. Baker's firm maintains an office in Baku staffed by five attorneys. He is a member of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce's advisory council, as is Cheney. During the 1990s the council's cochairman was Richard Armitage, a veteran administrator of the American-sponsored anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s and undersecretary of state in the second Bush administration. Brent Scowcroft, Rice's boss and mentor when he was Bush Senior's national security adviser, is a member of the board of Pennzoil, an active investor in the Caspian Sea oil consortia.
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Is anyone else seeing a pattern here? High government positions and multi-national contracts. Who woulda thunk it ? ? ? ?
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Clinton camouflaged his policies by carrying them out under the banner of “globalization.” this proved quite effective in maneuvering rich but gullible nations to do America's bidding – for example, Argentina – or in destabilizing potential rivals – for example, South Korea and Indonesia in the 1997 economic crisis – or in protecting domestic economic interests – for example, in maintaining the exorbitant prices of American pharmaceutical companies under cover of defending “intellectual property rights.” During the 1990s, the rationales of free trade and capitalist economics were used to disguise America's hegemonic power and make it seem benign or, at least, natural and unavoidable. The main agents of this imperialism were Clinton's secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy (today, president of Harvard University), Lawrence Summers. The United States ruled the world but did so in a carefully masked way that produced high degrees of acquiescence among the dominated nations.
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Now where have we heard those last two names? Oh yeah, I know: Rubin was also a former Goldman Sachs and Citigroup big wheel and advisor to the current US president on the economic crisis, and Summers is actually a member of the current administration. Great how this is working out so far . . . .
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Starting in approximately 1981, the United States introduced, under the cover of globalization, a new strategy intended to accomplish two major goals: first, to discredit state-assisted capitalism like Japan's and prevent its spread to any countries other than the East Asian NICs, which had already industrialized by following the Japanese model; and second, to weaken the sovereignty of Third world nations so that they would become even more dependent on the largesse of the advanced capitalist nations and unable to organize themselves as a power bloc to negotiate equitable with the rich countries.
The United States's chosen instruments for putting this strategy into effect were the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank and the IMF were created after World War II to manage the international economy and prevent a recurrence of the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s. What has to be understood is that both the fund and the bank are actually surrogates for the U.S. Treasury. They are both located at 19th and H Streets, Northwest, in Washington, DC, and their voting rules ensure that they can do nothing without the approval of the secretary of the Treasury. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson compares the IMF to the famous dog in the RCA advertisements listening to “his master's voice” - the Treasury – on a Victrola.
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Appears to be a bit incestuous, don't you think? Probably not too much of a problem, though. These guys are trustworthy, or they wouldn't be in these positions, right ? ? ? ?
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Thus was born the weird phenomenon of “moral hazard,” meaning American bankers could make outrageously irresponsible loans without any risk of having to absorb the loss or make good the money they had mismanaged. Before it was over, the 1970s loan bonanza produced a disaster of exactly the sort Keynes and the reformers at the end of World War II had sought to avoid. Virtually every country in Africa and Latin America was deeply in debt. In August 1982, Jesus Silva Herzog, the Mexican minister of finance, announced that his country was bankrupt and would no longer be able to pay interest on any of its loans. Just as the bankers had assumed, the U.S. Government stepped in – not to save Mexico but to ensure that American banks did not collapse. At no time, then or later, did our government suggest that the people who made the bad loans bore some responsibility for the results.
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Well, golly gee whiz. Where have we heard that tune before? Perhaps during the end of the bush regime and now at the beginning of the new one? One would think that learning by past mistakes would be a no-brainer, but I guess not . . . .
(Remember this book was written in 2004, not 2009.)
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The United States was the architect of and main profiteer from these efforts. From 1991 to 1993, Lawrence Summers was the chief economist at the World Bank and the man who oversaw the tailoring of “austerity measures” to each country that needed a loan. He decided exactly what a country had that Washington wanted to open up. On December 12, 1991, Summers became notorious for a leaked memo to senior officials of the bank encouraging polluting industries in the rich nations to relocate to the less developed countries. He wrote, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Brazil's secretary of environment, Jose Lutzenburger replied, “The best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.”
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There's that Summers guy's name again. What's he doing nowadays? Oh yeah, he's currently the Director of the White House's National Economic Council. This oughta work out just great . . . .
As my friends hear me say on a semi-regular basis:
“We're doomed! Doomed!”
Get the book or check it out at your local library like I did.
ONCE UPON A TIME, starting in the mid 30's, five Cambridge students were recruited by the NKVD: H.A.R. (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt. They were amazing, unique characters living in an amazing, unique era, when "isms were wasms", and loyalties were passionate, and they came to be known, once their treason had been discovered as The Cambridge Five.
It is now 25 years since Anthony Blunt's death, and the British Library has released a 30,000 word memoir, written by Blunt as a somewhat evasive apology.
Blunt wrote the 30,000-word document after former prime minister Margaret Thatcher exposed his treachery in 1979.
The revelations had led to a man who had worked as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures being stripped of his knighthood.
His version of events was given to the library in 1984, the year after his death, on condition that it was not displayed for 25 years.
In it, he describes his recruitment by Moscow: "I found that Cambridge had been hit by Marxism and that most of my friends among my junior contemporaries - including Guy Burgess - had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it politically."
The most interesting thing to my mind, is the complete lack of detail on his WW2 activities, both in his memoir, and in the literature about the Cambridge Five. Why? Some sources have stated that in May-June 1945, immediately after the German capitulation, Blunt went into Germany at the behest of the Royal family to obtain "documents" that would confirm Eddie the 8th's (and Wallie's) treasonous dealings with the Nazis, after his abdication, when they moved to France, and later, Portugal.
Thus, some contend, as a result of pulling the Windsors' chestnuts out of the fire, the Intelligence establishment refrained from any punitive action, when his treason came to their attention, probably in the late 50's, as a follow-up to inquiries about Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
Will we ever know? Probably not. Some interesting Cabinet papers do exist in the UK, but they have "Do Not Open Until" — dates vary, like 2020+. Oh well, we've got CSIS (Can't See Intelligent Solutions) to keep us entertained, so time will pass.
Give everyone a 30 leave and wait for summer to cool. Then come back and start over.
Last week a French Foreign Legion unit stationed at Carpaigne near the southern French port of Marseille was conducting a live-fire exercise and let loose a few tracer rounds into a forested area around the camp. The problem was, the forest fire hazard level was "extreme".
French soldiers have been branded "imbeciles" for firing shells into parched woodland - and sparking a massive forest blaze that threatened up to 1000 homes.
The Foreign Legion unit started one of the worst fires in recent years when it blasted tracer ammunition into tinder dry trees at their base near Marseille.
At about the same time, the Russian Navy was preparing to celebrate Navy Day in the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. Things didn't go quite as well as hoped.
A missile fired from a military vessel during a Navy Day parade rehearsal has hit an apartment block in the Far Eastern city of Vladivistok, Russia.
News agencies said the missile hit a nine-storey block of flats in Leonova Street, but that noone was injured. Other reports said the missile fell a meter short of the building, leaving a wide crater on the ground and breaking the windows of the ground floor apartments.
In the profession of arms, shit happens. Usually because someone executed a really stupid idea.
Abousfian Abdelrazik spoke out this morning about his exile, his torture, the false charges against him, the harrassment of his dying Canadian wife and her family by CSIS before he returned to Sudan to care for his ailing mother in 2003. . He could identify by sight, he told us, the Canadian agents who questioned him while he was in captivity in Sudan, including the one who told him "Sudan will be your Guantanamo" and that he was never coming home. He describes being interrogated in Sudan in 2008 by Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary Deepak Obhrai, who questioned him about Osama bin Laden and what he thought of Israel. . I watched it on tv. Paul Koring, Dr. Dawg, and Kady were there. .
There's a sense in which this case is more important than that of Maher Arar in terms of how Canadians, at least Muslim Canadians, can expect to be treated by our government, and whether CSIS can legitimately be said to be under anyone's control any more. There was no US middleman here, no wiggle room in which Canadian intelligence agencies could claim to have been overpowered or misled or shut out of the proceedings by US security forces. This one is all ours. . In the meantime, Abdelrazik is still on that 1267 UN blacklist : he cannot work, he cannot receive money or medical attention, he cannot fly, he cannot receive gifts. He is currently an exile in Canada. .
UPDATE : "NDP foreign-affairs critic Paul Dewar called on the government to launch a public inquiry even more far reaching than the judicial probe into the imprisonment and torture in Syria of Maher Arar. ... there was no middle man," Dewar said.
Riding home from work, I was listening to the lawyer of alleged disgraced moneyjuggler Earl Jones, discussing how Jones has been in Canada for 10 days, how he is suicidal, depressed, and afraid of being attacked or killed.
What I did not hear was anyone else stating, much less proving, that Jones is in fact in Canada, or even alive. I found the horrible denouement of the Hammett novel "The Thin Man" rising in my consciousness like a body out of a lake.
So, I will listen with interest to what happens next, hoping no-one has to dig up the cellar floor.
Tobacco Smoke Enema (1750s-1810s) The tobacco enema was used to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient’s rectum for various medical purposes, primarily the resuscitation of drowning victims. A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a fumigator and bellows that forced the smoke towards the rectum. The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase “blow smoke up one’s ass.”
The report of the inquiry into the listeriosis outbreak last year is slowly working its way to the streets. The way the initial "leak" is being reported by CTV it would give you the impression that food inspection had always been deficient in Canada.
That impression would be wrong.
Food inspection and the safety of the food supply was a responsibility of the federal government which was dumped as a part of the ideological shift imposed by the Harper government. Those who died or became ill were the collateral damage of the Harper push to get rid of government.
In order to understand that, you need some context. Right here.
THE WASHINGTON POST has a disturbing article by Blaine Harden on the giant Gulag system that has been operating for some fifty years in Socialist Wonderland.
A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.
The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors' stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show.
If this were a real emergency, it would look more like a nail gun.
Basically, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under the US Department of Homeland Security, will be carrying out a top level national exercise (now known as a tier 1 exercise) to test intelligence and information sharing among various federal, state, county and other agencies, presumably right down to publicly employed dog-catchers.
As big a deal as this may appear, these things are paper exercises with an operational function added. In short, local command centres will be activated to see if they... you know... work. Once it's over, all the stuff goes back into the container until the batteries die in the portable radios and the emergency water bottles go dry.
NLE 09 will be an operations-based exercise to include: activities taking place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and potential field locations to include federal headquarters facilities in the Washington D.C. area, and in federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in FEMA Region VI, which includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
Note: Of the areas included, neither Arizona nor Alaska are involved. Those states are in FEMA regions IX and X respectively. This exercise is taking place in region IV.
That little fact, however, didn't stop the wingnuts from crawling out of their sandholes. The Arizona Citizens Militia gives this exercise in paper shuffling and "can you hear me now" production the Michelle Malkin treatment - along with a suprising connection.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has announced that she will leave office on 26 July 2009, one day before the start of the FEMA National Level Exercise 2009
Because, according to this group of "concerned" citizens, she knows what is going to happen. According to the group, which offers Alphie Omega training (no shit!), Palin knows that she was going to be rounded up and put into a concentration camp with all the other wingnuts on 27 July.
It gets better.
Canada, having an obvious surfeit of combat troops laying around doing nothing except dreaming about their next rotation to sunny Afghanistan, is apparently involved.
The Obamunist White House has directed that armed Canadian, Australian, British, and mexican troops will be on our streets.
Do we need passports, or will an enhanced driver's licence do the trick? And really... Mexico is capitalized; so is Mexican.
Apparently the Arizona Citizens Militia will upgrade to "ribbon" status right after work this coming Friday. That should give them enough time to down a half-dozen chili beers before the spouses start lighting up the cell-phone system with advice that "Dinner is now being kept warm in the oven. And dinner was a green salad."
The wealth of fun at the ACM site is almost too much to handle. The Yosemite Sam quote did me in. And I've got a busy week ahead.
You may have read it here first, but I read it at Jesus' General.
Once again, Bill Moyers of PBS puts current events in their respective places.
His essay this weekwas on the winners and losers in the debate over US health care "reform."
If anyone has doubts that there will be substantial "reform" I'm with 'ya. There is WAY too much $$ involved on the corporate side to allow it. That $$ funnelled to elected "representative's" political campaign funds was and is not $$ wasted. Politicians know it, lobbyists know it, political "talking heads" know it and the for-profit health industry knows it.
So why does the MSM continue to report the story like there is actually a snowball's chance in hell of "reform"? Probably the same reason they:
Insisted there were meaningful debates during the presidential campaign; Had wall to wall coverage of Michael Jackson's death; Cover Britney Spears' lastest breakdown ad nauseum; Convince everyone to run for cover from swine flu H1N1; Warn that professional sports is coming to an end due to steroid use by the athletes; Blah, blah, blah, blah blah.*
It all boils down to ratings/commercial ad rates which - as is the case with the for-profit health industy - means profit$.
They're all playin' for the same team.
Wanna know who the losers are gonna be in this "debate"?
Look around. Unless you're in the corporate boardroom, you are . . . .
*(As a side note, can you imagineWalter Crokitereporting on MJ's funeral or BS' breakdowns in any way, shape or form? Nah, me neither . . . . )
Frankly I think the Onion headline understates it.
40 years ago, June 20, 1969, humans walked on the Moon. The MOON. Maybe you've seen it? Big yellow thing in the sky? said to hit your eye like a big pizza pie? Yeah, that thing. As a species, we've been there and done that. We went to The Moon.
In the history of human endevour, that is still the big one, our greatest technological achievement. Seriously, the Pyramids - mere sandcastles. The artificial heart - a bit of biomechanical clockwork. Splitting the atom - okay, impressive and dangerous, but also some pretty nasty side effects. The computer and the internet - yeah, just like the human brain, 90% of it is used for porn. Cracking the code and mapping human DNA is going to be a bigger and bigger deal as time goes by, but if you told DaVinci or Newton or Galileo about it, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. If you told them "Len, Issac, Gal - we went to the moon" they would be all "no way! that's fucking amazing! Holy crap, wait until we tell the Pope - he'll freak out!"
I don't mean to disparage the early astronauts: Guys like Yuri Gagarin and the Right Stuff boys were beyond brave - early space travel was a dicey business that involved getting shot into the sky in a box built by the lowest bidders - or the astronauts currently living in the International Space Station, who are still a long way from home. Manned satellites are going to become more and more common and the zero gravity/vacuum enviroment has enormous industrial and scientific potential. But we're talking about the difference between sailing up and down the coast and sailing across the ocean. In orbit, you go round and round the Earth, the Apollo 11 boys actually went someplace. I feel sorrier for Michael Collins than just about anyone - imagine going all that way and having to wait in the car.
All the reasons people invariably give for opposing space exploration - it's too expensive, it's a "waste" of resources, more pressing problems on the ground - are all reasons to go to space. Space exploration costs a fraction of what is spent on the military. The money spent in Iraq probably would have bankrolled a Mars colony. This rock we live on is eventually going to run out of resources, no matter how careful we are. We will eventually use up all the oil, all the iron, all the water - you name it we will run out of it sooner or later, including real estate and elbow room- so we better get out there and find some more. A lot of those more pressing problems are likely to be solved by technological development driven by space exploration and colonization - and if they can't be, it might be nice if humanity had a lifeboat.
40 years ago, we finally proved we didn't need to keep all of humanity's eggs in one increasingly fragile basket. Why no further progress has really been made is anyone's guess. Financial costs have a lot to do with it, but NASA is the rare government effort that has actually made money (You think all those communication satellites were put in orbit for free?). The only reason we don't have permanent manned bases on the moon, launching manned missions to Mars is a lack of political will. We could have done it by the mid 80s or at least the mid 90s if we as a species hadn't been busy squandering money on ways to exterminate ourselves via the nuclear arms race.
So we went to the Moon and all we got was this lousy, soon-to-be-shut-down space shuttle program and the nobody seems that interested in going back at the moment except the Indians and Chinese. We left behind some probes and a couple of golf balls and and worst of all, a plaque with Richard Nixon's name on it. We should at least go back to clean up that kind of embarrasing shit.
There are even people out there whacked out enough to think that Capricorn One was based on a true story and that we never landed on the moon. Their tiny minds just can't handle the idea that his is something humans could have done. I think Buzz "the second man on the moon" Aldrin deals with such critics in the most appropriate way.
Toronto Star Public Editor, Kathy English, presented us with a non-apology yesterday in a convoluted attempt to "clarify" the waters which she muddied when she dutifully obeyed the instructions of others and publicly disciplined Antonia Zerbisias in a drive-by hit for a comment left on Broadsides.
English got a virtual earful, from all sides, in response.
English, to put it mildly, has simply highlighted her own lack of understanding of the network medium she is unsuccessfully attempting to control and defends her position by continuing to suggest her initial shot was correct.
English, as you can see from reading the above postings, clearly doesn't get it. She had the fall of shot called on her first column and everybody called it way off target.
I don't need to add much to that, except to say that her "tone" in the latest offering suggests a high level of keyboard rage and makes clear her disdain for anybody smithing words without the benefit of a paycheck and particularly those who have not earned their stripes in the "Toronto School".
I could fire back with two words, which English would dismiss as evidence supporting her current view. So, I'll say this: We are your readers, Ms. English.
The "new media" and the bloggers English decided to castigate are the same people that used to sit around the kitchen table bitching about things read in newspapers and whose only recourse was to submit a letter to the very organ and editor with whom they took issue.
It was a one-sided arrangement that left communicative readers at the mercy of "edited for brevity" or without a voice at all. What English doesn't like is that we like this process a whole lot better. Further, because of the "new media" we are able to communicate directly with the principle subjects of stories and columns - and do. I'm sure that sends chills down the spines of newspaper editors because their worst nightmare has come true: continuous and unrelenting scrutiny, and continuous and unrelenting criticism - some of it accompanied by the language spoken around the kitchen table.
In that context, I'll add to the return fire offered by the bloggers above.
English, in defending her ambush of Zerb, said: (emphasis mine)
Here's the fuller context that explains why she wrote this: Zerbisias had seen Farber marching in the Pride parade wearing a T-shirt that said, "Nobody knows I'm gay." She didn't include that information in her blog so readers didn't know that context. Nor did she tell me that when I showed her my column before publication.
In complaining to the Star, neither did Farber think to tell me that he, along with dozens of others who marched with the Kulanu group, had worn a T-shirt that made its own ironic quip. That's context I sure wish I had known.
She didn't know that?! How much time would it have taken to find out? Within minutes of publishing her initial column, all of us were provided with the context.
Who's confusing readers now? English has admitted that her column was a knee-jerk reaction to the complaint of Canadian Jewish Congress head Bernie Farber and, instead of gathering every fact she could, she went with Farber's version of things.
She and John Cruickshank were manipulated by Farber.
As I said in an earlier post, Farber didn't like what Zerb had written in her initial post and wanted a way in. He found it; he trolled it; English and Cruickshank took the bait.
Readers deserve an apology for that. Not some doughy reproof for writing what's been said around the kitchen table.
WHEREVER HE IS, Hyman Rickover must be pleased. Admiral Rickover, U.S.N., is regarded as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy", which as of July 2007 had produced 200 nuclear-powered submarines, and 23 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and cruisers, though many of these U.S. vessels are now decommissioned and others under construction. With his leadership, the USN developed reliable and safe nuclear propulsion for water-craft — especially compared to Russian efforts.
Well, the tradition for innovation appears to continue. The USN has been quietly funding the Energy Matter Conversion Corporation, aka EMC2, which was started by the inventor of the Wiffle Ball or Polywell fusion process, the late Dr. Robert Bussard.
Why should you care?
Well, CO2 production concerns means that like it or not, fission reactors are going to pop up around the world like never before, and they are going to produce thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel.
Scientists have been chasing the holy grail of fusion power for around 50 years, without much success. Currently, Big Science, Big Government is backing a derivative of the Russian Tokamak technology, called ITER. It is the epitome of the "We Need a Bigger Hammer" approach that is the essence of big-budget physics, like CERN.
The Polywell approach is at the other end of the fusion rainbow, for energy requirements. It also offers an inherently easier way of getting usable power out of the fusion reaction, produces way less dangerous radiation — and it seems to work, which is why the USN has signed on for Version 8 of the Polywell design.
It appears that other techies are getting behind the concept. Check out Talk-Polywell.org, which is a discussion forum for Polywell fusion. There are sections on history, theory and design. Also, check out IEC Fusion Technology blog-site that also follows Polywell developments.
Why should you care (2)?
IMHO, fission reactors are a dead-end, and the ITER fusion approach is a dead-end. Canada needs clean electrical power. Compared to what AECL has spent on CANDU, we could bring the Wiffle Ball to Canada for a fraction of the cost. You may not like technology, you may not like nuclear power, but all those electric vehicles in our bright shiny happy future have to get their power from somewhere — and that's just one area of demand for electricity. Polywell devices could also allow the use of hydro rights-of-way for other uses, as a lot of power transmission lines just won't be needed.
So why does the MSM continue to report the story like there is actually a snowball's chance in hell of "reform"? Probably the same reason they:
