Why does Turkey count?

Well... to a hillbilly government led by a donkey... it doesn't.

Campbell Clark lays it all out. 

Harper is way too shallow to work in the background. That takes finesse and the willingness to know how to wield the power from a second chair. And an awareness that extends beyond the horizon of pumping asphalt to Houston.

Turkey’s growing economy hasn’t featured in Mr. Harper’s push for trade with emerging-market countries. There were exploratory talks about free trade in 2010, but none in 2011.

Because he's too much of an ideological turd to actually know here he really sits in the world. He wants to be the leader of a superpower. Parades, pictures of himself everywhere, glorification at Timmy's (not the upscale version), and adoration from the gun-tottin'  gopher shooters.

You'd think that one of the overstrengthed battalion he employs as communications staff could figure it out.

You'd be wrong.

Happy Holidays . . .

WITH AMERICAN THANKSGIVING JUST PAST, we are into the Holiday Season. Here's Ron Cobb's take from 41 years ago.

Finally...

Someone else sees exactly what I saw over a year ago.

Lawrence Martin gets it.

Added: Orwell's unclaimed child lays it out in point form. 

Six years on . . .

NAOMI KLEIN is, IMHO, one of the most lucid and prescient political analysts to be found. Six years (how time flies) ago, as the Iraq elections ground to a conclusion after the invasion, Naomi made a number of acerbic observations.

Six years later, in the light of Arab Spring and OWS, they are even more trenchant, IMHO. "The Neoliberal Project" is a reprise of a spell-binding address she gave as part of the CBC's Massey Lectures, which I cannot seem to find, unfortunately. The litany of neocon abuse is mind-boggling. Paul Bremer the Threeth, or the Bugblatter Beast — which is the stupidest?

Ottawa, we have a problem . . .

Many children are scalded and burned from living in densely overcrowded houses with makeshift wood stoves.

AND IT'S NOT GOING AWAY. According to Charlie Angus, who's the MP for Timmins-James Bay, the plight of our aboriginals on the northern Ontario reserve of Attawapiskat is intolerable. His post on Huffington Canada, "What if They Declared an Emergency and No One Came?" has a must-see video, as well. It's AOL-resident, and AOL doesn't play nice like YouTube for embedding, so check out the Huffington link to see it. I wonder who owns the new Cadillac Escalade to be seen in it? A $60K SUV could supply a lot of plumbing.

It's been three weeks since Attawapiskat First Nation took the extraordinary step of declaring a state of emergency. Since then, not a single federal or provincial official has even bothered to visit the community.

No aid agencies have stepped forward. No disaster management teams have offered help.

Meanwhile temperatures have dropped 20 degrees and will likely drop another 20 or 25 degrees further in the coming weeks. For families living in uninsulated tents, makeshift cabins and sheds, the worsening weather poses serious risk.

Two weeks ago I travelled to this community on the James Bay coast to see why conditions had become so extreme that local leaders felt compelled to declare a state of emergency. It was like stepping into a fourth world.

• • •

You'd think that a medical warning from a provincial health authority would move government into action. Think again. When it comes to the misery, suffering and even the death of First Nations people, the federal and provincial governments have developed a staggering capacity for indifference.

H/T to le grand chef Daniel

Yummy . . .

FOOD FREEDOM is an interesting site, proclaiming that people should Decentralize, Grow Your Own and Buy Local — which makes great sense. There's a report by Miriam Reimer, originally posted on The Street, "15 Food Companies that Serve You ‘Wood’". Yep, wood, like pine trees.

Chief among those concerns is the use of cellulose (wood pulp), an extender whose use in a roster of food products, from crackers and ice creams to puddings and baked goods, is now being exposed. What you’re actually paying for – and consuming – may be surprising.

Cellulose is virgin wood pulp that has been processed and manufactured to different lengths for functionality, though use of it and its variant forms (cellulose gum, powdered cellulose, microcrystalline cellulose, etc.) is deemed safe for human consumption, according to the FDA, which regulates most food industry products. The government agency sets no limit on the amount of cellulose that can be used in food products meant for human consumption.

“Most consumers would be shocked to find these types of filler products are used as substitutes for items that they believe are more pure,” Yoshikami said. “We would expect increased disclosure to follow increased use of cellulose and other filler products as the practice increases in frequency.”

Finger-lickin' good!

H/T to le grand chef Daniel

Bizarre . . .

Really. Like The Three Stooges, with sledgehammers. I feel for the cleaning staff.

Ursula comments . . .

IN THEIR CREATIONS, artists expound and explain. Io9's Charlie Jane Anders has a report that is worthy of your attention, "Ursula K. Le Guin writes a fable of Occupy Wall Street". 

If you've been wondering just what's wrong with unemployed people, and why they won't just go get a job, then Ursula K. Le Guin has some answers for you. In the time-honored tradition of fantasists and fabulists, she's phrased her answers in the form of a fable, "Ninety Nine Weeks: A Fairy Tale".

Grow op . . .

SEEMS TO BE A GROWTH INDUSTRY. According to Spencer Ackerman at WIRED, in an article, "Pentagon’s War on Drugs Goes Mercenary", now the Pentagon is joining the DEA in the "War on Drugs", in a BIG way:

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.

The sprawling contract, ostensibly designed to stop drug-funded terrorism, seeks security firms for missions like “train[ing] Azerbaijan Naval Commandos.” Other tasks include providing Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopter training “for crew members of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.” Still others involve building “anti-terrorism/force protection enhancements” for the Pakistani border force in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.

The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

Festung Amerika! Meanwhile, basement labs all over the US crank out the crank and the US slides further into a fascist hell. Yum.

OWS perspective . . .

THE TYEE has been a source of sound perspective for years, now.  John MacLachlan Gray has a fascinating article, "Managers vs. the Managed: Another Way to Look at #OWS", wherein he points out some aspects that, upon reflection, are so obvious, they're hard to see.

It's not about resenting wealth. It's about stopping the war on productive work.

• • •

There's a class war brewing all right, but it's not between the Rich and the Poor: it's between the Managers and the Managed.

Put simply, North America suffers from a cancer of the management class.

Not to be offensive, but these people are breeding like rats.

Even so, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the colossal failure of the financial services industry will diminish the mystique of management itself -- in which a single CEO is deemed to be worth a sum equal to the gross national product of a third world nation.

The Tyranny of the MBA. Take a minute or two and check it out.

Occupation . . .

Jamison Wieser created this delight.

Money math . . .

IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER: according to Robert Lenzner at FORBES, "The Top 0.1% Of The Nation Earn Half Of All Capital Gains". YIKES! This means that it's not the top 1%, it's the top thousandth, that 1/1000 of some 330 million people are staggeringly wealthy.

The top 0.1%-- about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million-- are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.

It's crystal clear that the Bush tax reduction on capital gains and dividend income in 2003 was the cutting edge policy that has created the immense increase in net worth of corporate executives, Wall St. professionals and other entrepreneurs.

• • •

I commend you to the late Justice Louis Brandeis warning to the nation that "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." We have to make up our minds to restore a higher, fairer capital gains tax to the wealthiest investor class-- or ultimately face increased social unrest.

Ouch! And the GOP wants to give these people tax cuts?                                   H/T to Nolan

Pascal's perspective . . .

AISLIN AND PASCAL are such a treasure, compared to our Toronto editorial cartoonists. Harper Fudd, indeed.

Fetch the smelling salts, someone said "Fuck" on the internet

As I write this, the number one story under Canada on Google news is the report by the privacy commissioner about the government collecting too much information about us, especially at airports. The number two story is about a carpenter from Winnipeg saying "fuck you" someone (who was definitely asking to be told) on the Internet.
Normally this would not be a story, but the carpenter in question is NDP Member of Parliament Pat Martin, who first expressed his anger over the government swiftly closing debate on the budget bill.

"This is a fucking disgrace... closure again. And on the Budget! There's not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot shit,”

followed by

For gods sake. In these uncertain economic times, don't you think our parliament should be debating our federal budget? Some due diligence?

These drew a series of tweets in response. Many of them, including my own, agreeing that, yes it is a fucking disgrace that the Harper government considers Parliament an inconvenience at best and that its passing of major pieces of legislation with little or no debate has the whiff of autocratic fascism. It also drew the predictable pearl-clutching trollery of the usual crowd of ignorant twerps who are more worried about the use of naughty words than they are about the government abusing its power.the one that broke the camel's back being from some hardcore Catholic fundamentalist anti-gay anti-choice dingbat who goes by the moniker of Lettingsmokeout

@PatMartinMP Sad how a foul mouth socialist capitalizes "Budget" but not "god" #ndp #cdnpoli

That was the first of several tweets by Lettingsmokeout condemning "socialism" (apparently the Pope doesn't care for socialism and since he is god's official spokesman, he couldn't possibly be wrong)  which led Martin to respond with an annoyed "Fuck you" -- to which I would only add "and the altar boys you and the pope rode in on."

Such people don't deserve to be given the time of day. Before you accuse me of anti-Catholic bigotry let me say I've nothing against Catholics that I don't have against adherents of any other major religion. Most are fine people, its the few that get carried away that spoil it all. Religion is like whisky -  it's a comfort, but those who start letting it run their life get annoying fast.

Having gotten what he wanted, the mook in question makes sure the jackals at SUN-TV are notified and seeing a shiny object, the pile-on begins with much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about decorum in politics and those awful, awful socialists.

Well, fuck that noise.

Pat Martin is entirely correct to be as mad as hell and the language he used was entirely appropriate to the situation and the medium.

In the 46 days that Parliament has been sitting it has closed debate at least five time, ending debate on the omnibus crime bill and the gutting of the Canadian Wheat Board among other issues. This is the most times that closure has been used in such a short span and by the end of the session will likely be the most it has ever been used. That is what happens when you have a majority government that cares more about its narrow ideological agenda than about democracy.

No one was talking or writing about the number of times the government has shut down debate and pushed through legislation without allowing the opposition to examine and debate the bills., it has happened so often it isn't considered a story anymore.

But thanks to Pat Martin and a few well chosen words, that story is now at least being mentioned in passing, even if only as the reason the Winnipeg-Centre MP got angry.

Guys like Pat Martin are exactly what politics in this country need. We can no longer afford to have the opposition "go along to get along" - we can't afford to play nice while the other side is engaged in scorched-earth take-no-prisoners endless campaigning. We need an opposition that will dig in its heels and scream bloody murder every single time the Harper government tries to pull a fast one, every time it puts corporate profits ahead of public  good, every time it puts cementing its own power ahead of good public policy and fair play.

Crossposted from The Woodshed, where we often use those seven magic words

Tweet

OMG . . .

FIRST THERE WAS "METH MOUTH", now there's Krokodil Korrosion. According to a frightening report from Keith Veronese at io9, "Krokodil: Russia’s Designer Drug That Will Eat Your Flesh", some clever Russkies have developed a new designer drug that has horrific side-effects.

It sounds like a direct-to-Netflix horror movie plot — a cheap, addictive drug available in a foreign land, that turns the user's skin a scaly green color. Soon it rots the flesh, causing the user's skin to emulate that of a crocodile, leaving bone and muscle tissue exposed to the world. But the Russian drug known as krokodil is real.

• • •

Just as crack is the broke addict's cocaine, krokodil is a substitute for a much more expensive drug, heroin. The chemical behind krokodil, desomorphine, was available as a morphine substitute shortly after laboratory synthesis in 1932. Desomorphine is 8-10 times more potent than morphine. The medicinal use of desomorphine was concentrated to Europe, particularly Switzerland. The synthetic opiate has a structure nearly identical to heroin.

Money travels, it seems . . .

INTERSTELLAR TRADE? THE ECONOMIST wonders, with an article "Exports to Mars". You see, when they totaled up all the balance-of-payments statistics for all the countries,

the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014.

It explains a lot of the weirdness at Wal-Mart, though. But financial stats are always a problem, as Douglas Adams showed us so delightfully:

Wealthy weasels . . .

THE DAILY BAIL is a fine site devoted to putting America's wealth under inspection, proclaiming its focus on "Debt & Deficits. Bailout News. Federal Reserve Corruption.". Anyway, they received a posting worthy of your attention:

We receive video submissions daily, and this is one of the most impressive piece we've ever seen: a short film by Lagan Sebert and Harry Hanbury of the American News Project featuring Ron Paul, Wlliam Greider, Dennis Kucinich, Darrell Issa and Alan Grayson. Film produced in July 2009.

If you have been following the weasels, the video may not tell you anything you don't already know, but it sums up how the Fed "manages", and some of the problems. While it's two years old, the problems are still current, and add perspective to OWS.

Merry melody . . .

FROM THE NEW YORKER. Marvelous magazine.

Peace . . .

CALAMITY SONG, by the Decemberists, is a fine piece of rock n' roll — great twang on behalf of Peace.

Lest we forget . . .

Airshow's latest problem . . .

ACCORDING TO WIRED'S David Axe, the F-35 is a long way from service. "Stealth Jet Won’t Be Ready for Combat Until 2018" says it all.

More bad news for the Pentagon’s next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons program in Defense Department history — and arguably the most important one in the Pentagon today. The Air Force has confirmed what observers long expected: that the land-based F-35A model probably won’t be ready for combat until 2018, two years later than previously scheduled.

The single-engine stealth fighter, built by Lockheed Martin, has been beset by parts failures, design changes and a 64-percent increase in overall cost since development began in 2001. While testing has gone better lately, the nearly $400-billion program still needs to complete thousands more test flights before the first batch of regular pilots can even begin training.

The effects of the delay are cascading throughout the world’s biggest and most powerful Air Force. To keep up its strength while awaiting the F-35, the Air Force is having to keep its 1980s- and 1990s-vintage F-15s and F-16s far longer than anyone ever imagined when those planes rolled off the production line.

The problem of aging airframes for F-15, F-16 and F-18 fighters is becoming a serious problem, and the F-35 delay is cause for serious concern. It is also a major reason why the USAF and the USN are working as fast as possible on an RPV fighter, aka "drone".

Meanwhile, our F-18's pile up the airframe hours. And it's all just fine with Stevie and Airshow.

Eternal spirit . . .

BACK IN 2006 LOREENA MCKENNITT recorded a concert at the Alhambra Palace in Granada. Inspired location, inspirational music.  

Think of her music as a bubbling fountain of anti-Koch, and take a break from the idiots, the psychopathic and the merely greedy.

Have a koch and a $mile ? ? ? ?

The right-wing-billionaire-zealot brother$ koch are about to fully engage their database war on the rest of the civilized world.

Feature article in today's GuardianUK reveals the details:

The secretive oil billionaires the Koch brothers are close to launching a nationwide database connecting millions of Americans who share their anti-government and libertarian views, a move that will further enhance the tycoons' political influence and that could prove significant in next year's presidential election.

_______________

The database will bring together information from a plethora of right-wing groups, tea party organisations and conservative-leaning thinktanks. Each one has valuable data on their membership – including personal email addresses and phone numbers, as well as more general information useful to political campaign strategists such as occupation, income bracket and so on.

_______________

At their most recent billionaires' gathering in Vail, Colorado in June, Charles Koch described next year's presidential contest as "the mother of all wars". A tape of his private speech obtained by Mother Jones said the fight for the White House would be a battle "for the life or death of this country".

Exhorting the 300 guests in attendance to open their sizeable wallets and donate to the Koch election coffers, he went on: "It isn't just your money we need. We need you bringing in new partners, new people. We can't do it alone. We have to multiply ourselves."

"We have to multiply ourselves."

Not unlike rats in a garbage dump . . . .


(Alison has more on how everything really does go better with koch here.) 

Vote for Johnny . . .

JOHN LEE HOOKER FOR PRESIDENT: too bad the man is dead. Anyway, that's the title of a delightful Ry Cooder opus.  Brilliant, creative player; while recording the music for the Bruce Willis flick, Last Man Standing, Ry created some powerful bass notes using an 8-foot 4x4 and a bass piano string strung on two spikes, with a guitar pickup underneath.

Nasty . . .

POOR YEMEN: OIL, FUNDIES AND RACISTS have their day in the scorching sun, and the country self-destructs, to the concern of Foreign Offices around the world. Poor Yemen, so far from God, and so close to Saudi and Iran.

ALJAZEERA has been providing yeoman service in following this sorry debacle. Ali Abdullah Saleh has run out of time and legitimacy in the Yemeni hearts and minds, and it looks like his count-down to "retirement" has started. It's how this is going to happen that keeps the ER's busy, like we see below.

That's gotta hurt. How much more pain will be endured? This may be determined in Riyadh and Tehran, because that's the way the Umma is, and the Sunni/Shi'a problem continues to fester.

"The Party of the People . . . ."

Is not that "people friendly" according to this piece from SocialistWorker.org. 

A snippet follows, but check out the entire piece here:

More generally, the truth is this: Democratic mayors may talk about how they sympathize with the Occupy movement. They may even try to speak in its name, as Quan has. But their office requires them to keep order and protect the interests of the 1 percent--and so they will turn to repression to try to stop the struggle from disrupting business as usual.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE SAME truth applies further up the chain, in the White House of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the U.S.

Where was Barack Obama, who claimed to understand the "broad-based frustration" of the movement, when Occupy activists in Oakland were reclaiming Oscar Grant Plaza after enduring vicious police violence 24 hours earlier? Answer: He was across the Bay at a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser for his presidential campaign.

Quelle surprise, eh ? ? ? ?

99% Action from Home . . . .

Something we all can do from home to annoy the 1%:



H/T BTO

That was then, this is now . . .