Signs of the apocalypse

It has struck me lately that components of our "western culture" here in North America are turning back in on themselves.
No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're nuts.
So, I've decided to document this in an occasional feature I intend to call "Signs of the apocalypse".
And I'm NOT even going to use any C&W lyrics to make my point -- that would be just too easy.
So here's the first one -- I realize that western civilization may be doomed when I see photos like this --

-- showing a diver in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off Key Largo hiding eggs for an underwater Easter egg hunt.
I think its the bunny ears that did it for me . . .

OK

Sorry for the lack of posts -- everything is OK but my daughter is here visiting for the weekend so main minutes and spare minutes have been spent visiting -- also, for the first time yesterday since my accident, my knee was strong enough that I actually went shopping in three different stores! And I bought some clothes!
Amazing how your frame of reference changes after a period of being physically exhausted by walking a few steps.

Great line of the day

Tim over at POGGE describes the ridiculous spectacle of our Prime Minister manufacturing needless disputes with the Ottawa Press Gallery.
Doesn't he have better things to do, like running the country maybe?
Anyway, Tim writes:

However his supporters try to spin this, the public is seeing the image of a prime minister trying to control the press, or trying to pick friendly reporters instead of those who might ask uncomfortable questions. It's absurd, and Harper appears a little bit smaller every time he tries to assert his 'executive privilege' or whatever the hell it is he's asserting . . . why is it no one that he trusts is explaining to him that he is engaging in a popularity contest he simply cannot win? Journalists may not be held in as high public regard as, say, teachers, but they certainly rank much higher on the credibility scale than politicians.

Emphasis mine.

16 days?

Yeah, sure, Iran can produce enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb in 16 days -- provided those days are February 1 to February 17, 2016.
Maybe.
IF they can somehow get 54,000 centrifuges. Right now, they have 180.
Oh, and they also have to figure out how to do it.
So as Steve Gilliard notes, the scare headlines about Iran having the nuclear bomb are utter bullshit.

Fear and loathing

The blogosphere is unleashing its best fear and loathing on the prospect of the US starting an unprovoked, aggressive nuclear war against Iran.
First, for some perspective on Iran's actual political situation and actual uranium enrichment capabilities, see these two short articles:
Ian Welsh's The Three Principles of Iranian Foreign Affairs

[1]Iran wants its neighbours to not be a threat . . . [2] Iran needs a deterrent against the US and other great powers . . . [and 3] The Mullahs intend to stay in charge . . . Really, almost everything else is a corollary of these three rules . . .

And Juan Cole's "Iran can now make glowing Mickey Mouse watches" :

. . . all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they "cascade." The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb . . . The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran. Likewise, Bush is trying to shore up his base . . . If this international game of chicken goes wrong, then the whole Middle East and much of Western Europe could go up in flames.

Now for some perspectives on the impact such a war would have on the world and on the United States itself:
Billmon worries about the muted media reaction to a US nuclear first strike:

. . . to the extent there is a rational excuse for treating a nuclear strike on Iran as the journalistic equivalent of a seasonal story about people washing their cars, it must be the cynical conviction that the Cheneyites aren’t serious . . . the rest of us have learned that when Dick Cheney starts muttering about precious bodily fluids, you'd better pay attention. . . . Maybe the idea of the United States would launch a nuclear first strike – albeit a "surgical" one – is too hard for most Americans, including most American journalists, to process . . . the current nuclear war gaming strikes me as much more likely to end in the real thing – partly because the neocons appear to have convinced themselves a "tactical" strike doesn't really count, partly because of what Hersh politely refers to as Bush's "messianic vision" (Cheney may have his finger on the bureaucracy, but Shrub is still the one with his finger on the button) but mostly because I think these guys really think they can get away with it . . .

Tristero at Hullabaloo punctures the myth of the so-called "tactical" nuke:

It really doesn't take much effort to make a tactical nuclear device.
1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.
2. Add the word "tactical" to the description.
Voila! You now have a tactical nuclear weapon that magically always hits its target and only kills evil people, leaving all the good people alive and perfectly healthy.

Josh Marshall :

President Bush's dimwit megalomania seems to have survived the disaster of his Iraq adventure wholly intact . . . They appear to have learned almost nothing from the last three years in Iraq. The only sensible expenditure of energy is to find ways to hem these guys in or constrain them before they do even more damage to this country.

Pachacutec at Firedoglake:

Nuking Iran will not just incite the Middle East against us for the rest of our lifetimes. The whole world will turn against us. China. Everyone. World War III. Terrorism will continue its post 2001 increase. Oil will go to $200 per barrel, destroying our economy. Many of us will starve as food grows scarce. Most of us - the educated and the unskilled alike - will lose our jobs. Foreign nations will sell U. S. dollars and invest in Euros. We will lose international trade, and our national debt holders will band together to neutralize us. Nuking Iran would quite simply be the end of America . . . the current Bush policy is not contemplated in self defense. Iran is ten years away from the ability to develop weapons grade uranium. It possesses no nukes today. This is a situation fundamentally unlike any we faced during the cold war with the USSR. All Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, should stand shoulder to shoulder to demand that plans for preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran be scrapped . . . Iran is willing to engage in direct negotiations with the U. S. Our allies lack the leverage to induce concessions without our participation in direct talks. And yet, we refuse to talk to Iran. What is the point of threatening use of force when we offer Iran no alternative course of action, other than confrontation? Bush and Cheney are playing suicide pact politics in a gutless, insane attempt to save their plummeting poll numbers among some members of the Republican base going into the November elections. They want to look strong because they are weak: that makes them dangerous. They love their power more than they love America. . . . There is no reason to believe Bush is bluffing, since he has offered no negotiated way back from confrontation to Iran’s leaders (who frankly also face weakness at home and are at least in part colluding in this suicide pact for internal political gain). Bush is too filled with grandiose messianic delusion to engage in sane "strategery."

Arthur Silber :

If we can repeatedly engage in aggressive, non-defensive war -- and if we can use nuclear weapons offensively -- other countries will make the same arguments. Self-justification is not our exclusive domain. We may want to believe that we can control events across the world: the last few years have demonstrated conclusively that we cannot control events even within Iraq. But if we continue to seek to control events on a worldwide scale in the manner we do today, we will achieve one end at some point: destruction of a kind that will make the twentieth century pale in comparison . . . The possible end of civilization as all of us have known it, either in slow motion or on a faster schedule, is almost impossible to comprehend. It is the material of science fiction, not of real life. But whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, this is the nature of where we are today, and this is the critical historic juncture at which we stand . . . The world as we have known it may well be swept away in time, just as all the great civilizations of the past have been

We should also remember this:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

and this:

I think the Bush administration approved the Plame leak

The new official story doesn't make any sense.
The story is now that the Bush administration wanted to refute Joe Wilson by leaking to Judy Miller that the National Intelligence Estimate supported the uranium-from-Niger claim
But this claim had already been discredited before the "leak" occurred.
Here is the timeline:

July 6, 2003 - The New York Times publishes Joe Wilson's Op-Ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa"
July 7 - The White House retracts the Niger allegation, which was its first admission of a flaw in the case for war
July 8 - Scooter Libby meets with New York Times reporter Judith Miller over a two-hour breakfast and supposedly leaks the NIE story
July 11 - George Tenet issues a statement taking the heat for the 16 words, that they should not have been included in the SOTU.
July 13 - Novak's column "Mission to Niger" published: Plame outed to public.
July 18 - A declassified version of the NIE is released. (Newsweek)

So the seeking-uranium-in-Niger story was already toast by the time Libby and Miller met.
Now, perhaps Cheney is so far around the bend that he thought the NIE could still be waved around like a magic wand to convince a doubting nation that war was justified after all.
But for stone-age white guys like Bush and Cheney and Rove and Libby -- and for Novak and Woodward too -- its much more likely that they would think the Plame revelation was a great, juicy smear.
A long-haired, limp-wristed liberal, whose brassy-blond spy wife gets rid of him by sending him on junkets -- wow, they would think, what a wimp...
So I think THIS is the leak Libby was told to spill.
It must have surprised them that Miller didn't care what Valerie Plame did for a living-- nor did Walter Pincus or Matthew Cooper. They were actually more concerned about the war, amazingly, and so none of them wrote a story about Plame.
But good ole boy Bob Novak went along with the pussywhipped spin, and so did Woodward.

Oh, for crying out loud

For crying out loud, will we ever stop with the tests and the trials and the reviews and the hearings? Here's the latest-- Ontario coroner has no luck with DNA tests on exhumed body of Lynne Harper
Enough, already.
Steven Truscott was found guilty of murder 47 years ago. For 40 years, ever since The Trial of Steven Truscott was published in 1966, Canada has known that he is innocent.
It is time to exonerate him.

Anti-immigrant claptrap

When we lived in BC 20 years ago, we used to hear a certain amount of anti-immigrant claptrap -- from people whose great-grandparents were, of course, immigrants but who now considered themselves "Canadians" and who now deeply resented all those new people, usually brown-skinned of course, who had the effrontery to use Canadian social services from time to time.
With all the marches going on in the United States now, I'm hearing more anti-immigrant claptrap again in the blogosphere.
So here is an interesting post -- More Stupidity in my In-box -- which rebuts very effectively some of the most ridiculous clap-trap stuff -- worth reading because it applies to Canadian attitudes too.

We'll meet again...

I was going to title this quote a Great Line of the Day, but its a little more serious than that. AMERICAblog writes: "We cannot afford having George Bush think that America is in the business of launching pre-emptive nuclear wars."
This is in relation to Seymour Hersh's article The Iran Plans. AMERICAblog's line reminded me of George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove -- Gentlemen, we cannot afford a mine-shaft gap! But the Hersch article reminds me even more of the last scene in Dr. Strangelove -- Slim Pickin's Texan pilot Major T.J. "King" Kong, riding his bomb down to oblivion, yahooing all the way:

Followed by Vera Lynn singing the war torch song:
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do,
'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.

Its a chilling article, describing how the Bush administration is talking itself into going to war, then talking itself into using nuclear weapons -- all with the purpose of preventing Iran from building its own nuclear weapons, which the US cannot even prove Iran is trying to do anyway.
The US intention, apparently, is to bomb the shit out of Iran so that local rebels will be able to take over the government thereby changing Iran's leadership to one that will listen to the United States and won't want to build nuclear weapons anymore.
Yeah, that's what I thought, too.
Here's what Hersh says about how the US is justifying nukes:

. . . at least four hundred targets would have to be hit . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons . . . One of the militaryÂ’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites . . . the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete . . . The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," the former senior intelligence official said. " 'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan." He went on, "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout -- we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don't have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out -- remove the nuclear option -- they're shouted down." The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran --without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.' " . . . “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.” The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said. The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

How pathetic yet how frightening -- "It's a tough decision but we made it in Japan"?
Yeah, Truman used nuclear bombs to stop an unprovoked war of agression against the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, China, and Malaysia, that had already gone on for four years, had killed hundreds of thousands of people and promised to kill hundreds of thousands more -- and even then, the justification for using nuclear weapons has barely passed the world's muster.
So now Bush thinks he wants to go down in history as the first president to authorize using nuclear bombs again -- this time not to end a war but to start one, against a country which hasn't attacked any of its neighbours and doesn't offer any imminent or proveable threat to the United States?
People, that is simply crazy -- the leadership of the United States is suffering from a pathological disorder, grandiose narcissism?

Found at last

I love stories like this one, about Sam who was finally rescued after two years living by his wits. In his case, he had been neglected as a pup, and had only been with his new owners three weeks when he got loose. Luckily, he stayed in the area so his owners kept hearing about him. But he was spooked, so they had a hard time recapturing him.
Lost dogs spook easily and it doesn't take long for even a dog raised in a loving home to "go wild" -- I think it is some kind of primitive survival instinct.
Our dog, Mars, got away from a vet's office once and wandered the streets near the riverbank for several hours before we could find her. As we were driving back and forth, I spotted her just lying down on the grassy section of a boulevard. Driving up, I got out and opened the passenger door and called her to come -- she got up and just looked at me for a few seconds, sort of confused, like "do I know you?" before she finally responded to the "going for a ride" cues and jumped into the car. Then suddenly she DID know me and was wiggling all over with excitement and joy. We were a very relieved family that day, let me tell youl.
One of the greatest stories I ever heard was a friend of my sister, whose little Sheltie dog got away in Waskisiu provincial park. She spent weeks driving back and forth every weekend, putting up posters and looking for the dog. Finally, five weeks later and some 30 miles away from where the dog had been lost, she got a phone call from a cafe in a lakeside resort area where they had seen the dog scounging their garbage.
With her other two dogs, she drove up and started walking around the wood trails near the cafe, calling for her dog. At last she spotted her lost one in the bushes. Careful not to shout or leap or startle the dog, she just called the dog softly. He didn't run but he wouldn't come to her. So -- and I don't know how she managed to do this so calmly -- she just kept on walking. Finally, she turned around to find all three dogs walking with her, and she got all of them back to the car. Her lost sheltie was malnourished and took several weeks to fully recover but, amazingly, had nothing wlse wrong with him. She was convinced it was the other two dogs, as much as herself, who helped bring her dog home again. But I credit her devotion and persistence -- she wouldn't give up and she blanketed the area with her fliers -- the person who called her about the dog was the teenage son of the cafe owner, who had happened to see a flier with the dog's photo on it and finally convinced his parents that their stray was that particular dog.

So who will be voting for this?

Now we hear that one of the aspects of the Conservatives trumpted "accountability" act is to impose a whole new set of accounting requirements on Aboriginal reserves -- thus pandering to the right-wing mantra cum Conservative wedge issue which claims that poor people, particularly darker-coloured poor people, are always trying to rip us all off.
Are the Conservatives also demanding similar levels of accounting detail for all of the municipal highway projects they fund each year? How about all of the business development grants they make? And the job-creation funding for companies? And the health-care transfers to provinces? Is the Auditor-General planning to expand her staff to hundreds of people, to look into all those federal transfers? Or are Aboriginal reserves going to be singled out?
I just hope the NDP, Liberals and Bloc will be asking questions like this before they give a knee-jerk vote in favour of "accountability" -- because who would want to be against it? -- without realizing they are actually voting for a divisive - maybe even racist - policy.
I say racist because so many reserves are already struggling to stretch their very limited, non-indexed federal dollars for education and housing. Now they'll have to spend even more on hiring more accountants, just to prove that they aren't spending anything wrong.
And don't tell me that these additional federal audits are needed to catch illegal embezzlement -- police and RCMP are already catching these offenders. Some cases of fraud don't justify implicitly tarring every reserve with the "fraud and mismanagement" brush, any more than every city mayor should be blamed whenever one or two mayors put their relatives on the payroll.

I searched the web for some photos of Aboriginal reserves, just to demonstrate that these are not people living in the lap of luxury. Here's a CTV photo of the Kashechewan reserve, which was under a boil-water advisory for two years -- TWO YEARS -- because their sewage treatment plant wasn't working and they couldn't get the money to fix it.

How about a nice little recession this spring?

In Comments, Scott notes that what many of us have had so far from the Conservatives is actually a tax increase. No GST cut yet -- apparently its not happening until the April or May budget or even later, into July.
Personally, of course, I'm going to try like hell to avoid buying anything major until the GST is reduced -- no new car, no new flooring if we can possibly delay.
I'm no economist, but it occurs to me that if everyone else in the country does likewise -- and apparently I'm not alone -- then in no time at all Canada will have a nice little recession underway plus maybe a few business bankruptcies.
Great stuff, Stevie.

Harper has opened the first envelope

A new manager takes over and finds on his desk three sealed envelopes marked One, Two and Three, with a note from the previous manager advising him to open them in order when he doesn't know what else to do.
So he settles in OK but finally the honeymoon is over and he starts having some problems, so he opens the first envelope.
"Blame your predecessor" it says.
So he does that and this works for a while. But then things start to go downhill again, so he opens the second envelope.
This one advises "Reorganize".
Ok, that works just great and everyone seems happier for a while, but then he starts having problems again and he's at his wits end how to solve them. So finally, he opens the third envelope.
It says "Prepare three envelopes."

Today Harper spend Question Period blaming the Liberals for every problem he was asked about -- obviously he has already had to open the first envelope.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out

Tom Delay's last words, referring to Hillary Clinton:

Nothing worse than a woman know-it-all.

Takes one to know one, you jerk.
Let's just remember, too, that neither Hillary nor Cynthia McKinney nor any of those other know-it-all women have had to resign in disgrace.
Memories of Charlotte Whitton, first woman mayor of Ottawa:

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Yes, it happens just about every day

From Digby (of course, who just won a Koufax for his writing):

...I guess that whole 'Delay Rule' thing was secret Democratic plot to take over the minds of Republicans and make them act like asses. (A common leftist tactic.)