A True Critical Thinker

For many decades Noam Chomsky has been fearlessly fighting for truth. His capacity for incisive critical thinking and unwillingness to submit to the bluster of the right is much in evidence in this excerpt from a 1969 edition of William Buckley's Firing Line. Would that today's progressives were as tenacious.

Enjoy:



h/t The Knowledge Movement

A Conspiracy Of One

It’s not uncommon for an RCMP Commissioner to jump through hoops at Stephen Harper’s bequest.

We saw that when Zaccardelli gave Harper a leg up to victory by conjuring up an empty scandal about Ralph Goodale in mid-election campaign. Ominously for a country based on the rule of law, Zac refused to explain his actions afterwards, defying the demands of Parliament for answers.

Now we have Commish Paulson who seized the Duffy-Wright-Harper scandal at the outset with an iron fist. Paulson’s leaked e-mail in which he absolutely forbade his senior officers from having contact with opposition parliamentarians without his express prior consent pretty much established that the investigation and any eventual prosecutions were going to be decided from the top, no questions asked.

Then the circus began. First, RCMP investigators opined that the $90,000 ‘gifted’ by Nigel Wright to Mike Duffy was a bribe. Then they announced that Nigel Wright, who put up the money for the bribe, would not be charged. Then, after a suitable interval and in the middle of the summer recess (Stephen Harper’s preferred time for doing these things), it was announced that, while Wright was still off the hook, Mike Duffy would be charged with accepting a bribe.

Paulson hasn’t explained how he jumped through that hoop. It’s been left to others to speculate that investigators could not conclude that Wright had given Duffy the money with a “corrupt intent” but were satisfied that Duffy accepted the gift with a “corrupt intent.”

Wait a minute. On what possible basis did the Royal Conservative Mounted Police absolve Nigel Wright of any corrupt intent? They had to have done it by isolating all the surrounding circumstances. They excluded the other elements of the “deal” from the cash payment. We know what that deal was because Duffy was foolish enough to put it all in an e-mail to his confidantes. It was that e-mail, leaked to a reporter, that triggered the scandal. We know what that deal was because the elements of the deal Duffy described all came to pass.

Wright didn’t just hand Duffy $90,000. The money came with strings attached, bundled into a deal. Duffy was ordered to keep his mouth shut and to refuse to cooperate with the auditors appointed by the Senate to report on expense irregularities. There’s the corruption the RCMP doesn’t want to acknowledge. But wait, there’s more. Duffy wasn’t just getting cash. The guys who conjured up what the cops say, in respect of Duffy was a bribe, also promised to see to it that the Senate audit report on Duffy would be laundered. They did and it was. There’s the corruption that the RCMP has to do backflips to ignore. The bribe was the whole deal.

That Nigel Wright wrote a cheque on his personal account is irrelevant. The PMO gang tried to get the money elsewhere – from the Conservative Party’s cache - and they almost succeeded. Only when that fell through did Wright step in with his own cheque after clearing the deal with Stephen Harper. Would it have been a bribe if the cash came from CPC funds but not when Wright had to step in with his own money?

By looking at Wright’s cheque in isolation, the Royal Conservative Mounted Police are blatantly whitewashing the involvement and culpability of everyone except Stephen Harper’s target, Mike Duffy. No wonder Paulson put his senior officers under a gag order.

This deal oozes corruption throughout the PMO to the prime minister to the Tory Senate leadership to the Senate audit committee to the Conservative Party. The measure of the integrity of the RCMP lies in its ability to sweep all of that under the carpet even after the facts are out in the public.

We know better. We know this prosecution has been tailored to take Nigel Wright, Benjamin Perrin, Stephen Harper, Senators Gerstein, LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen, and Arthur Hamilton off the hook. This is the doing of the prime minister’s partisan state police apparatus and it harkens back to another time on another continent.

If it was valid to jettison the Canadian Airborne Regiment after the Somalia scandal (and, for the record, I’m not convinced it was), then this sorry affair surely warrants dismantling the RCMP. There’s no place in a democracy for a partisan political state police agency. From the barn burnings in Quebec in the 60s to this I’ve certainly had my fill of these rogue operators.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

More On Duffy

Like many others, I have been trying to fathom how Nigel Wright has escaped without charges for the cheque he wrote to Mike Duffy, while the latter has been charged with accepting a bribe. I have also been attempting to get video of two programs, Power and Politics and last Thursday's At Issue Panel, which discuss this mystery in some detail. Unfortunately, CBC no long seems to offer the embed code for their shows, but you can watch the P&P show by clicking here. I was able to find the second show on You Tube, and you can view it below.

Perhaps, like me, you will find the proffered explanations for Wright's 'get-out-of-jail-free card' less than edifying.

Holding Our 'Leaders' To Account

It is almost impossible, I think, to feel anything but a dark impotence when it comes to world events today. Wherever we look, be it the Ukraine, Africa, the Middle East or our own backyards, death, despoliation and injustice prevail. At times, it seems assuming the fetal position is the only reasonable response to a world out of control.

Yet, even when there seems little we can do to ameliorate the world's suffering, there is something all of us can do - refuse to be silent and passive in the face of atrocity - refuse to make it easier for those with power to have their way - refuse to allow them to commit their atrocities in our name.

Clearly, that spirit of defiance is at work in today's letters to The Star, a few of which I reproduce below:

Re: ‘Hamas has no interest in peace,' Baird says, July 16

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s condemnation of Hamas and his unconditional support of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza ought to be appalling for anyone with a modicum of consciousness. What happened to the Canada known internationally known as a soft-power participating in peaceful resolutions for world conflict?

Would Mr. Baird and his boss, Stephen Harper, be as critical of the victims’ struggle for nationhood if they were the ones helplessly watching their hopes for a homeland on just over 20 per cent of what Palestine was before 1948 being progressively confiscated by Israel while living in a concentration camp called Gaza?
Should they, instead, not be working toward brokering ideas for a two-state solution so that Israelis can leave in peace and without collective guilt for the genocide taking place and the Palestinians can once again be a sovereign people as they rightly deserve?

Carmelinda Scian, Islington

One wonders how Baird can walk through the front doors at Foreign Affairs each morning knowing the whole building is laughing at him behind his back. The pantheon of poorly educated cretins appointed by Harper to cabinet has destroyed 105 years of solid partnership and respect with the world.
Now that Canada advocates (and demands others advocate) state murder in Palestine of women and children, are we any different from Vladmir Putin who presides over the deaths of thousands in Syria purely for the purpose of arms dealing.

Surely we’ve murdered enough Arabs for our selfish want of oil and our kook obsession with Israel.

Bryan Charlebois, Toronto

How dare our prime minister give Canada’s pledge of “unequivocal” support to a nation that has in recent days killed over 150 civilians. Israel claims to be defending itself from rocket attacks that have amounted to one civilian death.

Stephen Harper, you do not speak for all Canadians in giving unconditional support to a nation that is okay with home demolitions, bombing residential areas, destroying schools and hospitals, killing children and unarmed civilians. We cannot give unequivocal support to anybody, let alone a nation known for its human rights violations.

Harper represents the citizens of Canada, not his personal political affiliations. He must not put the blood of innocents on the hands of Canadians through unconditional support of this nation.

Arsheen Devjee, Edmonton

Harper and Baird abandoned any pretense of objectivity on the Israel/Palestinians file when they allowed themselves to be feted as Negev Dinner honorees. Their motives in doing so were to keep the generous donations coming to the Conservative Party of Canada from many Canadian Jews who have come to take for granted their knee-jerk praise of Israel, right or wrong.

Ron Charach, Toronto

A Little Something For Your Friday Evening Enjoyment

When it comes to Mike Duffy, the hits keep on coming. Enjoy:

About That Invasion Of Gaza

To hear our political leaders tell it – the sorry lot of them – Israel is right to yet again invade Gaza. The Palestinians have it coming. It’s all the doing of Hamas.

It’s a convenient and cowardly political posture. Harper probably believes it. Trudeau and Mulcair? Expedience, sheer craven expedience.

Nathan Thrall, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, has an op-ed in The New York Times, entitled, “How the West Chose War in Gaza. Gaza and Israel: the Road to War, Paved by the West.” The Palestinians, he writes, were on the road to forming a “consensus government” until Israel, with the tacit backing of the west, derailed it.

In the new political Canada we choose the good guys and, by default, the bad guys. The good guys (usually the powerful side) can do no wrong, the bad guys deserve whatever they get.

And when the good guys do bad things, we just look the other way. Harper, Trudeau, Mulcair – if you think one of them is fit to run this country, you’ve got a damned poor regard for this country.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

UPDATE: Of course Canada’s political weasels will proclaim that Israel is only rampaging through Gaza to get at Hamas. That’s why the Israelis have destroyed Gaza’s water and sewage plants.

The eight-day assault has caused massive damage to infrastructure and destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said. “Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement. If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis”, he said. “Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

While Harper Fiddles, Canada Burns

There have been so many developments on the climate front of late that, collectively, give us a pretty stark warning and yet the media, the public and our political leadership are tuning out. We seem to be culturally embracing a sort of Andean fatalism that seems to precede abrupt civilizational decline. Perhaps we’re hampered by the fact that it’s a moving target that repeatedly exceeds our ‘worst case scenarios’. Far from being pessimists we constantly underestimate the onset of climate change even as severe events increase in frequency, intensity and duration. Maybe that’s why Harper (and his rivals) aren’t coming forward with any meaningful responses. They’re all avowed fossil fuelers and, having staked out that turf, any significant reduction in Canada’s GHG emissions would have to be borne by every other sector of the economy and the Canadian people. Who would risk the public wrath when pretending to act and doing nothing remains an option? There’s a rank and dangerous cowardice that runs through the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democrats alike. God save the Queen. The Canadian people can fend for themselves.


The other day came news of a mysterious crater in Siberia that Russian scientists determined was caused, not by a meteorite, but by an eruption of subsurface gas released by thawing permafrost – a global warming event. We’ve known for several years that the ancient permafrost that girds the high north was “perma” no more. The tundra was drying out, catching fire, and exposing the permafrost below that it once shielded. The permafrost was a sink for massive quantities of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, or, as the energy industry calls it, natural gas.

On the heels of the Russian crater story comes a report from Climate Central about fires spreading unchecked across the Northwest Territories.

“The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

“Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates "unprecedented" in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.

“The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that's taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8°F rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.”

The Climate Central report indicates that the massive amounts of airborne soot from these forest and tundra fires could accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet far faster than we had ever imagined, perhaps by the end of this century. Ice, being white, reflects most solar energy back into space. Soot, being black, absorbs the solar energy and it passes into the ice beneath, causing melting. The melt run-off should wash away the soot except that these fires just keep adding more soot. And, of course, the fires that generate the soot also release ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Forest fires release the CO2 from the trees. Tundra fires release CO2 and expose the permafrost below that releases methane.

As for the Greenland ice sheet and the prospect of losing all or most of it by the end of this century, here’s what you need to bear in mind. When that ice sheet is gone, and it will eventually, it will create 23-feet of sea level rise. You’ve probably seen plenty of graphics of what three or four feet of sea level rise will mean around the world. The reality is that we tend to build our major cities where there’s navigable water. In Canada that’s Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. With Lake Ontario at 75 metres above sea level, Toronto should be safe from inundation but Montreal, on the St. Lawrence and at 6 metres is vulnerable and, as for Vancouver, well let’s just say that False Creek, Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet will be a whole lot bigger and the Lower Mainland an awful lot smaller.

So, with the prospect of runaway climate change steadily worsening, with major population centres and critical infrastructure at increasing risk, surely this must be at the very top of our Lord and Master’s priority list, right? What’s that, no? His priority is flogging as much of the world’s highest-carbon oil as quickly as he can push through the pipelines and supertanker ports to carry it, really? Surely the opposition parties are going to shut this down as soon as the voting public gives Harper the boot, right? Wrong? Oh dear. Maybe it’s time to caulk the dinghy.


MoS, the Disaffected Lib.