George Orwell Meets Rudy Giuliani

"Truth isn't truth," proclaims the increasingly zany and demented uncle known as Rudy Giuliani. Start at the 1:20 mark to take the full measure of the man, the man he represents, and the fulfillment of George Orwell's direst warnings:

Jack Dorsey, Hypocrite

I am posting less these days, likely because I am losing faith in the possibility of positive change. I realize now, more than ever, that our fate is not in our hands, but rather in those of the powerful that have captured government and will protect and enhance their profits until the bitter end.

While this fact is most evidenced by the refusal of national governments to enact measures to meaningfully combat the ever-growing peril of climate change (disaster capitalism is alive, well and thriving!), it is also seen in less obvious ways. To get a taste of this truth, watch the following interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, conducted by Lester Holt. The interview initially revolves around Twitter's suspension (cutely called a 'time-out' by Dorsey) of hate-monger Alex Jones. The suspension itself, of course, is hardly a brave or principled stand, given Jones' removal from other social-media platforms already.

Dorsey's moral vacuity, bottomless hypocrisy and capacity for spin are pretty obvious here. And the fact that the CEO, a stand-in for so many other 'movers and shakers', will not let the public good interfere with his ceaseless march for greater and greater profits becomes very clear in the second part of the interview, when Holt asks him about Donald Trump and his Twitter account.

Playing To The Lowest Common Denominator

...looks like this:

On Canadian Hypocrisy

While many (but not our strangely silent allies) have cheered Canada's tweet critical of Saudi Arabia's abuse of human rights' activists, it has not escaped others that the gesture has the stench of hypocrisy about it. The Star's Tony Burman reminds us:

that it was this Liberal government that approved the $15-billion deal to sell military vehicles to Saudi Arabia originally worked out by the previous Harper government. There is reason to believe that some of these vehicles have been used by the Saudis to crush the very internal dissent that Canada embraces.

If the Middle East has taught us anything, it is that talk is cheap.

Similarly, Star letter writers offer some critical thinking:

The Canadian admonition of the Saudi government is evidently hypocritical, and lacks moral integrity.

Hamid S. Atiyyah, Markham

So Canada will have to stop selling weapons of war to the Saudi Arabians for them to use against their own people and against civilians in Yemen.

Good.

Alan Craig, Brampton

A year ago it was reported that Canada was Saudi Arabia’s second largest arms supplier. While Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland expresses outrage at Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses, she conveniently turns a blind eye to scathing reports by UN officials and a long list of civil society groups over Canada’s lucrative weapons trade in defiance of international norms.

Joe Davidson, Toronto

My guess is, had Canada known the kind of overreaction its tweet would provoke from the Saudis, it would not have issued such a public castigation of the dictatorial state. On the other hand, I'm sure there is a bright side to the whole situation, as a government and a prime minister hoping for reelection can now once more assert to a largely uncritical world that Canada is back; it certainly worked wonders for Justin Trudeau's image when he declaimed thus after winning the last election.

Lord knows, given the massive disappointment he has been on so many fronts, a little prolonged diversion may be just what the spin doctor ordered.

Hothouse Earth

Hot on the heels of the news that Justin's folly will now cost taxpayers at least another $1.9 billion comes widespread acknowledgement that we may indeed be reaching the climate-change point of no return. For specific details about this, check out The Guardian and The Mound's post yesterday. As well, Owen's post is well-worth the read.

Also, you can watch the following newscast to get a greater sense of our peril:



Still, our politicos fiddle while the world burns. This is the inevitable outcome of the plague known as captured governments, of course.

I Don't Know Why

... but I never tire of watching lunatics like Jim Bakker and his brethren. Guess I am just desperate in these trying times for some comic relief, and believe me, the good pastor and his cretinous cohorts deliver it in abundance:

A Betrayal With Far-Reaching Implications

Despite the inspiring persona he peddled to win the last election, Justin Trudeau has turned out to be just another politician. As hard as that might be to accept, his betrayal of his promise to be something else, something better, is undeniable. For me personally, the sting of his failure to enact meaningful measures to combat climate change hurts the most.

And I am not alone in recognizing the fraud he perpetrated. Both The Toronto Star's editorial board and columnist Thomas Walkom offer lacerating assessments of the prime minister's perfidious antics. His most recent decision, to scale back the carbon tax, is emboldening the retrograde Doug Ford, Ontario's new premier with some very old (think 1950's) ideas:

... in scaling back one element of the national plan to put a price on carbon, Justin Trudeau managed to weaken an already too tepid program, and hand some provincial premiers — who are determined to oppose any carbon tax — more ammunition to fight in the court of public opinion, never mind, possibly, in the courts of law.

Emission-intensive industries that compete with companies in jurisdictions without a carbon tax, were already set to receive credits worth 70 per cent of what an average firm in their sector would pay under Ottawa’s plan.

Now, most won’t have to pay the carbon tax until their emissions reach 80 per cent. And four industries deemed to face particularly high competitive risks — iron and steel manufacturing, cement, lime and nitrogen fertilizer producers — won’t pay until they hit 90 per cent.

The Ontario government is running with this retreat:

Already, Ontario’s Environment Minister Rod Phillips is crowing about how this change is proof that his government was right to kill Ontario’s cap-and-trade plan, and right to fight Ottawa’s carbon tax in court.

All of which, of course, panders to a public that is far more eager to embrace willful ignorance than confront harsh reality, a hint of which was recently released by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which revealed

2016’s record-breaking year of damage caused by natural disasters such as wildfires, floods and ice storms across the country cost $4.9 billion. And that was just in “insurable” damage.

Thomas Walkom comes at this issue from a different perspective but with the same underlying premise, that Trudeau's weak carbon tax will accomplish little:

Before Ford became Ontario premier, Trudeau was in danger of being outed as a fraud on the all-important climate change file. But Ford is such a laggard in this area that no matter how little the Liberal prime minister does, he seems active by comparison.

Ford’s decision to challenge Trudeau’s carbon tax in court serves to obscure the reality of the proposed federal levy, namely that it is too low to be effective. And it allows Trudeau to continue pretending that his climate change strategy is vastly different from that of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — when in fact it is not.

And Walkom offers compelling evidence that the emperor has no clothes, nor any real climate-change convictions as he echoes the old Harper way of doing things, such as mirroring U.S. behaviour:

In 2016, he very publicly matched Obama’s decision to reduce methane emissions. A year later, after Donald Trump reversed that Obama move, Canada’s Liberal government quietly announced it would delay implementation of its new methane rules until 2023.

Last week, Ottawa announced even more quietly that it plans to ease proposed carbon tax rules for big industrial polluters in order to match the new laissez-faire attitude of the Trump regime.

But surely Trudeau's carbon tax marks a bold departure from American inaction? Well, not so much:

Ottawa’s fallback carbon tax — set to start at $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions next year and rising to $50 per tonne by 2022 — is too low. If carbon taxes are to work, they must be high enough to discourage consumers from using products, like gasoline, that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts I’ve talked to say that, to be effective, carbon taxes must be set at about $30 per tonne now, rising to $200 a tonne by 2030.

There is no indication that the Liberal government is willing to be so audacious.

Supporters of the Trudeau government will argue that something is better than nothing, and that economic realities constrain Trudeau's hand. The only problem with that thinking is that it is much, much latter than we like to think, and smiles, rhetoric and half-hearted measures will not slow the tide of the earth's inexorable march to a new normal, one that already is proving decidely unpleasant and deadly for millions of people.