'The Pentagon's eternal arms race of one'

Secretary Doomsday and the Empathy Gap

The Everyday Extremism of Washington

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: 'In Pakistan, US Courts Leader of Opposition.' And nobody thought it was strange at all...

It's just the norm on a planet on which it's assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called 'foreign aid,' now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince...

We now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which 'American national security' -- defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth -- is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy... 

The US government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions -- to support Pakistani military dictatorships or, in periods when civilian rule returns, pour yet more money (and support) into the Pakistani military...

The situation is unnerving -- certainly for the Pakistanis, the large majority of whom have not the slightest love for the Taliban, have opted for democracy and against military dictatorship with a passion, and yet strongly oppose the destabilizing American air war in their borderlands. It could even result in the fall of the elected government or of democracy itself...

[US national security managers] are, it seems, incapable of seeing the situations they deal through the eyes of those being dealt with. They take it for granted that America's destiny is to 'engineer' the fates of peoples half a world away and are incapable of imagining that the United States could, in almost any situation, be part of the problem...

The decisions to be made in future panicky 'crisis' meetings in Washington, when 'American security' once again faces a 'mortal threat,' are already being predetermined in the Mojave desert and elsewhere. In the Pentagon's eternal arms race of one.

Image source here.

New great game: legitimizing 'Af-Pak'

The myth of Talibanistan

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times: The Taliban's activities in Buner in Pakistan have raised concern over the country to the level of hysteria; that it is about to fall to an army of turbans. This is not going to happen. What is happening is that the United States, to legitimize the next stage in the Af-Pak war, is creating a new uber-bogeyman.

So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more a threat to 'US interests' than the Taliban...

What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup -- and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf is active behind the hysteria scene... Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO...

The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel -- which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.

Pakistan Daily:

Barack Obama is Lying about Pakistan

Hillary Clinton admits US role in prevailing situation of Pakistan

Obama's sins of omission

Patrick Cockburn, in The Boston Globe: Obama may differ from Bush on particulars, but he appears intent on sustaining the essentials on which the Bush policies were grounded. Put simply, Obama's pragmatism poses no threat to the reigning security consensus...

For decades now, that consensus has centered on what we might call the Sacred Trinity of global power projection, global military presence, and global activism -- the concrete expression of what politicians commonly refer to as 'American global leadership.' The United States configures its armed forces not for defense but for overseas 'contingencies.' To facilitate the deployment of these forces it maintains a vast network of foreign bases, complemented by various access and overflight agreements. Capabilities and bases mesh with and foster a penchant for meddling in the affairs of others, sometimes revealed to the public, but often concealed.

Bush did not invent the Sacred Trinity. He merely inherited it and then abused it... Obama's revised approach to the so-called Long War, formerly known as the Global War on Terror, should hearten neoconservative and neoliberal exponents of American globalism: Now in its eighth year, this war continues with no end in sight... Far from abrogating the Sacred Trinity, the president appears intent on investing it with new life.

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Talking torture

Slavov Žižek, from In Defense of Lost Causes: Those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives it if is sustained by what Hegel called 'objective spirit,' the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual's activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable... 

This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization's greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine: Despite the mystique that surrounds, it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behaviour beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule... The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system -- whether political, religious or economic -- that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling.

Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain 'indicator species' of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

Paul Woodward, in "Churchill's 'we don't torture' -- except they did": The reason we should not torture isn't because we operate on a higher moral plane... but because we know that we too are as capable of descending into barbarity and moral depravity. We should not torture because we want to protect ourselves from our own demons.

Karen J. Greenberg, in "Kiss the Era of Human Rights goodbye": One casualty of the Bush torture policies... has been human rights itself. And no one seems to notice...

The United States succumbed to the exact patterns of abusive state action that the human rights movement was created to outlaw forever... Among other things, the Justice Department lawyers... were offering nothing short of a detailed manual for those about to go to work on actual human beings...

One day, perhaps soon, much of the rest of the minutiae produced by the Bush administration's torture policy bureaucracy will come to light... For now, however, we have far more than we need to know... The supposed moral exceptionalism of the most powerful nation on Earth is no more.

Bill Moyers Journal: 

Bill Moyers: When you wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?

William K. Black: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."

Žižek and Klein quotes from Briarpatch. Image source here.

Swine flu, health, and conscience

Swine Flu Ancestor Born on US Factory Farms

Wired Science.com: Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in US factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic...

High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the US pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste. Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter.

Life-threatening disease the price for cheap meat

Modern factory farms a 'perfect storm' for powerful viruses

Johann Hari, The Independent: In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces...

[HiN1] is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before... Its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina... We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged -- Perote, Mexico -- contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs...

We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process...

Of course, agribusiness is desperate to deny all this is happening... But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion. We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience -- but now we know they are a scar on our health.

Image source here.

Project Kaisei: clean up the Garbage Patch

Mission to break up Pacific island of rubbish twice the size of Texas

The Times [UK]: The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current)... 

Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.

The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals...

'The trick is collecting the plastic while minimising the catch of sea life. We can't catch the tiny pieces. But the net benefit of getting the rest out is very likely to be better than leaving it in.' says Doug Woodring, the leader of the project...

Plastic bags, food wrappers and containers are the second and third most common items in marine debris around the world, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which is based in Washington. The proportion of tiny fragments, known as mermaid's tears, are less easily quantified...

Mr Woodring admits that Project Kaisei has limitations. 'We won't be able to clean up the entire ocean. The solution really lies on land. We have to treat plastics in a totally different way, and stop them ever reaching the ocean.'

Image source: The Seattle Times

Mayday! for the US

China has 'canceled US credit card'

The Raw Story: China, wary of the troubled US economy, has already 'canceled America's credit card' by cutting down purchases of debt, a US congressman said Thursday.

China has the world's largest foreign reserves, believed to be mostly in dollars, along with about 800 billion dollars in US Treasury bonds, more than any other country. But Treasury Department data shows that investors in China have sharply curtailed their purchases of bonds in January and February.

Representative Mark Kirk, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and co-chair of a group of lawmakers promoting relations with Beijing, said China had 'very legitimate' concerns about its investments. 'It would appear, quietly and with deference and politeness, that China has canceled America's credit card,' Kirk told the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group. 'I'm not sure too many people on Capitol Hill realize that this is now happening.'...

Kirk said he was the the first member of Congress to tour the Bureau of Public Debt, which trades bonds, and was alarmed at how much debt was being bought by the US Federal Reserve due to absence of foreign investors. 'There will come a time where the lack of Chinese participation may have a significant impact,' Kirk said. 'We should track that, because up until last month they were the number one provider of currency to the United States and now they're gone.'

Image source here.

May Day, Vancouver

Corner of 3rd and Yew, Kitsilano

Oíche Bealtaine Shona!

Lá Buidhe Bealtaine maith duit.

Bealtaine fires on the Hill of Tara, Ireland.

Image source here.

'Affecting every form of life'

Climate change hitting entire Arctic ecosystem

The Guardian: Extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic, according to a major new assessment by international polar scientists. In the past four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic Ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing. In addition, says the report... plants and trees are growing more vigorously, snow cover is decreasing 1-2% a year and glaciers are shrinking.

Scientists from Norway, Canada, Russia and the US contributed to the Arctic monitoring and assessment programme (Amap) study, which says new factors such as 'black carbon' -- soot -- ozone and methane may now be contributing to global and arctic warming as much as carbon dioxide. 'Black carbon and ozone in particular have a strong seasonal pattern that makes their impacts particularly important in the Arctic,' it says.

Image source here.

PTSD: 'a silent judgment of war'

How the horrors of war nearly destroyed me

Peter Beaumont in The Observer: War's most dreadful secret, banal and terrible at the same time, is not that men kill -- that much is obvious -- or even that many men enjoy their killing. That, too, has been well documented. It is more insidious than that. There exists a widespread envy of those who kill, and especially those who kill and kill again...

Most of the [US] soldiers I talk to want to get out of Iraq as quickly as they can. Not DC... "What's back there? Nothing. This is it, he says emphatically. "Ain't nothing better in the world. Take a big hit on the bong and then get all dressed up and get behind my gun. And then it's: 'Come on, fuckers, fire at me,' so I can shoot up the streets."...

On another occasion a smart and studiously polite woman soldier shows me her knife. She says she bought it after she came across graffiti in one of the plastic porta-potties outside the command centre where she works announcing that the writer "would like to fuck" her. She tells me she tried to scrub it out. Three times. Three times it returned... "I know it is someone I work with," she explains. It feels like I'm being stalked."

Ex-soldier bragged about Iraqi rape, deaths

Reuters: A former US soldier on trial in the gang rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family in the war zone  in 2006 was caught in a 'perfect storm of insanity,' his lawyer told a jury... But government prosecutors in the same courtroom said former Private 1st Class Steven Green, alleged ringleader of the slayings, was only interested in killing Iraqis 'nonstop' and bragged during a barbecue celebration later that what he had done was 'awesome.'... The incident unfolded after the soldiers drank whiskey, played cards, and plotted the attack.

Politics and Combat Stress in America

Tyler E. Boudreau, Truthout: The trouble with combat stress (and the traumatic accounts that go with it) is its tendency to call into question the morality of military action... War's essence is challenged outright by the mere existence of combat stress.

Upon witnessing the sundered consciousnesses of so many returning veterans and hearing about all the horrible things they endured and commited... When the moral compasses of young soldiers are spun to the point where they find it difficult to bear their own skins (as we've seen expressed in the record suicides of late), it leads to a natural suspicion about the moral direction of the war overall... Like it or not, combat stress is, in its own way, a political statement. It is a silent judgment of war (and of society)...

For those whose angst comes specifically from their deeds in war -- from the violence they inflicted or the deaths they caused -- those veterans come to understand one immutable truth: It is better to break the law than break the faith.

James Baldwin: The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world.

Image source here.

Swine flu and factory 'farms'

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power.

The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a highly globalised industry with global political clout

Mike Davis, The Guardian: The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever... Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith... that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health...

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry... This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure...

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The [Pew Research Center] commission reported systematic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers...

There is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield 

factory farms

Grist: Is Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated.

Image source here.

Peak Oil: 'We enter a new world'

Interview with 

Colin Campbell

(excerpts)

Colin Campbell: Peak Oil is a turning point for mankind. It is a big subject... The population only doubled over the first 17 centuries of the last millennium. But then came coal followed by oil and gas, and the population increased six-fold. These new energy sources, especially oil, allowed the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade and agriculture... It was accomplished by the growth of financial capital as banks lent more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow's Expansion was collateral for Today's Debt.

But now we face the dawn of the Second Half of the Age of Oil when supply declines from natural depletion, meaning that debt goes bad (as is already happening) and the economy contracts. Today's oil supply supports 6.7 billion people, but by 2020 the supply will be enough to support no more than about 2.5 billion in their present way of life. So the challenges of using less and finding other energy sources is great.

The transition threatens to be a time of great tension. Urban conditions will become especially difficult... The position of governments is changing. They are heavily influenced by classical economics and badly advised by such practitioners for whom finding oil is just a matter of investment...

The resource in the ground of tar sand in Canada and elsewhere is huge, but extraction is slow and costly, yielding a low or even negative net energy return... The accessible world has now been thoroughly explored, such that all the major productive provinces and large fields within them have been found.

Attention now turns to the deepwater and Polar regions... The main deepwater areas have also already been found... Most of the oceans are definitely non-prospective... There are a few freak occurrences, such as Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, but generally Polar seems to be a gas-prone domain... It is unlikely to have any material impact on Peak Oil...

I doubt that renewable energies will ever replace oil and gas sufficiently to maintain the past order of things or still less allow economic growth to continue... I don't think new technologies will have any impact on the date of peak, which I estimate to have been passed in 2008... but they can of course ameliorate the subsequent decline...

The whole flimsy financial edifice has now crashed, and some of the sillier governments are now pumping yet more fictional money into the system to encourage new consumption. Such policies may briefly succeed, but will only make the subsequent crash worse.

We enter a new world, as the principal energy that drove the anomalous past two centuries heads into decline from natural depletion. This is not necessarily a doomsday message. I have known many simple people in different parts of the world who smiled and laughed, not being part of the consumer society.

Image source here.

'Centre of the world' needs scapegoat

US Customs uses border 'hits' to blame Canada

Canadian officials vexed as Americans continue to repeat lie connecting 9/11 hijackers to Canada

Mitch Potter, Toronto Star: According to figures confirmed by the US Customs and Border Patrol, travellers arriving from Canada registered 500 'hits' on the government's integrated terror watch list for the year ending last October. That compares to 150 hits on the US-Mexico border for the same period...

But the breakdown of those '500 hits' shows the vast majority of the individuals in question are either US citizens or US landed immigrants... And the overwhelming majority were air travellers... connecting flyers with few or no links to Canada...

One US security source said: 'Yeah, that is about dead-on... Nobody should take that number as any kind of proof that Canada is wildly more dangerous for us. That just isn't the case.'

But that is precisely how such numbers are used... Michael Chertoff was heavily criticized in a similar flap last year for spinning statistics to generate apprehension about the US-Canada border.

Chertoff announce[d] the end of an 'honour system' under which Americans and Canadians have for decades entered each other's country simply by showing a driver's license. Among the reasons, he said, was the discovery of 1,517 false claims of US citizenship at land crossings in one three-month period. The Washington Post... found 

99 per cent of the false claims were made at the Mexican border.

McCain, Napolitano and the myth that the 9/11 terrorists entered the US from Canada

James Laxer: The myth... is hardy and resistant to all efforts to expunge it... I think we're missing the bigger picture here. I've concluded that the myth will never die. Our grandchildren will still be refuting it decades from now.

The legend of the terrorists materializing out of the snowy north, shadowy figures en route to attack New York and Washington, conveys a fundamental truth about what America is and is not and who is and is not American. A civilization that sees itself as the centre of the world has to draw diamond-hard lines to set itself apart from the rest of creation.

The Romans did that... From their City on the Hill, Americans look out at the lands beyond in the same sort of way, branding peoples and continents as having this or that characteristic in a world that is taking an agonizingly long time to become civilized in the way that the people at the centre believe it should.

Canada and Canadians occupy a tiny portion of the American imagination... Attempting to inform Americans about their northern neighbour is to inflict a low-level form of torture on them. With the best intentions in the world, the American mind cannot fathom thinking about Canadians for more than a few seconds. Pressuring an American to consider Canada is a form of sensory deprivation, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. No human being should attempt it.

Image source here: 

Canadian students near top of world

Shocking news: Canada does something important well

Paul Wells, Maclean's: [In] the OECD's Pisa study, a large international survey of 15-year-olds' performance on standard math, science and reading tests... you get large samples, lots of buy-in, a time series that results from administering the tests repeatedly, and other good stuff. And here's what it shows about how Canadian 15-year-olds do compared to their peers in dozens of other countries.

1. Canadian students perform near the top of the world.

2. Being rich or poor is a worse predictor of test outcomes in Canada than in almost any other country. Typically, poorer students do worse on tests. But that effect is greater in some countries and smaller in others. In Canada it's quite small, compared to other countries.

3. Put those two together and you get a very cool scatter chart. You want to be in the upper-left-hand corner: students score high, and economic inequality is a poor predictor of score inequality. The lower right-hand corner is the dunce-cap corner: students score low, and the poor ones are screwed for good. Guess where Canada lands.

4. How much are we paying for this sort of success? About in the midrange, as these things go... It's a rough measure of the efficiency of a school system. Again, bad news for the United States, which spends profligate sums for very modest results. Canada is not shockingly efficient, but its results are solidly in the middle of the countries on the chart.

5. So, we send out 15-year-olds into international tests quite close to the top of the league tables, and the poorer ones are less disadvantaged than their poorer peers around the world. We achieve these results at a very ordinary cost.

Image: Pisa