Interactive website tracks US air strikes

Our bombs: An interactive website and documentary film that looks at the human cost, psychological reasoning, and strategic implications of US air strikes.

Alberta's tar sands from above

From the website: Shot primarily from a helicopter, filmmaker Peter Mettler's Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world's largest industrial, capital and energy project.

Canada's tar sands are an oil reserve the size of England. Extracting the crude oil called bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate.

It's an extraordinary spectacle, whose scope can only be understood from far above. In a hypnotic flight of image and sound, one machine's perspective upon the choreography of others suggests a dehumanized world where petroleum's power is supreme.

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'There may even be an element of shame in all this'

G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero

The Long, Slow Death of American Triumphalism

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: Given the couple of hundred years that made triumphalism a kind of American sacrament, it's nothing short of remarkable that the young are no longer willing to troop to movie theaters to see such films. If you think of Hollywood as a kind of crude commercial democracy, then consider this a popular measure of imperial overstretch or the decline of the globe's sole superpower. Only recently has a mainstream discussion of American decline begun in Washington and among the pundits. But at the movies it's been going on for a long, long time.

It's as if the grim reality of our seemingly never-ending wars seeped into the pores of a nation that no longer really believes victory is our due, or that American soldiers will triumph forever and a day. There may even be an unacknowledged element of shame in all this. At least there is now a consensus that we fight wars not fit for entertainment.

As a result, war as entertainment has been sent offshore -- like imprisonment and punishment. Hollywood has launched it into a netherworld of aliens, superheroes, and robots. Something indelibly American, close to a national religion, has gone through the wormhole and is unlikely to return.

Joe lives. So does war, American-style -- the brutal, real thing in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantanamo and Bagram, in the Predator and Reaper-filled skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, among Blackwater's mercenaries and the tens of thousands of private, Pentagon-hired military contractors who now outnumber US troops in Afghanistan. But the two of them no longer have much to do with each other.

If the Chinese, and South Koreans, and Saudis, and enough American young men vote with their feet and their wallets, there will be another Joe film. And if Washington's national security managers have anything to say about it, there will be what's already regularly referred to as 'the next war.' Film and war, however, are likely to share little other than some snazzy weaponry, thanks to the generosity of the Department of Defense, and American kids who will pay good money to sit in the dark and then perhaps join up to fight in the all-too-real world.

Image source here.

Surface area to power the world: solar, wind

Click on images to enlarge; source here.

The damage done

Harper cabinet unleashes flood of patronage

Canadian Press: Weeks before Stephen Harper named some of his closest Tory friends to the Senate, his cabinet quietly approved a flood of appointments to federal boards that also rewarded party faithful. At least 20 of the 111 appointments made Aug. 4 went to identifiable federal and provincial Conservative donors and supporters... Some of the bodies involved were: the Immigration and Refugee Board, Canada Pension Plan review tribunals, employment insurance referee boards, the parole board, coastal pilotage authorities, port authorities and museum boards...

The rush of appointments followed a little-noticed series of judicial appointments to superior courts across the country in July. That round brought the total number of superior court judges appointed by the Harper government to 201 since 2006. It also further fuelled opposition claims that the prime minister has abandoned election promises of transparency and merit-based public-service and judicial appointments. Conservative appointments to courts, boards, quasi-judicial tribunals and Crown corporations now total an estimated 3,000 since Harper became prime minister...

Harper has yet to establish his promised Public Appointments Commission to set standards and criteria for cabinet nominations to federal posts. That despite the fact that Treasury Board documents show a four-person secretariat set up to support the commission has cost taxpayers a total of $3.6 million since 2006.

Image source here.

'A bleak and terrifying vision'

Afghanistan Apocalypse

Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation: At the Brookings Institution, four analysts portrayed a bleak and terrifying vision of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan in the wake of the presidential election. All four were hawkish, reflecting a growing consensus in the Washington establishment that the Afghanistan war is only just beginning.

Their conclusions: (1) A significant escalation of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won't be possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until after five years have passed...

Not a single analyst questioned the goals, purpose or objectives of the Afghan war. Not one said anything about a political solution to the war, about negotiations, or about diplomacy. Not one questioned the viability of an open-ended commitment to the war. And none of them had any doubts about the strategic necessity of defeating the Taliban and its allies. Although the growing political opposition to the war was referenced in passing -- more than half of Americans say the war isn't worth fighting -- the panel seemed to believe that President Obama can and must ignore politics and push to expand the war when General McChrystal, as expected, recommends an increase in the level of US forces once again.

Afghan Apocalypse, Part II

Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation: A key point of the Heritage Foundation presenters... is that it is critical for the White House to shore up declining political support for the war... So the White House is caught between two bad options: if it continues to gloss over problems like the fraudulent election, it will develop a Vietnam-like credibility gap as the truth becomes clear. But if Obama tells the truth, an American public already soured on a hopeless war against a vaguely defined enemy ten thousand miles away, with rising US casualties and the prospect of spending hundreds of billions of dollars, is very likely to decide that it's long past time to get out.

The four panelists... all agreed that getting out of Afghanistan would be a first-order catastrophe... Their argument was: if we leave, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and their jihadist allies will gain influence across the region... Again, as in Vietnam, all the panelists seemed content to make Vietnam-era, domino-theory arguments that the entirety of the Muslim world is at stake... It's easier to make the argument that radical Muslim extremists are energized by the US presence in Afghanistan and the concomitant jihad, and that a US withdrawal from Afghanistan would calm passions, not inflame them...

Barno's main argument was that the Taliban's strategy is to 'run out the clock' -- yes, he used a football analogy! In other words, the Taliban expect that US political support for the war will force a US withdrawal before we can 'succeed.' (I wanted to ask him if he was aware that precisely the same analogy was used in Vietnam, that the Viet Cong and Hanoi wanted to outlast the US invasion. How ironic.)

Image: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; source here.

People of the Omo River

Tribes of the Omo/ Les tribus de l'Omo (photo galleries)

Translation from the French: Within the most remote parts of Ethiopia, centuries from modernity, Hans Sylvester photographed for six years tribes where men, women, children and elders are true geniuses of ancestral art.

At their feet the Omo River, across a triangle of Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya, the grand Rift Valley [our human homeland] is slowly separating Africa. It is a volcanic region providing an immense palette of pigments, ocher-red, white kaolin, copper-green, luminous yellow and ash-grey.

They are painting geniuses, and their six feet tall bodies are an immense canvas. The strength of their art can be defined in three words: their fingers, speed, and freedom. They draw with their open hands, their nails and fingertips, sometimes with a wooden stick, a reed, a smashed stalk. They draw with swift, rapid and spontaneous gestures beyond childlikeness, these essential movements that great contemporary masters are looking for when they have learned a lot and are trying to forget it all.

h/t Bill Yake; image and translation source here.

Mythical creatures

Click image to enlarge. Source here.

Not what to do but how to be

Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don't. They're a different species. They require a different kind of tending.

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult -- to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization -- not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their 'product' not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their 'success' something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.

They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

-- Mark Slouka, 'Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school,' Harper's (September 2009)

Image source here.

Global Peace Index: Canada #8

Source: Global Peace Index

Global Peace Index Rankings

1 New Zealand

2 Denmark

2 Norway (tie)

4 Iceland

5 Austria

6 Sweden

7 Japan

8 Canada

9 Finland

9 Slovenia (tie)

.......

83 United States

America The Violent

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in 1969: We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart... We must recognize, I believe, that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.

The US appetite for Canada

Canada has a tidy relationship with the US

-- but for how long?

Current trade relationship suits us, but there may come a day when the American appetite for our resources might exceed what we consider to be our best interests.

Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun: A US takeover of Canada?... Realistically, the issue would become pressing only if Americans were to relentlessly continue their unsustainable consumption patterns even as US resources kept on depleting and their economy declined...

Last year, Boston University economics professor Karen Holbik, in a US academic journal, wrote about 'one of the more subtle problems facing the US. The problem concerns retaining economic and political power in the face of decreasing self-sufficiency in natural resources and raw materials.'

The fact is that Americans increasingly depend on Canada's bounty. The two countries have been upgrading North American transit and electricity corridors and installing new pipeline infrastructure, to share resources. The US experienced peak oil way back in 1970. That was the year its old production began declining.

Canada funnels more than half the 3.4 million barrels of oil it produces daily to the US. And provides 82 per cent of all US natural gas imports. And sells a third of its hydroelectricity to US markets. And supplies a third of the uranium used in US nuclear power plants.

Water, of course, is another resource Americans will soon be short of, while Canada's supply remains healthy. Earlier this year, the US Government Accountability Office revealed at least 36 states are anticipating water shortages within five years. The US National Drought Mitigation Centre pinpointed areas hardest hit: The Southeast, Southwest, West Texas, Georgia and southern California -- all high population centres...

If Washington, DC can get what that country needs through 'an economic takeover' -- which nationalist groups like the Council of Canadians assert has been occurring in recent years... Why bring out muskets against a country politely marketing to you what you desire? And doing so happily, in the knowledge that US purchases make Canadians richer.

Obviously it's only at a point when the US appetite might exceed what Canada considers to be in its best interests that push might come to shove... For most Canadians, the current arrangement suits -- we've got extra, they can buy it. That said, we'd be foolish to think that within the current century this tidy equilibrium might not be challenged.

Image source here.

'Male domination of a society is a risk factor'

The Women's Crusade

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NYT: In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater... The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution...

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine 'gendercide' far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. For those women who life, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal... In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved... Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute...

Why do microfinance organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks?... Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor -- especially by men... When women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. 'Well, if you're not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,' Gates said, 'you're not going to get too close to the Top 10.' The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering...

Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country's population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is a risk factor;... when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys' locker room.

Image: Saima Muhammad, shown with her daughter Javaria (seated), lives near Lahore, Pakistan. She was routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business. Katy Grannan for the New York Times.

Measuring the Health of Nations

Source: The Commonwealth Fund

US deluded about its health care: ranks 37th

The Most Outrageous US Lies About Global Healthcare

Foreign Policy: As the US Congress this summer holds its first serious health-care reform debate since the Clinton era, the resulting public furor has featured increasingly overheated claims about everything from so-called 'death panels' to the supposed prowess of America's homegrown medicine. Many of the most wildly inaccurate statements have been directed abroad -- sometimes at the United States' closest allies, such as Britain and Canada, and often at the best health-care systems in the world...

The lie: The United States has the best health care in the world.

The liars: A slew of US presidents, politicians, journalists, commentators, and everyday citizens.

The debunking: There is one yardstick by which US health care distinguishes itself: cost. The United States spends more -- in total dollars, percentage of GDP, and per capita -- than every other country on Earth.

On virtually every other broad metric, the claim that US health care stands for global excellence is demonstrably false. The United States doesn't take a top spot in either the World Health Organization or nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund rankings. The American health-care system is not best in terms of coverage, access, patient safety, efficiency or cost-effectiveness. It does not produce the best outcomes for diseases such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes; for the elderly, the middle-aged, or the young; or in terms of life expectancy, rates of chronic diseases, or obesity.

Which countries do come out on top? -- France, Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and Japan. On the World Health Organization's list, the United States comes out 37th.

Image source here.