Greenpeace blocks Suncor at tar sands

Greenpeace disrupts Canada's largest energy company

Greenpeace: Activists from Canada, France, Germany and Brazil have shut down a bitumen conveyor belt and blocked a bridge at the Suncor Energy site on the Athabasca River north of Fort McMurray.

Live streaming video from the action is here.

Activists locked down on the bridge have erected a banner reading 'Bridge to Climate Hell.' Other activists have floated a banner on the Athabasca reading 'Dying for Climate Leadership.' to focus attention on the disregard for the river and the people who rely on it.

The river banner also speaks to the failure of the Canadian government and world leaders to fight climate change.

The action comes two weeks after the successful Greenpeace blockade at a Shell open-pit mine and a week after Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's leading body on climate change, said that Canada is failing on climate action, and should consider putting the tar sands on hold.

Watch for updates on the Greenpeace web site.

Dimona: Israel's 'original sin'

The Most Dangerous Nuclear Facility in the Middle East

Juan Cole, Informed Comment: There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production.

There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and not just enriched uranium, which has the capacity to make 10 nuclear warheads a year.

Here is a 3-D reconstruction of the most dangerous weapons plant in the Middle East, at Dimona in Israel.

It is Israel's ongoing nuclear weapon production that drives the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Saddam wanted a bomb because Israel had one. The Iranians were then worried both about an Iraqi and an Israeli bomb. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others are annoyed at their geostrategic helplessness in the face of Israeli nukes.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is the region's Original Sin.

Image source here.

Quotes for the day

Arundhati Roy: As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry. (In 'What Have We Done to Democracy?')

Whishaw said that when he agreed to take the role, [director Jane] Campion told him that he should know as much about how poets approach their craft as possible... "She said 'You have to experience the world as poetry to have a poet's view of life. You can see poetry in everything, and poetry only reveals itself over time.'

"I visited his house and did everything I could to get myself closer to being in his spirit. I spent some time in class with a poet and we touched on some of the technical things. But Keats said, 'Poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree.' He was a smart man and educated himself to the technical stuff, but when he was writing, he was receiving it from somewhere else." ('Ben Whishaw channels poetic John Keats in Bright Star')

Photo of the day

The call on America Inc.: A can't-do nation

Water here, water there

New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast of 6.3-Degree [3.5C] Temperature Increase

The Washington Post: Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released by the United Nations Environment Program...

The significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change... Sea level might rise by as much as six feet [1.8 metre] by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC had projected, and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice [free] summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.

Laser satellite records ice loss

BBC News: Greenland and parts of Antarctica are losing large volumes of ice to the oceans as their glaciers get thinner, a NASA satellite has revealed... A full melt of the Greenland ice would push sea level up by about 7m (20ft)... The swiftness with which some of the glaciers now move towards the sea far outstrips the rate at which ice can be restored to the land through precipitation. As a consequence, these glaciers are shown in the Icesat data to be falling in height -- some dramatically so...

The findings re-affirm what many suspect -- that the reduced elevation of these glaciers is not the result of changes in precipitation or melt, but the increased speed at which they now move... In many places in both Antarctica and Greenland, glaciers are being confronted by warmer waters which are eroding their fronts... The break-up of floating ice shelves that would normally constrict glacier flow has also contributed to the observed acceleration. And in some regions, increased air temperatures are having an effect.

In Surprise, Moon Shows Signs of Water

The New York Times: Data from three spacecraft indicate the widespread presence of water or hydroxyl... 'It's so startling because it's so pervasive,' said Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a co-author of one of the papers that analyzed data from a NASA instrument aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite. 'It's like somebody painted the globe.'...

The Chandrayaan-1 data looked at sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface and found a dip at a wavelength where water and hydroxyl absorb infrared light. Dr. Taylor estimated the concentration at about one quart of water per cubic yard of lunar soil and rock [approximately 1 litre per cubic metre}.

Image sources here and here.

The Nuclear World

Image source here.

The US 'culture of cruelty'

A mean streak in the US mainstream

Mary Dejevsky, The Independent: When we Europeans -- the British included -- contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States?... It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea...

The point is that, when on 'normal,' the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others... There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation... Underlying the culture of cruelty... was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice...

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment... that promotes a 'symbiosis of suffering and spectacle.'

Health Care, Race and Political Polarization

Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weller, The Washington Post: Americans' views of political issues and their partisan attachments are being increasingly shaped by gut-level worldviews. On one side of many issues are those who see the world in terms of hierarchy, think about problems in black and white terms, and struggle to tolerate difference. On the other are those who favor independence over hierarchy, shades of gray over black-white distinctions, and diversity over sameness.

We call this dividing line an authoritarian one, and we find that what side of the line people fall on explains their positions on a wide-ranging set of issues, including race, immigration, gay rights, civil liberties, and terrorism... We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Dissecting the Lizard Brain

Dday: I would say that in general, opposition to any social insurance program for the less fortunate meets head-on with racial animus. Whether the presumed leader of this policy shift is white or black, a substantial portion of those with racial resentment pictures that leader as delivering their tax dollars to the undeserving other...

What these professors are really probing is the lizard brain, the tribal identifiers that often bubble to the surface, in unguarded moments, as racism. It's almost too neat and simple to simply call it racial in intent. It goes much deeper to a visceral resentment, a put-upon persecution complex, this constant paranoia that someone else is getting a better deal... It's purely an emotional release to explain whatever personal failings or lack of compassion already exists...

These thoughts have taken decades if not hundreds of years to wind through the American lizard brain. It will take perhaps as much time to wind them out.

Image source here.

From the journals of Mahmoud Darwish

As if he were asleep

He woke up all at once. He opened the window onto a faint light, a clear sky and a refreshing breeze. He felt his body, limb by limb, and found it was intact. He looked at the pillow and saw that no hairs had fallen out in the night. He looked at the sheet and say no blood. He switched on the radio and there were no reports of new killings in Iraq or Gaza or Afghanistan. He thought he was asleep. He rubbed his eyes in the mirror and recognized his face easily. He shouted: 'I'm alive.' He went into the kitchen to prepare coffee. He put a spoonful of honey in a glass of fat-free milk. On the balcony he saw a visiting canary perched on a tub of flowers he'd forgotten to water. He said good morning to the canary and scattered some breadcrumbs for it. The canary flew away and alighted on the branch of a bush and began to sing. Again, he thought that he must be asleep. He looked in the mirror once more and said: 'That's me.' He listened to the latest news report. No new killings anywhere. He was delighted by this peculiar morning. His delight led him to his writing desk, with one line in his head: 'I'm alive even though I feel no pain.' He was filled with a passionate desire to make poetry, because of a crystal clarity that had descended upon him from some distant place: from the place where he was now! When he sat hat the writing desk he found the line 'I'm alive even though I feel no pain,' written on a blank sheet of paper. This time he didn't just think he was asleep. He was sure of it.

From A River Dies of Thirst, Translated by Catherine Cobham

Happy Autumn!

Tom Thompson, Autumn Foliage, 1915

And about that Afghan Army...

Meet the Afghan Army

Is It a Figment of Washington's Imagination?

Ann Jones, TomDispatch: American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen -- and ever faster...

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training?... My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of 'Basic Warrior Training' 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the US once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban...

Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques -- 'as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the US Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.' Of course, some of them have attended training sessions which teach them to fight in 'austere environments,' probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn't you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn't you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?...

There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army a washout?

When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the US: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That's how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe -- that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. 'Our' Afghans try to get by...

'Our' Afghans are never going to fight for an American cause, with or without American troops, the way we imagine they should. They're never going to fight with the energy of the Taliban for a national government that we installed against Afghan wishes, then more recently set up to steal another election, and now seems about to ratify in office, despite uncontrovertible evidence of flagrant fraud. Why should they? Even if the US could win their minds, their hearts are not in it.

Image source here.

Preparing for disaster

Rivka Galchen: These grand weather-control ideas, charted in mathematical detail, are works of the scientific imagination. I myself think of them as poems. They are constrained not by meter or rhyme or genre but by the stuff of our real world. We're used to thinking of constraints as a way to enhance the artistic imagination; we're just not used to these particular constraints, the laws of our universe as we understand them.

When we treat certain scientific imaginings as pragmatic undertakings rather than as a kind of art, we end up with bumbling disasters, occasionally profound evil, and now and again something like a smallpox vaccine and affordable clean-water resources for millions of people. But as a way of dreaming rigorously, these poems of science might be like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, or Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky.' Or like the work of the Marquis de Sade.

-- 'Disaster Aversion: The quest to control hurricanes,' Harper's (October 2009)

Leslie Fiedler, on Simone Weil: This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the 'imaginary,' our own dreams and self-deceits, the utopias of politicians, of the futile promises of future reward and consolation which the misled blasphemously call 'religion.'

-- quoted by Mary Gaitskill in 'Lost Cat,' Granta 107

Nicholas Fraser: Humans aren't generous or even coherently motivated by self-interest. They are what they are -- nothing is to be done about it. All you can do is notice things and work hard at surviving.

-- 'A Man of Extinction,' Harper's (October 2009)

Image source here.

After the lament

Chris Turner: We fell into casual conversation in that easy way men do when there's a fire to be tended, and talk turned to my recent communion with the Great Barrier Reef. One of the locals, a maker of elegant slide didgeridoos of his own design, said something about how the future didn't look very bright for the reef.

'Not unless we really make some changes, no,' I replied, shooting for a note of pragmatic optimism.

'Nah,' chimed in a ponytailed dude named Angus who was assembling pizzas. 'It's gone, mate. Might as well start getting used to the idea.'

I didn't know what to say to that, so I busied myself with the cheese grater. His tone had sent me reeling for reasons I couldn't place until much later. It wasn't grave or accusatory, not glib nor gleefully nihilistic. It was a win-some-lose-some tone, a shooting-the-breeze-around-the-bonfire tone. The tone of someone who'd already reached some sort of difficult reconciliation a good while back with the notion that there was nothing so sacred or durable that it exists beyond the reach of this tumult. It was the tone, I guess, of someone who'd dedicated his life to the step that came after the lament.

-- 'The Age of Breathing Underwater, in The Walrus (October 2009)

US racist crazies: 'Now the mask is off'

The Return of the Repressed

Michelle Goldberg,

The American Prospect: Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself...

For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety... The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore...

It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right -- they were initially deeply intertwined... As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a Kulturkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and lesbians. The movement convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off.

The GOP's Evangelical Subculture is a Fifth Column of Insanity

Frank Schaeffer, to Rachel Maddow: We have a subculture... that is bred from birth, through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever to reject facts as a matter of faith... Can Christianity be rescued from Christians?... When you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our President is the anti-Christ you have to draw one of two conclusions.

Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they're beyond crazy. And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation and that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America. We have a bit slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon...

A group of people who are resentful because they know they've been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature... These people are standing on a hill top waiting for the end and this is a dangerous group to have as neighbors. And they're our national neighbors... It's a disaster.

Obama as witch doctor: Racists or satirical?

CNN: William Jelani Cobb, who has written extensively about race and politics, said Obama's election has also rekindled the historic rancor some whites feel against successful blacks... 'The upsurge of riots at the beginning of the 20th century was driven in part by the fact that blacks were perceived to be moving up in society -- at the expense of whites... Now we have a black president, which means, on its most basic level, that a black man has more power than any single white citizen in this country... Whether people want to admit it or not, I suspect the Tea Party crowd believes that the currency of whiteness has been devalued.'

Can America Be Salvaged?

David Michael Green, Common Dreams: The folks most aggrieved and most estranged from their senses of late are precisely the people who were bought off of their sanity at every turn with the latest form of bigotry du jour, used to assuage their ever-diminishing sense of relative social status. Over and over again, the people I see on my television screen acting absolutely and incoherently stupid in their senseless rage seem to be little more than fat, white, Southern, sixty-something racist good ol' boys.

Well past their sell-by dates, they've of course gotten tremendous help cranking it up again. That's no surprise. I'm not sure these crackers are smart enough to even be stupid without coaching...

It takes a willful act of ignorance (something we see a lot of these days) not to perceive the United States as the latest in history's failing empires... Unlike Rome, this puppy is taking decades, rather than centuries, to collapse.

Empires come and go, of course. Rising and falling is what they do... What is truly frightening to contemplate, however, is what happens when an empire falls in the era when technological capacity absolutely dwarfs political maturity? And what happens if that occurs not just anywhere, but in arguably the most immature, self-serving and self-indulgent of developed societies on the planet?

Image source here.

Meanwhile, down under...

Antarctic Ozone Hole 2009