For kids of all ages: Lanterns to Copenhagen

Earth Hour Lantern Project:

Send a lantern to Copenhagen

Canadians don't want to go down with the ship

The forecast: Warmer, with a chance of survival

Debra Black, The Toronto Star: Tim Flannery believes the biggest challenge of the 21st century is to create sustainability for the human race. That's par for an environmentalist, and the consensus of a majority of scientists. But the quest is no small task given the resistance and denial in many circles, including among power players in the realms of politics and business...

'If we fail, all of our species' great triumphs, all of our efforts, will have been for naught,' he writes in his latest book Now or Never. 'And perhaps the last 4 billion years will have been for naught as well.'...

Is it as simple as people don't see it? I don't think it's as simple as that. The Europeans see it. They have fostered a whole lot of global energy technology. It's just that North Americans are much closer to a frontier society where business grabs whatever it wants without having to be accountable for the consequences. Canada, the United States and Australia are three great frontier societies. It's not an innately human thing. I think it's a cultural thing.

Would people got down with the ship rather than adopt change? I think if you were a person from a society that had done well from the 20th century then it's hard to let that go... For those people they would rather go down with the ship than adjust to the new world that is emerging.

What would you say to convince people who are naysayers? We're going to have to reach sustainability sooner or later, otherwise we won't have a civilization. This century we're facing some tough barriers. The climate crisis is the most severe. What it actually means in the end is we have to develop business and political models that don't take from society but add something to it.

Canadians, Conservatives differ on climate: poll

The Toronto Star: A new poll suggested most Canadians don't agree with one of the Conservative government's key tenets on climate change. The federal Tories say they won't sign any deal in Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol unless developing countries also adopt tough targets. But 64 per cent of respondents to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey said rich nations have a responsibility to commit to higher and harder targets than developing countries. Most also want to see a binding agreement come out of Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada should act independently of the United States... The Harris-Decima survey shows that 46 per cent of respondents would like to see Canada play a lead role in Copenhagen.

Image: An ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat built by Greenpeace in 2007 (Photo: Manuel Citak / Greenpeace); source here.

H2oil

This is a screenshot. For the animated sequences, go here.

For all the women then, before, and since

National Day of Remembrance and Action On Violence

Against Women

Now you see it, now you don't...

... and look out, here they come:

NATO allies pledge 7,000 more troops for Afghanistan mission

Washington Post: In addition, the US government hopes to dissuade two other major contributors -- Canada and the Netherlands -- from their plans to pull out within two years.

US hopes Canadian troops 'stay as long as they possibly can'

National Post: Barack Obama's national security adviser... Gen. Jones said the July 2011 withdrawal date 'was picked based on the recommendations of what our military commanders thought would be possible to achieve.' He emphasized it was only 'a transition point.'

Different Meanings for 2011 Withdrawal Date

Slate: The Obama administration appears to be saying one thing to lawmakers and another to foreign officials... 'The emphasis on drawdown is for domestic consumption, to appeal to [Obama's] liberal constituency at home,' said a senior official from an allied nation. 'We were told in no uncertain terms that there will be no withdrawal.'

'No Afghanistan withdrawal in 2011'

BBC: 'It's very important that people in Afghanistan hear this very clearly: this is not a withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in 2011, it is a decision to turn over to the Afghans some of the responsibility where they are ready to accept that responsibility. But in no manner, shape or form is the United States leaving Afghanistan in 2011.'

Image source here.

Crown of Thorns

An image featuring a water flea's 'crown of thorns' -- the snaking ridge at top left -- took top honors in the 2009 BioScapes microscope imaging contest... If water flea parents sense that their habitat is shared by their main predators, tadpole shrimp, the flea offspring sport their pointy crowns -- which are unappetizing to the shrimp. Zoologist Jan Michels, of the Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany, added a dye to reveal the tiny animal's exoskeleton (green) and cellular nuclei (blue smudges). The blue-and-red dots are one of the animal's compound eyes, like those of a fly.

Image source here.

'A president needs a war, or so they say'

The Afghanistan Parenthesis

David Bromwich, Huffington Post: Half of the president's logic believes in the urgency of this mission and half perceives no urgency at all. Since people who fear for their lives tend to err on the side of self-protection, we may infer that something other than the imperative of national self-preservation drove the West Point speech and is driving the new policy. Several possibilities are obvious: President Obama's cautious relationship to the military; his wariness of the ambitious general, David Petraeus, and the commander of forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who is an emanation of Petraeus. By leaking the high-end figure for the numbers of troops he would have liked, McChrystal threatened to outflank the president, and that threat has been quelled only for the moment. Meanwhile, Obama's fear of being called weak on defense by Republicans, and thus seeing his stature in foreign affairs diminished for the rest of his term, was doubtless a motive as well. A president needs a war, or so they say...

President Obama closed his speech by offering his large American audience a warm bath of self-love about the American way of life... This long peroration was ordinary and at the same time reminiscent of the war speeches of George W. Bush. By contrast Obama did not talk about the abstract issue that would have taken some courage to broach: the danger that war is becoming an integrated part of the American way of life...

Barack Obama is the most convincing person he knows. He can convince himself of a proposition 'A,' and a second proposition, 'Not A,' and come to believe that the two may be combined. At West Point, he seemed to want to declare a policy and take it back in a single breath. But there are circles that can't be squared; and it is with war as with other fatal commitments: the way in is not the way out.

Obama's war of necessity

Paul Woodward, War in Context: Among the many unanswered questions about President Obama's approach to the war in Afghanistan, there is at this point one thing about which we can be certain: He does indeed regard this as a war of necessity. But necessary for what?... Necessary for re-election?

Maybe. The answer to that question might well be contained in the genesis of July 2011 as the date US troops will start pulling out of Afghanistan. As CBS News reports, that date is 'locked in.' The president told press secretary Robert Gibbs, the date -- (contrary to assertions from US senators) IS locked in -- there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It's etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.'

The Pentagon doesn't like firm dates. It cleaves firmly to the line that everything is provisional, depending on the current conditions. So it's hard to believe that General McChrystal or General Petraeus would have volunteered this timetable. Did it come from David Axelrod? Does July 2011 fit as a 'necessity' into a 2012 campaign calendar?

Meet the Commanded-in-Chief

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: On Tuesday night from the US Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered... From today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded in chief. And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot...

Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with 'commander-in-chief' hand-stitched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet in his first months in office he has increasingly appeared at military events and associated himself with things military. This speech represents another step in that direction. Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech at West Point, no less a major address to the American people? Certainly the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Image source here.

US Afghan escalation: Indifference to reality

America's undying faith in war

Paul Woodward, War in Context: In one of the well-known Sufi stories about Mullah Nasruddin, the mullah has just returned from the market with a basket of red hot chili peppers. He is sitting in a room eating one after another and his mouth swells and his lips bleed and a student finds him and asks in bewilderment why the mullah is punishing himself. Nasruddin replies, 'I keep on thinking that the next pepper will be sweet.' ... This is the pathological shadow of the American can-do optimistic spirit: faith in a future uncolored by the past.

Going beyond necessity

Paul Woodward, War in Context: America's foreign misadventures now, as so often in the past, are spurred by a missionary zeal. However cynical a policymaker's motives might be, there are plenty of young Americans on the ground who sincerely believe that they are in Afghanistan to help... The Pottery Barn Rule was invoked to underline America's moral responsibility for the fate of Iraq... What we should instead keep in mind is what might be called the Rear End Rule: If you slam into the back of someone else's car, don't expect the owner of the other car to be grateful when you solemnly promise to repair the damage yourself.

Mullah Omar Demands Western Departure

Informed Comment: Afghanistan is our home and nobody negotiates with anyone about the ownership of their home and about how to share sovereignty and management responsibilities of their home. Nobody will give up their right to be the owner of their home and nobody will willfully lose their authority in their own home. The foreigners have taken over the home of the Afghans by force and cruelty. If they want a solution to the problem, they should first end their occupation of Afghanistan. Full text is here.

Karzai's Fall

TNR: 'Karzai knows very well that the United States is not going to pull out its troops,' said Afghan political analyst Waheed Mojda. 'He does not have to comply with their demands; there is nothing they can do. They are in Afghanistan for their own strategic interests, not for him.' Those strategic interests are coming under increasing scrutiny, but the administration, and numerous commentators, are bending over backwards to make the case for the US military presence in Afghanistan. They conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda and argue confidently that a loss in Afghanistan could trigger a regional collapse. Those who remember Vietnam and the Cold War experience a shudder of recognition.

Digby, Hullabaloo: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the standoff with Iran and all the other obsessions with the mideast are at least informed, if not entirely motivated, by larger geopolitical efforts to maintain stability at a time of impending competition over resources and access to them... We don't talk about any of that because it might lead us to get serious about changing our way of life... And frankly, maintaining a military presence everywhere is necessary to preserve American global dominance. Period.

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.

Image source here.

Full Moon over Vancouver

'The real villain is Canada'

Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling

The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the only obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen

George Monbiot, The Guardian: When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again...

Here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada... It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations... The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008 it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done the most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th, Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by this bullying... A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth...

The tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place... Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it... Get-rich schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world.

I will not pretend that this county is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

Image; Syncrude oil sands, mine and refinery; source here.

Meanwhile, back in our bodies

Natural Elegance

Fibrin is a protein created by the body that works with platelets in the blood to clot a wound. As they reach the wound site, they attach themselves to fibers, and create a mesh. Working with the platelets, they make a scab that covers the wound until it heals.

Image source here.

You don't want to kill your pretext

Bin Laden 'within grasp'

in 2001

Al Jazeera: The Senate foreign affairs committee report (.pdf) said that the failure to move in on Bin Laden when he was at his most vulnerable had 'enormous consequences'... 'The failure to finish the job represents a lost kill Osama opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.'...

The committee's report criticises Donald Rumsfeld, the then-US defence secretary, and General Tommy Franks, the US general who commanded the invasion of Afghanistan, for not sending more US troops to Tora Bora to block the mountain paths to Pakistan, which were bin Laden's only means of escape.

'Fewer than 100 commandoes were on the scene with their Afghan allies and their calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected, the report said. 'The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the army, was kept on the sidelines... Instead, the US command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin laden and on Pakistan's loosely organised Frontier Corps to seal his escape route.'

Related:

Afghan article says US-Bin Laden hunt phoney

'The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin- Laden and the Al Qa'idah terrorist network... All these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game, whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control.'

Delta Force officer: US stopped plans to kill bin Laden

'How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan that's disapproved by higher headquarters?' CBS' Scott Pelley asked the commando leader. 'In my experience, in my five years at Delta, never before,' he replied.

Elite Officer Recalls Bin Laden Hunt

Delta Force Commander Says Best Plan to Kill the Al Qaeda Leader in 2001 Was Nixed

Image source here.

An Ice-free Northwest Passage

September 15, 2007.

Image source: Earth Observatory/Terra Satellite/NASA/Reuters

US preparing for Arctic combat

US Navy plots Arctic push

'Roadmap' details plans to enlarge fleet in northern waters

The Ottawa Citizen: The US navy is planning a massive push into the Arctic to defend national security, potential undersea riches and other maritime interests. An 'Arctic roadmap' by the Department of the Navy details a five-year strategic plan to expand fleet operations into the North in anticipation that the frozen Arctic Ocean will be open water in summer by 2030.

While the plan talks diplomatically about 'strong partnerships' with other Arctic nations, it is clear the US is intent on seriously retooling its military presence and naval combat capabilities in a region increasingly seen as a potential flashpoint as receding polar ice allows easier access.

"This opening of the Arctic may lead to increased resource development, research, tourism, and could reshape the global transportation system. These developments offer opportunities for growth, but also are potential sources of competition and conflict for access and natural resources," says the 33-page document, signed by Admiral Jonathan W. Greenert, vice-chief of Naval Operations...

If the recent surfacing of a US submarine near the North Pole left any doubt, the navy's roadmap makes it clear the US and other nations will increasingly flex military muscle in the resource-rich region, says a specialist on Canada's northern security. "The Arctic is transforming and everyone else gets it and they're not going to go away," [said] Rob Huebert, associate director at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

But behind a public facade that promotes international Arctic co-operation, Huebert says, "If you read the document carefully you'll see a dual language, one where they're saying, 'We've got to start working together,'... and then they start saying, 'We have to get new instrumentation for our combat officers.'"...

The Norwegians and Danes have spent the last 15 years re-arming with a very combat-capable and Arctic-capable navy and air force, he said... "They're clearly understanding that the future is not nearly as nice as what all the public policy statements say." And the US, in addition to the planned naval re-armament, is to station 36 F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets -- 20 per cent of its F-22 fleet and what many consider the best overall fighter jet in the worl -- in Anchorage, Alaska.

Image: USS Annapolis on the surface of the Arctic Ocean after breaking through one metre of ice on March 21, 2009 (MC1 Tiffini, M. Jones, AFP/Getty Images); source here.