Liars, Damned Liars and the Conservative Party

    The Toronto Star /  Canadian Press Service are reporting that despite repeated claims that the Canadian government would address global warming and GHG emissions in step with the United States, Environment Minister John Baird has stated that this will not happen.
    With the failure to institute cap and trade in the US, the Obama administration has announced a "Plan B," passed by executive order, that strengthens the EPA regulation over greenhouse gasses. To quote the article:

    The first step tightens rules for existing facilities planning any expansion that would increase emissions. Then, starting in July, the rules will be extended to include newly constructed facilities.
    The EPA says its regulations target operations that produce nearly 70 per cent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources.
    The agency estimates the more stringent rules will require first-time permits for about 550 sources between 2011 and 2013. It also expects an additional 900 permits for new and modified projects each year.

    Although the EPA regulations are national, Texas has announced that the state will refuse to meet the federal guidelines. Baird offers the excuse that because of this refusal, this makes the US regulations "not national."
    Frankly, this position is absurd. It is the equivalent to suggesting that because Alberta has argued with, and been in contravention of, aspects of our national healthcare program, that this invalidates Medicare. It was not true in the case of Medicare, and it certainly isn't true in the case of the new EPA regulations.
    The Conservative Party has been relying on the American Republicans tactics of lies, denial, and fear to keep any meaningful change in American policy on GHGs from being enacted. With the strengthening of EPA regulation by the White House, this claim that "when the Americans do something, we'll do something" has been rendered moot. The Americans have done something-- and, importantly, something that could make a difference here in Canada. They have targeted GHG emissions from stationary sources. In Canada, that means only one thing; the Alberta tar sands projects.
    If the Conservatives were to actually harmonize Canadian environmental regulation with the US, this would force greater efficiencies on the tar sands projects, possibly restricting their (currently a cancer-like unrestrained) growth. It would do nothing to address the appalling waste handling in the tar sands, nor would it do anything to deal with tailpipe emissions (a 1970s problem addressed by a Conservative proposal to harmonize Canadian regulation with American earlier this year).
    The Conservative Party under Stephen Harper has made it abundantly clear that they will not, under any circumstances, do anything that might slow the exploitation of the tar sands, or that would impose any kind of regulation on them. This does, from their point of view, make sense; any regulation of the tar sands would raise, in Alberta, the spectre of the hated National Energy Program. Which, of course, would mean political suicide for the Tories in Oilberta. The Tories have recognized that opposing corporate interests, particularly in the oil patch, particularly in Alberta, is a non-starter. This despite the fact that most Albertans couldn't have told you what the NEP was about in the '70s, never mind now.
    In our current irony-impaired environment, Baird made his comments while preparing to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins this week in Cancun, Mexico.

Propaganda; Shouldn't It Really Be The Word Of God?

Over at the Conservapedia, there's a proposal being floated to re-translate the Bible. The Conservative Bible Project suggest that:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

The nutbars Conservatives over at Conservapedia are really worried about the liberal bias in the Bible.They state that:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

I'm particularly fascinated by #6 & #7: "Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning" and "Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story." To state so baldly next to each other that you want to remove what you think is liberal cant and insert what can only be described as conservative cant, and that you don't see a problem with this, is, to me, mind-boggling. But apparently this is not so on the far right: the belief that others have done something--whether or not that belief is supported by evidence--is apparently justification for doing the exact same thing. Instantly any concept of "truth" disappears and is replaced by the concept of competing propagandas. Any appeal to evidence is immediately seen to be a call on biased propaganda. "Things fall" is liberal propaganda, and any appeal to the senses (look out the window! Gravity is in operation!) as dismissed as biased and propagandistic nonsense ("that's just what they want you to believe! Gravity doesn't even work on those who believe in it!). This kind of thinking is completely resistant to argument; it is thouroughly magical and any appeal to reason, evidence, or even sanity is, by definition, biased and propagandistic, and can be dismissed out of hand. Logic and reason have no place in a hermetically sealed belief system, and are seen as enemies of faith or belief.
This program, on the part of the Amerikan Right, to create a political community where spiritual, economic, and political concepts are adopted and are then unchangeable proceeds apace. Mutually antithetical concepts like "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" are normal inside this doublethink groupmind. Regretfully, this type of thinking and political community building has spread into Canada as well. Alberta and Saskatchewan are hotbeds of it.

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Censoring Science

HuffPo is reporting that "[a] high-ranking Interior Department official tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species over five years." Apparently, according to a new report, Julie MacDonald, the former deputy assistant secretary overseeing the American Fish and Wildlife Service "did pervasive harm to the department's morale and integrity and may have risked the well-being of species with her agenda, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney said." More from the story:

The Interior Department last year reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found that MacDonald had applied political pressure in those cases. The new report looked at nearly two dozen other endangered species decisions not examined in the earlier report. It found MacDonald directly interfered with at least 13 decisions and indirectly affected at least two more.

MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, resigned in May 2007. Department employees reported that they used her name as a verb _ encountering political interference from senior managers was called "getting MacDonalded."

Devaney said "MacDonald's zeal to advance her agenda has caused considerable harm to the integrity of the ESA program and to the morale and reputation" of the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as potential harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act.

"Her heavy-handedness has cast doubt on nearly every ESA decision issued during her tenure," from 2002 until 2007, the report said. MacDonald was deputy assistant secretary from 2004 to 2007 and a senior adviser in the department for two years before that.

This is not unusual. When it comes to climate change and science, the Bush administration has done a great job of keeping scientists in line. Earlier this year I read Censoring science : inside the political attack on Dr. James Hansen and the truth of global warming (©2008 by Mark Bowen)

which talked about how NASA was pressured to keep Hansen's work and views away from the public. Much of this is typical; governments don't want information to be free for mostly political reasons. Studies are buried, polls disappear, all this is old news. But what we are seeing--both south of the border and here--is a new attempt to simply deny anyone access to the basic information on which we can make informed decisions. This is not disagreement on what information means, or whether a study is at all important. What it does mean is that the essential information is being repressed (in allegedly open and democratic societies). this is not an argument, for example, over whether stuff falls at 32 feet per second squared in a vacuum, but is closer to an attempt to repress the knowledge that stuff falls at all. Our governments--particularly south of the border, but I don't except the harper government (particularly after the lies and hysteria they spread when their hold on power was recently threatened)--currently most resemble the Catholic Church during the intellectual struggle over the change from a Ptolemaic to Copernican systems of thought. It is a situation where ideology is far more important than observable facts or even consensus reality. We've seen where this has left Bush (wondering why people are throwing shoes at him, and believing that his legacy will be awe-inspiring--clearly de-linked from reality). What we don't pay enough attention to is where this is leaving the public, both here and in the US.

Where it leaves us is in deep trouble. The world is being badly thrashed by environmental problems, religious problems, and a host of issues that are at heart, political. And the public is being harshly mistreated by our political and corporate masters, brainwashed, brain-damaged, and being left drowning in a stew of incoherent ideology and magical thinking. When we finally come to terms with the need to do something about a problem, magical thinking is all we're left with. Which is great for the Overlords--they get to keep doing whatever they want, free of any threats to their dominance. There is, over on Finlayson Road a garage door that must make the neighbours crazy: brightly painted with a large peace symbol and the words "peace now!" But a couple of years back, the door was changed. The peace symbol was painted over with a large "No" bar (the circle with a slash symbol), and the words "peace now" crossed out and replaced with "Revolution Now!" Can't say that I disagree.

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Well fucking 'Duh'

I mean, really. Who actually thought that the Alberta government and the Harper feds really wanted to do anything other than piss around the problem of CO2 emissions? Harper's "cap and store" proposals are nothing more than an attempt to look like he's doing something without actually doing anything to disrupt Alberta's fountain of dirty money. And both governments  have committed dollars to a plan they have to know is really crap. the CBC is reporting that:

CBC News has obtained a government document that says reducing greenhouse gases from Western Canada's oilsands will be much more difficult than some politicians and the industry suggest.

The ministerial briefing notes, initially marked "Secret," say that just a small percentage of the carbon dioxide released in mining the sands and producing fuel from them can be captured.

The oilsands are the fastest-growing source of CO2 in the country, set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of total emissions by 2020 under current plans.

These two batches of liars and dissemblers have committed upwards of $2.5-billion to carbon capture --allegedly to address the problem of the oilsands. They have committed this money knowing that it won't work, but the architects of the plans will be long gone by then, and the oil industry will be well satisfied that they've managed to maximize profits while ensuring they do nothing about environmental issues. 

This bullshit is the reason we're all going to die. Seriously. International corporate control of our so-called democracies ensures that the public interest comes last, while profit maximization triumphs.

Capture and storage may work with coal-fired plants (but notice the pr work being done by big coal in the US to position themselves as "clean")--the lead author of the study, David Keith, says as much: "[Keith] says he's frustrated that politicians and the industry keep focusing
on the oilsands when there are sources of greenhouse gases to capture
more easily and at less cost, including coal-fired power plants. Rational people shouldn't focus on reducing emissions in the oilsands through carbon capture and storage."

Well, that just points out that we don't have rational people in positions of power. We have purchased politicians. Damn it, but this pisses me off. You can find the CBC report here. The ministerial briefing notes are here (link is to a .pdf).

CBC Radio's Erik Denison speaks to host Jim Brown on the Calgary Eyeopener about the briefing documents at this RealMedia streaming link.(runs 6:29)

CBC Alberta has a big series about the oilsands here.

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More about the Wackaloon

So I'm sitting here thinking "WTF?" a lot the past couple of days. Sarah Palin is being savaged by her own people for the fair and balanced ass-kicking Americans handed McCain a few days ago. Hey, McCain picked a woman who (it is alleged by Fox News) didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country, that she couldn't name any of the members of NAFTA (as Jon Stewart put it, "there's us, gay us (pointing overhead) and the burrito place (pointing down)), and thought the US was at war with Iran. But according to Fox News' Carl Cameron (who broke this), they couldn't report on this because "it was off the record until after the election." To quote:

CAMERON: There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency.

We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement. That’d be Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series — a country just in itself. A whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability.

It should be pointed out that yes, Cameron did use the word "knowledgeability"--which should give rise to some concern over his own "intelligenceability." But more importantly, here is a woman who was supposed to have been vetted by the McCain campaign, who was one bad heart day away from the presidency should the ticket win, and Cameron couldn't find a way to bring out how woefully unprepared the VP nominee was? WTF? that is not just a story, but is essential information that citizens need to make a decision. To my mind, that is a firing offence, the kind of thing where you wind up in journalism courses under "bad decisions you really should avoid making." Look at Woodward and Bernstein--where information was "off the record", they pursued other sources until they could put the info on the record. To hide that kind of thing from the public, that's not journalism, that's being nothing more than a tool of a propaganda machine.
The post-election attacks on Palin, while perhaps deserved (the Wackaloon is, after all, pretty scary as a politician and human being), have, from the Right at least, taken on the worst of the anti-female rhetoric typical of the attacks on Hillary Clinton from the same sources.
Now, today in the Telegraph comes this report:

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

Now, I might argue a bit with the line "her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged." I would suggest that there was nothing unintentional about it. This was the Wackaloon playing to the base. Hell, she may not have been playing--I suspect that the fear and anger she was playing to were in fact her own. McCain himself never seemed too comfortable playing the race card--perhaps because he actually knew Obama as a human being. But "[i]rate John McCain aides, who blame Mrs Palin for losing the election,
claim Mrs Palin took it upon herself to question Mr Obama's patriotism,
before the line of attack had been cleared by Mr McCain." (from the Telegraph article) Again, I hesitate to buy that argument, as that kind of attack has Lee Atwater and Karl Rove written all over it. I suspect that Palin was seen by the big fixers like Rove as the perfect weapon to get the campaign back in line with previous winning efforts (Willie Horton anyone?). My suspicion is that McCain was running the campaign more his way than the fixers liked, and that they grabbed at Palin as their chance to run a classical Republican hate campaign in tandem with McCain's. Worked too--Palin did fire up the base. At least until the "liberal media" began exposing her deep unreadiness for office.

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Wackaloon from Wasilia

Seriously, she does look nuts as well as talk nuts. And I was watching her on CBC introducing her husband as "the First Dude." Really? First dude? That would make him John McCain's husband, which would shock Cindy McCain, I suspect. Best he could be is Second Dude, or Vice Dude, and where's the fun in that?
And ABC News is reporting the Wackaloon as saying (in an interview with WMAL-AM radio):

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the First Amendment is about. The US press is supposed to call you on your bullshit--exactly what has been missing (with the occasional John Stewart exception) for the last eight years. And if your point is legit, then they are expected to say that as well.
But it is typical of the Amerikan Right that criticism is automatically assumed to be an attack on their constitutional rights. Their case seems to be that it is inherently unfair to criticize them. That the Bush II administration has been working as hard as it can to actually make criticism of the Amerikan government illegal seems to be a logical outgrowth of this whiney, pissy attitude among the divorced-from-reality Right.
This denial of reality, the development of what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" ("We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist," Colbert explained. "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore.") on the Right, the attempt to convince the world that up is down, left is right, true is false, is what draws parallels to Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. (But as Chomsky et al. have pointed out, Goebbels got a lot of his ideas on the manufacturing of consent in the public from the American Walter Lippmann).
So when the Wackaloon from Wasalia gets into the act, trying to generate a reality more to her liking than the one she's forced to inhabit (~"I never supported earmarks. Or the Bridge to Nowhere. I don't abuse power."~), she is absolutely in the mainstream of Amerikan thinking. It's as if the ability to reinvent oneself--long an Amerikan tradition and a valuable one--has been extended to reinventing reality to a more congenial version. This kind of magical thinking leads to national obsessions like fascism and empire--as Amerika parallels Nazi Germany in the rise of fascist thought and over-reaching into empire based on the belief in the intrinsic unworthiness of the enemy.

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