Sunday, December 17, 2006

Gulliver in Iraq

"Washington was manifestly unprepared to handle the complexity of Iraqi internal politics and found itself caught in not only a military but politcal quagmire, from which it has so far failed to extricate itself. Indeed, as time went on, the US found it had less and less froom for manoeuvre, coming to resemble a Gulliver tied down by tiny Lilliputians."

Immanuel Wallerstein: The Curve of American Power


The complete article is available with a subscription or it can be bought seperately at New Left Review.

More Articles by Wallerstein.

See

Iraq


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About Time

I have to agree with Northern B.C. Dipper who says; Time To Fire Brad Lavigne, NDP Communications Director

My only comment would be that the time to do that was right after the last election when he refused to have an NDP blog.

Lavigne's performance on the political talk shows on CTV and CBC is less than inspiring, and he simple repeats himself over and over, spending more time attacking the Liberals than really attacking the Tories. And he is incapable of any sponteanous comment, or pithy counter point, or heck even a short sharp stab. He is always on his message, which is tiresome.

During the election there were those who live in the Ottawa beltway that like him.
*Unflappable, indomitable and effervescent even when he's on the attack-- nobody doesn't like Brad Lavigne.

Well I don't and it appears more Dippers are getting pissed with him.


On Afghanistan I have done a better job getting the NDP message out than Lavigne has. Lavigne has missed defining the mission in debates with his Conservative and Liberal counterparts. And the NDP really blew it with their messaging on Dion on Afghanistan.

Instead they engaged in cheap shots one expects from the Western Standard.


Brad Lavigne interview

Even worse his haircut sucks and he dresses like a dweeb, though in the last week it appears he has finally bought a new suit, and a found a matching T-shirt to go with it.


See

Brad Lavigne

NDP



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Linked Graphic Dangers


This is an example of what happens when you link to a graphic. Courtesy of the neandertal Alberta Seperatists at FreeAlberta. com.

I had linked to their graphic of Ted Moron for my article Ted Morton Goes Federal.

I guess they don't like being linked to criticisms of their favorite Moron.

I have to wonder though what is with the moonbats on the right and their Freudian fixation of accusing folks they disagree with of practicing beastiality. I guess it show's their rural roots.

And yes I removed their offensive graphic from my page, I guess they will be happy now. Of course if they weren't such dweebs they would have appreciated that I had linked to them, giving them more hits than they deserve.

And then there is a thing called email, that they could have used to let me know they did not appreciate my posting their picture as an embedded link. But heck why bother. Its easier being an asshole.

Even when Werner Patels and I have had our blog wars he at least did not stoop so low.

But when you're an asshole you act like an asshole. And after all we all know Alberta Seperatists are Assholes. Which is why they like asshole Ted Morton.


See

Goose and Gander

Blogging

Seperatism




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Call An Electiion


Our new President of the Executive Council of Alberta; Steady Eddie Stelmach is a man of few words.

Message from the Premier

Doing what's right for all Albertans

I pledge to do my best to serve the citizens of this great province. I am humbled and honoured by the support I've already received and I look forward to working with people across the province to do what is right for all Albertans. Together we can do great things.

Premier Ed Stelmach announced five priorities for government

Govern with integrity and transparency

Manage growth pressures

Improve Albertans' quality of life

Build a stronger Alberta

Provide safe and secure communities


To the point kinda of guy.

Stelmach plans to tour the province in January and February to meet with party members and other Albertans.

If he wants to do whats right for Alberta he will call an election in the spring of 2007 not just do the Royal Tour. In fact he should be obliged to call the election in 2007, no in 2008 or 2009 as he is contemplating and 2010 is way too late.

As this entry in wikipedia says;

The next Alberta general election does not need to be called until early 2010. However, it is probable that it will be called as soon as 2007 because the governing Progressive Conservatives held a leadership election on December 2, 2006 in which Ed Stelmach was elected to replace Ralph Klein as party leader and Premier.

The election will be called as soon as Stelmach formally advises Lieutenant Governor Norman Kwong to dissolve the Legislature. On June 11, 2006 Liberal opposition leader Kevin Taft announced a prediction for an election being held in February 2007. Former NDP leader Raj Pannu predicted a spring 2007 vote. However, Stelmach was not predicted by very many observers to win the PC leadership so whether he will call an election within that timeframe remains to be seen. There is also speculation that the vote will be delayed until fall to avoid running into a federal election projected for early 2007.

See

Ed Stelmach

Alberta




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Ted Morton To Outlaw Homosexuality

Amongst animals.

Ted Morton, a social conservative backbencher who garnered widespread grassroots support in his own leadership campaign, was appointed minister of sustainable resource development, which includes forestry, fires, and fish and wildlife.

Morton ran on a platform of challenging equalization payments to Ottawa, privatizing more of the public health system and legislating the right for people to speak out against gay marriage without fear of punishment.

Gay rights groups say such a bill would institutionalize discrimination.

Morton has failed twice from the backbenches to a pass private member's bill on it, but indicated now that he's on the front bench, the fight is back on.

"I think that issue will come back," he said.

Yep I can see our very own California Beach Boy Republican Right Winger trying to bring in legislation to ban wildlife from engaging in homosexuality.

Homosexuality is quite common in the animal kingdom, especially among herding animals. Many animals solve conflicts by practicing same gender sex


See

Morality not from animals

Ted Morton Goes Federal

Mortons Homophobia Rebuked

Ted Morton





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Rural Roots

This headline says it all about Ed Stelmach's, the new President of the Executive Council of Alberta, choices for Cabinet.

'This cabinet does not look like Alberta'


Nope it's all rural. And like the rest of Canada rural Alberta is declining in population and increasing in age, it represents the old guard, while urban Alberta booms.

"It's Christmastime. All the rest of the province got Play- Station 3s and Edmonton and Calgary got socks and underwear," lamented NDP Leader Brian Mason.


And the Deputy Ministers are even bigger unknowns from the backbenches reperesnting rural Alberta.

And it's 'Honest' Ed's first broken promise.....

'Nobody is going to get left out'

Stelmach was also asked how he would reach out to Calgary because his support was stronger in Edmonton and rural Alberta.

"As a minister I've always found balance in how I looked after Edmonton and Calgary needs, and rural needs, and I'll continue to do that," he said.

"Nobody is going to get left out under my leadership."

Along with short-shanging Edmonton and Calgary he forgot to have someone from Fort McMurray in his cabinet. So much for being honest.

The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fa/Ed_Stelmach.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7e/HarryStrom.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

As I said this proves Ed Stelmach is the second coming of Harry Strom.

A second one party regime has ruled Alberta for thirty five years.And again political entropy has set in. The PC's are doomed like their Socred predecesors to repeat history.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx

See:

Alberta

One Party State

Conservative Leadership Race

Socreds


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Saturday, December 16, 2006

Chavez vs. Klein


An interesting post that was published in Alberta Views magazine and is now online, comparing Alberta and Venezuela. This was written prior to Ralph Klein stepping down on Thursday, finally.

Interesting how the U.S. media refers to Chavez as a dictator but they never refered to Klein that way, though in Venezeula there is actually more opposition in government than there is in Alberta.

Now this is the challenge facing our new President of the Executive Council of Alberta, Ed Stelmach. Bet you didn't know that Alberta had a President. Yep that's the Premiers official designation. CEO of Alberta Inc.

This aritcle reminds me of the Parkland Institutes reccomendations for a new energy policy for Alberta
A Made In Alberta Canada First Energy Policy

Auctioning Canada’s Future Under the Klein Government

While Venezuela has taken advantage of record oil prices to invest heavily in social spending, Alberta’s Klein government has moved steadily in the opposite direction. Private companies investing in Alberta’s tar sands pay just 1 per cent royalties until all capital costs are paid off. Because of incentives from the provincial and federal governments, corporate taxes are low on tar sands projects and declining in the oil and gas sector as a whole.

Nonetheless, Alberta government revenues have increased in tandem with rising global prices—from just $2.6-billion in 1998 to a whopping $9.74-billion in 2004-05. Yet this money has been spent largely on maintaining the country’s lowest income tax rate and paying off the deficit. Despite the oil-fuelled economic boom, Alberta continues to have the lowest minimum wage in the country. While social spending has increased slightly in recent years, it has not yet been restored to the levels it achieved before 1993, when the government cut social spending by 30–40 per cent.

Despite this enormous surplus, the Alberta government has pushed for an expansion of public-private partnerships in the health care sector. Critics argue that this is just a code word for privatization and that it violates the Canada Health Act. According to a recent report by the Edmonton-based Parkland Institute, the affordability of public health care is not at issue—the government has more than enough money from recent oil and gas windfalls. Rather, the report argues, funding social programs is contrary to the Klein government’s market-obsessed ideology.

Strategic Skeptics

Of course, there are those who argue that Alberta’s oil policy is preferable to Venezuela’s. They raise two main criticisms of the emerging Venezuelan model. The first is the fear that PDVSA’s newfound assertiveness will scare away foreign investment. “If competitive rules aren’t in place,” warns James Williams of WTRG Energy Economics, “they won’t be able to develop the heavy oil—unless Chávez does it himself. Foreign investors won’t be there.” British Petroleum (BP) CEO John Browne recently mused to an interviewer, “One has to question whether Venezuela wishes foreign oil companies really to be there in any big way.”

But the next day, not wanting to compromise his company’s substantial investments in Venezuela, Chevron’s Latin America director Ali Moshiri noted, “The name of our company is Chevron, and our Chairman is David O’Reilly. We have a different view [than BP] on Venezuela.” The fact is that despite raising the cost of investment for foreign companies, big oil remains in Venezuela—and, with prices surging, it’s not going anywhere.

The second critique is that Venezuela’s excessive social spending will doom the industry by ignoring crucial reinvestment. In late 2004, the IMF called on oil-producing countries to save profits from high oil prices rather than spend them. Oil industry analysts in the US make the same argument: Jenalio Moreno warns, “Windfalls from higher oil prices are enabling nations such as Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela to mask the mounting urgency for reforms and investments needed in the region's energy sector.” Moreno cites Ricardo Amorim, head of Latin America research for WestLB in New York City: “One of the effects that you have when you have high oil prices is you can temporarily solve structural problems. Those countries are not investing as much as they should in the future and that could create bottlenecks.” Funding social programs with high oil rents is all well and good, say these analysts, but if maintenance of industry infrastructure (wells, pumps, roads) isn’t kept up, these oil-funded programs will be unsustainable.

But, according to the Venezuelan government, the future is precisely what Venezuela is investing in. In the same year that PDVSA invested US$3.7-billion in social programs, it reinvested almost twice that amount back into the company. The conflict at root of the “re-nationalization” process occurring under the Chávez government is between the “old PDVSA”—a profitable multinational that gave highly generous terms to private companies but transferred little profit back to the Venezuelan government—and the “new PDVSA,” managed efficiently and professionally in the interests of Venezuelan citizens.

Bolívar North?

A better deal for Alberta depends on the involvement of the rest of the country. This can come about only as the result of a collective decision by citizens to force it onto both provincial and federal agendas. But nationalist politics are probably not enough.

Canada has been riven by conflict over Alberta’s oil wealth for decades. During the days of the National Energy Program, Alberta fumed as the rest of Canada ate up their profits during boom-time. Since the death of the NEP, and despite relatively small surpluses in a few other provinces, the rest of Canada has come to resent what they perceive to be Alberta’s greed in hoarding a national patrimony as a provincial right.

This tension is, perhaps, less potentially divisive than it first appears. When we consider the potential rents that the provincial and federal governments are handing out in incentives to private companies, it becomes clear that there is enough money to go around—it’s just kept to a very small circle. A higher proportion of windfall profits would permit Alberta to reinvigorate and expand the Alberta Heritage Fund (a rainy day fund to protect Albertans in case of future price drops, the fund has been stagnant since the 1980s), bring funding for social-programs at least up to pre-1993 levels, begin serious restoration and mitigation of ecological damage resulting from oil extraction, and share a significant amount of money with its poorer brethren in the rest of Canada. As we have seen with Venezuela, the claim is preposterous that big oil would no longer find the tar sands profitable with royalties at such a rate. Oil-producing countries have the upper hand.

Alberta is not just missing out on the windfall profits currently enjoyed by private companies; it is squandering Canada’s reimbursement for the exhaustion of a non-renewable resource. The extraction of tar sands and extra-heavy crude is more than three times as ecologically damaging as conventional oil extraction. The resultant increase in greenhouse gas emissions is already encouraging the Harper government to renege on our responsibilities to Kyoto.

The impact is arguably even greater in Venezuela, where environmental regulations have historically been less stringent. Indigenous communities in both countries may be the worst losers in the race to the dirty-energy throne: both Canada and Venezuela are currently negotiating pipelines through indigenous territories, threatening to displace whole communities, with little compensation, if any, on offer.

Why isn’t Alberta investing a portion of current oil profits in developing an alternative energy industry that could establish itself as a leader once fossil fuels are exhausted, or once we decide that the cost is just too high? By taking the lead in alternative energy, protection of the environment and equitable partnership with indigenous communities, Canada could establish itself as model for constructive, socially just development.

The Alberta model depends on the assumption that private profits will be reinvested back in the industry, with resulting job creation. But oil companies are having difficulty finding projects in which to invest; their record profits are currently being passed on to shareholders. The distinction seems relatively straight-forward; but, at root, separating the Albertan and Venezuelan models are questions of power, and ultimately of ideology.

Prior to Chávez, Venezuela was pursuing an oil policy very similar to that of the Klein government. The transition was only possible by organizing and involving the populace while simultaneously implementing progressive policies from above. Similar changes in the Albertan context would depend on a corresponding mobilization of Canadian citizens—both here and in the rest of the country.

At present, this question isn't on the agenda in Canada—in 2005 it wasn't even an election issue. Making it one will require an ideological challenge to neo-liberalism, including a serious rethinking of our relationships with corporations at the provincial and national levels. It will also demand revisiting the relationship between natural resources located in Alberta and the broader Canadian social and political context. The popular mobilization needed in Alberta to develop a progressive oil strategy cannot occur in isolation from the rest of Canadian society. We must overcome the individualistic chauvinism that so often drowns out progressive voices in Alberta.

Jonah Gindin is an independent journalist and researcher living between Toronto and Caracas. He has written for Venezuelanalysis.com, ZNet, and NACLA Report on the Americas, among other publications.


See:

Chavez

Alberta

Oil


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Friday, December 15, 2006

Carnival of Anarchy



I have created a blog for a new Carnival of
Anarchy

A carnival for Anarchists, anarchism, anarcha-feminists, anti-authoritairans, anarchists of colour,libertarians, left libertarians, mutualists, libertarian-socialists, libertarian-communists, individualists, anti-statists, agorists,non-statist socialists, cooperative socialists, Free Market Anti-Capitalists, and Bugs Bunny.

And what the heck is a Blog Carnival well....

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.





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Bad Cops


Why does this not surprise me.

Dozens of Police Act charges have been laid against 24 Peel police officers for their roles in an off-duty beer party last summer.Some of the charges involve a complaint by two young men who say they were chased, threatened and roughed up by several officers after they were discovered filming the bash. It's believed to be the largest number of police officers to ever face discipline at one time on a Canadian force.


Could it be because of this
Peel For the Police or this Police View This Blog

Wonder if the video of their bash will show up on YouTube.

As theRolling Stones said, "Like Every Cop Is A Criminal"

See

Police

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Surprise



Back to the drawing board. Time to revise all those hypothesis mascarading as 'facts'. And I like the cheeky commentary of this writer.

Scientists hope to dust off the origins of space and time

It's only a fraction of a thimble's worth of dust, but scientists around the world are buzzing about it altering our view of how the solar system formed and perhaps, depending on what else gets teased out of these tiny specks, of how life arose on Earth.

"For the first time, we have a sample of the material that was around when the solar system formed more than 4 billion years ago," said Don Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer and lead scientist for NASA's $212 million Stardust mission.

Earlier this year, the Stardust space capsule returned to Earth (the Utah desert, to be precise) after traveling 2.9 billion miles over seven years. Two years ago, the spacecraft encountered a comet known as Wild 2 and collected dust by flying through its "coma" -- the cloud of ice, gas and dust at the front of the comet.

"We have found some amazing things," said the UW astronomer, citing as one example the discovery of a class of minerals known as calcium aluminum inclusions.

Holy cow! Calcium aluminum inclusions?

OK, even though most people likely haven't heard of this class of minerals, it turns out they are fairly interesting once Brownlee explains what they are -- and why finding them in an ancient comet was not to be expected.

"They are the oldest things in the solar system," he said, and they only form in extremely hot environments like that of a forming star, or the sun.

Yet comets such as Wild 2, according to the common wisdom, are formed of dust and ice to orbit out in the extremely cold regions at the edge of our solar system.

In short, comets shouldn't have any high-temperature calcium aluminum inclusions.

"That was, for me anyway, the biggest surprise," Brownlee said.

What this seems to imply, he said, is that the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago was either much more violent or the swirling proto-planetary material in space was much more "mixed" than most theoretical models suggest.

See

Space

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