Islamic radicals strike on Egypt/Israeli border...and elsewhere..can we connect the dots?

By Yusri Mohamed, Reuters, in Toronto Star, August 7, 2012
RAFAH, EGYPT—Egypt branded Islamist gunmen who killed 16 Egyptian police near the Israeli border as “infidels” and promised on Monday to launch a crackdown following the massacre that has strained Cairo’s ties with both Israel and Palestinians.
An Egyptian official said jihadist militants crossed into Egypt from the Gaza Strip before attacking the border station on Sunday. They then stole two vehicles and headed to nearby Israel, where they were eventually killed by Israeli fire.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Monday that up to eight assailants died in the attack. He also said he hoped the attack would serve as a “wake-up call” to Egypt, which Israel has accused of having lost control of the desert Sinai peninsula.
The bloodshed represents an early diplomatic test for Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist who took office at the end of June after staunch U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was overthrown last year in a popular uprising.
Morsi visited the border area on Monday, accompanied by the head of Egypt’s military, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi. The army sent in reinforcements and stepped up checkpoints.
During his rule, Mubarak co-operated closely with Israel on security and suppressed Islamist movements such as Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which rejects violence to achieve its goals but whose leaders often voiced hostility towards the Jewish state.
Egypt’s military, which still holds many levers of power, called Sunday’s attackers “infidels” and said it had been patient until now in the face of instability in Sinai.
“But there is a red line and passing it is not acceptable. Egyptians will not wait for long to see a reaction to this event,” it said in a statement on its Facebook page.
A largely demilitarized Sinai is the keystone of the historic 1979 peace deal between the two countries. But for the past year there has been growing lawlessness in the vast desert expanse, as Bedouin bandits, jihadists and Palestinian militants from next-door Gaza fill the vacuum, tearing at already frayed relations between Egypt and Israel.
Morsi has promised to honour Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel and has done little to suggest a major shift in ties. He has also reached out to Hamas, the Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip that borders Egypt and Israel, and Sunday’s killings put an instant strain on their relations.
It is not only the strain on the tenuous relationship between Egypt and Israel that is threatened by this incident. It is a sign of the growing "stage" for Islamic radical terrorists to wreak their havoc around the world.
We now know, for example, that the Syrian conflict has been infiltrated by Al Qaeda terrorists, threatening to tear the rebel forces apart, in spite of the defection of the former Prime Minister in the Assad 'government' and his return from Jordan to fight with the opposition. We know that Al Qaeda operatives are posing a threat in Yemen, and in other places in Africa such as Somalia and Nigeria.
Failure to destroy the Islamic radical element, an element committed to exacerbating the situation wherever there is instability, in order to plant their flag, through the inciting of anything western, man-made, and non-Islamic.
Of course, at the top of the list is Israel, United States, and most western countries, where, fortunately, political and economic stability are stronger than in the regions most fraught with economic and political instability, uncertainty and few prospects of turning that instability around.
These small, apparently isolated terror strikes, however, are, in their complexity neither small nor isolated.
They result, in part, from a well-documented conviction that the world community is unable to stop their occurrence, in spite of the billions spent on "security" in all its many forms, since 9/11. They result, also, from another deeply held conviction that violence is the only instrument in the terrorists' quivver that will keep the world community both on notice and increasingly unstable itself, given both the paranoia and the political will to build fortresses, both literally and militarily, and also cybernetically.
And underlying the conditions that make terrorism the new kind of conflict, are conditions of poverty, disease, lawlessness and the failure of "governance" in too many theatres, all of them potential locations for more strikes, and more lives lost and for more instability and opportunity for the big powers to take sides, as they are doing and have done in Syria, Iran, and potentially in Egypt.
As we watch these skirmishes, and their coverage as seemingly separate incidents as they are reported, we are wary of a media both too fragmented and stripped of adequate resources, as well as dedicated to micro-reporting of 'incident's rather than macro-reporting of connecting the dots, leaving that job to the specialists, and the experts and the insiders...while ordinary people are both deprived of their right to know just how serious these incidents are, cumulatively, and how the leaders of the world community are collaborating to protect us all.
There is, apparently, no effective international body empowered and responsible for macro-political implications, save and except perhaps small departments of international relations in various universities, and they are most likely underfunded, in an age of rapidly and dramatically changing world drama that is merging into a single drama played out by many-headed monsters like Al Qaeda, whose forces are unlike what the textbooks diagram as potential threats to us all.
The head of the Munk School of International Relations at the University of Toronto, Janice Stein, appearing on CBC's Power and Politics, just minutes ago, points to the danger of chemical weapons in Syria, and urges the Canadian government to continue to attempt to work with the Russians, who, she says, have personnel on the ground in Syria, know where those chemical weapons are stored and along with the U.S. have a common interest in those chemical weapons NOT being deployed.
As Ms Stein points out, "We all have an interest in seeing that those chemical weapons are not used on anyone by anyone, including Assad.

Hedges: August 6, The Anniversary of Hiroshima (READ AND WEEP!)

The Science of Genocide
By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, August 6, 2012
On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.
“In World War II Auschwitz and Hiroshima showed that progress through technology has escalated man’s destructive impulses into more precise and incredibly more devastating form,” Bruno Bettelheim said. “The concentration camps with their gas chambers, the first atomic bomb … confronted us with the stark reality of overwhelming death, not so much one’s own—this each of us has to face sooner or later, and however uneasily, most of us manage not to be overpowered by our fear of it—but the unnecessary and untimely death of millions. … Progress not only failed to preserve life but it deprived millions of their lives more effectively than had ever been possible before. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, after the second World War Auschwitz and Hiroshima became monuments to the incredible devastation man and technology together bring about.”
The atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral. Science and technology serve the ambitions of humankind. And few in the sciences look beyond the narrow tasks handed to them by corporations or government. They employ their dark arts, often blind to the consequences, to cement into place systems of security and surveillance, as well as systems of environmental destruction, that will result in collective enslavement and mass extermination. As we veer toward environmental collapse we will have to pit ourselves against many of these experts, scientists and technicians whose loyalty is to institutions that profit from exploitation and death.
Scientists and technicians in the United States over the last five decades built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.5 trillion. (The Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal of similar capability.) By 1963, according to the Columbia University professor Seymour Melman, the United States could overkill the 140 principal cities in the Soviet Union more than 78 times. Yet we went on manufacturing nuclear warheads. And those who publicly questioned the rationality of the massive nuclear buildup, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who at the government lab at Los Alamos, N.M., had overseen the building of the two bombs used on Japan, often were zealously persecuted on suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers. It was a war plan that called for a calculated act of enormous, criminal genocide. We built more and more bombs with the sole purpose of killing hundreds of millions of people. And those who built them, with few exceptions, never gave a thought to their suicidal creations.
“What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everyone except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” Oppenheimer asked after World War II.
Max Born, the great German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, in his memoirs made it clear he disapproved of Oppenheimer and the other physicists who built the atomic bombs. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote his old teacher back. “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.” But of course, by then, it was too late.
It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a “rational” enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species? Does it protect life?
For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction.
The 17th century Enlightenment myth of human advancement through science, reason and rationality should have been obliterated forever by the slaughter of World War I. Europeans watched the collective suicide of a generation. The darker visions of human nature embodied in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Frederick Nietzsche before the war found modern expression in the work of Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, along with atonal and dissonant composers such as Igor Stravinsky and painters such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Human progress, these artists and writers understood, was a joke. But there were many more who enthusiastically embraced new utopian visions of progress and glory peddled by fascists and communists. These belief systems defied reality. They fetishized death. They sought unattainable utopias through violence. And empowered by science and technology, they killed millions.

Human motives often are irrational and, as Freud pointed out, contain powerful yearnings for death and self-immolation. Science and technology have empowered and amplified the ancient lusts for war, violence and death. Knowledge did not free humankind from barbarism. The civilized veneer only masked the dark, inchoate longings that plague all human societies, including our own. Freud feared the destructive power of these urges. He warned in “Civilization and Its Discontents” that if we could not regulate or contain these urges, human beings would, as the Stoics predicted, consume themselves in a vast conflagration. The future of the human race depends on naming and controlling these urges. To pretend they do not exist is to fall into self-delusion.
The breakdown of social and political control during periods of political and economic turmoil allows these urges to reign supreme. Our first inclination, Freud noted correctly, is not to love one another as brothers or sisters but to “satisfy [our] aggressiveness on [our fellow human being], to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.” The war in Bosnia, with rampaging Serbian militias, rape camps, torture centers, concentration camps, razed villages and mass executions, was one of numerous examples of Freud’s wisdom. At best, Freud knew, we can learn to live with, regulate and control our inner tensions and conflicts. The structure of civilized societies would always be fraught with this inner tension, he wrote, because “… man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this program of civilization.” The burden of civilization is worth it. The alternative, as Freud knew, is self-destruction.
A rational world, a world that will protect the ecosystem and build economies that learn to distribute wealth rather than allow a rapacious elite to hoard it, will never be handed to us by the scientists and technicians. Nearly all of them work for the enemy. Mary Shelley warned us about becoming Prometheus as we seek to defy fate and the gods in order to master life and death. Her Victor Frankenstein, when his 8-foot-tall creation made partly of body pieces from graves came to ghastly life, had the same reaction as Oppenheimer when the American scientist discovered that his bomb had incinerated Japanese schoolchildren. The scientist Victor Frankenstein watched the “dull yellow eye” of his creature open and “breathless horror and disgust” filled his heart.” Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexican desert: “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another.” The critic Harold Bloom, in words that could be applied to Oppenheimer, called Victor Frankenstein “a moral idiot.”
All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation destroys them and us. They make the nuclear bombs. They extract oil from the tar sands. They turn the Appalachians into a wasteland to extract coal. They serve the evils of globalism and finance. They run the fossil fuel industry. They flood the atmosphere with carbon emissions, doom the seas, melt the polar ice caps, unleash the droughts and floods, the heat waves, the freak storms and hurricanes.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Drought, food price spikes, global warming and still we sleep-walk into our own furnace

The Financial Times of London has detailed these changes: panic buying in China, Europe and Mexico, a rise in U.S. and Canadian wheat prices as livestock are fed wheat instead of corn, and massive planting of corn and soybeans in South America....
Average corn yields have doubled since 1970 but this can’t go on forever, no matter how peppy Monsanto gets about its seeds improving year-over-year until yields double again between 2000 and 2030, as the FT reports. (From Heather Mallick's column on U.S. drought, exerpted below.)

Will 2012 be the summer when North America finally wakens to the truth, the unequivocal, irreversible and uncontrovertible truth that man is slowly but surely committing global suicide through global warming and climate change? Will the extensive pattern of 100 + Fahrenheit degrees in U.S. cities, in the mid-west, the "farm" for much of the world, and the resulting failure of crops that feed millions around the world, and the inevitable spike in food prices be enough to convince more than the most recent physicist, a former skeptic on global warming and now an avid convert, to start putting effective, relentless and unconventional pressure on North American governments to implement a carbon tax, to demand conversion of many coal-fired electricity-generating stations to natural gas, along with many automobiles and finally, to sustain long-term research in alternative energy supplies, like wind, solar and biomass?
Don't hold your breath!
Governments on both sides of the 49th parallel seem to be sleeping through the crisis, more interested in micro-managing, in the U.S. Republicans doing all manner of obstruction to defeat Obama, and in Canada, fretting over the hurdles to the Northern Pipeline, another agent of dirty heavy crude from Alberta.
And while there are small pockets of animated conversation, even a little hint of political activism here and there, mostly the humungus corporations, oil and seed, auto and pharmaceutical, continue to truck their profits onto ships to foreign bank accounts, where they hide from legitimate taxes. And the drum-beat of daily, nightly newcasts beats an ear-deafening and mind-numbing note of despair that we will all have to pay several percentage points more for food in the coming months...and farmers on both sides will suffer extensive losses to their incomes, their herds and their crops.
Talk about a cognitive dissonance!
It's as if the "leaders" are asleep at their desks, while the fire-fighters rush to put down the rampages that erupt from both arsonists and nature, and the police and criminal investigators rush to mass murder scenes and the commodities markets panic purhase raw food products as a hedge against what looks like a perfect storm of drought, carelessness, greed and another front of the 99 vs 1% battle. The Donald, for example, plants his ugly footprint on the sand dunes of Scotland with a mega-golf course, interrupted only by the hiccups of a few home owners who would not sell to the money-maniac, while the dumbest honorary degree ever is handed to "the Donald" by Aberdeen University for his "commercial vision."
Is this latest tragi-comedy in Scotland a sign of the indifference, the absolute stupidity and the narcissism of allegedly "smart" people in the face of real eco and economic choices? Seems so.


By Heather Mallick, Toronto Star, August 5, 2012 Commodities brokers notice climate change, though, because it quickly links to profit or loss. The U.S. midwest, dry as powder, grows a third of the planet’s corn and soybeans and exports 40 per cent of what is traded around the world.

Could there be any word more boring to the general public than “commodities?” No, but try “food prices” and ears will perk up. People’s ears, that is. Corn ears are stumps right now, two months after predictions of a warm spring and one of the finest crops in recent years. Then came the drought.
There is a long rolling effect as big crops — corn and soybeans — die. The Financial Times of London has detailed these changes: panic buying in China, Europe and Mexico, a rise in U.S. and Canadian wheat prices as livestock are fed wheat instead of corn, and massive planting of corn and soybeans in South America. Agricultural centres will switch around.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper got a lucky reprieve from the consequences of killing the Canadian Wheat Board. Wheat prices will be strong in the short term, but in the long term — when the drought moves north — farmers will suffer. Without the board, they will suffer alone.
As for corn prices, remember that high-fructose corn syrup is what feeds poor and middle-class Americans cheaply. The 99 per cent won’t be happy.
Grass-fed beef? Cattle need grass, hay and water. They have little and so they’ll be hustled to the slaughterhouses, a cull that will be difficult to repair. “Bulls don’t breed in 105-degree weather,” Missouri cattle farmer Matt Hardecke told the FT flatly. And that kind of heat is in Missouri to stay.
Unlike grain and food prices, ethanol use has been debated. It was always madness to make gasoline out of corn — corn is food for animals and people — but now the U.S. government may have to stop mandating ethanol content in fuel.
We used to assume science would take care of farming, the Green Revolution that relied heavily on expensive fertilizer having boosted farming in the Third World. Average corn yields have doubled since 1970 but this can’t go on forever, no matter how peppy Monsanto gets about its seeds improving year-over-year until yields double again between 2000 and 2030, as the FT reports.
But Monsanto can’t predict the ravages of global warming.
Rising food prices are part of the second warming wave, although all such classifications are obviously arbitrary. Was the spruce pine beetle eating Canadian forests part of the first wave or the second? Rising sea levels — for which Britain, New York City and Florida, to name only three sites, are noticeably unprepared — are coming but when?
Freak storms are already here. Extreme heat may or may not be causing glass to fall out of some Toronto condo towers, the glass not being adaptable enough. We can partly attribute a lack of blackouts to Ontario factories shutting down, which is not exactly great news.
What’s the upside, people ask. There is no upside because we are global now. We import and export, we rely on each other, we hope to be able to flee the heat. We won’t suffer equally, but we will all suffer.

Brits' addiction to form over content trumps fair practices in colony and church

In Canada, it used to be said that the Anglican church was the Tory party at prayer. Reading the history of the words used in the Canadian constitution, dedicated to "peace, order and good government" as compared with the earlier and more compassionate "peace, welfare and good government" in John Ralston Saul's book, A Fair Country, demonstrates the importance of a single word, in the development of a new country.
Order was generally used in the British Empire to describe the use of authority or power. Welfare was used to describe the nature of governmental policy, which implied the existence of a public weal.
In practical terms, power meant power over programming. As late as 1942, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council--the equivalent of a Supreme Court in London  for the Dominions and the colonies-- had to interpret the meaning of Peace, Order and Good Government in the India Act. They said it referred to the scope and not the merits of the legislation. In other words, Order referred  to power over the extent of the law, not to the nature of the law, which would come under Welfare....Power in 1866 meant that the Canadians would assume power over programs, that is, pay for their own defence." (A Fair Country, p.155-156)
So there are two regrettable results of these decisions, to replace "welfare" with "order".
First, the British government was now exempt from paying for the defence of the colony, demonstrating a kind of parsimony, as well as a degree of disinterest, unless and until the colony could be shown to be "profitable" for the Empire.
Second, the matter of how power was shared would, forever, trump the quality or the fairness or, in French, the bien-etre (the well-being) of the nature of Canadian law although that quality was the focus of much of the discussion, including the proposed wording, that went to London from the Canadian colony for approval.
Saul continues:
(The Judicial Committee) used the section on peace order and good government to turn the decision of power into the central question of Canada's existence, in fact, of Canadian public life. In the context of order, they made all debates seem to be about the "scope and not the merits of legislation." They made form, not content, the driving force of Canadian politics. Over the decades this has become increasingly the case. It matters less whether children are hungry than who writes or does not write the cheque. Nothing national in scope can be discussed except under the magic umbrella of form. (Ibid, p. 162)
Not only is this tragic, but it manifests a similar situation in the training and development of priests in the Canadian Anglican tradition. First, all priests are like "colonials" under the thumb of the bishop, whose power, when deployed, is fiat, without appeal. Second, the matter of form is much more important than substance.
For example, two weeks of formal training in "holy hand-waving" demonstrating and practicing how to literally hold and move one's hands during the course of the Eucharist epitomized, for the writer, this emphasis on form, while not a single class, lecture, reading or discussion was dedicated to the delicate and highly important issue of parish conflict and its resolution. Nor was a single class, lecture, debate or discussion dedicated to the topic of personal spiritual development, and when I once asked a bishop to describe the spiritual life of a specific warden, for whom I was going to work as a student intern, I heard, "Red book!" (as opposed to the more liberal and contemporary green book of prayer and liturgy.) Categorizing individuals as politically more in favour of one prayer book than another does not describe their spiritual life but rather attempts to depict their political leaning, as to form, and certainly not as to content.
There is much ink being spilled in daily papers these days, about the troubles of the liberal church, much of it focussing on the decline in membership of the American Episcopal church. With a history of attending to form, over content, to holy hand-waving over conflict resolution, to the worship of authority over welfare, fairness and compassion, it is little wonder that more and more people are acknowledging they are not being fed the kind of spiritual food that can and will sustain them in their private search and pilgrimmage for God.
Nor is it any wonder that the Canadian government can pass a law in 1979, with a unanimous vote, to eliminate child poverty by 2000, and in 2012, not a single piece of evidence exists that would indicate any effort was made to enact such a law. In fact, child poverty has grown worse in the ensuing decades.
Once again back to Saul:
Again, what matters here is not the specific splits of federal-provincial power, Much more important is the direction in which this process of defining order took the expression of Canada's imagination. Our energies were deflected away from the conceptualization of policy and toward the arcane battles of ministerial and bureaucratic control at different levels. Nevertheless, Canada continued to grow as an intentional civilization producing unusual content. However, we could no longer sound like an intentional civilization. In our legal public descriptions of ourselves, the concept of welfare, fairness, bien-etre has been erased." (Ibid, p 165)...
You know that this lugubrious atmosphere, of a country finding its way accidentally, has begun to matter when you have a large, well-trained elite that seems increasingly incapable of action, as if incapacitated by some unexplained force, as if they cannot conceive of Canada as an intentional civilization capable of undertaking unusual and original initiatives. And so they are reduced to arcane battles of short-term power and profit. They have difficulty imagining content as anything more than form. It seems as if our own country is unable to do what should not be that difficult to do.  (Ibid, p. 166)
Saul then lists examples of default in government action:

• a 2004 law to sell cheap drugs to poor countries, not one pill sent two years later
• Canada has lowest per capita number of doctors in OECD..not enough places in medical schools and number of immigrant doctors
• a lost Canadian steel industry while smaller countries still retain a flourishing steel industry

Arcane battles over power and authority as compared with substantive debates over the fairness and the justice of proposed legislation/ministry....hardly defines either a healthy intentional country or a healthy intentional worship community.

Annan quits, slapping both Assad and the UN Security Council in the face!

By Patrick Martin, Globe and Mail, August 2, 2012
In an abrupt move, Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, has resigned his position as head of a UN Security Council peace-making mission to Syria.

The news signals the end of any realistic hope for a political solution to the raging conflict that has torn apart the country and left as many as 20,000 people dead.
“The increasing militarization on the ground [in Syria] and the clear lack of unity in the Security Council have fundamentally changed the circumstances for the effective exercise of my role,” Mr. Annan said, reading from a prepared statement Thursday.

“It’s a bad sign,” said Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “I guess it means he’s given up hope of getting the backing he needs from the external parties for a substantive dialogue with the [Syrian] regime. And he's given up on getting any meaningful engagement from the regime and opposition.”
“He’s not wrong,” Dr. Sayigh added. “This conflict is going to go on for a very long time.”
Within weeks of taking the assignment this spring, Mr. Annan, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had devised a six-point plan that would allow the protagonists in Syria to step down in stages.
It included the withdrawal of military forces from urban centres, a cessation of hostilities by both sides and negotiations for a gradual handover of power to democratically elected leaders
But neither side would have anything to do with it, beyond saying they would not abide by it.
“The bloodshed continues, most of all because of the Syrian government's intransigence, and continuing refusal to implement the six-point plan, and also because of the escalating military campaign of the opposition, all of which is compounded by the disunity of the international community,” Mr. Annan said.
“The plan was doomed to fail,” said a former senior official in the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Neither the opposition nor the regime showed any inclination to compromise,” said the former official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“Neither side has put forward a realistic agenda for what to do when the conflict is over,” he said. “They are only interested in destroying the other side.”
Mr. Annan didn’t disagree with such an analysis, but in responding to reporters’ questions at a hastily assembled press conference Thursday in Geneva, Switzerland, said he had felt obliged to take on what some called a “mission impossible.”
“The severity of the humanitarian costs of the conflict, and the exceptional threats posed by this crisis to international peace and security, justified the attempts to secure a peaceful transition to a political settlement, however daunting the challenge,” Mr. Annan said.
He blamed international leaders for not accepting responsibility to act.
“At a time when we need – when the Syrian people desperately need – action, there continues to be finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council.”
Countries such as Russia, China and Iran must do more to persuade the regime of Mr. al-Assad to end the conflict and to step down, Mr. Annan said emphatically. And countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the United States must do more than simply root for the opposition to triumph.
As the news of Mr. Annan’s resignation was becoming known, the U.S. State Department announced a further $12-million (U.S.) in humanitarian assistance for Syrian civilians. That brings the total for Washington’s humanitarian relief to $76-million.
Anna is right to say that he cannot be more committed to peace than the combatants in the fight. Nevertheless, why are we not hearing more about what has really become a "proxy war" with the western powers on one side (SFA, the Syrian Free Army) and China and Russia on the Assad/government side?
We continue to hear that "Russia and China are blocking any resolution that calls for Assad to step down, because that would lead to chaos"...but we know that Russian arms have supplied Assad, as has Iranian support. And, now there is evidence that Al Qaeda is operating in Syria, as well as Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and yesterday there were arrests of three potential Al Qaeda suicide bombers in Spain.
To what extent is the Syrian conflict linked to the radical Islamic drive to remove "man's government and replace it with god's government" around the world?
What is the role of religion in the Syrian conlict?
What possible gain can come to either China or Russia from backing Assad?
If, as most observers agree, this is likely to be a very long conflict, with many more casulties than the already tragic 20,000, how long will it be before the major powers enter the fray militarily and where will that lead?
This is another black day for world diplomacy, for the UN, and for the Syrian people whose lives continue to be at risk, and yesterday came word that Assad's forces had bombed a refugee camp killing another two dozen people....
When will the killing and the slaughter of the innocents stop? 

Walkom skewers Romney with Romney's own words

By Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, August 1, 2012
The excellent adventures of Mitt Romney make for hilarious reading.

In London, the Republican contender for the U.S. presidency manages to inadvertently insult British Prime Minister David Cameron, a key ally and ideological soulmate.
From there it’s on to Jerusalem where what should have been a standard I-love-Israel speech ends up throwing an unintentional spanner into the delicate Middle East peace process.
Thence to Warsaw, where Romney — in an address that baffles many of his listeners — insists that struggling, sclerotic, post-Communist Poland is a model of sound economic management and suggests the United States would do well to copy it.
All of which leaves we benighted non-Americans to ask: What planet is he from?
Romney often gives the impression of being a visitor from another dimension. On television his motions are robotic, his eyes empty. His carefully-styled hair never moves....
What was alarming about Romney’s foray abroad was his seeming inability to understand the world outside the U.S. It’s one thing to argue academically that a people’s culture can help explain its economic success. Sociologist Max Weber made that point about Protestantism and capitalism long ago.

But it’s another to go into the heart of the middle-eastern cauldron, as Romney did, and ascribe Israel’s economic success to the superiority of Jewish over Palestinian culture.
A normal person would have understood why such language, uttered in such a place would be so provocative. Romney did not.
(As New York Times columnist and former Middle East correspondent Thomas Friedman has pointed out, Romney’s statement is also not true. Palestinians are notoriously entrepreneurial. Their current economic plight is a function of the Israeli occupation and the political stalemate that created it.)
Romney’s London remarks were even more puzzling. At least he has a chance of gaining votes at home by praising Jewish culture. But he gets nothing from suggesting that Cameron’s Olympics are badly run.
Romney aides now insist that his maladroit comments only prove he’s a straight shooter who says what he thinks.
But as anyone who has listened to a Romney speech will know, he is anything but. He is prolix, circumlocutory and craven, a man who reverses his views on matters like health care reform or abortion when he finds it politically expedient to do so.
What was so strange about his London remarks was that he didn’t realize it was politically expedient to be polite to foreigners.
Then there was Poland. Ah, Poland. According to Romney it is a beacon of capitalist self-reliance, a country that eschews Obama-style government intervention and, as a result, is going gangbusters.
But as Associated Press later reported in a poker-faced reality check from Warsaw, none of this is true. With its universal medicare and handsome welfare systems, Poland’s government intervenes more in the economy than America’s. The country’s economic growth rate is robust but that’s in part because of subsidies from other European Union nations.
And with an unemployment rate near 13 per cent as well as an economy that suffers from persistent corruption and red tape, it is hardly a model.
If Romney had known he was telling whoppers, his Warsaw speech might have just been an example of crafty politics aimed at Polish-American voters back home. What’s disturbing however is that he didn’t seem to know he was spouting fiction. He had no idea.

Religious theocons rule in Canadian government...DANGEROUS CURVE!

The Prime Minister is a member of the Alliance Church, more specifically the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The church believes the free market is divinely inspired and views science and environmentalism with what might be called scorn.

Alberta journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk, a Governor-General’s award winner, sees the evangelical creed as being at the root of much of Conservative policy-making in these areas – religion is trumping reason, he says. Mr. Nikiforuk is a conservationist and a Christian social conservative who has spent “many pleasant hours in a variety of evangelical churches and fundamentalist communities.” He recently wrote an analysis for The Tyee, British Columbia’s outstanding online newspaper, which garnered a huge response. Under the headline “Understanding Harper’s Evangelical Mission,” the article carries a subtitle reading, “Signs mount that Canada’s government is beholden to a religious agenda averse to science and rational debate.” (Quote from Lawrence Martin's column, Globe and Mail, July 31, 2012, below)
Not only is the subject of Harper's religious convictions appropriate for public debate, it is also cause for serious public alarm. In fact, whatever the church to which he belongs believes, it is the question of authority and its use that crosses the line between the faith community and the public weal.
Authority, if it is perceived to come from God, through Holy Scripture, and from a literal reading of that collection of books, is neither debatable, nor errant. There is, to put it bluntly, no possibility of negotiation, debate, discourse or challenge to that authority, at least from the perspective of those adherents to that faith.
Whether the environmental movement and rational scientific research is scorned by members of the faith is a matter for those who participate in that faith.
However, whether or not public debate is at the core of the governance of the public weal is not open to foreclosure, and that includes both the conventional and the legal definitions of that word. We have a long-established tradition in Canada, articulated most recently by former Prime Minister Paul Martin, when he declared that he could not and would not impose his personal views on abortion on the law of Canada.
Mr. Martin himself is a practicing Roman Catholic, a church unalterably opposed to all abortions, and the public funding of those procedures.
Canadians expect a similar detachment not only of the dogma of faith institutions from the governance of the country but also of the processes and the deployment of authority from the public administration of the government.
Clearly, the current Cabinet operates as if all of its thinking comes from the PMO, and should anyone wish to remain in Cabinet, one must comply with the "gag" order that prevents public debate of even potential government policy. To discuss policy options in a public forum, by interested and informed citizens is the life blood of any democracy. If and when that process is thwarted, for whatever reason, including the religion of the head of government, the public must push back.
If and when the head of the Canadian government subverts the public's right to learn both the philosophy and the research behind a government policy, whether that learning occurs before, during or after the passing of a law, that head of government is abrogating his or her position as head of the government. Let's remember, the Prime Minister, and all of his ministers are "servants" of the public....they answer to the public, and in that process are "responsible to the public"....and so far, the public has not had access to either the philosophy or the research that supports the generation of public policy.
And, as for the "sacred" trust of "divinely inspired" capitalism, as a specific tenet of any faith, such a view is so fill of holes, from a religious perspective, that a fleet of trucks can and should be driven through the position, at the earliest possible moment. Capitalism is a form of economic activity, that, like any other, requires both serious monitoring and even more serious regulation. We are no longer living in a Darwinian jungle where the survival of the fittest, in economic and political terms, is the operative premise. We have long ago graduated from such tribalism, and become a fair more inclusive and compassionate society and culture, and, such graduation must not be declared invalid by some t wonky fundamentalist theology that says it knows that God supports capitalism. That verges on the kind of non-theology that is preached in Texas, to thousands every Sunday by a charismatic preacher by the name of Joel Osteen and his spouse.
There is also reasonable evidence that suggests that that kind of religion is partly responsible for the housing bubble, and the economic collapse of 2008.
Harper is not, and never will be, analogous to, or have the authority that is analogous to that of God.
Harper's government, by following the methodology (if not the specific tenets) of a fundamentalist, evangelical religion, is veering at uncontrollable speeds down a treacherous mountain road, politically speaking, and it is time the public held out a warning flag, before the country falls into a canyon from which it cannot recover. And should the flag have no impact in stopping the careening vehicle, the public, including the media, has to begin to construct both speed bumps and off-ramps so the public weal doesn't crash into the canyon of both self-righteousness and the darwinian jungle, in the pursuit of some phoney and unsustainable perception of God through the uncontested and uncontestable authority of the head of government.
By Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail, July 31, 2012
Much has been made of the government’s muzzling of the science community, its low regard for statistics, its hard line against environmentalists.

Because Stephen Harper otherwise appears to be a clear-headed rationalist, there is some wonder about the motivation for these impulses, including the question of whether they are triggered by his evangelical beliefs. The Prime Minister is a member of the Alliance Church, more specifically the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The church believes the free market is divinely inspired and views science and environmentalism with what might be called scorn.
Alberta journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk, a Governor-General’s award winner, sees the evangelical creed as being at the root of much of Conservative policy-making in these areas – religion is trumping reason, he says. Mr. Nikiforuk is a conservationist and a Christian social conservative who has spent “many pleasant hours in a variety of evangelical churches and fundamentalist communities.” He recently wrote an analysis for The Tyee, British Columbia’s outstanding online newspaper, which garnered a huge response. Under the headline “Understanding Harper’s Evangelical Mission,” the article carries a subtitle reading, “Signs mount that Canada’s government is beholden to a religious agenda averse to science and rational debate.”
Mr. Harper is quiet on the issue of his religion, and the media have mostly steered clear of the subject. After all, religion is a personal business. Many of our prime ministers have been of faith, and it has not been in our tradition to pry. (In retrospect, it would have been right for Canadians of the day to know about Mackenzie King’s table-rapping séances and spiritualism – they certainly seemed to affect his policy-making. But Mr. King’s devotion to the deities wasn’t revealed until he was out of office.)
While religious privacy is important, the evangelical movement is not a typical religion when it comes to politics. Its aggressive propagation of social conservatism and biblical fundamentalism has had a significant impact on U.S. politics and presidents such as George W. Bush. In the United States, a politician’s ties to the religious right are fair game – evangelicals represent something like a third of the American population. In Canada, where that number is more like 10 per cent, evangelicals have achieved nowhere near the notoriety, and Mr. Harper, restrained by public opinion, has not pursued a strong social conservative agenda, undercutting the notion that his government is beholden to theocons.
But the Conservatives’ positions on research, statistics, environmental assessment, pipeline opponents, climate change and so on leads many to wonder. In Mr. Nikiforuk’s view, “Republican religious tribalism is now Ottawa’s worldview.” He says Mr. Harper openly sympathizes with, if not endorses, evangelicals’ climate skepticism, their distrust of mainstream science and their view of libertarian economics as God’s will.
Not long after the Conservatives were first elected, Mark Noll, a church historian and one of the most influential evangelicals in the U.S., said he thought many Canadians would be upset to learn about the conservative beliefs of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. “They certainly are far less tolerant than, say, the United Church of Canada.” But the Conservatives’ image has not suffered much, if at all, from the affiliation.
Since Mr. Harper never speaks about his religious beliefs, much of what’s said about them is speculation. Just because he is an evangelical does not necessarily mean he holds to all evangelical teachings or even most of them – just as being Catholic does not necessarily mean one believes a communion wafer is literally the body of Christ. As for intolerant views, there are many religious denominations guilty of the same.
That said, given evangelicals’ strong ties to politics, the subject should not be left unexamined. The Prime Minister is under no obligation to tell anyone about his religious convictions. But if his government’s policy-making in important areas like the environment is being motivated by religious faith at the expense of reason, it is cause for debate.