The Evolution of the Bush Doctrine

George W. Bush, September 2002: The UN must help the US in the Middle East, or it will be irrelevant.

George W. Bush, August 2006: The UN must help the US in the Middle East, because I am irrelevant.

Bush: Felon

Glenn Greenwald puts it nice and slow for the media to understand, but I think he'll still need hand puppets.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

They agreed to acquiesce to the administration's fiction that there are some sort of complex and difficult legal questions with which one must grapple, and that only shrill partisans say that the President is violating the criminal law. And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.

He also gets at the root cause of this all - the media is unwilling to call Bush for the felon he is because, in large part, the media is complicit:

This judge, unknown to the Important People in academia and the political power centers, sitting in her little Detroit courtroom, has broken the rules. She used language which is uncouth (she pointed out the obvious -- that this President has pretenses to being a King) and refused to pay homage to the false orthodoxy that there are really difficult questions triggered by the President's refusal to abide by the criminal law. How irresponsible, unscholarly and unserious she is.

This is the same mindset that has placed off limits any real accounting for the abject disaster that our country has been lead into in Iraq. Official Washington won't accept any emphatic declarations of guilt over what happened because virtually the entire Washington establishment endorsed the invasion of Iraq, continued to defend the occupation, and is thus responsible for it. Thus, it's acceptable to offer polite and muted criticisms of those responsible, but they are not to be castigated or stigmatized in any way for their horrendous misjudgments and ongoing deceit.

On Consequences

I was just speaking with a cubicle-mate, and he remarked that - given the unlikelihood of a Nuremberg-style tribunal for the various members of the Bush Administration - the UN specifically, and International Law more generally looks hollow and illegitimate. After all, if there's no consequences to disobedience, what's to stop China, France, or whoever from breaking international law in the future if the UN is powerless to stop any nation stronger than, say, Gabon?

This, I think, mistakes legal and political punishment for a consequence. The American government, economy, and military are all going to pay heavily for the violation of international law that was the Iraq War. A short list of the consequences would be: 2600 dead (so far), $1 trillion in expendtures, and the probably-permanent besmirching of whatever good record America had pre-war.

It would therefore be profoundly stupid for the leaders of China, Russia, or whoever to look at Iraq and say, "Gee, the Americans haven't paid a price for their breach of the law. We should go do the same!"

Rather, the intelligent, reality-based response to Iraq is to look and say, "Gee, the Americans violated international law, and it turned out to be a total fucking disaster. Perhaps there's a correlation."

As much as I would love to see Bush, Rumsfeld, et al at the docket in the Hague, don't confuse personal punishment with consequences. As with so many criminals, the biggest punishment for the American government, for now, is having to live... like a criminal.

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

You know, I had been wondering lately if American intelligence had gotten any better in the last year or so in Iraq. Apparently not. From Armchair Generalist:

WASHINGTON -- The US military establishment has quietly undertaken a wholesale reassessment of its war strategy with a goal of identifying the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and remedying them before the next conflict...

The studies, according to several Pentagon officials involved, have found serious deficiencies across the board. For example, US troops in Iraq have often used too much force when conducting operations in civilian areas, unnecessarily alienating local populations. They cite US commanders as being too slow to establish working relationships with local allies, and note that providing security and safety for the Iraqi people wasn't an early priority.

The military's continuing shortcomings in gathering accurate intelligence about insurgents has particularly hampered its missions: ``We know relatively little about insurgent motivation and morale, leadership, and recruitment," according to an unpublished study produced in June by the government-funded RAND Corporation.

It really astonishes me that the Americans have been fighting a war without even the basics of intelligence. Let me do my part for the war effort by asssting the US DoD with their intelligence-gathering, with this report of relevant facts.

IRAQI INSURGENT INTELLIGENCE REPORT:
A rope of sand.

Motivation: Americans are in a country not-America. In fact, this country is Iraq. Iraqis are upset by this reality, and are seeking to change it.

Morale: Iraqis are changing the above-mentioned reality with some success, thus morale is high.

Recruitment: Ever since Abu Ghraib was put under new management, it's been easy for the insurgents to raise recruits. The same cannot be said for the US.

Leadership: We said relevant facts.

This concludes this report, happily written to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Japan

George Will writes a stupid column today:

...both of Japan's most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan's 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices.

Leftist ideology causes South Korea's regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.

Well, considering that Japanese authors were talking about invading Korea going back to the 1600s, maybe Seoul can be forgiven for concluding that Japanese militarism wasn't just a fad. Hell, does anyone think that Poland is cool with Germany yet?

The choice by China's regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China's regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China's resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek's forces, Mao's enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan's brutal occupiers did.

When did that happen? Not Mao's massacres (which require no more evidence), but the Nationalist resistance to Japan. I was pretty sure that all the scholarship pointed towards a pretty lacklustre resistance by Chiang, and a still-ineffective but at least more vigorous resistance by the Communists. Accusations that the Communists spent more time fighting the Nationalists than the Japanese need to be tempered with the well-documented facts that Chiang was similarly more interested in fighting the Communists. Neither side saw Japan as the main fight.

On the plus side for Chiang, when he died, Taiwan at least began a transition towards democracy. Mao's death did not have similar effects, sadly. While I don't venerate Mao, I find it hard to understand why men like Chiang or Korea's Park Chung-Hee are celebrated by the American right for the changes in their countries they fought tooth and nail. Indeed, in both cases, those countries could only become democracies after the dictators died.

But men like Will aren't interested in any kind of historical accuracy. Rather, the Chinese Civil War is only useful for American pundits - as all things are - for what they mean about America, Democracy, etc. So Chiang had to be the better fighter, because otherwise we'd have to admit that Communists can do something right.

Meanwhile, it's not just the Chinese Communists and the Korean leftist pinko dopeheads who are worried about Japanese nationlism. Listen to this commie bastard:

Veteran lawmaker Koichi Kato, victim of an arson attack on one of his houses last week following his criticism of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, is warning that signs of "dangerous" nationalism are increasing in Japan.

Kato, a former secretary general of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, also voiced concerns in an interview Friday that diplomatic policies presented by Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the most likely candidate to succeed Koizumi, are "too naive."

"In today's Japan, I see a kind of aggressive nationalism without repentance (of Japan's militarism before and during World War II) like, 'We did nothing wrong in the last war,' " Kato said.

"It would be dangerous if this (kind of mood) goes extreme. I'll sound an alarm against it in a serious manner," the 67-year-old House of Representatives member said.

In the real world, there is every reason for Korea and China - aside from their government's ulterior motives - to worry about Japanese nationalism and militarism. When high-ranking officials in Japan's party of government for the last 50 years start ringing alarm bells, there is good reason to worry. In the world of George Will's head, there's only victimhood complexes and Chinese Communism to blame.

Choose which voices you want to listen to - the voice of legitimate concern, or the voices in George Will's head.

Inequality and Ideology

So it all began when Paul Krugman (in the NYTimes, reprint here) wrote about inequality that:

What’s noticeable is that except during stagflation, when virtually all Americans were hurt by ... oil prices, what happened in each era was what the dominant political tendency of that era wanted to happen.

Franklin Roosevelt favored the interests of workers while declaring of plutocrats who considered him a class traitor, “I welcome their hatred.” Sure enough, under the New Deal wages surged while the rich lost ground.

What followed was an era of bipartisanship and political moderation; Dwight Eisenhower said of those who wanted to roll back the New Deal, “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid.” Sure enough, it was also an era of equable growth.

Finally, since 1980 the U.S. political scene has been dominated by a conservative movement firmly committed to the view that what’s good for the rich is good for America. Sure enough, the rich have seen their incomes soar, while working Americans have seen few if any gains....

And if that’s true, it matters a lot which party is in power — and more important, which ideology.

Now, Krugman does throw the explicit partisanship in, but really this isn't an argument at all about which party control government, nor is it exclusively about government actions. Some bloggers, like Brad Delong, have too-narrowly construed Krugman's argument that inequality is due to government policy. It inarguably is to some extent, but that's not what Krugman is saying. Read it again:

...what happened in each era was what the dominant political tendency of that era wanted to happen.

"The dominant political tendency" isn't the GOP, it isn't Bush, it isn't Congress or the Supreme Court. Broadly speaking, the dominant political tendency of the years 1980-2000 was Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. While I've used two national leaders as the icons of this philosophy, they certainly didn't create the ideology - they were, at most, very prominent advocates. Ironically enough, Paul Krugman used to be one of neoliberalism's brightest lights, before he joined the order of the Shrill.

The rise of neoliberalism led to the deification of obscene wealth, and the glorification of men (like Ken Lay or Jack Welch) whose pursuit of that obscenity finds them just the other side of the law. But Marx never really goes out of style, and thesis begets antithesis, and Enron pre-2001 begets Enron post-2001, Worldcom, and Martha Stewart. (Spare me. She broke the law.)

It's been interesting to see the reaction, post dot-com, against neoliberalism gain steam. As I've said before, it's a shame that more people aren't willing to blame the people - like Krugman* - who got us in to this mess. I suppose if the American pundit class can't be expected to properly apologize and recant for a disastrous 3-year war, I can't very well expect those same pundits to apologize for a totally calamitous 20-year debacle of economic policy.

And a debacle it has been. Never mind that growth has been slower - world wide, with the almost-unique exception of China - in the neoliberal era than it was before. How about three lost decades now for Africa and Latin America? How about the final, withering blows against American labour unions? How about the seemingly permanent destruction of our expectations for what a government should do? Well, it's been a debacle for most of us. For the usual suspects, the years since 1980 have been a godsend.

Has there been growth? Yes, albeit less since Reagan than before. Has there been innovation? Yes, but prove to me the connection between Maggie Thatcher and the Internet and I'll bake you a solid gold cake. (Indeed, the Internet's foundation is a relic of the pre-Reagan period.) What we've gotten in exchange for slow growth and innovation is money shovelled to the top and higher unemployment.

Nice work, if you can get it.

*Before you think I'm being too harsh on Krugman, let me be clear: Krugman was not just a leading neoliberal advocate, he explicitly belittled the anti-globalization, fair trade movement, in some pretty insulting language. He was, at one point, not too far from Friedman's condescending language. I sincerely welcome him to our side, but it's kind of like Joe Lieberman coming out against the Iraq War after all this time.

I've been insulting in my writings too, but a) I'm not a writer for the New York Times, and b) the economists I read (Baker, Galbraith the Younger) were right, and Krugman (when it comes to the majesty of global capitalism) was tragically wrong.

Good to know

Bush, today:

We’re not leaving [Iraq] so long as I’m the president. That would be a huge mistake.

You've been warned.

Energy Solutions, Real and Imagined

(Cross-posted at Ezra's)

The problems facing us in the future when it comes to - broadly speaking - energy production and consumption are myriad, and the sheer size and number of them can make us desperate for solutions. This is not, however, an excuse for hucksters preying on the credulous. So it's with some trepidation that I see an Irish company (Steorn) is hawking an electrical generator that they claim produces energy from nothing.

(Thanks for the link, Theo!)

When your main marketing gimmick is to proudly claim your invention violates one of the fundamental laws of the universe (conservation of mass and energy) then the audience has an obligation to set our skepticism to 11. Mark Frauenfelder, at BoingBoing, has what I think is about the appropriate reaction:

Check out this video, not for an explanation of how the technology works ...but for the ways the [sic] use a variety of emotional tricks to sucker people into believing in it.

The company's credo is a George Bernard Shaw quote: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." But I'm sure Shaw would also agree that the overwhelming majority of blasphemies that go against bedrock principles of science are utter bullshit.

Just to be clear, if this turns out to be legit I'll recant, apologize, and cheer when the guys at Steorn get the well-deserved Nobel. But considering the website has exactly zero explanation for their claims, consider me unimpressed.

A less sinister, but I think equally unlikely idea came up a while ago from an interview in MIT's Technology Review, where one Jefferson Tester (who's been working on this idea for more than three decades, judging by his website) claims that geothermal energy could provide all of our energy needs in perpetuity. Tester's interview with MIT got a bit of play with the DailyKos crowd, as well as my other hangout, Gristmill.

On the surface, nothing he says is overt BS, as with Steorn. Indeed, a lot of what he says is quite right - the amount of geothermal energy available to us at great depths is fantastic, and only a small portion would be needed to drive all human industry. Better yet - unlike, say, oil - all that is required is to dig a deep hole anywhere.

Problems arise when translating this to real life. Tester's own work (a 1997 article, here in PDF) indicates that a single plant would only continue to operate for about 20 years, after which point the source rock would cool too much, and be useless (for generation) for "less than" 200 years. A 20-year deadline is a bit short to finance high-capital cost plants, and (while I continue to welcome correction) I find it hard to believe that these plants could be built cheap.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias finds a far more mundane piece of geothermal technology appealing - effectively, geothermal heat pumps are pipes filled with water (or possibly air) buried about 6 feet deep, where the ground stays the same temperature year-round. Cools the air in the summer, warms it in the winter, and dramatically reduces the energy required to cool and heat the home.

This is kind of frustrating for me, as geothermal heat pumps were being proposed, oh, thirty years ago, as a way to reduce energy use. I can literally go to my bookshelf and find authors who, during the oil shocks of the 1970s, were advocating low-tech alternatives like heat pumps and solar water heaters. Not to slander higher-tech alternatives like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, but solutions come in all shapes and sizes. We may well need all of them, but we really need to avoid wasting resources on dead ends.

Health Care Woes in Canada

I have, on occasion, seen American authors talk about Canada's health-care system and remark that, unlike in the US, Canadian doctors have embraced single-payer and find it superior. This is true in an academic sense (Canadian medical journals who have studied it unequivocally say our system is better) but it misses some important counter-examples.

Read More...

One of the best examples of how Canadian doctors' have a love-hate relationship with our system comes from way back in 1985, when the government of Ontario had to endure a doctor's strike over the issue of extra-billing practices by the province's doctors. More recently the Canadian Medical Association has, while being opposed by its younger members, endorsed expanding private, for-profit medical care in Canada. And now, the election of the President of the CMA has become another battleground for the fight against what many Canadians see as the Americanization of their health care system. (link via Pogge.)

The point of all this is that while Canadian doctors have accepted single-payer health care, they've done so somewhat unwillingly, and they have - since it's inception in the 1960s - continued to fight it on a regular basis. There's a lesson here for the American advocates of various health-care reforms - don't expect this fight to be over, even if you do win it once.

The one caveat is that I actually think the socialization of American health care would have an immensely salutary effect on the debate in Canada. On any number of issues, including health care, media policies, and energy issues, the presence of a wealthy, rather predatory* industry to Canada's south has seriously perverted the debate.

*at the very least, the word "predatory" defines the American insurance, energy, and media industries, if not understates their behaviour.

I swear I'll stop (planets, cont.)

Two interesting comments re: the definition of planets. First, Flocons gets the prize for wit:

This new planetary definition follows in the legacy of Esperanto. It's built around logical and unambigious rules... but in the end, the public will ignore it and use what they use already.

Second, Chris writes:

The reason the huge moons aren't now classified as planets is because they properly orbit their planet.
... It's actually a fairly nice elegant and common sense solution.

Well, kind of. What this definition strikes me as is a way to rationalize the definition of planets without changing the definition of Pluto-Charon in any way whatsoever. Which strikes me as a silly way to write what is supposed to be a label with some academic value. (Here, "academic" can be read however you like it.) I agree, Chris, that this is actually an elegant way of summing up the conventional list of planets - that is, what do all the nine common planets have in common. Nevertheless, I think the definition remain problematic.

We agree that, conventionally speaking, Pluto-Charon don't orbit the sun the same way the Earth, but not the moon, does. Rather, they orbit a point in space between the two bodies. So we've already agreed that the definition of "planet" isn't exclusive to bodies that solely orbit the Sun.

I submit that it's hard to argue that Ganymede, which indirectly orbits the sun as it is tugged around by Jupiter, is easy to distinguish from Pluto-Charon, which orbit the sun as they are tugged around by each other. Notwithstanding the IAU's distinction between "double planets", etc.

Moreover, if a body like Ceres, or UB313, are inducted in to the hall of fame, this will mean that the label "Planet" is non-exclusive, as Ceres will remain best described as a G-class asteroid, and UB313 will best be described as a Kuiper Belt ice body. So Ganymede should be able to qualify as both a Planet in its own right, as well as a satellite of a larger planet.

(Binary stars remain stars if they orbit a larger parent star, after all. Star starry star star.)

If we are making a definition of a planet that is based solely on the shape, mass, and composition of a body - without regard to its orbit - then I think it's basically impossible to define Mercury as a planet but not Ganymede, which is actually larger than the innermost planet.

And all of this needs to be kept in context - this is possibly the least important debate going on right now. But the whole idea of building a rational naming scheme with the express goal of not leaving out the last-discovered, least-known, most-insignificant planet in the solar system strikes me as silly. I have no idea why I became a partisan for Ganymede, but I did.

Good news in Iraq!

What marvellous news. In a wonderful act of constitutionalism, the Shia have decided to excercise their second ammendment rights all over each other, causing chaos in the South of Iraq. Meanwhile, the Kurds have been trying to spread God's gift of liberty to... Turkey, provoking a response that can only be described as the "birth pangs, if you will" of the New New New Iraq. The Sequel. Continued.

I guess this would be the third act in Iraq - having destroyed the Baath government in the first, and endured an out-of-control insurgency in the second, turning Iraq in to a regional black hole, like the Congo, is really the perfect way to end this disaster.

Meant to post this earlier

My favourite line from Stephen Colbert lately, ironically enough spoken during his "surprise appearance" on the Daily Show.

What are you imlplying Jon? That O'Reilly and Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities on to the world around them? Inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance? Itty-bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!

GM was always full of shit

Remember everyone - real Americans don't want electric cars:

SAN CARLOS, Calif. — (August 15, 2006) — The limited-edition “Signature One Hundred” series Tesla Roadster, the first high-performance electric car manufactured by Tesla Motors, has sold out in three weeks, confirming that the sleek, stylish, zero-emissions Tesla Roadster is a hit.

When the rotting carcass of the American car industry is dissected and sold to Japan, Korea, Germany, and China, I do hope someone will have the appropriate level of taste and, I don't know, punch Rick Wagoner in the mouth for killing the EV1.

Oh, and everyone with eyes saw this one coming:

The Signature One Hundred Club has attracted a diverse group of members... Some of the initial members include Oscar® winner George Clooney...

So Tesla just raised $10 million by courting the rich bachelor playboy set. Call it Bruce Wayne marketing, I guess.

Exactly

August:

Whenever a huge actor does a crap movie, the usual response is a condemnation of their refusal to turn down any role (see Walken, Christopher) or wonderment over just how much money you actually had to pay the guy to be in the movie (see Hopper, Dennis and Kingsley, Ben). Few people understand that Samuel L. Jackson wasn't recruited for Snakes on a Plane to make the movie better. He asked to be in it.

In every interview, every article about SOAP, Jackson has done nothing but emit sheer unbridled enthusiasm about the general silliness and fun of the movie, all the while acknowledging that much of it is just how much people love the "badass" character he personally embodies. To put it very simply, this is a man who finds nothing more enjoyable than making his fans happy.

I plan to see it tomorrow. Possibly intoxicated. But I'll be there.

Watch his Daily Show interview here. You've never seen two grown men have so much fun on television.

Woot for me!

Treehugger has one of my posts at Grist on their list of Favourite Green Blogs of the Week!

Hooray!

The post in question is yet another in my unseemly love letters to Bucky Fuller.

Ah, news!

DETROIT (Reuters) - A federal judge in Detroit on Thursday ordered the Bush administration to halt the National Security Agency's program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling was a setback for the Bush administration, which has defended the program as an essential tool in its war on terrorism.

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the controversial practice of warrantless wiretapping known as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" violated free speech rights, protections against unreasonable searches and the constitutional check on the power of the presidency.

Despite the clear facts of the case, I expect the SCOTUS to figure out some reason why the Constitution in fact says the exact opposite of what we all think it does.

UPDATE: Reading Glenn Greenwald, I expect this will be what Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Judge #5 use against the constitution:

Second, the court ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the legality of the NSA program even though they cannot prove they have been eavesdropped on, because they have suffered actual harm merely from knowing that the Government is eavesdropping.

So if this case makes it through appeals and gets to the Supremes, they can simply decide that the plaintiffs didn't have standing, and dismiss the whole thing. Lovely.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington: Why does the Supreme Court hate our freedoms?

More on Planets

Wait just one minute here...

Charon, moon of Pluto, gets to be a planet because it's round and over 800 km wide, but Ganymede - moon of Jupiter - is still a moon, despite being more than 4 times the size?

...there seems to be an exception for Charon because it's less of a "moon" and more of a junior partner in the Pluto-Charon "double planet". For all the talk of keeping Pluto a planet for the schoolchildren, this is a pretty arcane reason to deny the Galilean moons of Jupiter their rightful title.

I think Ganymede is being robbed. I also think this is an important enough issue to post twice about. Finally, I think I have way too much spare time today.

Because I have nothing better to write about

Well, I'd probably be nerdy enough to write about this story eventually no matter how slow it is today:

The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between "planets" and the smaller "solar system bodies" such as comets and asteroids. If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered 14-25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will include 12 planets, with more to come: eight classical planets that dominate the system, three planets in a new and growing category of "plutons" - Pluto-like objects - and Ceres. Pluto remains a planet and is the prototype for the new category of "plutons."

With the advent of powerful new telescopes on the ground and in space, planetary astronomy has gone though an exciting development over the past decade. For thousands of years very little was known about the planets other than they were objects that moved in the sky with respect to the background of fixed stars. In fact the word "planet" comes from the Greek word for "wanderer". But today hosts of newly discovered large objects in the outer regions of our Solar System present a challenge to our historically based definition of a "planet".

Now, the simplest - and I believe most rational decision - would have been to simply drop Pluto from the roster and call it a chunk of the Kuiper Belt. But noooo... scientists are so fussy. This little piece of rationalization is cute:

Member of the Planet Definition Committee, Richard Binzel says: "Our goal was to find a scientific basis for a new definition of planet and we chose gravity as the determining factor. Nature decides whether or not an object is a planet."

Right. Nature has been unable to sleep, trying to decide whether planetary body 2003 UB313 is a full-fledged "planet" or not.

Of course, every time I get to thinking about the outer solar system - that is, stuff beyond the asteroid belt - I keep thinking how much more there is to explore just within our own solar system, never mind the rest of the near galactic neighbourhood. And then I get depressed because we should already be doing this stuff.

More nuclear in Alberta news

The profit margins in Alberta keep getting slimmer, and the development costs are starting to spiral upwards. It's no surprise then that the nuclear industry is being aggressive in courting the tar sands companies. The latest comes from the Globe today:

Talks with six firms have already happened and a bigger push is now in the works, he said. Energy Alberta is targeting developers of projects that use steam injection to recover bitumen from the oil sands. That list is led by the likes of EnCana Corp., Husky Energy Inc. and Total SA of France.

Energy Alberta hopes to build a reactor worth about $3-billion by 2014 to provide steam to support the production of 220,000 barrels of bitumen a day.

As a rough guess, that probably means they're thinking "small" for nuclear, which means about 1000 MWe reactor. As it turns out, Westinghouse, GE, and the French company Areva are all pushing 1000MW reactor designs around the world, including here in Ontario. That said, Energy Alberta would be smart to think larger - if Canada is serious about increasing the tar sands production, then nuclear is pretty much the only option, aside from imported LNG.

For critics of the tar sands, just one more reason.

What is wrong with these people?

Why are they consumed with terror? Don't they know that means the scary brown people win?

From the Jerusalem Post, William Shawcross has gone totally, irretrievably insane:

Civilian deaths in Lebanon are utterly tragic. But if you watched only British television, particularly the BBC, you would be hard-pressed to understand that Israel has been forced into a war for its survival, one in which Iran has empowered its proxy, Hizbullah, to undertake the final solution of "the Zionist entity."

Well, the reason the BBC might not be willing to put that message on the air is because they're a responsible news broadcaster, not purveyors of science fiction addicted to crystal meth.

1) Israel was never "forced" in to a war. Olmert and Halutz both escalated this conflict far beyond where it needed to go.

2) Israel was never forced in to a war "for it's survival". Neither Hezbollah, Syria, or Iran have the capability to destroy Israel or pose anything more than a limited, conventional threat.

3) Hezbollah may have been "empowered" by Iran (how? A good shrink?) but nobody has presented any evidence, much less credible evidence, that Iran or Syria directed Hezbollah's attacks.

Oh, but it gets worse:

Reasonable, conventional armchair critics concentrate on the mistakes of Israel rather than the evil ideology of Hizbullah. They refuse to acknowledge that a small, decent society is now literally under the threat of death from an illegal fascistic military machine built throughout the hills, valleys, towns and villages of southern Lebanon.

I admit it. I refuse to acknowledge the above. Know why? Because it's a figment of Shawcross' imagination. Shawcross needs to show how a few thousand fighters - well armed and trained, but small in number - pose an existential threat to a country of 6 million of the wealthiest, best-armed people in the middle east. Rather than actually do that, Shawcross spins a paranoid fantasy about how Hezbollah is staffed by atomic supermen seeking nothing more than to stomp Israel flat.

If we're going to talk about terrorism seriously, lets talk seriously. Desperately clinging to beliefs that we're fighting the new Hitler are silly, and make the people who dispense such stupidity look like scared children.