Next: Purges and the Midwest Gulag?

It never occurred to me that I'd be agreeing with pieces on the state of capitalism that come from Pravda, but this one hits on all cylinders. Example:

'The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?'

Of course Putin warned about this very trend a few months back, and I noted that (somewhere) here. The tone of this one is a bit hectoring, but I can't disagree even with that. The Russians know all about centrally planned EVERYTHING, and the Americans ignore 70 years of that at their peril. Here, peril, peril; come here boy!

There is a lot of talk about the new US Supreme Court appointee, Sotomayor. She's as politically correct as anyone could want, and apparently believes (as many judges do) that it's the courts' job to change or even make laws. Needless to say I don't agree with that; we elect people to do that, but a lot of "progressives" want things to move faster than legislatures generally do.

There's a certain amount of that in Canada, but our political and social structure is (shockingly) far healthier, at least so far. The USA is certainly in trouble, and seems to be digging a deeper hole for itself on all fronts. I've read a lot about the dismal state of the American education system, mentioned in the linked article (but see Jerry Pournelle's blog for a lot more) and the political pork-barrelling going on with the auto bailouts rivals anything Mugabe could come up with.

Plus ca change; the Russians are trying to warn the Americans away from the Marxist edge, and plus c'est le meme chose; the Americans are ignoring them. Sheeple indeed, but they aren't exclusive to the USA...

All is not lost. Yet.

OTTAWA -- The Supreme Court of Canada refused Thursday to hear arguments that Canadian troops in Afghanistan should apply the Charter of Rights in their dealings with prisoners.

That leaves it to the Military Police Complaints Commission to investigate whether foreign captives delivered to Afghan custody by Canadian troops are routinely tortured.

I really hope this comes as no surprise to anyone; it is, after all the CANADIAN Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the last time I checked we hadn't taken Afghanistan over. I had my reservations about the Turks and Caicos joining Canada, but if I must make a choice...

Afghans, particularly ones that are trying to kill Canadian soldiers are, well, Afghans. They have their own government (and they're welcome to it!) to appeal to (ha!) if the ANA or ANP are mistreating them. It is not our troops doing anything untoward with them, it's their own people.

This of course opens questions about what kind of system are we propping up. I personally don't care what they do to each other, because you can see from what NATO (you know who I mean when I say that) is going through to try to hold the place together, that it's a hell of a lot of blood and treasure for little return.

I won't go back to that "well" right now, but I'll keep this short and just say that I'm happy that the idiots who'd like to flood our country and courts with all sorts of fellow (but different) idiots can't do it with these clowns. I might not mind so much letting a few in, as long as I could make them live with these Amnesty types. I'd be curious to see how many of these secular humanist idealists would still be pushing this idea if they had to be responsible for an illiterate Pashtun, etc. jihadi under their own roof. An interesting experiment to separate the real idealists at least...

The other end of the arc.

I thought this was interesting, not because I agree with his entire postulate, but because it represents in some ways the opposite swing of the pendulum from the Gaea "nature is everything" school.

That said, I think that this guy REALLY underestimates the power of natural processes in comparison to what we can do. That statement however opens up some questions about what is considered nature. The biggest change in the biosphere (once Earth had one) was largely driven by plants "vegeforming" (my word) the planet by creating Oxygen in large enough amounts to change the makeup of the atmosphere.

One major natural event (hurricane, volcano, earthquake, solar flare) puts out more energy, etc. than the entire human race does in an equivalent period of time. The idea that we can modify anything more than our immediate environment is pretty arrogant, the more so because it's demonstrably false. Thera and Krakatoa are just two volcanic events in (sort-of) recorded history that put any nuclear bomb we've come up with in the shade.

Society needs to learn from recent scientific efforts to explain changes in greenhouse gases and the biosphere during the Anthropocene. Three lines of evidence demonstrate that we live on a planet reshaped by humans for thousands of years.

The first evidence dates back to the beginnings of science itself, when amateur scientists stumbled across the bones of massive, long-extinct mammals like the mastodon, giant ground sloth and saber-toothed tiger. The last glaciation can’t explain their disappearance 10,000 years ago, because they survived many preceding glaciations.

So what do I think? That is after all what this spot is about, so I'll tell you. Of course we can modify our environment, and history (and prehistory) shows it, from those first photosynthetic respiring plants to draining the Aral Sea for cotton production. We can pollute and wipe out species left and right, and to date we've done a fine job of it. Hopefully we can cut back on that, because there are a hell of a lot more of us around, and we all want consumer goods which don't grow on trees, but may come from them in some form.

What we can't do, is totally derail the planet, at least not without a gob load of H-bombs going off, like, say, all that we've ever made. Even that the planet would eventually recover from, and some sort of life would reseed from whatever survived. It just wouldn't be us.

That, we can concern ourselves with. Keep things as clean as we can, but be realistic about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Heavy metals in the water: bad. CO2 in the water: fizzy, and we drink it all the time. How is that a pollutant? Is sugar? I guess the EPA should ban pop; I say that glibly, but if they join up with the FDA (using American examples here as they're bigger than ours) that's exactly what the nanny-crats might yet do to protect us from ourselves.