Art's blog

There is no logical reason to deny Iran the right to operate a nuclear programme, for peaceful purposes as its leaders claim or otherwise. Iran’s neighbours have nuclear arsenals: Pakistan, India, Israel and, a little further afield, China, Russia and North Korea. Israel didn’t seek permission of the IAEA or publicise its nuclear weaponry plans. Why should Iran? Why are the U.S.A., Israel and their flunkies, including Canada, so bent on preventing Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons? Such a dog in the manger attitude is bad for business and international relations. Iran merely wants to join the nuclear club, which is little enough to ask. The brutish and outright thuggery of assassinating Iranian scientists is no better than the drug gang slaughter in Mexico. The simple answer is for the U.S.A. to send Iran half a dozen nuclear bombs from its own overstocked arsenal. Do this, save the Iranians the effort, and oil from the Middle East will flow again without let or hindrance. We will then all settle down, sleep better in our beds and the Israelis can go on building their settlements on the West Bank undisturbed.

Sergeant Ryan Russell, a Toronto police officer, was struck and killed by a snow plough driven by a rampaging driver. As one who spent a modest three years on the beat and the parent of a daughter who served in the RCMP for 20 years and died on the job, I well understand and sympathise with the anguish suffered by Sergeant Russell’s family and the grief felt by his fellow officers. An estimated 4,000 uniformed police and fire-fighters from Canada and the United States attended the funeral, marching to the lamenting music provided by massed pipers and drummers while untold numbers of onlookers lined the sidewalks.

Necessary as respect and homage to the fallen may be one has to count the cost of food, transportation, and accommodation for so large a contingent of mourners. What purpose did so large a demonstration of sanctioned grief serve? And was the expenditure of so large an exhibition of sorrow borne from the public purse or did the police and fire fighting fraternities, their unions, societies or alliances bear the cost?

These are questions worth asking. With the brouhaha of the recent Toronto municipal election and the emphasis on need for fiscal prudence in mind, one would hardly call pageantry of the funeral parade modest and restrained.

Given the handling of protesters at last year’s G20 summit by the security forces, some might suspect the laying to rest of a slain police sergeant an opportune means of raising the public image of Toronto’s finest. One wonders.

According to the Harper government, a little under a thousand Canadian soldiers will stay on in Afghanistan to train the Afghan Army. Yet according to the usual unreliable sources, only 14 per cent of the Afghan Army is literate. It enjoys an attrition rate of about 3 per cent a month, which means that, to create an additional 28,000 soldiers, which is the plan, the Afghan government will have to recruit another 80,000 Afghans willing to serve. There’s an even greater problem never mentioned.

If only 14 per cent can read and write, how many have learned to speak English or how many of Canada’s training force of 850 soldiers can speak Pashtu (35%), Persian (Dari) or one of the other 35 languages of the country? Canadian bilingualism is no match for the Afghani multilingualism. The instructors will have to rely on interpreters.

How weird can military training get? In addition to the language obstacle, 850 Canadian soldiers training require a horde of support personnel to make sure they’re fed, clothed, paid, accommodated, entertained, get medical care and dosed with their spiritual uplift by the God squad – as anyone who has ever done military service well knows.

Military training is more than teaching soldiers on the firing range how to spread their legs to fire at targets against a sand bank, which is all we see in the news clips of military training. What is the real game plan? What purpose is being served? It’s enough to make anyone who’s ever worn a khaki uniform despair.

Ships plowing the Arctic waters have made a good start at plugging the North West Passage. During the first season the open Passage has been used by commercial shipping, at least three large vessels have gone aground along this uncharted waterway: a tanker, a cruise ship and freighter. Each one hit rock bottom. Well, the tanker mounted a sand bar, but it still grounded and stuck. The cruise ship wth over 300 sight-seeking tourists on board, including Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood who one would have thought had a more conscious regard for the environment, struck a rock and stuck. It took three days to remove the passengers to safety by helicopters and the Canadian Coast Guard. Is there any sense of responsibility when ships, especially large cruise ships plowing the Arctic region for gawping sightseeing tourists risk the hazards of passage without an experienced pilot to guide them? Three pile-ups in the first season makes another Valdez oil spill certain soon – at grave risk to the environment and public expense, of course. Is there any chance of the North East Passage opening up to ocean traffic?

By what logic and hypocritical reasoning do those in their mangers bristling with nuclear weaponry deny like ownership to Iran? I mean no harm. I represent no pernicious and evil point of view; I merely ask the question. Surrounded by neighbours who by means fair, foul or at best of questionable skullduggery, have acquired nuclear arsenals, why should Iran not have the same right of possession? Does that aphorism about he who is without sin casting the first stone – and one is very well aware that stone throwing is not yet banned in that sad land of Iran – not apply to Israel, India, Pakistan and akin regimes further afield? Equally, and by what irrefutable reasoning, do the so-called laws of international civility and restraint not apply to Iran? Naively, I suppose, I fail to understand this warped judgment of denial. Furthermore, I suspect these same questions occur to many too afraid to ask them.

Art, you’re an iconoclast! And good for you too. We’ve just had an election here that’s stirred the possum something shocking. Neither of the Big Two – Tweedledum and Tweedledummer – can govern in their own right. For the first time they’re going to have to negotiate the Lower House with three independent conservatives (who hate the Liberal National Party Opposition with a vengeance) and the very first Green to be elected to Reps. The Senate looks like it will have nine Greens, which means they’ve got the balance of power there. If they can restrain the crazier of their ideas and stop looking for white rabbits and red herrings, we’re headed for interesting times. And lots of icons burning!

Mike Duffy

Long ago in the olden days of 1952-53, I was what today would be known as a project manager of a government-funded experimental 10 Kw wind turbine generator known as the Orkney Windmill. This was a wind turbine with three, 40 feet long, blades hydraulically-feathered to compensate for the variable wind strength and velocity. The turbine was built on one of the Orkney Islands off the west coast of Scotland where the wind was strong and constant for most of the year. Even so, we could only operate the turbine with mechanical safely within a narrow range of wind velocities. The technical details are unimportant, but from an economic standpoint the Orkney experiment was costly failure. That was because, despite the unlimited wind power, the turbine could operate for a fraction of the time only. Advocates of this ‘alternative form of energy’ whistle in the wind at public expense, but what expense? The cost of wind power energy is many times the cost of nuclear energy, but still those wind farms dot the landscape. Still, looking on the bright side, and forgetting the resulting ugliness of the landscape, the industry occupies a large work force. For that matter, solar energy is almost, if not equally, inefficient. In short, let’s build more nuclear-power generating stations.

Three Muslim would-be suicide bombers planning to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners were convicted in a London court as reported in the ‘Telegraph’ (8 July 2010). Originally, 24 Muslim were taken into custody; 13 were charged; and two were released without charges. While no one can doubt their intentions – and those accomplices who escaped trial – the practicality of mixing otherwise inert liquids, in an in-flight loo to make a bomb is ludicrous. The fallacy of such a plan has already been exposed as untrue by a fellow alumni, Lieutenant-Colonel Nigel Wylde, the explosives expert awarded the Queen’s medal for gallantry for his bomb disposal work during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
As far back as September 2006, Wylde cast doubt on the liquid explosives threat much to the annoyance of the British Security Service, MI5, and ‘Home Security’ in the States. Why? Because the Ordnance Officer’s revelation made nonsense of the ridiculous precautions imposed on the air-travelling public: the whopping sums spent on increased airport security, the ban of liquids taken on board, the body searches and increased presence of armed police. The increased cost of air travel as well as the financial bonanza for security services is beyond belief; the facts are simple and remind us of the fiction created by big brother.
As Wylde stated, the idea of people sitting on a plane loo to mix simple household fluids to make an explosive mixture is untenable. Creating a liquid explosive ‘is a highly dangerous and sophisticated task,’ he said. ‘Who came up with this idea?’
Beside stinking himself and the rest of the passengers out of existence, any concoction mixed would have to be let stand for a few hours for crystals to form, crystals that would form the explosive element. Then there is problem of fitting or fashioning and fitting a detonator.
In short, there’s been a lot of lying and deception from the security services. The answer is to abandon flying and do one’s business on the internet. We’re being swindled again.

The G20 meeting for 2010 is over and we’re two billion dollars lighter. That’s a difficult sum to comprehend, but help is at hand. As a correspondent put it: ‘A billion seconds ago was 1959; a billion minutes ago Jesus walked on water; a billion hours ago our ancestors were in the stone age; a billion days ago no one walked on two feet.’ Two billion dollars ago was less than a week ago at the rate our government is spending our money.

Israel refuses to apologise to Turkey for the slaughter of Turkish citizens accompanying humanitarian aid to Gaza. What other reason for Israeli intransigence is there if not its continuing thuggishness towards the Palestinians and those who would offer them relief? Defending territory acquired by conquest is one thing; unrelenting subjugation of a people confined in an overcrowded concentration camp is another. Considering the Israeli national experience in confinement of this kind its behaviour towards the conquered foe, if one may so express it so, is uncharitable if not unchristian.