New Media

George Bush Jr. seems to have lost all grip on reality, Then again, perhaps it’s just his sense of hearing.

Criticizing the critics of his “new” surge strategy for Iraq, he and former presidential hopeful, now self-sabotaged fellow Republican John McCain are asking the opposition pundits what their plan is.

Perhaps they haven’t been listening. Get the troops out now. That’s been the critics’ plan from day one. It wasn’t a good option four years ago.

A lot can change in four years.

Notwithstanding some local Vancouver pundits’ assertion that Saddam Hussein’s hanging was unjust (question: who really, really cares if it was all completely by the book?), the tyrant is dead. That should have given Bush an out. Instead, the date came and went and now it’s just another day in a very bad couple of years.

Yes, the security situation will probably get worse if they pull out. The country could be mired in violence and chaos for decades. Millions could die.

But after four years of war, it’s clear what the trend is going towards. Keeping US forces in Iraq is just postponing the inevitable.

An article in today’s Georgia Straight coughs up some pretty toxic drivel about carbon credits as a solution to Canada’s environmental problems.

The Georgia Straight article actually admits that carbon trading has a lot of drawbacks criticized by leading environmentalists – not least of which is the lack of accountability for carbon-traded projects that are supposed to make up for polluters’ ongoing operations. Unfortunately, it leaves such critical information until the final couple of paragraphs, after about 1,000 words of gut-check anti-Conservative, pro-Kyoto propaganda.

Canada is a major polluter, worse in some respects than the American gas-guzzling empire that many self-righteous Canadians are the first to criticize. There seems to be no real debate left regarding humanity’s carbon-producing societies being behind a potentially catastrophic (well, for us, maybe not cockroaches) climate change. Something needs to be done.

But carbon trading isn’t it. Buying carbon credits on the international market doesn’t actually reduce global warming – it just makes countries billions of dollars poorer.

Instead of sending our currency abroad into a black (green?) hole, why not invest those billions in Canada on renewable energy research, or the production of tried and tested renewable energy sources: wind, solar, and yes, nuclear power?

The wind is rushing outside my window at nearly 100 km an hour – just the latest unseasonable windstorm that has torn Stanley Park up by the roots in the last couple of weeks.

The jewel of Vancouver is looking more like a logging camp than a public park these days. We’re still not sure if federal funding is going to come through to reforest the area.

Hopefully, no public money going towards replanting and setting reinforcements for the trees that have survived.

The people tallying up the damage are saying it could cost $4 million to repair the park. I have no problem with repairing the seawall, but the trees themselves? There’s probably 997,000 or so left after all the freak weather.

There’s no guarantee that another storm this year or next won’t just tear down the work we do now. Trees fall down in forests all the time. The forest itself will survive, without our help.

When there are hundreds of people shivering on the Vancouver streets tonight because there aren’t enough spaces at the shelters, now is not the time to give an emergency handout to the parks board.

BC Place Stadium blew up yesterday.

Okay, it didn’t actually blow up – more like blow out. But it’s never a good thing when the roof of a major sports venue often packed with 60,000 fans just “pops” and deflates without any warning. Had this happened in the middle of BC Lions game, you can bet that hundreds of Vancouverites and visiing tourists could have been crushed in the panic and inevitable rush for the exits.

We got lucky, folks.

United Nations soldiers are raping and abusing children in south Sudan.

This kind of atrocity is just the icing on the cake for refugees of genocide in the Darfur region. It’s also par for the course for the United Nations, which lists upstanding human rights defenders like China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Cuba on its Human Rights Council (Sudan actually won membership in an uncontested election to its precursor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, while still in the midst of its ethnic cleansing campaign).

Hopefully, this news (which is not really “news”, since reports about UN soldiers abusing the people they’re supposed to be protecting – and then trying to cover it up – have been circulating for years) won’t dampen people’s efforts to get a more responsible and effective intervention into Sudan.

Hats off to you, George Clooney, using that Hollywood clout for a good cause.