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It is time to put the pieces in place in the Pacific Rim.  Consider this the equivalent of buying a program at the ballpark, so you can see the players and their stats.

China has missiles.  They point a bunch of them at Taiwan.  The deal is simple: If Taiwan declares independence from mainland China, the mainland will send a bucketload of badness at Taiwan.  China also has much unpleasantness pointed at Russia.  China has a huge army that can kick ass and takes names.  China has nukes, including submarines.

Taiwan has missiles.  Their stuff is mostly of ground to air and anti-ship missiles.  Taiwan also has a decent air force to protect from invasion from China.  The US has been the purveyor of fine weaponry to Taiwan since 1948.  Taiwan has all the primo gear the US makes.  Taiwan doesn’t have nukes, but they do have submarines.

South Korea has missiles.  Some of their own, but mostly US owned and operated missiles for defense.  South Korea also has artillery pointed at North Korea.  There is a significant US military presence in South Korea doing police action along the 38^th parallel.  South Korea doesn’t have nukes, but they do have a couple of reactors at Ulsan.  South Korea also has submarines.

Russia has missiles.  Most of them are pointed at China.  Russia also has an army that can kick ass and take names.  Russia has nukes including submarines. 

Japan has missiles.  Most of them are short range air defense or anti-shipping missiles.  They also have a 240,000 person self-defense force that has some good, US provided toys.  Japan does have nuclear reactors, but no nuclear weapons.  Japan has submarines.

North Korea has missiles that work well enough.  They have a mammoth standing army with hundreds of artillery pieces pointed at South Korean targets all long the 38^th parallel, including the US forces that are doing the police action along the 38^th.  North Korea might very well have a couple of nuclear weapons.  North Korea also has submarines.

The United States has missiles.  A battle group is floating around in the area at all times including Aegis guided missile cruisers that could send rounds right into Kim Jong-Il’s second floor bathroom window in Pyongyang.  The US has a big base in South Korea and a couple more in Japan.  The US has nuclear submarines, with nukes, in the area.

Here’s the danger, aside from everyone in the area being armed:  The Sea of Japan is not that big.  You’ve got seven nations rolling around in there in ships and submarines, not to mention aircraft.  Of those seven, three nations are somewhat sensible:  Japan, South Korea and Russia. 

I can’t believe I just wrote that Japan, South Korea and Russia are somewhat sensible, but compared to the other four, they’re like Switzerland on Valium.

The other four are bitter, twisted and looking to pick a fight with anybody.  Somebody is going to either screw up or be deliberately provocative.  There is historical precedence for this kind of dumb.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident saw a couple of US war ships being snotty off the coast of North Viet Nam in August 1964.  North Viet Nam let off a couple of rounds at the ships as their own special way to saying ‘eff off’.  That was all it took for Lyndon Johnson to go to Congress and get the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed.  That was the justification for escalation of the Viet Nam war by the US.

In 2005 the US released what really happened.  The USS Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were shooting rounds into North Viet Nam from international waters.  A North Vietnamese torpedo boat came out and let fly with a machine gun.  One round hit the Maddox.  The rest of the story regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident was, to be generous, bull manure.

Will a submarine driver for any of the interested parties make a mistake and bump into someone else’s submarine?  Would the various governments manipulate that into a “provocative, unwarranted attack on a sovereign nation in the free and open Sea”?

Would that be slim enough justification?  For North Korea, it doesn’t take much to set them off.  The US is wound a little tight.  China operates in a state of perpetual panic regarding Taiwan.  Taiwan has had their colour-code terror alert Pez dispenser pinned on red since 1948. 

It won’t take much.

Is global warming for real?  I can tell you that the weather has been strange this year, but is it global warming or just a cycle? 

Science is a good tool here.  Drill a six-inch hole a few thousand feet into a glacier, in Greenland or Antarctica.  Bring up a core sample of glacier ice the same way you would if you were drilling for oil, nothing complicated.  There is no hocus-pocus weird science interpretation of reality involved. 

You have a time capsule of what the climate was thousands of years ago, frozen in layers.  Scientists can divine, (a mass spectrometer works well) how much oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and dusty bits were floating around in the air, then frozen in the ice.  By counting down the number of layers you can put a year to it.  The same works with lake sediment or tree rings.  Nothing strange:  Percentages of stuff and some rudimentary counting. 

Science has figured out there is a range of normal for CO2, nitrogen, oxygen and other stuff.  It has been more or less the same for 650,000 years.  Yes, there are ups and downs. This is normal as the Earth is not a fixed system, but the variances are very small. 

Pre-industrialization of our planet, the average number was 280 parts per million of CO2 in the air:  Carbon Dioxide is naturally occurring. We need some to live.  Too much and we change things. 

In 2005, at high altitude over one of the tallest peaks in the middle of the windswept Pacific Ocean, one would expect air that would sit nicely in the average of the whole planet, over 650,000 years.  The number is 341 parts per million of CO2.  Or, way out of whack.  Not in the range of normal.

The real point is that tiny little changes in our atmosphere can have devastating consequences far away from, or much later than the event.  This is the truism of the single nail.  For the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost.  For the loss of a shoe, the horse was lost.  For the loss of a horse, the battle was lost.  For the loss of a battle, the war was lost.  That is the way big systems seem to work.  It is an eternal truth.

Lake Chad, once the sixth largest lake in the world, near Niger, is almost gone.  A lake not much smaller that Lake Superior is gone?  Yes.  Look at two pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro, one from 1970 and one from 2005.  The snow-covered peaks of Kilimanjaro, right?  Today, it has a tiny wisp of snow around the very top that looks thinner than Jean Chretien’s comb-over. 

The Earth is an interdependent system that is very finely tuned.  Britain is mild because of the gulf stream.  Change one factor, say move the gulf stream one hundred miles south of the UK.  Edinburgh is not much further south than Goteborg, Sweden, or Churchill, Manitoba.  You might wind up with 172 inches of snow in Edinburgh; an old fashioned Canadian winter. 

Where do hurricanes, like Katrina or Rita come from?  The answer is the east coast of Africa.  Temperature changes, weather and ocean currents around Nigeria, or Gabon can put a topspin on weather going into the Gulf of Mexico.  This might tweak the gulf stream, which could juggle things along Spain or Morocco.  It all ties together very delicately and only takes a few degrees to make a change. 

The other problem with global warming is it accelerates exponentially.  It doesn’t go twice as fast, it goes four times as fast, then eight times as fast, then sixteen times as fast and so on.  Thirty years’ difference in glacier size are quite telling of how fast it is running.

In the last two hundred years we went from agrarian to urban.  We invented all kinds of things, like electricity, internal combustion engines, cures for hundreds of diseases, skyscrapers, nuclear energy, subways, cars, airplanes, radio, radar, microwaves, fascinating ways to conduct wars, air conditioning, the Slinky, aerosol cheese, the Backstreet Boys and iPods.  We also created a catastrophe called Global Warming.  The science is irrefutable.  We did it in, oh, give or take, seventy years. 

I’m not saying we go back to the Grand Old Days of 1806 to fix it.  Remember them? Before medicine, when E.Coli was a condiment?  You got unpasteurized milk out of the family cow?  You saw a village twice a year?  Your family had to grow enough hay to feed the horses over the winter to have a live horse in the spring to pull the plow?  School was three or four years, at the most, if you lived near one?  You could die a painful death if you broke an arm?  A refrigerator was a hole in the ground, but so was the toilet?

A rural, agrarian, self-sufficient life would kill most of us, probably from starvation, in the first year.  We’ve lost the skills and the wisdom from 1806.  We don’t live near the resources anymore.  I can’t get to, or store, or tote five cords of split, dried firewood into a fourteenth floor apartment, even if I had a fireplace.  The park outside isn’t that big.  I can’t keep a cow up here.  I can’t plant crops up here.

We can’t un-invent our present.  But we can change our present. 

Buy a smaller, fuel-efficient car or a hybrid if you can afford it.  Take public transit where you can.  Turn off lights.  Turn off the air conditioning.  Conserve electricity.  Plant trees.  Save water.  Avoid aerosols.  Leave as small a carbon footprint as you can by recycling, reducing and reusing things. 

Stir up some shit with politicians.  Conservation has a faster, better payback than trying to build new generation capacity.  In Ontario they’re talking about building a new nuclear generation program.  It takes at least 10 years to get one up and running, but we need the electricity now.  With that kind of money, $40 Billion, invested in energy conservation and green generation programs, we could save as much power as the new reactors would produce, probably in half the time and even create some jobs out of the deal. 

Do one other thing for me, will you please?  Go and see “An Inconvenient Truth”.  It is the Al Gore global warming film.  Even if you wouldn’t trust Al Gore to tell you the correct time, just go and see it, then decide for yourself.  He tells the story and the science better than I can.

Since I’ve been doing RoadDave for years, even before blogs existed, I figured, why not make it a legit blog.  Who knows, maybe some day, some pathetic individual will read this written waste product and find it funny, laugh their pants off and tell two friends. 

Then the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon come into play.  I’ll load in some of the older RoadDave material as we go, if only to see if anyone in the ‘public’ actually gives a flatlined beep about it.

It’s a three-fer today.  Three subjects, no waiting…

Today is the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the 2000 series.  I suppose with a bit of manipulation you can label it Satan’s Day, as the day contracts as 6-6-6, or the Sign of the Beast from the Book of Revelations in the Bible.

This means the World Will Come To An End.  Or Not.  It depends on how much stock you put in the Book of Revelations.  So light a black candle and slaughter a goat in celebration of the Prince of Darkness, if that is your particular brand of theology.

For the rest of us, we get to watch two interesting bits of theatre play out for our entertainment.  The first is Dubya.  The war is going badly, some Marines quite possibly going off and murdering a bunch of people near Haditha in Iraq is not a good story to have out.  Bush’s buddy Ken Lay getting years in the crowbar hotel.  Scooter Libby pointing at Cheney. 

White folks wanting to ship all the Mexicans back to Mexico, unless they’re actually cutting the lawn at the Golf Club. 

The rich getting insanely richer and now the middle class is taking it in the ear.  People are waking up in the US and realizing the immigration and border system is irredeemably pooched, jobs being relocated, debt increasing and real income in the toilet.  Plus, the most recent polls put Bush’s popularity on par with a bowl of mealworms in your sock drawer.

Dubya needs a distraction to keep the citizens from marching on Washington.  When in doubt, wrap yourself in the flag, or bash fags.  Well, wrapping yourself in the flag right isn’t the best idea.  Americans remember the “Mission Accomplished” banner of a few years back.  That leaves fags.

The Dubya Brain Trust decided to put on a distraction by sending a Bill down to the Senate making same-sex marriage illegal, regardless of what various states have to say about marriage.  The sad truth is the tactic worked.  Various Senators, pundits and media bottom feeders have lined up for a supersize serving. 

The usual suspects are up on their back legs about same-sex couples getting hitched.  There has been no mention of various Mormons committing polygamy, as that is a “private matter” and “faith-based” and the government doesn’t get involved in religion.  Unless it is a different religion from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which means they can crap all over it.

But fags and dykes?  Hell yeah, open season baby!  My attitudes have been consistent for years.  Heterosexuals have screwed up marriage for hundreds of generations.  Why not give homosexuals a run at it?  As long as the parties involved are of the age of majority, both consent and no animals are involved, I have no issues with it.

 However, the media likes a good distraction and they’ve bought it as this week’s talking point to keep us amused and confused.

The second fun-show is closer to home.  I live in Toronto and I can see the CN Tower from my apartment.

Seventeen people have been arrested in the Toronto area, suspected of being terrorists.  The RCMP, local cops and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (Our domestic and foreign CIA, called CSIS, or SpiesCanada) busted the group buying three tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to bake up a bunch of home-made Timmy McVeigh bombs.  The story is the group wanted to blow up the CN Tower, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Peace Tower in Ottawa. 

There is no word if the suspects had planned to use Ryder Truck Rental or U-Haul as their transport of choice.  My personal preference is still for Ryder, as Timmy McVeigh used Ryder and so did the nutbars who did the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.  (“Ryder, we’ll rent to anybody with a grudge!”) 

I don’t doubt that the folks involved are quite possibly bad guys.  At least on the face of it, radicalized fundamentalist religious people, determined to blow stuff up to make a point or three, is a concept that we all understand regardless of race, upbringing or religion. 

Here’s the difficult side:  The cops have not disclosed, except to their media buddies, the evidence.  It seems that there was a sting operation involved.  Urban apartment dwellers don’t normally need three tons of agricultural fertilizer to feed a window box planter of green peppers and petunias.  Three tons takes up, roughly, the size of your livingroom, piled floor to ceiling, wall to wall. 

The defense lawyers were not allowed to meet their clients until a few minutes ago, more or less as the accused were being marched into court to be charged.  Of course, the defense lawyers have not been allowed to see any of the evidence, except that which was printed in the newspapers.  The cops did manage to brief the Mayor and the Prime Minister, over the past few months, who both said “They’re toast, fry’em”

Now you and I both know that cops never, ever go after people because of their skin colour or religious background.  You and I both know that cops never entrap people or encourage them to do bad things.  You and I know that CSIS would never gather a wad of shaky semi-facts and then slap “Secret” all over it to prevent the defense from actually questioning the veracity of the source or evidence.  And, you and I know that our cops would never, ever, act as judge, jury and jailer on the same day, even with excellent media coverage readily available and widely reported.

I am going to keep my counsel until I can read or see some of the evidence.  If the accused were planning on doing bad things and the evidence supports this in open court, then I’ll be the first to offer to drive the guilty to prison, strapped to the hood of my car.  I’ll gladly beat them with an axe handle the whole way to Kingston Penitentiary and stop from time to time to let others take a whack at them, $3 a go, proceeds to charity.

But if the evidence is only from a sting operation with a security operative encouraging the group to do bad things, or leading them to someone who was a real nutbar, then I’m going to be upset.  That crosses the line and brings up an unholy stench.

If they are guilty, then they are Canadian home-grown cement-heads, just like McVeigh was an American home-grown cement-head.  It has nothing to do with our immigration or security profile, just like McVeigh was under the radar in the US, or the July 2005 subway bombers in the UK were under the radar.  And they’re not Saudis on bogus student and visitor visas looking for flight training.  Sorry to bring that one up. 

Of the seventeen Canadian terrorist suspects, five are Young Offenders, meaning, in legalspeak, under 18 and can’t be identified by the media.  What has come out, is that of the adults, Qayyum Abdul Jamal was, to be charitable, an extremist.

Another of the suspects, Steven Chand, or, as he wants to be known, Abdul Shakur, is the one quoted as being quite happy to storm the Parliament buildings, take the politicians hostage and behead the Prime Minister, if Canada didn’t pull out of Afghanistan immediately.  There were the usual other demands too: Play nice, say bad things about Israel, and everyone in Canada must convert to Islam by Thursday afternoon.

There were allegations that the group wanted to blow up the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation HQ in Toronto and the CN Tower.  Steven Chand’s lawyer said the charges against his client were “very serious”.  Oh?  No kidding.  I’m not a fan of most politicians, but I think voting them out of office is sufficient.  The CBC, I like and the CN Tower isn’t good or bad; it is simply tall.  I think we can agree the aims of the suspects are extreme and seriously out of kilter.

Other things have been whispered.  First of all, most of the suspects are young, as in late teens, early twenties.  They seemed to be enthralled with the concept of radical fundamentalist Islam as posited by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.  The interviews with the friends of the younger suspects have said that the guys were normal, Canadian boys, who suddenly went off the rails when they started taking instruction from Qayyum Abdul Jamal at the Ar-Rahman Islamic Centre, a storefront mosque, in Mississauga.

The Toronto Star had a very sensible article in today’s edition.  Some of the evidence presented by the police has included five pairs of camouflage boots that the suspects used, along with a cell phone, a voltmeter, some batteries, a door with paintball marks on it, a set of hotdog tongs, a computer and one lone 9mm handgun.  This was the evidence of the ‘terrorist training camp’ north of Toronto.  To précis the article, it sounds like a bunch of young men went into the woods to play soldiers and be jerks, as young men tend to be from time to time. 

It is also alleged that several in the community knew the suspects were under surveillance and quite possibly that the suspects themselves knew they were under surveillance.  This also makes them incredibly stupid terrorists in training, as well as jerks.

I am vitally concerned about a backlash that will hurt everyone.  Several local Imams have roundly condemned the actions of these people.  They have tried to explain that Islam does not condone, or support, or encourage this kind of fundamentalist violence. 

Much like fundamentalist Zionists, or fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Islamists can come up with strange stuff in the name of religion.  Examples:  Shooting Palestinians as invaders of the Promised Land, killing abortion doctors because the Bible said so, or flying planes into the World Trade Centre.  Any fundamentalist group can find justification for any kind of violence in their respective holy books.  Intolerance is a hallmark of fundamentalism and it isn’t the way God meant us to act. 

I am also vitally concerned that some extraordinarily stupid white people are going to go off the deep end.  Some already have, breaking the windows of a local mosque.  I’m sorry for that.  Just as not all Muslims are terrorists, not all White folks are narrow-minded racists.  Like every other group, white people have our share of people with shit for brains.

I’m not going to make any apologies for these suspects, nor condemn them just yet, as the whole story is not out.  It will take time to work through the court system, as it should. 

But I am going to ask two hard questions:  Why did seemingly ‘normal’ Canadian young men think that this behavior is acceptable?  Why did they feel so disassociated from mainstream Canadian society that they felt more sense of belonging with a religious extremist group that could best be described as nuts?

Answer those questions and you have the answer to home-grown terrorists.  Then, we, meaning all Canadians of all colours and heritages, have to fix it, together.