9/26/08

Novacadia Alliance, Mission Statement

Peak Oil, the advent of Post-Peak Oil, global warming, climate chaos, global overpopulation, 9/11 Truth, and North American Union are all inter-related givens. These are our times. We live upon the cusp of a major historical transition.

NAmerican secessionists are agreed that the NAmerican secessionist movement is a consequence of, and response to, the collapse of the American Empire. This view is only a partial, though important, analysis of the secessionist phenomenon. A wider perspective incorporates the collapse of industrial civilization, which is global in scope and, of which the United States is but one player, albeit the central player.

We live in an age that encompasses a colossal contradiction. On the one hand, there is the corporatist and technocratic thrust for globalization and a purported New World Order. On the other hand, there is the interrelated dynamic of empire collapse. Both tendencies stem from a diminishing supply of and access to cheap energy resources as evidenced by the imminent arrival of Peak Oil.

Both of these historical events, although diametrically opposed as political templates, are one and the same of a greater whole. The latent collapse of industrial civilization is the mirror image of the seemingly desperate and brutal grasp at the creation of a technocratic fascist state. It does not require a degree in rocket science to conclude that not both of these global tendencies can succeed. A clash of perceptions, of values and of political wills is inevitable. It is proposed that the balance of the 21st century will be the timeline for this clash.

In Canada, the mainstream political parties, relative to their own philosophies, have taken up the call for environmental concerns only while neglecting the other elements of the historical mix, in particular, the imminent arrival of Peak Oil. Over the last several years, these parties have fallen over themselves to develop Green policies, ranging from the banal to the ludicrous. Wisdom, courage and leadership have been betrayed by electoral spin for political favour and self-preservation. The Bilderberg orchestrated Kyoto Protocol was too late by at least 25 years.

What all parties, the Green Party inclusive, hold in common re their differing environmental policies is a common philosophical premise. It is the premise that an ecological catastrophe and related social hardships can be averted by endorsing their particular environmental platform. This position is a misperception. It is a political falsehood. It is a smoke screen. It is a lie.

All political parties, except one, can be relatively forgiven for not being more forthright with the public and charting a courageous and realistic course to tackle the challenges and dimensions of true eco-politics for the coming century. The governing Conservatives can be forgiven for a philosophical and moral blindness bordering on the insane. The Liberals can be forgiven for attaching themselves onto anything that might possibly translate into power and privilege. The NDP can be forgiven for being historically irrelevant. The party that cannot be forgiven for its timid and narrow political stance is the Green Party.

Global warming is now firmly rooted in the public consciousness, but it is merely one of three factors constituting the socio-political triad of industrial civilization’s collapse. The other two points of this triad are Peak Oil and global overpopulation. To deny this interrelated triad of global transition relegates mainstream politicians as pre-Copernican monks mumbling into their beards the empty platitudes of an earth-centered and false heliocentricity. It is a simple fact that Peak Oil and global overpopulation have never been brought into public discourse by our political parties.

The one party that may have been in a position to take a definitive stance, the Green Party, has betrayed and abandoned its core principles and responsibility by pandering to short-sighted, politically-correct and opportunistic drool. The comfort of being a taxpayer-subsidized lobby group with well-intentioned hand-wringing and save-the-world philosophical myopia serves no concrete political utility. By virtue of gutting the core principles of political decentralization and recognition of continental bioregions for purposes of secession, Green policies beg to be thwarted and co-opted by parliamentary shell games and bureaucratic self-interests. In a severe and paradoxical twist, this leaves the Green Party as the most irresponsible, least trustworthy and most deceptive of all for addressing the political challenges of a Post-Peak Oil world.

Being situated at the historic turning point of Peak Oil, The Novacadia Alliance recognizes that industrial civilization is not merely in decline, but that it has entered the end-game. It is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that a civilization has outstripped its energy foundations, outlived its institutional purposes, and collapsed.

As such, The Novacadia Alliance acknowledges the following:
  • Burdened with non-sustainable energy carrying capacities and gargantuan institutional complexities, the United States and Canada will implode upon themselves and dissolve as nation states during the current century;
  • Regional jurisdictional survival and societal re-invention trump vacant political posturing, and that the political vacuum spawned by the latter states-of-affair begs to be filled;
  • In the American New England and Canadian Maritime regions, the optimum size for undertaking the latter post-industrial political, economic and cultural re-invention encompasses the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and the American states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Recognizing the historical primacy and necessity of decentralization and secession, as forces inherent in the age of Post-Peak Oil, The Novacadia Alliance proposes the creation of a new Maritime political party to embark on such mandate called The Novacadia Independence Party. Optional party membership for American citizens has been written into the party's draft bylaws, taking the legal entity of a North American political party with dual-nationality membership to exciting and uncharted legal territory. The Draft Constitution and Bylaws are put forward in good faith for consideration, discussion, modification and eventual ratification.

North American regional secessions are the natural political counterpart to the "powerdown" era of Post-Peak Oil. The fusion of two seemingly divergent historical events delivers the necessary conditions and opportunity to spawn a truly unique political hybrid for our age. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed founding of The Novacadia Independence Party would make it the first political party in North America to be founded strictly upon the recognition of the ecological, economic, social and political premises, and related institutional devolutions, of the Post-Peak Oil era.

9/21/08

The Mallick-Palin Affair

Yes, there are federal elections underway on both sides of the border. The number of sources for political commentary and opinion are limitless. There is little need for one more stranded opinion, although there is room for opinion on what the outcomes of these elections may hold for the NAmerican secessionist movement. Consider such a post “pending.”

A minor explosion has occurred on the Canadian political landscape that has jumped the border into the CNN newsroom and is now blipping on the American political landscape. I refer, of course, to the dust-up over the Heather Mallick-Sarah Palin affair.

What is most interesting and yes, nauseous, about this sordid event are the pissing contests underway in the Con and Lib camps of the Canadian blogosphere. The Cons are predictably outraged. The Libs are likewise predictably outraged that one of their spokespersons should be called out as a “pig” by CNN. The self-righteous wrath of some Libs questioning the Cons’ lack of civility is comical.

The notion of "civility" in the Canadian political blogosphere is, by and large, a quaint linguistic remnant of a ghost era or a principled objective to be pursued at some point beyond the present. Neither camp has the foggiest comprehension of what it entails, let alone being able to spell it. The mutually-supportive fallout around the Mallick/Palin soap opera may just be the most evident example of this mutual embrace to date. Excusing the out-and-out naive and stupid, one is amazed that some of the self-proclaimed enlightened Libs are so thick between their ears as to their own hypocritical conduct. Witness the outpouring of wounded pride that flowed into Red Tory's post entitled "When Brownshirts Attack!"

The meta-context is that a military coup was inflicted on the peoples of NAmerica on September 11, 2001. The ongoing prattle about which type of political personality, representing supposedly differing political philosophies, will best serve this condition is just that...prattle. The cult of personality and related attacks against those personalities, in both camps and in both Canada and the United States, merely abets the illusion of contributing towards a tattered democracy and its principles. Literally, it is the fog of war.

We witness first-hand a clash, on the political extremities of neanderthal Con knuckle-scrapers and redundant Lib wankers and apologists. Both are caught in the headlights of an unwelcome future and a gutted ethos for how to deal with it. Somewhere in the middle are liberals and conservatives, decent, small human beings (a goodly proportion likely “trash”), who may wish for nothing more than a reasonable and acceptable explanation of why the fabric of their world is unraveling at an alarming rate and why that world is being steam-rolled by a freight train of maniacal entropy. That middle ground constitutes every general's and mainstream politician's worst nightmare: the center will not hold.

The political option of "the lesser of two evils" has quite possibly never been more pronounced, on both sides of the 49th. We have the hillbilly version and the oh-so-slick version. It is a 21st century Prisoners' Dilemma on steroids.

We make our beds and we get to sleep in them, when maybe what we should really be contemplating is burning them.

What awaits us is, indeed, a delicious banquet of consequences.

9/12/08

9/11 Truth: Keith Olbermann is On-Side

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann spares few punches on this September 10, 2008 commentary. Coming down very heavy on the Bush administration for their “criminal neglect” in allowing the attacks to occur and identifying the continued exploitation of 9/11 as “sociological pornography” is an astounding editorial leap for the corporate media to take.

9/10/08

NAmerican Secession Hits the L.A. Times

Here's a great article on NAmerican secession by Kristopher Ketchum published to-day in the Los Angeles Times. It is further acknowledgement of the secessionist movement by the mainstream media since the secessionist ties of Gov. Sarah Palin were revealed. There is no such thing as bad publicity.

Mr. Ketchum offers a generic and somewhat limited overview of NAmerican secession, yet still a good piece for public consumption. As example, he limits the notion of Cascadia to the states of Washington and Oregon, disqualifying altogether the inclusion of British Columbia. Unfortunately, such myopia is also shared by too many NAmerican secessionists. Although the terms of reference for NAmerican secession are given limited and qualified verbal acknowledgement, the philosophical perception and sentiment fall far short of actually owning the terms of reference. The Chatanooga Declaration itself clearly exposes this blind spot.

In time, this shortcoming will no doubt be addressed and corrected. This will be necessary to do not only to recognize the continental dynamic of secession but, more importantly, to safeguard and build upon the strategic importance of a continental scope. Should the movement fall short in owning such scope then, alas, it will be left with just one more ethnocentric overture masquerading as revolutionary exuberance. In the words of James Howard Kuntsler, the secessionist movement will be straddled and doomed with "the banality of American exceptionalism."

9/3/08

More Dancing Around the Maypole

It would seem that the Green Party and its leader, Elizabeth May, know no shame. Now the party has gone bottom-fishing and snagged for itself a political specimen that not even the Liberals wish to touch with a ten-foot pole. The Liberals, yet! Those denizens of democratic decorum! Add this latest gaffe, with the singular motive to gain television air time, onto the back room May-Dion non-aggression pact, and the Green claim to taking the ethical high road evaporates into the fog of Green philosophy. With a political bed now so crowded and diverse, the ability to maneuver diminishes accordingly.

The Conservatives have already let it be known that the back room deal cut in Central Nova is about to turn around and bite Ms. May big time on the very thing she so cherishes: taking part in the televised debates. Having cake and getting to eat it too seems to be snuggled alongside the Green notion of not acknowledging the principle of merit, such an endearing quality of the Millennial generation. For all its shortcomings, we have an electoral system of first-across-the-line. This translates into the legitimacy of an elected MP, not one foisted onto the public as a political prop, much like a housing purchase (disguised as roots in the community), made with taxpayer money.

The New Glasgow News conducted an online "poll" last week that gives at least a rough picture of how things are shaping up in the riding of Central Nova. Ms. May is pulling 9%, which matches national support for the Greens. It seems that the abandoned and disaffected Lib vote is going en masse to Louise Lorifice, the NDP candidate. In the same online poll, Peter MacKay and Lorifice are pulling 35% and 33% respectively.

May/Dion may yet pull off their little coup of unseating MacKay, although not as anticipated. That 9%, when it comes to marking one's X on the ballot, could easily shrink down to 5%. How does the Honourable Louise Lorifice, Member of Parliament, sound?

Given the lopsided playing field that was orchestrated for Ms. May via the benefit of the non-aggression pact, and then not being able to deliver on it, she may be looking for another job after October 14. Unfortunately, there are only so many parties and ridings one can jump to. One’s credibility tends to take a shit kicking.