Krugman - Europe Also Won in Yesterday's Greek Bailout Referendum

From my years practicing insolvency law, I was left stunned at the illogic in the demands that the creditors sought to impose on Greece.  The approach made no sense.  They demanded Greece accept a debt load it could never hope to pay off. They essentially wanted the Greek government to mortgage the very future of Greek youth, even those yet unborn.

It doesn't make any difference whether it's an individual, a corporation or a country - when it falls insolvent the best deal for creditors is always a workable deal and that means debt forgiveness, taking a haircut.  If Joe owes you a million dollars but he can only repay it at a hundred dollars a month, you have no more hope of recouping your money than Joe has of paying it.  Sometimes there is no deal.  Companies go under, their assets sold for pennies on the dollar of value. Countries can go in all sorts of predictable and unpredictable ways.

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman writes that yesterday's No vote in Greece was a win not only for the Greek people but also for Europe itself.


...Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.

...In advance of the referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency.

...In the failed negotiations that led up to Sunday’s referendum, the central sticking point was Greece’s demand for permanent debt relief, to remove the cloud hanging over its economy. The troika — the institutions representing creditor interests — refused, even though we now know that one member of the troika, the International Monetary Fund, had concluded independently that Greece’s debt cannot be paid. But will they reconsider now that the attempt to drive the governing leftist coalition from office has failed?

...Unless Greece receives really major debt relief, and possibly even then, leaving the euro offers the only plausible escape route from its endless economic nightmare.

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over. If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

Why the Leaked F-35 Flight Test Results Must Worry Lockheed.

When word got out last week that Lockheed's uber-costly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter got its tail waxed by a 30-year old F-16 in air combat flight tests, it was a serious blow to the already troubled stealth light bomber.

Lockheed's American customers - the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps - probably weren't happy with the F-35s poor showing or that the information had leaked out but that's probably not Lockheed's real concern.

The timing of the leak couldn't be worse for Lockheed.  It comes just when the pressure is on for the manufacturer to firm up its foreign orders into confirmed sales.

Lockheed needs those foreign sales if it is going to meet American demands to get the unit cost of the F-35 under control.  Foreign orders are the key to lowering costs and that could make or break the Joint Strike Fighter programme.

The problem is that a lot of the countries that Lockheed and the Pentagon are counting on to buy this warplane are expecting it to replace their current aging fighters.  Smaller air forces can't afford to buy several different types of warplanes so they depend on getting what's called a multi-role fighter that can be called upon to do the gamut of missions - close support, tactical bombing, air defence and air to air combat.  That was what they had in their now aging fleets of F-16s and F-18s.  That's what's on offer in today's Eurofighter, Rafale or Griffen fighters.

However, if the F-35 can't best an aging F-16, those foreign customers are going to think twice about whether this F-35 is a multi-role fighter after all.  Lockheed's assurances that it is have now been thrown into doubt.  That's the sort of thing that makes people sit up and start asking hard questions.

Lockheed will say that there never was a realistic scenario where the F-35 would have to dogfight anyway.  If the F-16 was a threat, the F-35 would have used its sensor wizardry to launch an air to air missile to eliminate it before the F-16 even knew it was there.  That might even be true... if...

If the F-35 had a sophisticated electronic warfare aircraft trailing some 50-miles behind it picking out targets and feeding the data to the JSF, then the first strike missile scenario is plausible.  However in these smaller countries, those F-35s are going to have to go commando, using their own onboard radars to detect, track and attack their adversaries.  Stealth is right out the window and, with it, this fantasy about killing the enemy before he even knows you're there.  This is where you get into old fashioned dogfighting country and, as we now know, that's where the F-35 goes to die.

Just when Lockheed needs to get these allied air forces to sign on the bottom line, those potential customers are getting an eyeful of the F-35's limitations that, until now, has been carefully kept under wraps.

All it's going to take is for some country, like Canada, to decide that a real, head to head, fighter competition is necessary to force Lockheed to put its warplane here its mouth is.  I'm not sure Lockheed would even accept the challenge of a fly-off.

It Sounded Like Something Out Of Apocalypse Now

They came at last light as I sat in my livingroom, reading.  It sounded like a helicopter assault straight out of Apocalypse Now and it went on for quite a while.  It didn't take long to put two and two together and realize this was a fleet of helos returning from fire fighting operations nearby over on the mainland.

The province operates a forest fire fighting training facility a few miles from my place and, of late, I've spotted helicopters sitting on their landing pads.  There are also commercial operators in the vicinity, some of them involved in helicopter logging.

Waited all day yesterday for our usual winds off the Pacific to blow our smoke canopy back to the mainland but the air has gone still.  Today the smoke that was higher in the sky yesterday has descended and tall fir trees that were green yesterday now have a greyish-hue.  So we wait and hope for the return of those cleansing breezes from the vast, forest-free Pacific.

Next Up, Spain

As events unfold over the next few weeks following today's No victory in Greece there'll be plenty of people watching in Spain.  That country's Podemos movement promotes a similar sort of anti-austerity platform to that of Greece's Syrzia.  It's hard to imagine today's defiant events in Greece not having a knock on effect in Spain and perhaps Italy also.

I've spent some time this afternoon prowling the web for online European newspapers, stopping to look at their photos of street celebrations across Greece. What struck me is how generational this seems.  Unlike the earlier protest marches where the crowds were of all ages, today seems to be a day for young Greeks to rejoice.

Greek youth, after all, had the most to lose.  Just coming into adulthood they faced the prospect of either having to emigrate or face a future of perpetual penury.  They grew up with five years of punitive austerity, saw what it did to their parents.  They understood that a Yes win would be "game over" for their future.  They fought and they won even if it victory only means the right to fight again another day.

By contrast it was the wealthiest Greeks who were the most outspoken proponents of the Yes side.  The austerity measures the Euro Bank and IMF were using to crush ordinary Greeks really didn't matter to the oligarchs who, in many cases, were the real tax dodgers contributing to the debt crisis.  The shipping magnates remain unscathed, still venerated as de facto nobility.

The Spanish go to the polls in a general election some time before 20 December. Podemos has gone up and down in the polls but today's events might give a much needed boost to anti-austerity supporters.

Is It Time to Skewer Harper With the F-35 Fiasco?

Probably the question should be whether Mulcair or Trudeau have the political acumen to bloody Stephen Harper over his blunders and deceit in Canada's F-35 saga.

We know now that Harper's obsessive drive for a single source procurement on a "buy before you fly basis" was insanely reckless.  Harper owes a profound debt of gratitude to the parliamentary budget officer and the auditor general for stopping him cold in his tracks before he could ink a deal for 65 of these hyper-costly and deeply flawed airplanes.

Harper, with his early insistence that no competitive fly off was necessary, came awfully close to saddling Canada's air force with a terrible airplane for decades to come.

Harper needs to be called out on the floor of the Commons for what he tried to do, what he very nearly did and what would have befallen the defence of Canada had he not been derailed by Michael Ferguson and Kevin Page.

At the very least Mulcair and Trudeau should extract a commitment from Harper that there will be a full, open and competitive fly-off of every fighter on the market that can perform the full range of multi-role fighters - close support, tactical bombing, air combat and air defence/interception.  Invite Lockheed to bring their F-35 if they dare and let us see how it goes, head to head, against Rafale, Eurofighter, Griffen, Super Hornet and the latest F-15.  That would probably be the last we would hear from Lockheed which would send a clear message to every other American ally signing up for the F-35.

Greece - Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Greek voters appear poised to rather narrowly reject another round of austerity measures demanded by the IMF, the European Commission and the EBC.

It's something of a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.  Be it Yes or No, the Greek people are pretty much screwed either way.

As observed in Der Spiegel, even if the Greeks accept the terms they'll be stuck with debts they have no reasonable prospect of repaying - as in none, ever.

The German press seems to be blaming their Chancellor, Angela Merkel, for being too soft on the Greek's Syrzia government.  The cover of the German edition speaks for itself.

The Guardian is predicting a 61% win for the No side.  Doubtless some will say that given the referendum was called on such short notice, even that win is less than decisive.

What's totally unclear is how the IMF and European Union will respond.  They might go thermonuclear and expel Greece, the Grexit option which is sort of like holding a gun to the Greek people's head and another to your own.

Having done a lot of insolvency work in my time, it's dismaying to see how irrelevant reality is to this disaster.  The Euros, especially Merkel, need to understand that there are no debtors prisons any more.  There was a time not all that long ago when we forgave Germany for debts and a lot of other things right up to and including the Holocaust.  The quality of mercy thing...

When you're dealing with an insolvent you need to find a deal that works for creditor and debtor alike.  It has to give the creditor more than they could receive otherwise while leaving the debtor motivated to pay what it can.  There has to be light at the end of the tunnel.  If you leave the debtor without hope, usually you're both screwed.

Athens' creditors need to accept reality, figure out how much Greek debt needs to be forgiven, and strike a deal.  Or not.

As for the No side, they're already celebrating their referendum win.  This is a big day, especially for young Greeks who played no role in their country's collapse but were looking at paying a punitive price indefinitely.  I think this picture captures their mood perfectly.

FIFA - Blatter Doubles Down

When is a resignation not a resignation?  When you're the Pharaoh of FIFA, Sepp Blatter.

Ol' Sepper has announced he won't be attending the final of the Women's World Cup in Canada tonight.  The way he explained that is really bizarre.

"For as long as things remain unresolved, I won't take any travel risks," Blatter said, adding that he was needed at FIFA's Zürich HQ, saying the "commanding officer remains at his post during a battle."

So traveling to Canada almost right under the noses of American investigators is one trip too risky for the Sepp Monster.  He is, however, looking forward to traveling to Russia this month for events related to Russia's 2018 World Cup. Canada is too high risk, Russia is oh so sublime.

"Criticism doesn't hurt. What hurts me are hateful tirades. From jealousy, hate has grown," Blatter said.

Burning Down the House

We were warned to prepare for severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration and that cautionary heads up has already come to pass.

I went out back to gaze into the brilliant night sky before bed last night.  I awoke to find the sky had turned a dirty yellowish-grey, smoke from a forest fire over near Sechelt on the mainland.  Around here we're expecting to be next.  After months of abnormally high temperatures and exceptionally low rainfall our local forests are tinder dry just waiting for a careless hiker or thunderstorm to spark a major wildfire or several.

Saskatchewan is burning.  Alberta is burning.  Alaska's wildfire season is already the worst on record.  Fires are raging along the coast, right down into Mexico. British Columbia crews are fighting several fires but, as yet, we've been spared the sort of conditions that have beset Saskatchewan and Alberta.  With all the dead pine forests devastated by beetle infestations there's loads of fuel throughout the interior just waiting for a spark.

Rain would sure be welcome but nobody is expecting that anytime soon.

Is the Biggest Military Procurement Programme in World History the World's Biggest Ever Con Job?

"Where once mighty American warplanes soared over all others, giving Washington a distinct strategic advantage against any foe, in coming decades the U.S. air arsenal will likely be totally outclassed on a plane-by-plane basis by any country possessing the latest Russian and Chinese models — one of which, ironically, appears to be an improved copy of the JSF … minus all its worst design elements."


As I wrote in an earlier post today, Lockheed's F-35 now stands exposed not as the multi-role fighter the manufacturer and the US Air Force touted it to be but as little more than a super-costly, light attack bomber. This might be a good time to consult with your broker.

The flight test report leaked earlier this week leaves no doubt that the F-35 is no fighter, not of any variety.  It's a bomb truck.  However Lockheed pitched it to its foreign customers as a perfect replacement for their existing multi-role fighters - F-16s, F-18s, Tornadoes and such.  These were warplanes those countries relied upon to do all the essential fighter stuff - air combat, ground support, tactical strike missions and the ability to, at long range and high speeds, intercept and defend their airspace against all intruders.

I don't like to get into, much less launch, conspiracy theories but this report raises a lot of questions.

Did Lockheed and the USAF only just discover that the F-35 can't fight its way out of a paper bag? Why were they so insistent that it was a genuine, multi-role fighter when they had to have known with its speed, payload, range and agility limitations plus the degrading of its stealth cloaking it could never be more than a light attack bomber? Getting to the point, did they deliberately set out to hoodwink America's allies and, if so, were the F-35's boosters in those allied air forces in on it?

This is a 1.5 trillion dollar programme, the biggest in world history. It sounds like the very sort of thing that could make a company resort to some pretty squirrelly things.

I wonder what they're doing to hunt down the snitch who leaked this report? Getting those flight test results into the public domain is really a Snowden-grade effort.

We'll probably have to wait a couple of weeks to see what the political fallout is going to be in those countries that have already signed on to Lockheed's order book. Talk about a political football for the opposition parties in those countries.

Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler stand vindicated. Sprey predicted the US military would never buy more than about 500 F-35's, one-fifth of the announced buy.

Update:

If you're not already creeped out by this, watch this incredibly prescient, slightly eerie Australian documentary from early 2013.

After you watch that (and you really should watch it) read this to understand how we've all been had.  If this is right, our national security and that of many of our most important allies has been compromised... entirely for commercial gain.  If you don't think our democracy has been likewise compromised, read the article and give that a second thought.

Every comment is absolutely welcome.  Have at it.

The Little Bomber That Couldn't

F-35 "Fatso"

The myth of the F-35 as an all purpose, multi-role fighter imploded this past week with the leak of a report on flight tests showing that it couldn't hold its own, much less defeat a decades old F-16 in air combat maneuvering.  To put it bluntly, the old (and cheap) F-16 waxed the F-35's tail.

When the specs were written for the F-35 one of the requirements was that it had to maneuver at least better than the venerable F-16 it was intended to replace. It's not the first time the F-35 has come up short - or long in its case.  Among others, it also failed to meet its landing and take off distance requirements.  So the US Air Force rewrote the specs to reflect what the F-35 could do and changed its F to a C-minus with the stroke of a pen. It also has a pretty worrisome weight problem.  At one point Lockheed tried to trim the plane down by removing its onboard fire suppression system not the best solution for an airplane where the fuel tanks are wrapped around its oh-so-hot engine.  One lucky hit by some illiterate farmboy with a Korean War vintage assault rifle and - kaboom.

Caught with their pants down, Lockheed and the US Air Force, while admitting that the leaked report was genuine and the F-35 did indeed fail its air combat test, chimed in with a duet about how the dismal report wasn't the whole story.  Truer words were never spoken just not quite in the same way that the manufacturer and the American air force types intended.

What the damning report shows and what Lockheed and the F-35 boosters are now going to have to admit is that their claim that the F-35 is a multi-role fighter is a ruse, seemingly intended to win foreign orders.  The CF-18 that Trudeau bought for the air force is a genuine, multi-role fighter.  It can do a respectable job at ground attack (bombing), close support (helping troops on the ground - bombing and strafing), air to air combat (dogfighting), patrol and interception (air defence).

The F-35 is no multi-role strike fighter.  It's a somewhat stealthy, light attack bomber.  It's designed to carry two bombs to a high-value target (worthy of the F-35's gold plated price tag) and then get out however it can.

Close support?  Not a chance.  That role requires loiter time.  The supporting fighter has to arrive on station, communicate with the troops who need help, identify and try to take out the bad guys, and then hang around for a while in case there are more enemies lying in wait.  It has to carry enough gear to make multiple runs on enemy positions.  And - here's the big one - it has to be able to take a few hits and survive to make it home.  The F-35 is fuel limited.  Hanging around to help out would be a problem.  Then there's the "Pinto" problem of the fuel tanks wrapped around the engine that make ground fire a much more serious threat.  The F-35 is one hot airplane.  Its engine generates an enormous heat plume, ideal for a Russian or Chinese or ISIS soldier with a shoulder-launched, infrared missile just looking for something to shoot down.  Oh yeah, that engine? There's just the one.  When you lose one engine to ground fire and one is all you have you had better hope those friendly troops can get to you before the bad guys do. And if all that wasn't enough, there's the small matter of cost.  This is one super expensive airplane to put at such significant risk.

Patrol and interception, the air defence mission?  I think it was some air force type that came up with the term MTBF which stands for mean time between failures. It's based on the idea that equipment eventually breaks down and the longer you run it, the more likely it is to fail.  We used to require 4-engines on passenger jets crossing the Atlantic. Why?  MTBF, that's why.  Multiple engines provide redundancy which comes in really handy if one craps out.  MTBF takes on a whole new dimension when it comes to a single engine warplane hundreds of miles from home up in the Arctic in February.  Another problem is speed. Once a suspect aircraft is detected, you need to get an interceptor there as quickly as possible.  Gives the target less chance to launch a salvo of long range cruise missiles and such.  Even clean, with no long range fuel tanks or missiles to slow it down, the F-35 lacks "supercruise."  That's the ability to fly at supersonic speeds without having to use the fuel-guzzling afterburner.  It can't go supercruise fast because it's fat - really, really fat. It's fat because, when Lockheed was chosen to build it, they had to build three versions, one of which was the vertical lift model for the US Marines and the Royal Navy.  It takes space to house that extra engine and that made the F-35 a very wide, high drag airplane (see the top photo).  Put all of these shortcomings together and the F-35 would seem to be a very poor pick for the air defence mission.

Which brings us to the glamour stuff, the 'turn and burn' fighter role, dogfighting.  When it comes to the aerial furball, the US Air Force's own leaked tests show the F-35 simply cannot hold its own even against a vintage F-16.  It seemed to take even the pilots by surprise at how easy it was for the F-16 to get on the F-35's tail and stay there.

The Air Force brass kind of gulped and then said that report doesn't tell the whole story.  True enough.  In reality, the F-35 won't have to contend with F-16s. The adversaries it will confront will be far deadlier than the F-16.  It will have to deal with aircraft such as the super nimble Sukhoi Su-35; Russia's agile stealth air superiority fighter, the PAK50; and China's Su-30s and its stealth fighters, the J-20 and J-31.

Since the F-35 is plainly not an air defence fighter, or a close support fighter, or an air superiority fighter, there's just one mission left - light attack bomber.  The reason the F-35 design sacrifices speed, range, payload and agility typical of genuine fighters is because it is intended to bomb high-value targets in heavily defended enemy territory.  That's what the stealth cloaking is all about.

The F-35 is intended to defeat conventional x-band radars found on older fighters.  It has frontal-aspect cloaking.  Scanned from other aspects - the sides, above, below - the F-35 is not very stealthy at all.  The F-35 is designed to go straight to its target, drop its bombs, and go straight back out again via the shortest route possible before hostile fighters can engage it.  Okay, what's wrong with this picture?

For starters, F-35 operators will announce their presence well in advance. Because of the range limitations, the F-35 will require its support aircraft, especially its air refueling tankers to come far forward where they'll be readily detected. The little bombers need to top up on the way in and again once they get out. You see those tankers at the edge of your airspace, you've got time to get your defending fighters in the air to meet the attackers.  You can also assign fighters to destroy the vulnerable tankers ensuring those F-35s, even if they do reach their target, will never get back to their base.  There's the first Achilles' Heel.

The obvious intended adversaries, Russia and China, have made good use of the inordinate delays in the F-35 development to do plenty of developing of their own.  As Edward Snowden revealed, the Chinese managed to hack a lot of the secrets of the F-35 design right out of the contractors' computers.  Additional secrets were obtained from the Lockheed RQ-170 stealth drone that was brought down, seemingly intact, by Iran.  That included the onboard stealth cloaking electronics and the stealth coatings from the skin of the drone.

Their time and effort seems to have paid off.  They developed work-arounds. They focused on the limitations of the American stealth technology and its weaknesses.  This resulted in what's called "sensor fusion" - the combination of sensor technologies such as L-band radar together with long-range infrared and optical sensors.  Slaved together via computers what was invisible is now detectable sufficiently well to permit not just detection but tracking and targeting.  Fighter interception is again viable and when fighters can find the F-35, the US Air Force's playbook goes out the window.  Achilles Heel numero dos.

Under attack the F-35 will have little choice but to maneuver - to turn and climb and dive - and once it has to turn its stealth cloaking is simply gone.  It can try to use its onboard missiles (all - i.e.both - of them) to bring down its attackers but it probably won't be able to get enough of them for it to avoid the very dogfight it lost to the F-16.  It has a gun but, as the test showed, it can't move its nose fast enough to get on target.  Dogfighting also consumes a crazy amount of what the F-35 has in such limited supply - fuel.  Because of its high drag it's going to be dependent on its afterburner and when the guy sitting behind you has infrared missiles your day is pretty much over.  Achilles Heel nummer Drei

Wonder Why This Is the Only Picture Showing How Much
The Pilot Sees from Behind?

As for the Russians, they have what's considered to be the world's best surface to air missile systems - the S-300 and the even newer S-400 which the Russkies claim is "stealth ready."  The 400 was purpose built to defend high value Russian targets from stealth attack.

The sad truth is that the F-35 was designed for conditions as they were when the order was placed.  You might remember that time as pre-9/11.  One thing those brilliant designers never factored in was that its secrets might be hacked right out of their own computers or turned over to the bad guys when that super secret drone was force landed. They never factored in 'sensor fusion' or that the F-35 might have to go up against an adversary with its own stealth warplanes. The F-35 was supposed to have a world-beating technological edge far into the future. There was simply no other way to justify the cost or its operational shortcomings.  All of those assumptions now stand unraveled.

Defrocked, the F-35 appears awfully prototypical.  It's like a technology demonstrator where combat essential qualities such as range, payload, speed (remember, no supercruise) and agility have been sacrificed for the sake of supposed stealth cloaking that is frontal-aspect only. It's sort of a "look what I can do, dad" airplane that's hard to take seriously.

Lockheed and the US Air Force continue to dismiss the F-35s critics even as those critics' claims keep getting proven right.  Let's recap what we now know about this would-be multi-role fighter.

Close support:  too costly to be worth the risk, insufficient loiter time, too vulnerable to ground fire and shoulder-launched IR missiles.

Air defence:  too slow (no supercruise), inadequate range, single engine vulnerability.

Air combat: a dead duck - underpowered, lack of fuel, inadequate turn and climb rate, terrible rear visibility, a heat-seeking missile's dream date.

It's not a fighter.  It just can't do fighter things.  It's a light attack bomber purpose built to attack countries with relatively sophisticated air defences which would be China, Russia, Iran, Britain, France, maybe Israel - as they were back in the Year of Our Lord, 2000.

This is a warplane that makes absolutely zero sense for Canada.  Even the US Navy isn't keen on buying it and the US Air Force is clamoring for quick development of a "sixth generation" fighter to replace the F-35.  The goddamned thing is years away from entering service and they're already yelling "next." I think we should take that as a clear warning. Maybe the Americans can afford to move on but if we buy it we can't.  It will drain our defence budget even if it does spend most of its time idle undergoing maintenance in our hangars.

Jeez, If I Buy It Will You Let Me Sit In It?

If We Can't Pry Our Politics Free of Neoliberalism, We're Screwed

Like it or not, neoliberalism is the prevailing economic orthodoxy in Canadian politics, the NDP included.  It's also the seed of our destruction as a nation and it's going to be a real bugger to kick our way free of it.

For years I've been writing on this blog that neoliberalism and free market capitalism do not work past a certain point at which a society starts running out of stuff and begins running into walls.  That's when you either descend into a form of economic neo-feudalism or else you transition into an allocation-based economy.  When there's not enough to go around, to meet basic needs, people expect pretty egalitarian solutions.

Which is why I was immensely pleased to find Oxford professor and economic historian Avner Offer's insights in Chris Hedges new book, Wages of Rebellion.

According to Offer, our ideology of neoclassical economics - the belief that, as E. Roy Weintraub wrote, 'people have rational choices among outcomes' that can be identified and associated with values, that 'individuals maximize utility and firms maximize profits,' and that 'people act independently on the basis of full and relevant information' - is a 'just world' theory.  'A just world theory posits that the world is just.  People get what they deserve. If you believe that the world is fair, you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually by blaming the victim.'

But, he warned, if we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation and decline, this neoclassical model becomes ominous.

'Major ways of thinking about the world constitute just-world theories,' he said. 'The Catholic Church is a just-world theory.  If the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they deserved. Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If Kulaks were starved and exiled, they got what they deserved. Fascism was a just-world theory. If Jews died in the concentration camps, they got what they deserved. The point is not that the good people get the good things, but the bad people get the bad things. Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy norms, is a just-world theory.'

Offer quoted the economist Milton Friedman: 'The ethical principle that would justify the distribution of income in a free market society is, "To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces."

'So,' Offer went on, 'everyone gets what he or she deserves, either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one asks how he or she got this property. And if they don't have it, they probably don't deserve it. The point about just-world theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that it provides a warrant for inflicting pain.'

Offer... said that the effectiveness of an ideology is measured by the amount of coercion it takes to keep a ruling elite in power.  Reality, when it does not conform toi the reigning ideology, he said, has to be 'forcibly aligned.'

...As larger and larger segments of society are forced because of declining economies to become outsiders, the use of coercion, under our current model, will probably become more widespread.

...Offer argued that 'a silent revolution' took place in economics in the 1970s. That was a time when 'economists discovered opportunism - a polite term for cheating.  Before that, economics had been a just-world defence of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating. The invisible-hand doctrine tells us there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the best. But once you enter a world of cheating, there is no longer one outcome. It is what economists call 'multiple equilibria,' which means there is not a deterministic outcome. The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economists are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.'

The problem, he said, is that the old norms of economics continue to inform our policies, as if the cheating norm had never been introduced.

'Let's take the doctrine of optimal taxation,' he said. 'If you assume a world of perfect competition, where every person gets their marginal products, then you can deduce a tax distribution where high progressive taxation is inefficient. This doctrine has been one of the drivers to reduce progressive taxation. But looking at the historical record, this has not been accompanied by any great surge in productivity; rather, it has produced a great surge in inequality. So once again, there is a gap between what the model tells us should happen and what actually happens. In this case, the model works, but only in the model - only if all the assumptions are satisfied. Reality is more complicated.'

...Our current economic model, he said, will be of little use to us in an age of ecological deterioration and growing scarcities. Energy shortages, global warming, population increases, and increasing scarceness of water and food will create an urgent need for new models of distribution. Our two options, he said, will be 'hanging together or falling apart.' Offer argues that we cannot be certain that growth will continue. If standards of living stagnate or decline, he said, we must consider other models for the economy.

Offer, who studied the rationing systems set up in the countries that took part in WWI, suggested that we examine how past societies coped successfully with scarcity. ...In an age of scarcity, it will be imperative to set up new, more egalitarian models of distribution. Clinging to the old neoclassical model, he argued, could erode and perhaps destroy social cohesion and require the state to engage in greater forms of coercion.

...However, if we cling to our current model - which Offer labels 'every man for himself' - then, he said, 'it will require serious repression.'

He concluded: 'There is not a free market solution to a peaceful decline.'

What professor Offer is arguing for is, essentially, social democracy as the only viable option to safeguard social cohesion and ward off serious repression necessary to continue today's status quo. What a great time for Layton and Mulcair to embrace neoliberalism and guide the NDP to abandon the Left.

Some Times Things Go Really Wrong. Some Times They Go Really Right.

It's about the worst thing you'll ever hear on a cockpit voice recorder - the pilot saying, "Wow, pulled back the wrong throttle," seconds before the passenger plane falls out of the sky.

According to Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council investigators, those were among the last words uttered by Captain Liao Jian-zong before his Trans-Asia ATR turboprop plane went in.  One engine lost power about three minutes into the flight and then the pilot cut the power to his remaining good engine.



Some pilots, however, catch a break.  A month before the Trans-Asia disaster a pilot found his Cirrus SR-22 out of fuel over the Pacific west of Maui. Fortunately for the pilot the Cirrus comes with its own, built-in parachute.  The pilot came down safely and was rescued by a passing cruise ship.

Maybe That's Why It Was "Buy First, Fly Later."

Lockheed's F-35 joint strike fighter is one for the books.  In fact there'll be several books written examining how it was conceived, developed, built and sold and they'll be studied in aviation circles for generations to come.

To call the F-35 counter-intuitive is a massive understatement.  It's what you might expect of a George w. Bush and Dick Cheney love child.  One quick mistake in the middle of a boozy night and the rest took care of itself.

The idea was to build a new ground attack light bomber that would be not one but two generations ahead of anything else flying.  It was supposed to be so advanced that it would take America's potential adversaries (can you say China and Russia?) decades to catch up, ensuring America's air superiority far into the future.  That was the idea.  From there pretty much everything went very, very wrong.

To rush the world dominating F-35 into service, they would put it into production while it still had years of testing ahead of it.  It would be coming off the assembly lines and into customer's hangars while the Lockheed/US Air Force team were trying to find and fix whatever was wrong with it.  Here's the thing. What is this now, 2015? That testing isn't scheduled to be completed until 2019 at the earliest.  In other words, you build it.  You sell it.  You eventually figure out what's wrong with it and then hope you can fix it.  Imagine walking into some car dealership, pointing to the shiny red thing on the showroom floor and asking the sales guy "what's wrong with this model" only to have him reply "we really don't know yet. We think it's mainly going to be the engine and the steering and the brakes. Oh yeah, there's also that fire thing."  It's such a curious approach that the Pentagon boss who took over monitoring the project coined a special term for it, "acquisition malpractice."

With something this screwed up from the outset, it didn't take long for politics to creep into the F-35 programme.  This is one very political airplane, right up there with Canada's Avro Arrow, only in this case the political wheel of fortune is working to keep the airplane alive.

Two numbers you have to keep in your mind - 22 and 35.  The F-22 Raptor is Lockheed's stealth super-fighter.  It's the one that the White House decided that even America's closest allies could never have.  The US Air Force was supposed to get about 800 of them but the Obama administration shut down the project at about 178.  Now think of that from Lockheed's point of view.  They developed it and got it into production assuming they would recoup their costs with a tidy profit over a run of 800 airframes.  Suddenly the customer, who won't let you sell it to anyone else, says, "I've thought it over and 178 will be plenty so just shut it down."  Talk about being left hanging.

But Lockheed had a backup airplane that could save the day, the F-35.  The Pentagon was looking to buy a couple of thousand of those and there would be several hundred more flogged to America's allies from Italy to South Korea. Salvation.  With that, the F-35 became the biggest and costliest military package in American history.

Unfortunately the F-35 dream turned into a nightmare.  Development problems kept popping up, costs soared and the testing/delivery schedule fell several years behind.  Those foreign customers got nervous, very nervous.  Let's just say that Lockheed, the Pentagon and the White House had their hands full keeping the international market from collapsing.

One thing the foreign customers wanted to know was if they bought the F-35 what else would they have to buy?  The F-35 might be okay at dropping bombs in someone else's back yard but how were they going to defend their own airspace?  With that, the light strike bomber morphed into an air superiority fighter.  Lockheed went to great lengths to tout the F-35 as superior in all respects, including air combat, over the F-15/F-16/F-18/Mig-29/Sukhoi-27 legacy fighters.  There were some who coughed "bullshit" into their hands but Lockheed insisted their stealth bomber fighter could take on all comers.

Which is why Lockheed can't be very happy about the leak of an in-house test report showing that, in the furball of air combat, the F-35 is, as critics have long claimed, a dud.

A Lockheed Martin F-35A Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was outperformed in the type’s first basic fighter maneuvering exercise by a 20-plus-year-old F-16 fighter, according to a leaked Lockheed Martin report prepared by the pilot who flew the mission.

Inferior energy maneuverability (EM), a limited pitch rate and flying qualities that were “not intuitive or favorable” in a major part of the air-combat regime gave the F-16 the tactical advantage and allowed its pilot to get into both missile-launch and gun parameters over the F-35. Another drawback was that the large helmet and F-35 canopy design restricted the pilot’s rearward view.

"You got a bogey on your six."  "Okay, what is it?" "Hard to tell, could be just about anybody. Don't worry, it'll all be over soon."

The report confirms the critics' "over/under" description of the F-35 - overdue, over priced and under performing.

The manufacturer and the US Air Force admit the report is genuine but say that, thanks to the F-35's on-board electronic wizardry, it doesn't matter.  The F-35 will shoot down the enemy before it ever has to get into the turn and burn stuff. Sort of like saying "sure, there's a wheel missing but aren't those seats just gorgeous?"

The fact is that Lockheed said their plane could at least outperform those 20-year older fighters and it can't.  Once again Lockheed's credibility is in the toilet and still they expect everybody not to notice the smell.  What else are they claiming that is stretching the truth?  If you ask the critics, well they've got a list.

An F-35 pilot would be damned lucky if all he had to go up against was some vintage F-16 or F-18.  He's more likely to find himself trying to survive an encounter with some Russian or Chinese super-fighter specifically designed and equipped to defeat the F-35 by exploiting its many vulnerabilities.  

The years of delay in developing the F-35 have been a gift to its intended adversaries and they've made the most of it.  For starters, it's no longer invisible. That stealth advantage, for which the F-35 sacrifices speed, range, payload and agility, has been largely negated by new, multi-sensor technology that can detect, track and target the F-35 at long distances.  Worse yet, the other guys now have their own stealth fighters in development aided by generous, unauthorized access to American stealth technology secrets.  Memo to Lockheed: If you think you're onto something really, really good, try to keep it to yourself. 

For Canada, which was planning to blow the budget to acquire a paltry fleet of just 60 F-35s, the leaked Lockheed test results should be enough to at least demand a real flying competition pitting the F-35 against its competitors.  We've been put on notice that the F-35's pitchmen aren't all that reliable.  We need to find out for ourselves what this thing actually will and what it won't do by inviting all the warplanes to Cold Lake for competitive trials under realistic combat conditions.

Update

Lockheed and the US Air Force are going to incredible lengths to downplay the dogfighting report as "not telling the whole picture."  One part of the picture they left out was that the F-35 can't count on having to go up against a 30-year old, vintage opponent.  If it ever comes into service it can expect to cut its teeth on new, far more capable warplanes that are vastly superior to that aged F-16 and are being specifically designed and equipped to counter the F-35's supposed ability to engage and destroy opponents before it can be detected, targeted and attacked.  Those aircraft are much faster, longer ranged, more heavily armed and vastly more agile than the F-35 and the F-16 that trounced it.  Worse yet, three of those warplanes soon to go into service are themselves stealth fighters.  Even worse yet, those adversaries will enjoy the home field advantage, meaning an array of ground based anti-stealth radar and multiple sensor systems.

As each layer of the F-35's stealth cloaking is peeled away, you're left with a marginal performer facing ever increasing odds of having to dogfight vastly superior warplanes.  In those circumstances the F-35 could become the world's most expensive lawn dart.

If you're interested in reading more, you can access the entire report here.  A helpful summary of the highlights can be found here.

It's Time to Bury the Myth of the NDP Being the Party for Blue Collar Canadians

As the Layton-Mulcair tag team "Blairified" the NDP, it triggered some grumbling among its more devout members who briefly bemoaned the extinction of social democracy in Canada.  Even that passed quickly enough and the membership got used to being what they for so long so loudly decried - liberals. Yessir, real honest to Odin, market fundamentalist, neoliberals.

They still like to make themselves out as progressives (is there such a thing as a "closet progressive"?) but that's just pretentious.

Yesterday Emily Dee ripped the beard right off Tommy Mulcair to expose his true colours.  It was a scathing indictment of Mulcair and what he really stands for (hint: if you're blue collar that's not you).

Then there's well known and respected voice of the Canadian Left, James Laxer, who dismantles the Dippers' claims that the Green Party are just "conservatives with composters."  Laxer explores the Greens' economic policy platform and finds that, if anything, they're more progressive than today's Dippers.

Laxer doesn't even get into the Greens' policy to restore a free press in Canada or the party's clear and decisive foreign policy (remember Gaza?) that should shame Dippers into utter apoplexy.  And I think we'll give the environmental/climate change issue to the Greens hands down, won't we?

Ron, Define "Trust"

But don't worry, Tom Mulcair is just screwin' with ya.  I got that straight from Dipper apologist in residence Ron Waller who left this telltale remark: "Certainly the NDP is a right-leaning centrist party. But they can be trusted to move the political football back towards the center and eventually to the left-of-center."

They can be trusted - once they hoodwink enough voters to win the election - to change course?  What part of "trust" does Waller not understand?  This guy Waller also upbraided me for referring to Mulcair as "the Angry Beard." Talk about thin skinned!  Hell, I didn't even mention Tommy's dead, "serial killer" eyes.

(h/t Northern PoV for the Laxer/Rabble link).

Just When I Thought the Left Had Collapsed, This. A Must Read.

Many thanks for this from Emily Dee.  Read it, take it all in, remember what we Canadians used to be, what we believed in, what once made us great.  There is still hope.

If Today's Youth Care About Their Future, They Would Do Well to Keep Their Distance From Us.

We're used to drought out here.  Every summer the Rain Festival takes a break for two to three months and the place dries out.  It's great for the tourist operators as visitors flock to the place to enjoy the vast beaches and ocean breezes, warm and sunny days and delightfully cool and comfortable evenings.

Not this year.

The drought arrived, months earlier than usual, and its brought what, for us, is a grinding heatwave that shows no sign of breaking anytime soon.  That's very worrisome indeed.  We didn't really have a winter this year so next to no snowpack on the local mountains.  That translates into a disastrous salmon spawning season and increased likelihood of major forest fires this summer.  It's not the same drought and heatwave conditions that are hammering the prairies but, hey, this is supposed to be the rainforest.

This brings to mind a couple of items I've recently read about the need for Canada's youth to embrace our political process, to make their voices heard, and lay claim to their fair share of political influence.  To me, that sounds like calling for our young people to capitulate, throw in with us and sit quietly in the corner while we mete out what will remain of their future.

The pre-Millennial generations have done a masterful job on today's young.  Our parents bequeathed us a much better world than they had known.  We never had to experience the turmoil they endured during the first half of the 20th century. No, we got the second half, the really good half.  We got the half our parents built and forged and handed us on a silver platter.  We got the half of ease and comfort and plenty that eclipsed anything in the entire history of mankind.

Compare what we got to what we are bequeathing to these poor buggers over the balance of this century.  For we not only took everything we got from our parents and grandparents but we helped ourselves to everything we could steal from the future.  In the process we're raping and pillaging the environment.  It's barely taken us thirty years to reduce the planet's stock of wildlife by half.

Bill Moyers did a series on posterity that is gathering dust in some tape vault somewhere.  I do so wish that could be aired again.  It traced the role of posterity in building the great society through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and the abrupt extinction of posterity in the postwar era.  Leaders, believe it or not, used to plan for the future, a better future for the generations to follow them.  What a fucking crazy idea, eh?

When was the last time anybody did that?  When was the last time some pol declared this is what we'll need to go into a better future?  I suppose you could argue it was Trudeau introducing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the instrument intended to secure liberal democracy for Canada.  He just squeaked that in with almost no time left.

Look at Harper today.  He and his absolutely despise that Charter because - well because it's doing its job, it's reining them in, limiting their powers against the individual.  Take a second, think about this.  Bad as Harper unquestionably is, what would the damage he's caused the country be like if he wasn't repeatedly rebuffed by the Charter? Absent the Charter, how much further would he have been encouraged to go? How much more of his darkness would have bubbled to the surface? The Harper so many of us loathe is the moderate one, the Harper who has been wrestled to the ground by the Charter and our Supreme Court. Keep that in your mind.

Do you think Harper gives a good goddamn about posterity, about future generations?  He dreamt of Canada becoming an energy superpower and it remains his abiding obsession.  He envisioned Canada as an American "Mini-Me."  No more peacekeeping for us, we bomb shit now.  Yeah, that's what we do - muscular (in a ripped, oiled up and bronzed, bikini-brief sort of way).  We're no longer in the business of making friends. Got all the friends we need, that book is closed. There are, however, still plenty of vacancies for new enemies.  Bring'em on.

To today's young people, we're the gift that just keeps on giving.  Long after we're gone we'll be giving them more and more cause to hate us.  Here's just one example. Today we're already getting the brunt of early onset climate change - more hot, more cold; more dry, more wet, that sort of thing. Sea level rise is accelerating, our oceans are steadily acidifying.  Our once pristine waterways are becoming polluted and clogged with blue-green algae.

The thing is, we've got all this and we're only just at 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  You won't see it when you look up into that big blue sky today but up there is a carbon bomb  just waiting for our young people.  The atmospheric CO2 already there has locked in for them 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.  Even if we all threw our car keys in the sewer today that's already up there just waiting to wreak havoc on our kids. In their lifetimes and that of the next three generations, minimum, that's their lot and it, for them, is inescapable while yet they draw breath.

Okay, maybe we really didn't know better in time to prevent that 1.5C result. Maybe we didn't know but we damn well know now. We know our grandkids are going to take it in the neck.  So what are we doing about it? Well, we're going to raise carbon taxes.  Isn't that nice? What a thoughtful gesture, an open hand generously, selflessly extended to the future.  Sure.

Carbon taxes are great, don't get me wrong. They encourage consumers to cut down on their use of fossil fuels which is obviously a good thing.  Carbon taxes might have been an answer back in the 60s.  Just not today.  Every tonne of CO2 we release into the atmosphere today is going right atop that pile that now stands at 1.5C and rising.    Every tonne we add to the 1.5C is going to make our grandkids' lives just that little bit more hellish, more challenging, more dangerous.

Carbon taxes are sort of like taking a knife to a gunfight.  We need to commit to decarbonizing our society, our economy and we should be doing that, not for us but for the grandkids.  Here's the thing. We need to do it now because there's a lead time to this of at least twenty years, probably more like thirty and that's time we may not even have any longer.  We're already at 1.5C (partially deferred) so we have to get this happening, now.  This carbon tax initiative may actually doom us to failure because it makes us think we're dealing with this existential problem when we're really just kicking it down a very short, dead end road.

Carbon taxes are the ideal solution for people who believe they won't be around to experience that 1.5C world anyway.  It's a dandy solution for us, just not so good for the kids. It's really like asking the band on the Titanic to play something livelier, more jovial.  Carbon taxes, without more, are just a dangerous smokescreen.  They're all today's young people need to know to grasp that we're still just having them on and that's not about to stop especially not if they toss in with us.

It's delusional to believe that the "political process" offers solutions to the problems that confront our youth.  It's actually a major source of their problems and it takes people like us, the generation of comfort and ease, to conjure up bullshit that rank.

If they're to have a hope they need to circumvent and overcome our atrophied, unresponsive and oh so neoliberal political process or we really have to reverse direction - thrust reversers, now, full.  Fortunately - for us - we've got them right where we want them - disaffected, distracted, uncoordinated and, frankly, very weakened, at least for now.  I think it's quite possible that the day may come when that changes, when young people come together, unite and get political. But if and when that day comes I don't think they'll be uniting to participate in our political process.  No, they'll have something quite different in mind - collecting their due.

In keeping with this theme, I'd like to share a photo a friend sent along taken at the recent Pride parade in Dublin.

"The Greens Could Return Harper to Power" - That's Pretty Rich Coming from a Dipper

I've kept the NDP at arm's length all my life, a convenient place from which to observe their astonishingly convenient memories and full-bore, unrepentant hypocrisy.  Hell you would think they were Reformatories in liberal clothing.

I nearly flipped my biscuits today when I read this agitprop bullshit warning Greens that they could be Harper's salvation, drawing just enough of the vote to let Beelzebub squeak back into power.

This coming from the party of Layton and Mulcair that has done more than any other to first help Harper ascend to power and then to deliver him his majority. This from  the party that has completely abandoned the Left to become Latter Day Liberals for raw political opportunism, thus greatly assisting Harper achieve his fundamental goal to move Canada's political centre well and permanently to the Right.  Hell, if they'd played their cards better I'll bet Harper would have found a way to put the lot of them on the Conservative Party payroll.

It's a giggle to see how the NDP and the Libs are getting all touchy-feeley greenish in the runup to the election.  Sorry, buttwads, but you're a little late to the game to salvage any credibility on that front.  You're still solidly behind the extraction and export of the filthiest, highest carbon petroleum on the planet.  Oh yes, you'll raise the carbon levy.  So what?  Is that it, is that all you've got? And what happens when you change your mind as you have on one issue after another. That's a little better than the incoherent garbage coming out of the Libs but that only means you're just a little better than incoherent.

So spare me this agitprop bullshit and feeble guilt trip.  It's good to see you haven't lost any of your real skills.  As for this strategic voting business, have you ever heard the phrase "pound salt"?

A Word of Caution.

How can the most powerful court in the most powerful country in the world be so intellectually corrupt?

Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and especially Scalia - shameless political stooges the lot of them.

While many Americans and wellwishers in other lands celebrate today's US Supreme Court decision effectively extending same sex marriage to every state without exception, it was nonetheless a 5-4, split decision.  A 5-4 split on an issue as plain as this.  That's worrisome.  A little more stacking of that bench with another Scalia or Thomas could theoretically reverse today's decision, perhaps on the pretence of states' rights - you know, the same guise used to launch the Civil War.

It's nice to think "there's no going back now" but that may be just whistling past the graveyard.  This is 21st century America, something the 'founding fathers' would probably find unrecognizable.  Jesus Christ on a Crutch, this is the country that has abandoned habeas corpus.  It is the Land of Liberty where today even its very own citizens can be swept up and imprisoned indefinitely with neither charge nor trial. It's the nation where the president has assumed the power to execute US citizens by drone strikes.  It is the land of Total Information Awareness where everyone is spied upon by both government and the commercial sector.  This is the land where democracy and the political process has been subordinated to the forces of market fundamentalism, neoliberalism and corporatism.

This is not a place where same sex equality before the law is secure on the strength of a 5-4 split decision.  Sorry.  Maybe with time and a major demographic shift, political, civil and human rights may be restored.  Maybe not.

It's the D-Word and It's Arrived in Canada

Prime minister Cletis doesn't seem to have noticed that global warming has arrived in his very own backyard.  Funny how he can't hear all those local Tories squealing like pigs over the drought setting in across the West.

It's the sort of think I watch out of the corner of my eye, hoping that somehow what's happening isn't.

Even where I live we usually get somewhere between one and five or six days of snow every winter.   This year - nada, zip, zilch.  Truth be told we didn't get a winter this year.  I even topped off my woodshed with an extra cord of logging leftovers but I used, in total, less than a third of a cord keeping the house warm in the cold spells.  A lot of days I got by just fine with a warm sweater.

The real problem, however, is the lack of snowpack on the local mountains.  That snowpack is really important to the wildlife on the island.  The summer melt helps reduce forest fires.  It's also vital to salmon spawning.  Those salmon are critical for eagles, bears, wolves and other predators.  Those fish are an essential part of our food chain.  If we catch a break the salmon will simply stay out in the ocean and try again next year.  If they do come upstream there's a serious chance there won't be enough cool melt water in the streams to keep their eggs alive in the hot spells.  And, when the food chain breaks down it's a real good idea to keep a close eye on your cats and fluffy doglets.

The drought progressed steadily over the winter from California to Oregon and on into Washington.  Drought doesn't recognize borders very well and so it arrived in the True North, even the normally soggy parts.

Until recently I wasn't aware of the state of the prairies.  Then I read a June 21 post on Saskboy's (John Klein) blog talking about Regina getting its first rain of the year.  Hells Bells, we might have missed out on snow but we sure got rain, including the odd deluge over the winter.  Regina didn't get a real rain until June 21?

They've been keeping rainfall records of the prairies for 68-years and the 68th is shaping up to be, hands down, the driest of the lot.  Worse still, the weather boffins are expecting nothing but heat waves continuing straight into September. That means crop failures.

"June is typically the wet month, the month where crops are growing feverishly, and it just hasn't happened," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist, in Barrie, Ont. "So people are using the D-words: dryness, drought, no question about it."

Compounding the problem is that the dry spring came on the heels of one of the warmest, driest winters, particularly in parts of British Columbia and Alberta.

These dry conditions are a stark contrast to a wet spring last year and the heavy rains and run-off from melting snow pack in the Rocky Mountains that led to damaging floods in Alberta in 2013.

The wild swings in weather have even inspired a new term in climate circles called "weather whiplash," Phillips said.

"It has been one extreme to another, and it has been a tremendous challenge for farmers, ranchers and growers. They can't deal with these kind of weird, wild, and wacky kind of changes."

It makes you wonder whether the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill (that's pretty much the lot of them except for that one lady who keeps fighting to be heard) are going to wake up and smell the dustbowl.  

Severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration in a pattern of cyclical and devastating droughts and floods.  I think I read that somewhere. Oh yeah, it's a warning that's been repeated in literally thousands of scientific studies and reports for many, many years - science that has gone effectively unheeded in the ranks of Tories, Liberals and New Dems alike.

Eventually some of you will come to realize that you have to be a crazy bugger to keep supporting those Petro-Pols and their neoliberal policies.  At some point you'll have to sit down and tally up what their market fundamentalism has done for and to us and what lies in store for your kids and theirs if we keep going down this path.

What Does the Pope Know About Climate Change? Plenty.

We know the Holy Father has a background in science and a chemistry degree but just what does he know about climate change?  Lots - lots and lots.  The IPCC may have been around about two decades but the Vatican has had its own outfit, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for 400-years.

The Academy boasts some seriously brilliant and accomplished scientists.  Guess what?  Their ranks include loads of non-Catholics.  There's even a Hindu.  These guys know that the pope has a lot of clout and they want to see that clout well informed.

Besides it turns out the pope chose to name himself Francis after Roman Catholicism's first environmental radical, Francis of Assisi.  That's starting off with a bit of street cred, no?

The full academy meets every two years and is often granted an audience from the pope. In the stretches between the biannual sessions, scientists hold workshops and produce reports on whichever topics they agree are most important for the pope to understand. “The pope has his own experts, who are completely secular,” said Ramanathan. “Not all of them even believe in a god. They are there for pure scientific excellence, and they are not co-opted by any country. They’re not co-opted by the United Nations.”

Reaching the pope is one thing. They also wanted to reach everybody else. Ramanathan and a coterie of his colleagues endorsed a follow-up plan. They would bring leaders of reason and faith together under one roof to talk about the most consequential risk humanity has had to confront since the advent of nuclear weaponry.

That’s why in April, the Vatican invited representatives from the world’s religions — including Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians — to a symposium discussing climate science and the ways religious leaders might lead on the issue.

More than a dozen faith leaders heard from one of the world’s top climate scientists, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, about how the earth went “from glacial chaos to climate paradise” during the last big climate transition 12,000 years ago, and what we may be in store for next.

They heard from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who popularized the notion that human industry has shoved the world into a new geological phase — the “anthropocene,” or in plainspeak, “the human age.”

And they heard Jeffrey Sachs, prolific writer and Columbia University economist, say that “we can still, but just barely,” avoid pollution levels that lead to dangerous climate change risk.

So when Republican denialists like Senator James Inhofe or that weirdo Santorum or Bush the Chubby, tell the pope to bugger off and stick to things he knows about, they're just blowing smoke.

I agree, the pope was wrong to slam the door on the overpopulation problem but if he can kickstart some meaningful action on carbon emissions and our insanely destructive over-consumption, that'll be more than just about anyone else has managed.

Too bad their info session was limited to "leaders of reason and faith." That pretty much rules out prime minister Bullwinkle.

It's the Greybar Hotel for Deano Del

Dean del Mastro won't have to worry about buying groceries for the next month. He's been given a month-long, all expenses paid visit, probably to some minimum-security guest ranch followed by four months house arrest.  That's Harper's former spokesman and ex-MP's reward for fiddling with his election expenses in the last runoff.

DdM has also been given 18-months probation.

It's hard to say what Deano will do once he's paid for his crimes.  In the Tory camp there's not a lot open to jailbirds except a tour in the PMO.  Then again, consorting with slumlords, low rent drifters and shady characters like Steve Harper might be a breach of his parole.

Apparently DdM will only be spending one week in the slammer.  That's about how long he'll need just to get his lard ass in and out of a hammock.

In Defence of Justin

Justin Trudeau got sideswiped today, predictably so, by a self-identified Liberal (who, curiously, can't seem to get the time of day from Team Justin) for saying he would stop Canada's participation in the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and that he would even restore diplomatic relations with Iran. Apparently that will cost the Liberals Canada's Jewish vote.

So what?

That sounds awfully creepy.  Canada's Jews are somehow going to hold the Liberals hostage?

That particular writer is a tad susceptible to sensational news stories and a bit weak on reality.  Unfortunately he rarely lets facts get in his way.

Here's a fact. It was the West's failure to forge an inclusive government in Baghdad that fueled Sunni resentment that sparked the creation of ISIS.  It was the West's failure to deliver on any and all of its promises to Afghanistan that now sees ISIS spreading there.

Here's another fact.  It was NATO's bombing campaign that helped allow murderous Islamist radicals to get established in Libya.  It dragged on and on and on - 8 months in all - which gave al Qaeda (now superseded by ISIS) time to realize its promise to use the continual chaos to establish a foothold in North Africa.

The current bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria features most of the same players, on our side at least, and is achieving very similar results - little or nil to be precise. It's just another round of whack-a-mole conducted mainly for appearances. If we wanted to rout ISIS we and our allies have the means but that would cost money and lives and, as in Afghanistan and Libya, we're all about doing this on the cheap.

How then is anyone going to defeat ISIS?  Who can prevail without Western air power to vanquish these murderous Islamists?  Well, why not ask the Libyans?

You've probably not heard about it but they happen to have turned the tables - without our intervention - and now they've got ISIS on the run.  The downside is that the battle is being fought between ISIS and an al Qaeda affiliate allied with the Libyan National Army (our guys).

On June 9, fighting broke out in the eastern city of Derna between IS fighters and the forces of the Mujahideen Shura Council (DMSC), a militia linked to Al Qaeda. The clashes broke out after IS militants killed one of DMSC’s leaders. In one day, the DMSC fighters rose up and expelled IS from the city, forcing them to retreat to their hideouts in the remote Green Mountains.

These developments are important for several reasons. First, the city witnessed something of a popular uprising against the Islamic State. Unarmed people, angered by the alien and repressive practices IS has implemented in the city since it seized power last year, took to the streets in protest. As was perhaps to be expected, given the group’s zero tolerance for peaceful opposition, IS fighters opened fire on the crowd, killing at least seven and wounding more than 30. According to my own conversations with sources in Derna, the ensuing confrontations lasted for several days. In the end the DMSC effectively joined forces with the Libyan National Army, which is loyal to the internationally recognized Libyan government. The Army targeted Islamic State positions with air strikes. The tacit alliance between these two sides, otherwise mutually hostile, would have been unthinkable if it wasn’t for IS.

That's the way these things play out in the Muslim world.  It's all shades of grey. Today's bad guy turns into tomorrow's not-so-bad guy and sometimes picking sides is a repeatedly shifting crap shoot.

When you bomb ISIS in Iraq, you're providing air support for the other side which, at the moment, includes both Iraqi and Iranian Shiite forces (the latter being the real fighters).  Saudi Arabia is our nominal ally and yet it's bombing Yemen's Houthi rebels who are fighting their own ground war against ISIS and al Qaeda forces.  We know that much of the initial support that got ISIS off the ground came from the Sunni sheikhs and princes of the Gulf States, also our dear allies.

There's a precise term for the Western intervention in the ME right now.  It's FUBAR which, for self-identified Liberals, stands for F__ked Up Beyond All Recognition.

America and Britain achieved none of their objectives in their invasion of Iraq. America and her ISAF allies (Canada et al) achieved none of their objectives in the notional war in Afghanistan.  The NATO coalition achieved none of its objectives in the air war in Libya. We've been banging away pointlessly in Iraq and Syria for months and, predictably, getting nowhere.

So Justin's only chance of winning the Canadian Jewish vote is to promise to keep playing FUBAR in Iraq and Syria and to continue to snub the very country that America itself made the dominant Muslim power in the region?

I'm no Liberal but if I was I'd see that as a pretty pernicious bargain.

Then again, if we want to do some good in the Muslim world, we could muster our forces to help the Tunisians defend their fledgling democracy against the Islamist contagion. However the Likudniks prefer military and monarchical despots to democratically elected governments in the Arab world so that probably wouldn't do much to help Justin curry the favour of this apparently vital segment of the Canadian electorate.

The Case for Gun Control - From Jim Jeffries

Brace yourself, Sheila.  Don't whine about the language.  It's Jim Jeffries.

Seriously... Really? Just When You Thought You Had Heard it All.

Okay, it's China and adulterated food products - yada, yada, yada.  Yawn.  Tell us something new.

How about something old instead?  40-years old in fact.  But don't worry, most of that time it's been frozen - or so we're told... by someone who heard it from someone who heard it....

Chinese customs have seized around 3 billion yuan ($625 million) worth of smuggled meat, some more than 40 years old and rotting, the official China Daily said on Wednesday, the latest in a grim series of food safety scares.

Beijing toughened food safety rules in April to shake off a reputation for safety scandals that range from donkey meat tainted with fox DNA to milk contaminated with industrial chemical melamine that killed at least six infants in 2008.

Chinese authorities have launched a crackdown on beef and frozen meat smuggling, in addition to a campaign last year to stamp out the smuggling of farm products.

Authorities had busted 21 criminal gangs by June, leading to seizures of more than 100,000 tonnes of smuggled meat, including chicken wings, beef and pork, state news agency Xinhua said. In one bust, police in southern Hunan province arrested 20 people.

Customs officials found some of the meat was more than 40 years old, meaning it dated back to the 1970s. Other parts were rotten and decomposing, the China Daily newspaper said. It was not clear if the seized meat had been destroyed.

Industry sources say hundreds of thousands of tonnes of beef is being smuggled into China via neighbouring Hong Kong and Vietnam, from countries such as Brazil and India, to sidestep Beijing's import curbs.

Meat can last for a long time if continuously frozen, but smuggled meat is often moved under poor storage conditions that lead to repeated thawing, making it eventually go bad.

"To save costs, smugglers often hire ordinary vehicles instead of refrigerated ones. So the meat has often thawed out several times before reaching customers," Yang Bo, an anti-smuggling official in Changsha told the paper.

And there, kids, is your little culinary horror story for the day.

Austerity's Silver Lining - Arms Race Update

A couple of headlines this morning got me thinking that the West's embrace of austerity might not be all bad.  Of course it's probably just wishful thinking.

The first article concerns a refreshingly nuanced and balanced lecture delivered by former US ambassador to Russia, Jack Matlock.

In a lecture at King's College London, Jack Matlock said that the crisis in Ukraine is increasingly comparable to what he saw during his time as ambassador during the turbulent end of the Cold War. "We see increasingly implicit military confrontations and I'm beginning to wonder, could this result in something which is almost the functional equivalent of the Cold War," he said.

According to Matlock, an explanation for the crisis in Ukraine and worsening relationship between Russia and the West does not simply lie with the actions of Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

"Is it just a matter of Russia violating international norms and law, is there more to this story? There is no question that Russia has violated international law, that the way they conducted the referendum of the Crimea and then annexed it, was a violation of a number of agreements.

"However, all of us should recognise that as brutal and aggressive as Russian policy is, ultimately it is prompted by…feeling…that US and West in general…are trying to encircle and strangle them," he said.

Following a decision made at the recent G7 summit to continue imposing sanctions on Russia, and the steadily increasing popularity within Russia of its President, Matlock argues that the West needs to reconsider its own policies to "bring the results that we want."

The second headline concerns the newly minted NATO sec-gen Jens Stoltenberg claiming that the alliance will not get dragged into an arms race with Moscow.  I suspect Stoltenberg's comforting assurance is really code for the obvious.  With most of the peoples of the Western nations already under the heel of brutal austerity policies, their governing classes are keenly aware of what might befall them should they try to pump up their defence spending to 3 or 4% GDP to play the arms race game with Vlad Putin.  After all, you can't have defence and the ultra low, corporate tax cuts demanded by your corporate masters.

A silver lining?  Maybe, maybe not.  Well, we're plenty ready to sacrifice the environment and our grandkids future to the whims of corporatism.  Surely defence spending is a paltry bauble in the greater scheme of commercial morality.

Some Powerful Truths Require No Narrative