Is It a Tory Disease or Just a Contagion in Harper's Cabinet?

Joe Oliver - pow! Backpfeifengesicht. Pierre Poilievre - pow! Backpfeifengesicht. Julian Fantino - pow! Backpfeifengesicht.  Mackay, Ambrose, Finley, Clement, van Loan, Kenney, Ritz, Aglukkak,  Blaney, Rait, Alexander - pow! Backpfeifengesicht.

Trust those Germans.  When they're not leaving Panzer tracks across Poland or Greece or the rest of Europe and Russia and North Africa, they do come up with some pretty dandy words including the now celebrated Backpfeifengesicht. It's a laugh party just learning how to pronounce it.

There are a number of translations of Backpfeifengesicht but, when you boil them all down, they come out to "a face in need of a fist."  And, when it comes to Steve J. Harper & Co., it's not just the ugliness on the outside, it's that ever darker ugliness of spirit that dwells on the inside, that spitefulness, utter meanness.

In these dog days of summer you can while away a bit of time having fun ranking them.  Make up your own list of who you think most deserving of a bit of Backpfeifengesicht.  You can start with the rogues gallery below and don't hesitate to add a few of your own.

Ol' Leatherback

C'mon, Admit It.  You Know You Wanna.

Yeah, Sure, I Couldn't Care Less

I Can't Brain Today, My Hair Is Hungry

I Don't Kiss Babies, I Eat'em

I Can Clench So Tight, They Feed Me Up My Backside

The Finger Thing? I Dunno, They Told Me to Do It.

Look What I've Got for Lunch

The Smuggest Prick of Them All

And, if that's not enough, here's Alison from Creekside's latest Perps with Perks.

Give the Dippers a Break. Syriza Didn't Create the Problem.

A certain prominent Liberal mouthpiece has been going after the New Democrats for supporting the Syriza government in Greece. Unfortunately this fellow conflates the government of  Alexis Tsipras, who only came to power at the end of January this year, with the centre-right governments of the past who bequeathed a fiscal nightmare to the Greek people.

This self-proclaimed "progressive" knows all about what's going on.  He's read a couple of newspaper articles after all, one of them from the Star.  I expect he hasn't wasted too much time dwelling on what Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman have been saying - for months - or Thomas Piketty for that matter.  No, it seems he likes his reality German-style or from a rightwing Russian ex-pat who has been busy grinding his axe at Forbes, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Of course what progressive would object to a one-sided, crushingly punitive deal that even the IMF knows would saddle the Greek people with a debtload they could never pay off?  Why would you demand something you know the other side could never deliver?  Could it be that recovering on the debt owed is not the driving consideration?  Why, imagine that?  Could it be that you don't want the others - Spain, Portugal, perhaps Italy, getting any fancy ideas?  Could it be that you're afraid that Podemos might win the Spanish election that will be called later this year? Is kicking Greece to a pulp an object lesson, as Voltaire put it, pour encourager les autres?

Perhaps the only way the European Union can stay together is by subjugation of the weakest.  That's certainly one context in which irrational demands begin to make sense and it reeks of desperation.

If that's okay with what passes for Liberals these days then it's time for me to write them off for good.  If I've gone Left it's only because they've gone so far Right. Via con diablos my old friends.

Summertime on Vancouver Island, Just Another Day in Paradise

A lot of people on this island rarely think of how we share it with some amazing wildlife including a number of "alpha" predators.  Their ranks include everything from golden eagles to wolves and bears to the greatest concentration of cougars on the planet.

I've had a backwoods run in with a cougar.  Fortunately the big cat wasn't hungry or, if it was, didn't find the look of me very appetizing.  One hot summer evening I was awakened from a sound sleep by the very loud purring of a creature outside my open bedroom window.  Of course, it was a cougar, the biggest cat that purrs (and, hands down the loudest).

In recent conversations with people living out of town, I've heard three mention an unusual number of sightings of cougars on our backroads.  Like the bears and wolves they're coming out of the forests and they're hungry.

Still, especially for drylanders, it makes for some good story telling.



Fortunately for that fellow he encountered a pretty small cat.  It'd be a lot harder to punch out a big one.

And they can be bold as brass, even when you're out trying to get a salmon for dinner.

As I Stare at My Smoke-Clouded Sky, a Thought or Two About Tipping Points

A tipping point isn't that instant when water begins pouring over the canoe's gunwale.  The tipping point is actually before that, when the canoe is heeling over and can't be stopped.  It's summer time. Get in a canoe and try it.  There's a brief moment, perhaps not more than a second or two, when the outcome is both obvious and inescapable - the center of gravity has shifted and your momentum is going to carry you over.  At that point you're just along for a rather wet ride.

Climate change, anthropogenic global warming tipping points are very similar to what happens in a canoe.  The environment begins to heel over until it reaches a critical point at which there's no turning back.

The international community has set 2 degrees Celsius as the point at which we still have a reasonable chance of not rolling over.  No guarantees, just a reasonable chance.  That's based on a best guess from what we knew of climate change many years ago.  Many scientists are now telling us that 2C target is way, way too high.  That's discouraging because we've already loaded the atmosphere with enough greenhouse gases that we have locked in at least 1.5C of warming over the course of this century.

We need to remember, very clearly, what these targets are all about.  They're an attempt to reach a goal for arresting warming before all those emissions from our smoke stacks and our tail pipes and our cow farts trip natural feedback mechanisms that we cannot control and that will drive runaway global warming.

What do these natural feedback mechanisms look like?  We have a pretty good idea, a list, but it's not necessarily exhaustive.  One example is the pine beetle infestation that has devastated hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest across the west, turning those once verdant pine forests into rust-coloured, high-resin kindling, all dried out and waiting for a careless hiker or a lightning strike. When it comes to wildfire fuel, it just doesn't come any better than that.

In case you haven't heard, the West is on fire from northern Alaska all the way down into Mexico.  Step outside and you can't see the CO2 emissions but you sure can see and smell the heat absorbing soot in the air. It builds up on your window sills, it gets all over your furniture and your floors. Suddenly forests that, while alive, were powerful carbon sinks sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere for photosynthesis have now become carbon bombs. There's a natural feedback mechanism for you right there. Come out this way, you can't miss it. Although, from what I've read this is one time the West has come to you.  Sort of like that Mount St. Helen's thing.

Arctic sea ice is vanishing and quite rapidly to boot.  The ice cover that once reflected solar radiation, heat, back into space has walked off the job. No brilliant white ice means dark green ocean that is a heat sink.  That warming Arctic ocean warms the atmosphere that causes the tundra to dry out and catch fire.  As the tundra burns it creates black soot that winds up turning the Greenland Ice Sheet a dirty colour and that accelerates the melting of the ice sheet and sea level rise.

The thawing, burning tundra also exposes the permafrost underneath that, as it thaws, releases massive amounts of once safely sequestered, formerly frozen methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas.  As the Arctic ocean warms it also triggers the thawing of ancient, frozen seabed methane clathrates - methane ice if you like - that bubbles to the surface and then onward to the atmosphere.

From rampaging wildfires to tundra fires to ice caps covered in black soot to the release of ancient stores of methane from the permafrost and seabed clathrates these are all the feedback mechanisms your mother those scientists warned you about.  They're happening now, not forty years from now, not even twenty years from now.

Have we passed the point of no return.  The good news is that's a conversation we're not really having right now.  We're still proceeding - although not very quickly and not very well - with talks that assume we're not there yet and can, if we just try hard enough dammit, avoid the worst - maybe.

Today we're at just 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  We're not at the 1.5C mark yet because that persistent atmospheric greenhouse gas needs time to work its magic.  It will and as it does our children and grandchildren will experience the changes in creates.

There are two things that we must understand, and that includes you.

First off. That 1.5C is something we've already bequeathed our kids and theirs. What we need to realize is that emissions are cumulative which means our greenhouse gas emissions from today onward add to that 1.5C.  Every tonne of CO2 we emit goes on top of that 1.5C pile.  We're experiencing the impacts of barely 0.8C of warming (and it's a real bitch). As today's warming keeps getting hotter, those who follow us will endure a variety of impacts that are even greater, more dangerous, and demanding of new adaptation responses.

Second.  These numbers don't include the natural feedback mechanisms we already seem to have triggered.  The greenhouse gas emissions they create - CO2 from forest fires, methane released from the permafrost and seabed clathrates - also go atop that 1.5C we have already locked in.

What more incentive do we need to rapidly decarbonize our economies and our societies?  What conceivable justification do we have to continue to dither and squabble? This is a moral imperative, a fundamental obligation we owe not just our kids and theirs but to the very future of our country. It's time to sweep denialism and those behind it out of our path for they are immensely more dangerous than any terrorist group or tinpot tyrant that has ever beset our world.

Oh yeah, one other thing.  While we're decarbonizing and sorting out the climate change business, we have to realize that any real solution also must address two related challenges without which we don't stand a chance - over-consumption and overpopulation.  They're all tied up together and you have to solve them all if you're to solve any of them.  Bear in mind that if we don't come up with solutions that address all three of these existential challenges, they'll come up with their own solutions and we won't be very happy when they arrive.

Don't Worry, Be Happy. They Were Only Missiles.

Sure, they were sophisticated, Patriot missiles, belonging to the German military. And, yes, they were in Turkey along the border with Syria. Defending a NATO ally, okay?  Fine, so far so good.

Everything was just dandy - and then the missiles began doing things, responding to commands only they weren't coming from the Germans.  Hackers had briefly taken control of the missile battery.

According to German website Behoerden-spiegel, the German owned military paraphernalia were reported to unexplained commands sent by hackers. At this current time, location of where the hackers sent their commands from and the nature of these commands remain unknown. According to the source, the individuals that penetrated the security measures of the missile battery might have found two possible ways to seize momentary control of equipment.

One was they must have taken hold of the Sensor-Shooter-Interoperability (SSI) system that connects both the missile control system and launcher.

The second was that they must have taken control of the programming of the computer chip that is ultimately responsible for guiding the missiles towards the intended target.

According to experts, hackers could have stolen valuable information from the operating system of the missile battery, which would have granted them access in the first place.

It's Called the "Pucker Factor"

There's a powerful yet weird mix of angst and optimism building in advance of the December climate change summit in Paris.

Government types from the US to China to the EU express confidence that this year will succeed and do what every other summit has failed to do - reach an effective agreement to cut global greenhouse gas emissions to stay below the 2 degree Celsius target for man made global warming.

Non-government types mostly don't share that optimism.  Their skepticism, bordering on outright pessimism, is captured by this op-ed from Le Monde:

...Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, fossil fuel consumption has gone on growing. The Green Climate Fund launched by the UN in 2011 has attracted only €10bn to date. In 2013 subsidies for fuels responsible for greenhouse gases totalled €400bn worldwide — four times the amount allocated to renewable energy sources.

Any international agreement will fail to keep global warming within 2ºC if governments insist on protecting a production system based on accumulation, pillage and waste. We can’t meet the challenge of climate change without popular involvement; but individual and local initiatives won’t be effective without global political will. If we are to agree to consume less energy and become more frugal — changing well-established habits — we need the prospect of an improved quality of life. There can be no real energy transition without economic and social change, and without proper redistribution of income, globally and nationally. India, where 300 million people have no access to electricity, reports hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution each year.

In the West, sobriety stands in direct opposition to austerity, which looks like a trick for bringing about a still more inequitable distribution of wealth. Reducing carbon emissions will require massive investment in housing, public transport and renewable energy — as much as was spent on rescuing the banks in 2008. Improving energy efficiency and living conditions could create jobs, make life easier and generate substantial economies for every household.

Sobriety means a new definition of wellbeing: using less resources and more labour, fewer machines and more human intelligence; taxing fuel to discourage unnecessary air travel; making sea freight more expensive to curb the worst excesses of free trade and encourage the use of shorter shipping routes; deciding not to exploit certain mineral resources.

The industrialised countries, with only a quarter of the world’s population, have run up a hefty environmental bill. Their cumulative emissions have already raised the global temperature by 0.8ºC, and will soon double that (1). Yet they refuse to set targets that take account of past emissions or do more than talk about cooperation, though that will be indispensable. It is time to give the countries of the South the funding and technologies they need to move to development based on energy sobriety. That means quality rather than quantity.
From everything I've read on both sides, the optimists and the skeptics agree on one thing.  Both see the Paris summit as our very last chance for reaching a deal that can satisfy the 2C target.

The Le Monde article is important for making the critical point that we can't win this with only some deal on cutting carbon emissions.  There's more to it than the major players - especially the United States and China - want to acknowledge; things such as overproduction, over-consumption and waste; inequality and wealth redistribution; and the issue no one on either side seems to want to touch - overpopulation.

Mars May Rise Again

The sole survivor, it is moored on Vancouver Island's Sproat Lake a short drive west of Port Alberni.  It's the giant, Hawaii Mars, the last of what once was a small fleet of the biggest flying boats ever built, successfully converted into massive water bombers.

Yeah, That Big.

When, several years ago, I retired to the island I quickly learned of this deep affection the locals had for these Mars water bombers that they saw as their guardians against the threat of forest fires.  These planes were beloved, literally venerated.

Sproat Lake, Home Base

A couple of years ago the British Columbia government washed its hands of the Mars, claiming there were more cost-effective alternatives to dousing forest fires. Now, it seems, they've sobered up and think they might want the big red and white giant in the skies again.

Wayne Coulson, CEO of the company that owns and operates the Mars, says there's been a "certain public outcry" to return it to service.  Now there's an understatement.  Its first job could be right on its doorstep, a forest fire that's burning adjacent to Sproat Lake.  Maybe that's a sign, I don't know.

Dear Crusty. LNG is Volatile. It Could Even Blow Up in Your Face.

BC premier Christy Clark is in love - with British Columbia's natural gas reserves.  She sees it as a magical solution to pay off all of the province's debts and fund wonderful new projects and services.  She even imagines herself riding across northern BC on a unicorn sprinkling fairy dust wherever natural gas is to be found.

Uhh-uhh.  Crash. Thud.  Sorry, madam premier, to be the carrier of more bad LNG news (there's been a lot lately) but a new report says our own natural gas reserves may be a stranded asset if international action reaches an accord to limit global warming to 2C.

LNG projects allow gas to be compressed into tankers and sold around the world, making it key to hopes in the US, Canada and Australia of fully exploiting their gas reserves.

But the new analysis shows that if emissions are cut to keep global temperature rise below the internationally agreed target many LNG projects being considered will not be needed.

The report concludes that over the next 10 years $82bn of LNG plants in Canada would be surplus to requirements, $71bn in the US and $68bn in Australia, with the rest of the world, led by Russia and Indonesia, accounting for the remaining $59bn.

...The report is the latest to raise concerns that increasing action to cut carbon emissions, combined with falling renewable energy prices, will put some fossil fuel investments at risk. Carbon Tracker has pioneered this analysis, which has been backed by the Bank of England and the World Bank.

It Doesn't Get Much Uglier Than This. Well, It Does, Eventually.

The closer you look into the Greek economic fiasco, the more you'll see of a cautionary tale the rest of us need to absorb.  The Troika - the IMF, the European Commission and the European Bank - weren't just demanding austerity. They demanded the punishing impacts be placed entirely on the shoulders of the Greek people, not the elite.

Purple Library Guy kindly sent me links to this, from Counterpunch:

The Troika’s demand was for austerity to be deepened solely by taxing labor and reducing pensions. Its policy makers had vetoed Syriza’s proposed taxes on the wealthy and steps to stop their tax avoidance. The IMF for its part vetoed cutbacks in Greek military spending (far above the 2% of GDP demanded by NATO), despite even the European Central Bank (ECB) and German Chancellor Merkel agreeing to this.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to expel Greece from Europe, despite no law permitting this to occur. Let us see now whether he still tries to carry out his bluff, which has been echoed by right-wing leaders throughout Europe.

His retaliatory actions from an ostensibly non-political, non-elected office are not alone. The eurozone class war in support of finance against labor and industry is now open and in earnest. Instead of doing what a central bank is supposed to do – provide liquidity (and paper currency) to banks, ECB head Mario “Whatever it takes” Draghi forced them to shut down even their ATM machines for lack of cash. Evidently this was intended to frighten Greek voters to think that this would be their country’s future if they voted No.

Paul Krugman hinted at the creditors' male fides in his New York Times column this morning.

...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.

And then there's the bloated Greek defence budget, over 2% GDP, one of the highest in NATO.  This, again, is a clear giveaway of what the Troika has really got in mind.

Yiannis Bournous, the head of international affairs for Greece’s ruling Syriza party, heartily endorsed defense cuts as a way to meet the fiscal targets of Greece’s international creditors.

“We already proposed a 200 million euro cut in the defense budget,” Bournous said at an event hosted by the Center for Economic Policy and Research and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, referring to cuts in Syriza’s most recent proposal to its creditors. “We are willing to make it even bigger -- it is a pleasure for us.”

A German newspaper reported on Saturday that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had vetoed a compromise plan put forward by the European Commission that would have allowed Greece to substitute 400 million euros in pension cuts for equivalent military spending cuts.

Why would the Troika demand Greece accept a debt load they know full well it could never pay?  Why would they insist that crushing debt be placed squarely on the shoulders of ordinary, working Greeks?  Why would they block Greek government proposals to hike taxes on the wealthy and implement policies to stop their massive tax avoidance? Why would they veto a bankrupt nation's request to slash its bloated defence budget?  

If you believe the Troika when it claims that this is all about debt and responsibility and repayment, all of these gambits are more than counter-intuitive, they're madness.  But this isn't the work of mad people and it's not about the debt Greece owes or how it will repay its creditors.  It's something far more sinister than that, something that all people across the West need to understand.

This is nothing less than class warfare, capital versus labour, cloaked in a guise as transparent as the Reichstag Fire.  This is an experiment in coercive social engineering and, if it succeeds in Greece, it will be repeated again and again whenever the excuse, real or contrived, arises.  You can practically hear them humming the tune to Horst Wessel Lied.

Thomas Piketty Rides to the Defence of Greece

The noted French economist, Thomas Piketty, isn't mincing any words when it comes to defending Greece against its European creditors.  He drives home the point that bloody-minded hyper-austerity types like German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, aren't just wrong, they're utterly hypocritical.

...Piketty, who penned the blockbuster 2013 book on income inequality Capital in the Twenty-First Century, slammed conservatives who favor the economic austerity measures Germany and France are demanding of Greece, saying they demonstrate a “shocking ignorance” of European history.

“Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted,” Piketty said. “The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem.”

Germany, Piketty continued, has “no standing” to lecture other nations about debt repayment, having never paid back its own debts after both World Wars.

...Piketty criticized the “infantile” moral uprightness of Germany, whose economic success upon reunification has led it to rebuke nations like Greece for being in similarly weakened financial states as Germany itself was in decades ago.

Piketty argued that the same debt relief accorded to Germany after World War II should be granted to Greece today.

“After large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents,” Piketty said. “The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.”

Defence Contractors are like Leaking Sieves

Critics of the uber-costly F-35 usually expect to hear some variation of "no bucks, no Buck Rogers".   In other words if you want the super secret, latest and greatest,  you have to pay top dollar for it.  In this case you're buying the sizzle and the steak.

About that secrecy business.  What if it's only secret to you, not to the country you might have to use it against?

Here's the thing.  That F-35?  There's a fuselage full of technological wizardry that ought to be really secret.  Loose lips sink ships, that sort of thing.  Its premium price tag reflects having something that the other guys don't have. What, then, is it worth if the other guys do have it?

Brace yourself.  A new report on cyber-security finds that major Pentagon contractors, including Lockheed Martin, have weaker cyber security even than already hacked outfits like Home Depot and JP Morgan Chase.

"You can write a contract requiring somebody to do something. The question is, how do you enforce it? And if it's broken, what are the penalties? That's what DOD is really struggling with," said Jacob Olcott, vice president of business development at BitSight Technologies, which rates firms’ susceptibility to hacks. "If you are the only organization that's building an F-35, there is only so much that the government can demand of you."

When measured in aggregate, network controls at breached J.P. Morgan Chase and Home Depot, combined with the rest of the retail and financial sectors, rated higher than the top companies supporting the U.S. military, according to BitSight. Those firms include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and 22 other defense contractors. 

What are you going to do if those same secrets that some contractor is selling you for billions of dollars already went out the back door, free of charge, long ago?

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.