Way Out There

That’s where our future lies.

Way the hell out there… beyond the moon… and beyond even Mars.

If you haven’t been paying attention to all the noise being stirred up by the global scientific community – specifically cosmologists and those fields relating to astronomy – and watching all the pleading videos on YouTube from the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, we Earthlings on this blue marble that circles the sun every 365 days are driving our species into the ground because we can’t be bothered to spend tax dollars on endeavors that will eventually lead us away from our home planet.

Every year, this situation gets more dire – especially in these lean years where governments have had to drastically slash their budgets.

You’ve heard of NASA, right?

Yeah, yeah… they were in that movie about the asteroid – they supposedly had a bunch of people just sitting around dreaming shit up!

Well… in reality, I’m sure there are a bunch of people at NASA whose job is to “dream shit up”, but the American agency’s main job has been – since the late 1950s – to further humanity’s understanding of the cosmos by sending humans and robotic probes out into the big black yonder.

In the beginning, there were the Mercury and Gemini rocket programs that put Americans into space after playing laggards to the Commie bastards in the USSR.

And then there was the Apollo program… the one NASA program that has accomplished a feat so complex and daring that nobody has been able to duplicate in 40+ years since: putting a living human being onto the surface of the moon.

Before any of you conspiracy wingnuts try and set the comment section ablaze down below with your lunacy (see what I did there?), be of the understanding that all comments have to approved by me – and not one word of how you think the lunar landings were faked will ever see the light of day on this blog.

Why am I so certain that NASA put Neil Armstrong and the astronauts that followed him onto the moon’s vast plains of regolith?

For one single reason: the Red Soviets never said that the Americans were fibbing.

Why would the Kremlin stand by and let the U.S. of A. boast about landing on the moon if it actually hadn’t happened? Especially when that kind of press made the Soviet space program – which was National Priority #1 during the 1960s – look like a total and utter failure?

It would have been in Moscow’s best interest to dispute the American’s claims if they had definitive proof that NASA was actually filming the moon footage on a soundstage somewhere – but the only thing that came down the wire from the Soviets was a begrudging congratulation.

What made them privy to the actuality of the Apollo capsules heading to the moon? (And no… they weren’t paid off as some nuts insist).

The Russians had deep space tracking facilities just as powerful as the Americans… radar facilities that could track anything in Earth orbit or beyond – all the way to the moon and past it

So, as the Apollo missions unfolded, the Soviets watched with detached fascination on their radar tracking scopes – probably cursing aloud and hoping that each trip to the moon would go horribly wrong so that they could (politely and in political terms) laugh at the American’s bungling of something that they could then claim was easy and that they were going to successfully carry out via their superior scientific apparatus.

But, like I wrote up above, that didn’t happen – and the Commies were forced to eat crow, quickly killing their own moon landing program before it had even gotten off the ground.

So, yeah… humans have walked on the moon… drove around on the moon… played golf on the moon… and looked at porn while on the moon.

If you need more proof, check out the Mythbusters episode regarding the so-called Moon Hoax: Adam and Jamie thoroughly debunked all the most popular “theories”.

Okay… I’m gonna get this blog entry back on track.

Like I was saying before I went off on the wingnuts, space exploration – and human space exploration specifically – has gone off the rails almost globally due to the lack of political will to spend big money on things Joe Public had begun to take for granted.

The average person out there – who hasn’t studied the various doings of NASA, the ESA, JAXA, and other space agencies around the world in any depth beyond the 20 second blurbs on the nightly news when a space shuttle launched – kinda assumes that human space flight is routine, fairly easy, and is already half-way to Mars.

Sorry, space cadets: humans have been stuck in low Earth orbit for the past fortyish years since the Apollo program concluded – the farthest we’ve gone off the face of the planet is to service the Hubble Space Telescope…  570 kilometers straight up, or 350 miles for our Imperial measurement friends.

The moon is  385,000 kilometers away.

In the waning years of his presidency, George W. Bush tried to build himself a legacy by commanding NASA to start planning for humankind’s return to the moon before foraging outwards to Mars – something that the American people could surely get behind in the way that they embraced John F. Kennedy’s vision of man going to the moon for the first time.

However, elections came to America.

At first glance, Barrack Obama was good for NASA since he was science-friendly… and maybe Bush’s Orion/Constellation program would have maintained forward momentum if a class of representatives hadn’t been elected to Congress that were more interested in nickel and diming important federal prorgams in order to service that 1% the Occupy movement loves to hate.

Unfortunately, NASA’s budget kept getting scaled back in the years that followed Dubya’s departure (and even while he was still Commander In Chief)… cut down so much that Obama was forced to take a scalpel to the American space program – paring away costly items that Congress just refused to pay for.

The costliest of these items being human space flight beyond Earth orbit – whether that be to the moon or to Mars.

On paper, not all is lost: Obama has endorsed sending humans to an asteroid or a Martian moon by the year 2030… by which time the Chinese Commies will have set up a permanent base on our own moon.

You see, only the Chinese are taking human space flight seriously in the here and now - aggressively pursuing space flight at a rate of speed that would almost put the 60s space race to shame.

Of course, the Chinese have more money than they know what to do with – we buy nearly all of our consumer goods from them, after all.

I suppose it also has to do with the fact that they don’t spend a dime on basic human needs – but I digress.

So, on top of building entire metropolitan cities from scratch for people who won’t move to them, Beijing has spent billions of yuan on building rockets, space capsules, and other space-related infrastructure that will put them on the moon within the next decade.

You might be saying “So what? What does that have to do with me?”

I’ll tell you what: humankind needs a new home… and that home will be out there – first amongst the planets in our own solar system, and then out among the stars you gaze at every night.

This isn’t some panicky prediction based on environmental concerns (though our rapid depletion of natural resources here on Earth is certainly making a good case for it) but simply based on the fact that Earth will eventually run out of space for our massive populations.

If we – as a species – want to continue growing our masses without check, then we are going to need new places to put our children/grandchildren/great grandchildren/etc. so that they can thrive in environments capable of supporting them.

…And we can’t allow the Communist Chinese to control that stellar high ground – not when the individual human lives under their control mean so little.

The last thing we need is abysmal-pay sweatshops on the moon.

No.

Just no.

We need to band together as a species on united human space exploration front so that all of the ground that humankind can travel to will be open and fair to all.

I know that may sound like a rehashed speech from a Star Trek episode, but it’s true: when humankind’s destiny is clearly out into the cosmos, we all need to get behind that destiny to make it happen.

We need to speak up and force the people we elect to office to spend tax dollars that will help us into the future… instead of spending money on the same old crap that we’ve done for a 100 years or more: big business and a military to pursue the interests of big business.

Big business is only interested in pacifying the masses with goods and services… and the military’s only interest is in how to kill the masses.

Those two things do nothing to preserve our species – a species that has barely existed for a million years… which is inconsequential when taken in context with the actual age of Planet Earth.

We will certainly be our own undoing if we don’t get ourselves off this planet – not all of us, of course… but a number that will ensure our survival in case something untoward should happen to our homeworld (cataclysm, environmental collapse, alien invasion, etc.).

The only way we will do this is by spending money on human space flight… no matter how small in scale it may seem at first.

The  313,286,000 people who live in the United States Of America (minus the native population) didn’t all arrive on the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria with Christopher Columbus – they got here by being the children of those who immigrated to North America in the years after Columbus “discovered” the New World – an expedition of discovery that was paid for with money from Spain’s tax coffers.

Exploration on a grand scale is done by nations (and currently with the help of private companies).

Those nations now need to spend the money necessary to send our species way out there.

It’s our only real chance to make sure our species… well… lives long and prospers.

The Frayed Ends Of The Nuclear Cord

For all it’s faults (byproducts that have to be sequestered for half a million years, for instance), nuclear energy is amongst the best ways to generate electricity known to mankind at this time – discounting any future advances in fusion or solar power generation.

Nuclear doesn’t generate the greenhouse gases that spew forth from coal and natural gas power plants… isn’t effected by cloudy days or winter seasons like solar… has no problems when the air is still and fails to turn the windmills… and it doesn’t reroute entire aquatic ecosystems like hydroelectric dams.

But yes… there is that need to protect humankind and all our friends in the wild kingdom from the nuclear waste on scales of time that are longer than civilization has existed on the face of the planet.

Regardless, nuclear energy’s benefits are vast and every facility constructed to harness the power of the atom is a boon to society as it generally means there are less coal-burning plants toxifying the air we breath.

The problems with nuclear energy fall into two categories: environmental, which I’ve touched on above… and political, which I’m going to talk about below.

Nuclear reactors can be harnessed for electricity generation, yes… but they also can be used to create fissile material like plutonium or enriched uraniums that are necessary to create an atomic weapon.

Generally speaking, the technology required to build a nuclear power station is only affordable to nations that are more or less responsible enough to be trusted with any nuclear weapons that they might create – countries with governments that subscribe to the reality that deploying such weapons in anger would not be in their best interest.

Even the two most volatile neighbor countries that have nuclear weapons – India and Pakistan – realize that exchanging atomic potshots at each other would never be a small, localized engagement… that other nuclear powers greater than their own would most likely intervene with punishments of either military or political varieties.

With India being aligned with the Western superpowers like the United States, Great Britain, and France (don’t laugh… nukes can be dispatched from Parisian bunkers), a marginal country like Pakistan – who’s alliances aren’t clearly defined – would likely be struck with thermonuclear warheads carried by ICBMs or cruise missiles fired by New Delhi’s friends in the event Pakistan somehow came out on top.

The biggest check in the nuclear weapons business is that both the United States of America and Russia have enough nuclear weapons to end human civilization as we know it (or possibly altogether), with China, Great Britain, and France following behind them… and this is clearly enough to discourage smaller countries from developing any sort or atomic weapon.

There would assuredly be dire consequences for launching any sort of nuclear attack – no matter how much you hate the guy you’re pointing them at.

However, reality isn’t a universal concept in some corners of the globe.

There are a few governments that are so removed from society that they have become pariah states – the ones that nobody ever invites to the New Year’s celebrations at the United Nations, and ones that are perfectly happy with their status.

In the context of this discussion on smashing atoms, I’m focusing purely on the communist nation of North Korea and the middle eastern country of Iran.

Both countries eschew the global community (and the realities embraced by it) and have created unto themselves their own version of reality… one that generally places themselves at the center of the universe and deludes the ruling parties into thinking they’re untouchable/invincible.

In the case of North Korea, Kim Jong Il and his buddies (I use ‘buddies’ loosely since there isn’t a person in the country he wouldn’t shoot – including family members) rule the land in an almost empirical manner that really hasn’t been seen since the great dynasties of history: it’s taught to every North Korean child that Kim Jong Il is in fact a God.

In fact, North Korea barely qualifies as a communist state, and it can be argued – I’d imagine quite successfully – that it’s more in line with the leadership of Egypt’s pharaohs… just without the bountiful empire: North Korean citizens are probably the poorest out of any of the developed nations.

Kim Jong Il is so crazy that even his biggest (read: only) supporter at the United Nations, China, keeps him at arm’s length… and even then, they barely touch Pyongyang with their fingertips while wearing eight gloves on each hand.

The fact that this nutbar has access to nuclear weapons is entirely indigestible – and quite hard to fathom when you take into account that North Korea has no real money to speak of to pay for any sort of research program… but I suppose you can afford just about anything when you don’t actually have to pay the people who work for you.

Kim Jong Il is a god, remember? Don’t do what he wants and he’ll smite your ass… and probably your entire family while he’s at it.

If there’s any consolation, it’s that his atomic weapons are very basic and shoddily constructed: when testing them, they have a tendency to fizzle – more of a runaway nuclear chain reaction than an actual detonation.

These North Korean atomic bombs are barely in the same class as those deployed by the United States against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II… and nowhere near as advanced as even Pakistan’s.

But even the most rudimentary nuclear weapons are devastating… either through their explosive force (see photo below) or through the mass radioactive contamination of the target area.

Click Me

In  terms of instability, North Korea is like the guy who was arrested for killing his neighbor because he though the neighbor was telepathically raping his wife.

Nothing said by Kim Jong Ill or his government makes any sense, and North Korea has no qualms about threatening anyone with total and complete destruction… promising a war that will end Western civilization – despite lacking any way to follow through on these threats, even when including the estimated 5 to 8 nuclear weapons that Pyongyang possesses.

The North Korean military may have one of the largest standing armies on the world when compared to it’s national population, but the equipment they are outfitted with is barely any more advanced than it was during the Korean War in the 1950s – at best, it’s equivalent to Soviet designs from the mid to late 70s.

This irrationality is alarming for two reasons:

1) Technically, North and South Korea are still in a defacto state of war since the Korean War ended in a cease-fire treaty – a truce that’s been in place ever since… if only barely on some occasions – and that war could pick up at any time, and that becomes more and more likely as North Korea becomes more and more impoverished.

2) Pyongyang has made no secret of it’s willingness to help political entities that have similar designs to destroy the West… and has routinely shipped weapons and military equipment to those ideological comrades, and it’s not a stretch of the imagination that North Korea would share nuclear weapons technology – or even a finished atomic bomb – with those same comrades.

The only silver lining in the North Korean situation is that ships leaving North Korean waters are some of the most scrutinized vessels afloat: any tub that can carry anything bigger than a refrigerator is fair game for random inspections by South Korean and American naval assets – which makes shipping nuclear weapons, fissile material, or technology to create either of those things by water not really a winning strategy.

This of course doesn’t rule out shipping illicit weapons by land or air…. but similar searches are carried out against trucks leaving North Korea by Chinese and Russian agencies (how effectively, nobody in the West can say for certain), and all air cargo from North Korea is thoroughly screened at airports abroad.

There is only one destination outside of North Korea that North Korean ships and aircraft are welcome – and it also happens to be the other rogue nation with nuclear ambitions: Iran.

I’m sorry, Tehran… were you hoping I’d forgotten you?

Nope.

In many ways, you’re worse than those nutjobs in Pyongyang – mainly because, even though you’re batshit crazy, you’re also very focused on the destruction of those you hold in ill regard.

In Iran’s case, that’s most notably Israel.

There isn’t a day that goes by that Iran’s puppet government and it’s religious masters don’t call for the total destruction of the Jewish state, and it works on a daily basis towards that goal by funding terrorist organizations that operate in Palestinian territories.

If that wasn’t problematic enough, the Ayatollah also sends money to terrorist outfits – including Al Qaeda – that attack other Western nations that are allied with Israel.

And while the Ayatollah isn’t necessarily as committed to destroying the West as Osama bin Laden was, his plans call for weakening the resolve of Israel’s allies by hopefully making it more bother than it’s worth to the United States, Britain, and others.

It’s this fanatical devotion to destroying every single Jew in the Middle East (and everywhere else in due time) that makes Iran more dangerous.

While North Korea is more reactive – as in it puffs itself up and makes threats when it perceives itself to be threatened - and can be calmed down with offers of candy (financial and food aid), Iran is completely proactive in it’s plans… spending nearly all it’s money on weaponry and armed forces.

It should be noted than Iran has a lot of money to use for it’s own military and the funding of terrorism around the globe, and that money comes from the export of oil to the countries that need it – both the export of Iran’s own oil assets, and money from neighboring countries’ oil sales who are agreeable to the Iranian way of things… primarily certain factions inside Saudi Arabia.

While Western nations don’t conduct a lot of oil business with Iran, countries like Russia and China don’t make that distinction and gladly take any oil Iran can send their way to fuel their own economies.

Russian and Chinese weapons technologies have also readily been made available to the Iranian government, and this is why the Iranian military possesses weaponry that’s equal to the West’s technology of the late 1980s to mid-1990s.

You may not think weapons circa 1989 to 1995 would be all that dangerous to Western targets using weapons made in this millennium… but keep in mind, those Iranian weapons are equivalent to what the U.S. defeated Saddam Hussein with in the first Gulf War – so they aren’t to be ignored by the wise.

With all that oil money, Iran has been able to afford a fairly modern nuclear energy program – one that Tehran insists is for purely peaceful purposes and that they’re not at all interested in making fissile material for making atomic weapons.

You know what? Put a kid in a room with both a dart gun and a target to shoot at, he’s going to shoot those darts at the target the second you turn your back – no matter how much you tell him not to, and how much he denies his intention to do so.

The fact of the matter is that Iran has far more centrifuge units required to enrich uranium than are needed for the modest civilian-purposed nuclear reactor that Tehran claims is the only beneficiary – and these enrichment facilities are spread far and wide throughout the country, with some of them located underground in hardened facilities that would be problematic to destroy.

If you’re producing far more enriched uranium than you could possibly use in your nuclear electricity generation reactor(s), then that surplus uranium has to go someplace… and the two options that come to mind aren’t acceptable: a covert weapons program, or for export to other political entities that also have covert nuclear ambitions – Al Qaeda, for example.

The nuclear situation in Iran puts Israel – and by extension it’s Western allies – in a bind: while Iran potentially acquiring nuclear weapons capability is completely unacceptable, unilaterally attacking Iran in a pre-emptive strike would be heavy-handed and most likely to ignite a war that would spread like wildfire across the entire Middle East – and the forces of the Western allies are already exhausted from a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which leaves Israel to act on its own – and one must also keep in mind that Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons of it’s own if the situation got out of hand.

However, while Israel might have enough thermonuclear devices to level Tehran and a few other Iranian cities, the fact is that Iran is the 2nd largest country in the region… and Israel is the smallest, and therefore extremely susceptible to being destroyed in a single nuclear strike.

There’s also the small matter of delivering those nuclear weapons to Iran as – as far as anyone in the West knows – all of Israel’s nuclear devices are in the form of gravity bombs and not mounted on long-range missiles, meaning that Israeli attack planes would have to fly through potentially hostile Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish, or Iraqi airspace before even getting to Iran.

The same holds out for any non-nuclear intervention raid Israel might want to stage against Iran in hopes of derailing the Iranian nuclear program like they did when they pounded Saddam Hussein’s atomic facilities into dust back in the 1980s – there’s just too much territory to cover from Israeli airfields to targets in Iran unless those Israeli pilots commit to a one-way suicide mission… and I wouldn’t put that past the Israeli people as they know the value of sacrifice and are a hardened people after decades of being under attack from all sides.

And yet… all the logistics of attacking Iran pale in comparison to the destructive potential of either the Islamic Republic Of Iran Army, The Army Of The Guardians Of The Islamic Revolution (the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard), or any other Iranian military body – or any paramilitary body the Ayatollah deems satisfactory enough to share with – possessing nuclear weapons when they are ideologically tuned towards destroying Israel and the Western world.

The situation is untenable and will need to be resolved prior to Iran developing nuclear weapons technology – and that time isn’t all that far into the future.

Am I being an alarmist?

No.

Everything I’ve said here is absolutely true and cannot be argued by anyone outside North Korea and Iran.

The world has been under the illusion up until now that only the big players could afford nuclear weapons, and to be honest, global opinions should have changed once India and Pakistan developed the Bomb.

But we’ve fooled ourselves into complacency again… that we can send strongly worded letters to Tehran and Pyongyang and they will simply throw up their hands with a smile, saying “Well…  it was worth a try, right?” before packing their whole nuclear infrastructure up in crates and shipping it to Russia for disposal.

Without total regime changes in North Korea and Iran, localized or global nuclear attacks aren’t just probable – they’re an almost forgone conclusion because both countries stand today as spiteful (in Pyongyang’s case), hateful (Tehran), and wholly irrational states.

Kim Jong Il and his son to follow him will continue to develop their primitive atom bombs into more effective hydrogen bombs by working their researchers to death at gunpoint while the citizens throughout North Korea – who depend on the government – starve to death in the streets (while Pyongyang’s resident god drinks Hennessy and collects expensive toys).

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his boss, the Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will continue on their path to nuclear weapons while they continue to hate on the Jewish people and deny the Holocaust – which was the reason the state of Israel was formed in the first place from land ‘donated’ from the surrounding Arab states – in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

To me, that’s the sure sign of Tehran’s insanity and the reason they can’t be trusted: to completely deny the Holocaust when it was thoroughly documented by both the Allies when the camps were liberated, and by the Nazis themselves with their meticulous records of the methodical extermination of the Jews who they deemed as sub-human… and the continued existence of facilities like Auschwitz  and Dachau to remind humanity that the Holocaust was real.

It’s the equivalent of Ahmadinejad looking up and telling the world that the sky is in fact purple and that we’ve been duped by the Jews into thinking it’s blue… which I’m pretty sure he’s already claimed once or twice in his hateful stand-up comedy routines at the United Nations headquarters.

Folks… these are people who can not EVER be trusted with the nuclear genie.

You should be alarmed… you should feel a sense of panic.

These people aren’t going anywhere and won’t change their ways unless we make them.

And believe me… they’re not going to blink when we send them angry emails from the United Nations’ Gmail account.

.

Invisible Planes & Your Shopping Cart

With the Canadian federal government once again chugging along after a year of elections on both the national and provincial levels, certain issues are coming up again from the previous edition of Parliament Hill.

Many of the issues are crime related… but there has been some renewal of opposition grumblings over the F-35 Stealth Fighter.

I’ve written all about the technological benefits of the F-35 previously, but I really didn’t touch too much on why we need a stealth fighter in the first place beyond the vague (but real) threat that Russia presents to our borders.

Currently – in the year 2011 – there is only one player in the global military arena that has a fully functional, deployable  stealth aircraft asset… and it’s to our benefit that we happen to be best friends with the U.S.A. and their F-22 Raptor squadrons.

However, other nation states around the world are progressing towards testing their own stealth aircraft – and those nations aren’t always on the up and up… and yes, I’m looking straight at China and the former Soviet Union.

With Russia, the situation is fairly predictable: just as in the days of the Cold War, Russia can be relied upon to act solely in it’s own best interests – even if those interests are counter to what the rest of the world finds acceptable.

One poignant example of this would be the Georgian War of a few years ago where Russian military forces invaded the territory of another sovereign nation… and then subsequently told the world it could collectively go fuck itself if we didn’t like it.

At the end of the Georgian conflict, it was practically the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again – except in microcosm – as American troops stood almost toe to toe against Russian counterparts as they brought aid and supplies to the stricken Georgia.

The only differences were that Georgia was a former Soviet communist state instead of Castro’s newly communist island, and there weren’t at least 3,000 nuclear weapons ready to be shot at the other side with the push of a button.

However, the situation was fairly typical when you study the long term behavior of Russian military commanders and their political overlords in Moscow – so, it’s not too far of a leap in logic that (when Sukhoi or MiG gets a stealth plane into full production) their behavior will change  much in the stealth era.

The only wrinkle in that observation is that Russia will export it’s military hardware to virtually anyone with deep enough pockets – and I would only assume that would apply to future stealth aircraft produced for the Kremlin.

Despite the appearances of – and the lip service towards – democracy, Russian politics is really the bastard son of Mr. Communism and Ms. Democracy… and has been placed into the foster care of Mr. & Mrs. Capitalist-Autocracy – and that autocracy needs money to pay out hush money as well as distribute infrastructure contracts to political allies.

This money comes from those sales of military hardware to the highest bidder.

You know who’s the main beneficiary of Russia’s sales of military hardware and technological know-how?

The People’s Republic of China.

Believe me when I say that this is a bad thing.

Why?

It’s not that big of  a secret that Beijing would like to fully control their political area of influence – essentially every island between Australia and Japan, and a few more going in the direction of India – and have been steadily building up their army, air force, and navy with hardware that was either manufactured in Russia, or designed there.

The most dangerous of these military assets are Kilo-class attack submarines… which are damn near impossible to detect in their newest configuration.

Why are they dangerous – aside from the obvious?

Because the Chinese have always intended for them to be a very real threat to American carrier groups – the very U.S. naval assets that keep China from unilaterally invading Taiwan… the island nation that Beijing maintains is Chinese territory and has simply been ‘misbehaving’ since the 1950s.

Ask your average Taiwanese citizen, and I’m sure they’d have a different opinion… and it’s that fact that the U.S. government counts on to maintain it’s political influence right off the coast of the world’s largest communist nation.

With these political tensions constantly at play, it’s very probable that the next global military conflict will start in the South China Sea – possibly by the sinking of a U.S. aircraft carrier by a Chinese Kilo using a conventional or nuclear torpedo.

What does this have to do with Canada?

The Chinese are developing a stealth fighter of their own, independent of Russian researchers.

And yet we in North America overlook all of these alarming facts because nearly everything at Walmart is made in China – so it’s not to our economical advantage to call China on it’s various sins… not least of which is Beijing’s abysmal record on human rights and dignities that allow for factories in China to pay their workers with dust bunnies and a few grains of rice so that Chinese manufactured goods are the cheapest.

Things are considerably more complicated for our American neighbors: a lion’s share of American debt is owned by Chinese banks, and if those debts were suddenly called in – and if Washington didn’t put up a fight – up to 25-30% of all sellable real estate in the U.S. would become Chinese owned… on top of  industrial land which is already owned by Chinese corporations.

All this means is that there are conflicts coming – and those conflicts will have air wars fought with stealth planes.

Even in small, isolated conflicts that will be resolved by NATO or the United Nations in the coming years could be fought with stealth air assets – and if you haven’t noticed, those type of wars are where Canada steps onto the word stage.

Libya’s skies were patrolled by Canadian warplanes this year.

We need the hardware that will allow men flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force to go forward into the future and not be held back by legacy military hardware designed with attitudes from the 1970s (which is where the CF-18 design originated) or the 1980s (where most attack jets available on the open market were designed).

The F-35 Lightning II (Joint Strike Fighter) is that tool – a plane designed for the 21st Century, and for the air combat of 2020 and beyond.

The Canadian opposition parties are saying we should buy the Eurofighter Typhoon or the SAAB Gripen to replace our aging and rapidly failing CF-18s – but those planes are legacy designs from the 70s/80s/early 90s.

Yes, the Typhoon and Gripen are fast and agile aircraft… but they simply don’t bring to bear the warfare technologies that will be required in the future.

So… when China is no longer satisfied with just being an industrial power – and that’s coming, whether we like it or not – which planes do you want Canadian fighter pilots screaming through the skies in?

I know that I personally want them up there kicking ass and chewing bubblegum… long after they’ve run out of bubblegum.

How about you?

Tim Who ‘Dat?

Ontarians – from border to border, and from Hudson Bay to the Great lakes – are on the verge of going to the polls again.

How and who they vote for will shape the government of Ontario for the next 4-5 years, and that is no inconsequential responsibility: North America is pretty much three inches and a market fart away from falling back into an economic recession that will no doubt put further pressure on the unemployment safety net as thousands of workers are let go.

The province of Ontario is a very complex machine… and when a machine breaks down, you want the right tools in your hands to fix it, right?

Unfortunately, Tim Hudak is just a tool (in the most derogatory sense).

During the 2011 election campaign, Mr. Hudak has tried to paint himself with Mike Harris’ left over cans of Tremclad Rustoleum in the supposedly trendy colour of ChangeBlue™… but he’s failed to realize that colour has been out of style for more than a decade.

While LiberalRed™ is still the preferred colour of the Ontario electorate, they’ve also developed a hankering for Andrea Horwath’s truckload of LaytonOrange™ – at least in small doses.

Tim Hudak may be good at mugging for the cameras,  but he’s been overly terrible at public policy ideas – a failing that’s always terminal in a politicians’s case, and one that can make you a laughing-stock at what’s supposed to be your defining moment.

At the start of the campaign, everything was coming up roses for Timmy and his merry band of Harris leftovers because Ontarians thought that change would be nice after 8 years of Premiere Dad – and that’s bound to happen, no matter who’s been holding on to the province’s keys: people like change now and then.

Instead of always getting the pepperoni pizza, sometimes you go out on a limb and get the Hawaiian with extra pineapple.

After a week or so of glad handing voters around the province, Hudak firmly took his campaign off the rails by repeatedly saying the word “foreigners” – and in a province that only grows with the importing of landed immigrants from other countries around the world (because the Canadian birth rate is abysmal), that was just the wrong thing to focus on.

Suddenly, Tim Hudak was all about white guys – despite him looking out over Toronto sidewalks that skewed a bit more towards yellow and brown.

On top of that, the Progressive Conservative party – that’s led by Mr. Hudak – has always been the champion of big business.

So… Tim Hudak is all about rich white guys.

And yes… I’m using white guys on purpose since the PC party has never really been on board the women’s rights train – paying lip service to it when necessary, but always mumbling quietly about finding ways to outlaw abortions.

The funny thing about the “Foreigner” debacle is that, by and large, the immigrant population are the people most likely to agree with the PC platform since most of them have come from moderately- to radically conservative countries… which makes them more likely to drink the HarriBerry Blue™ Kool-Aid.

The idiocy of Hudak’s derailment is based on one glaring fact: they have no serious issues to grab the undecided voter’s attention.

Television advertisements paid for by the PC party have only harped on about taxes: Dalton McGuinty and his Fiberals are supposedly raising taxes every other week and twice on Christmas.

While it is true that taxes have gone up in Ontario, they’re not disproportionate to the rate of inflation… and there’s been a concrete need for any taxes implemented by the Liberal government over their past two mandates.

Evil Tax Number One a.k.a. The Health Care Premium: Do you have any idea how much money is needed to care for the rapidly aging Baby Boom generation?  To care for the existing senior citizens?  To battle health concerns like SARS and swine flu?  Billions of dollars… billions of dollars that can’t be completely extracted from the amount of money brought into public coffers through various levels of personal and retail taxation – so the government needed a way to continue paying for our universal health care without digging itself further into debt.

Evil Tax Number Two a.k.a. The Eco-Tax: More than a million metric tons of used electronics used to go into landfills across the province before the turn of the century, and many still do… but that’s changing under the auspices of the Ontario Stewardship (a program that was itself set in motion by the previous PC government as a way to boost their environmental credentials) – and the money that’s required to start complex recycling programs province-wide has to come from somewhere… and where better to get that money than at the point of sale for the widescreen LCD television that you will discard in the next 5 years? That way, you’ve already paid for it’s recycling long before it’s necessary… instead of the government having to dip into it’s already strained and tattered pocketbook.

Evil Tax Number Three a.k.a. The HST: I’ve already explained why the HST is a necessary evil in previous blogs, so there’s not much I can add here. At the end of the day, Ontario needed to have the HST so it’s businesses could compete with other business entities around the world in our Global Economy because other jurisdictions in Europe, Asia, the U.S., Mexico, and South America already had in place single-point or so-called “value added” tax systems that made paying corporate taxes easier and more streamlined… and therefore cheaper over the long run.

With that Evil Tax Trifecta, surely Hudak could have made a better case for lowering taxes for the masses, right?

No… he couldn’t – and didn’t.

The HST couldn’t be revoked without activating a ‘poison pill’ scenario that was inserted by Hudak’s Conservative cousins in the federal government: if the province of Ontario were to revoke the HST, it would have to pay back $4 billion dollars in equalization money that’s already been sent to majority of Ontario citizens by those four special cheques you found in your mailbox over the past year – which would immediately be added to the province’s debt load and sinking the S.S. Ontario further into the Sea Of Red Ink… and would necessitate a rise in income taxes.

The best Hudak could promise on the HST front (and to be fair, Horwath has said the same things) was a modification of items that were included on the list of items taxable under HST – mainly removing the federal portion of the taxes on heating oil and electricity bills.

I suppose that would be nice, but hardly practical since it would cause a headache for the taxation department – a department that would eventually find a way to make up the difference from some other way of taxing you.

Onto the Health Care Premium.

Has Mr. Hudak said he would do away with those?

Nope. In fact, he’s said – very quietly and far away from voters waving little blue flags – that he will keep those in place because they do what I said they did a few paragraphs upwards from this one.

At the end of the day, the only one of those three Evil Taxes that Mr. Hudak and the PCs could tamper with in any meaningful way – and the meaning wouldn’t be necessarily good – would be the Eco-Tax.

However, as I hopefully made it clear up above, that would simply be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul – letting you off the hook at the point of purchase and then raising your personal taxes to maintain funding for the recycling facilities for your disposable iPods, Blackberries, flat screen televisions, and laptops… and to also pay for the water purification plants that remove the chemicals you put down the drain every day.

Outside of he Evil Tax Trifecta, Hudak doesn’t have a platform.

Healthcare? It can be argued that Ontario’s health care system is in the best shape it’s ever been in.

Yes… there are still crowded emergency rooms at hospitals across the province, but the wait times are getting better on the whole – especially for surgeries that can change people’s lives… or let them continue their lives as whole persons.

A few years ago, I was in serious bicycle accident and I snapped my leg in three places – something that would have been seriously debilitating in decades and centuries past…. even so bad that amputation would have been considered in more primitive times.

Guess what? The accident happened just after 1 o’clock in the afternoon… and I was in surgery to have a titanium rod permanently inserted down the middle of my tibia with attending screws and other hardware required to regain structural integrity – allowing me to walk on it again within several months – at 6 o’clock in the evening on the very same day.

So, I went from mangled to mostly fixed in five hours… and I didn’t have to pay a single cent – not even for the ambulance ride.

No… our healthcare system may not be perfect, but it’s still pretty damn amazing when you consider how much it has to struggle when it comes to finances.

The Progressive Conservatives, during their last stint as the province’s controls had taken a slash n’ burn approach to healthcare – firing doctors and nurses, and closing nearly twenty hospitals across the province… which caused such systemic damage that Ontario’s healthcare system was amongst the worst in the country, and it’s only now (2011) that it’s gotten back to the top.

Hudak & Pals don’t have any where to go with education, either.

The Liberals under Dalton McGuinty have made some radical improvements to public education in Ontario.

More students are sticking it out all the way through high school, graduating with marks that they can be proud of.

Smaller class sizes have helped students get the attention they need from their teachers, which means they get the help they need if they need it – either in that same classroom, or in more specialized learning environments.

The biggest change, of course, was the implementation of full-day kindergarten for all youngsters – which had two effects: the first being that children started experiencing a constructive learning environment sooner than most other children in North America… and it eased the financial burdens of working families that would have otherwise had to pay for daycare or babysitting services.

There’s very little to complain about when it comes to Ontario’s public schools.

In fact, there’s very little for Ontarians to complain about on the whole as the province simply works.

Compared to the Mike Harris years – an era where nearly every public sector union in Ontario was on strike – that Tim Hudak clearly yearns for deeply, Ontario is firmly planted in the Garden Of Prosperity.

Yes… there are many people across the province who are out of work because of the current global financial climate that isn’t particular to Ontario.

However, there are many people who’ve either regained or retained their employment because of programs that the current Liberal government forced into being with their majority… programs that cost many billions of dollars, but had very clear and tangible results.

Sure – the bailing out of General Motors and Chrysler (now owned by Fiat) was a popularly unpopular move… but it kept those two massive companies who employed thousands of Ontarians (either directly or through companies G.M. and Chrysler depended on to build their cars and trucks) alive.

The manufacturing sector in Ontario – and the world at large – has taken a beating as money becomes tight for consumers.

Companies that face certain peril if they don’t downsize their workforce have no choice to let employees go… and this is not the fault of the Ontario government.

It’s the fault of American banks and financial institutions who squandered and pissed away more than a trillion dollars in crooked investments and other equally worthless endeavors – actions that had a ripple effect across the entire world of stock exchanges and investment banking from New York to Tokyo.

The current hard financial times facing Ontario are not something that was caused in Ontario, and is most definitely not the fault of the McGuinty Liberals.

However, Tim Hudak has done his best to blame Dalton McGuinty for it… and in the end, the blame hasn’t stuck.

Maybe because the average Ontario voter is smarter than that… and I would really hope that’s the case.

However, I think the Ontarian electorate is sticking with the Liberals because Ontario is in a better place than a lot of jurisdictions in North America – and even the world.

Dalton McGuinty goes on television and shows you all the  good things the Liberals have done over the time they’ve been in charge – most of which I’ve discussed here.

…And Tim Hudak challenges McGuinty and Horwath to a BBQ cook-off.

If that wasn’t a sign of non-existent political platform, I really don’t know what is.

…

No, Timmy.

No you can’t.

A Decade After The Fall: 9/11/11

Bright and early tomorrow, New Yorkers will have a new destination to fill their idle time.

Monday September 12th, 2011 marks the opening of the WTC/September 11th Memorial that takes up roughly half the 16 hallowed acres that formerly – 10 short years (okay… long years if you’ve been doing a lot of air travel) ago – housed the previous incarnation of the World Trade Center for 10 hours of that fateful Tuesday before being turned into a pile of smoking wreckage.

Up until now, the public at large hasn’t had any access to the WTC site – unable to stand on the ground where 2,500+ normal, everyday people were killed in an orgy of violence and death set in motion by hateful, bearded men half a world away in a country that for the most part was ignored by everyone except the Russians in the 1980s.

Monday morning, New Yorkers have the opportunity to obtain some closure as they can physically travel to the footprints of the North and South towers – looking deep into the pits where they once stood – that are now the world’s largest man-made waterfalls.

But more than just a water feature, the square tower imprints are bordered by bronze rails inscribed with the names of every soul lost to 9/11: both those perishing in the towers, and those killed at the Pentagon and in that barren field outside Shanksville, PA… which, like the Vietnam Wall in D.C., gives a place to mourn those souls – a great number of which simply vanished into thin air as their bodies were torn, crushed, and incinerated.

These bronze rails give those families who never received any remains of their loved ones a place to visit… something tangible where nothingness and abstract concepts have shadowed their daily lives for a decade.

Yet… the cynic deep inside me (maybe not that deep) wonders how long it will be until some asshat kid spray-paints a graffiti tag onto some part of the memorial? I fear it’s only a matter of time… whether it be on the bronze name rails, or on the side of the waterfalls, or on a tree – maybe the ‘Survivor Tree’ that was the last living thing pulled from the WTC wreckage?

Perhaps 9/11 is a tragedy that will transcend the disrespect that the 4chan generation has honed – the types of kids who video themselves urinating on other monuments to fallen heroes.

But I digress…

The memorial plaza will also host a museum, but that won’t be open to the public for another year – but will be very much worth the wait: all manners of debris and relics retrieved from ‘The Pile’ will be on display for people to see and emotionally connect with, including smashed firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, twisted ‘impact steel’ (portions of the WTC tower’s iron outer shell that the two hijacked planes collided with), recovered uniforms of fallen first responders.

However, the two defining features of the museum will be both iconic and immense: two of the recovered steel tridents that were an architectural flourish in the design of the WTC towers, and the naked retaining wall that held back the Hudson river from flooding the Trade Center’s lower levels and adjoining subway station – still covered in the nubs of structural supports that held the towers to the bedrock.

I’m not going to go on about the various politics of 9/11 as I’ve done that previously in this blog on another anniversary of the murders, and that topic has also been covered to death by those much more learned that myself – so what could I possibly add now?

9/11 is a defining moment that will stain and reverberate through history – and personal human conscience for the 90 years or so until the last survivors and victim’s family members have gone on to whatever is after this life – like Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, and the Challenger explosion… all of these events are something that you can look back and say with certainty where you were when you heard the news.

We, as a civilized and caring society, feel the pain of those affected by 9/11… even when the vast majority of us had nothing directly invested in the tragedy – having not lost a son, daughter, mother, father, aunt, uncle, or grandparent.

To not feel the collective grief is something one should be alarmed by… and something to admit with a great deal of shame.

But that is the way of the world: hatred consumes and burns inside many people… even in ways that aren’t quite so obvious, or not directly related to terrorism.

The myriad of conspiracy theories that surround 9/11 is a glaring example of that sort of hatred.

Groups of people who have – for the lack of a better term – hijacked the events and memories of 9/11 to suit their own biases and hatreds toward parties and persons of all political stripes… and generating fantastical, improbable, highly insane plots as to why all those people were really murdered.

By doing this… by creating these conspiracies… these people deny the simple truths of 9/11 and do a great disservice to the victims who gave their lives for nothing more than being in the wrong place and the wrong time.

Disrespect for those murdered is something I can’t tolerate, and isn’t something you should abide either.

So, in that spirit, I present here a video that comes completely without any message or leaning other than what is communicated visually – you can even turn off the audio to mute the music I chose.

You, yourself can be the judge of what happened 10 years ago today since you were blessed with two eyes and a brain capable of making independent conclusions.

Of course… many of you won’t do that, and will continue to think what someone else has told you to think – and I will feel a great swell of pity for you.

Election 2011: Now That The Dust Has Settled…

The Big Election is over and done… quickly disappearing in Canada’s rear-view mirror.

Conservatives won the day, which was written in the sand from the outset – but they made out like bandits and secured themselves four years of (what they hope to be) uninterrupted rule in which they can sell the country out to American interests and continue to ignore the real social issues like poverty and the environment.

What’s that? I was on their side during my last political blog?

Yes… I was – but that was in the face of a floundering Liberal leader who couldn’t have won a butt-kicking contest with his own two feet in field of one-legged contestants.

I also came to the conclusion that the NDP would pick up seats in the vacuum that the Liberals were leaving in their wake – but I wasn’t in any way ready for The Big Orange Machine that steamrolled Iggy’s Grits and made it all the way to a 100+ seat Opposition… though I was quite happily surprised since it turns our venerable parliament on it’s head.

As the news outlets have said over and over, the New Democratic Party has never been the official opposition in the history of Canada – always an ‘also ran’ behind the Liberals, Conservatives, and Bloc Quebecois… playing the role of spoiler/king-maker during the times we’ve had minority governments by placing their votes on bills and motions up for grabs in return for concessions from the ruling party.

However, on May 3rd, Jack Layton and his Merry Orange Band of NDPers woke up after the election and realized they were now Her Majesty’s Royal Opposition – which had turned out to be a both a boon and a curse: while they had gone from fourth place to second and boosted their national profile considerably, they had also lost any and all sway they had over the levers of power.

You see… being the Official Opposition comes with a set number of powers, and the only one that really matters is that they get the right to be the first ones to put the Government Of Canada (in this case, the Conservatives) on the hot seat during Question Period after Prime Minister Harper and his cronies prattle on about any given issue of the day.

While that may seem like a nice thing on paper, the fact that it means very little in practice is something that the inexperienced NDP caucus failed to calculate in their campaign: that they’ve gone from a place where the Harper minority government would listen to them and occasionally put items from the NDP wish list into the budget – to a position where they can scream/shout/bolster themselves up and needle the Conservatives all day long… only to have Harper blithely ignore them on all issues due to the Conservative’s 160+ seat majority that doesn’t need cooperative votes to pass legislation.

At the end of the day on May 2nd, it was clear that vote splitting had given the Conservatives their longed-for majority.

In a large number of ridings across the 9,984,670 square kilometers of Canadian territory, NDP and Liberal candidates were neck and neck in the polls – which would be exciting if it was a 2-player horse race, but effectively canceled each other out… leaving the inside lane free and clear for the Conservatives to storm their way to a commanding 1st place.

The fact that Michael Ignatieff – then leader of the Liberal party that had surged to power in 1993 and held on until 2005 – had failed to win even in his own riding was a bitter, bitter pill… one that the Liberal party executive council is still choking on this very minute.

Yet, even in his concession speech, Ignatieff seemed to be certain that he’d continue to lead the Liberals after he had torpedoed the party – clearly maintaining his lack of connection with reality that had hounded him and his closest lieutenant from the time he was named party leader in August of 2009 – before coming out the next day and telling the press that he was resigning the leadership effective immediately.

Since the Liberals have been mostly silent in the 6 days since the election, I’m forced to presume that as soon as Ignatieff had come down from the podium at party campaign headquarters in the early hours of May 3rd, he was promptly taken to a room far from the press’ omnipresent eyes and ears before being flogged/kicked/beaten by the Liberal executive for  killing “the natural ruling party” (a title foisted on the Liberals by opposing parties due to the arrogance that a string of back-to-back majorities had brought – and mostly assimilated by Liberal members over the years) and lacking the common decency to promptly fall on his sword during his concession.

Hell… even the leader of the Bloc Quebecois – a party determined to separate Quebec from Canada no matter what happened – had the sense to resign his post after securing only 4 seats out of 308, of which 75 are in Quebec.

As it is, only the Liberal party’s presumptive interim leader Bob Rae (himself once a provincial NDP member and 21st Premier Of Ontario before abandoning politics for a number of years in advance of joining the federal Liberals) has come out of seclusion to tell the party faithful that the party will rebuild and refocus in efforts to win the next election.

In fact, a strong case can be made for Rae to become the Liberal’s official leader come the next leadership convention – mainly because he’s the only guy in the Liberal camp who’s had political party leadership experience, and because Rae’s pretty much the only Liberal seat holder who has any sort of public persona that people could get behind – a born politician who can command a crowd with his oratory skills and an actual personality that can engage the Canadian population at large… which is precisely where Ignatieff failed since he was about as lively as watching grass grow.

The only problem with Bob Rae is optics… specifically how he’s seen in the province of Ontario – which is generally the area of the country that makes or breaks the Liberal campaign.

Rae had the unfortunate luck of being premier of Ontario during the early 90′s recession – an event not of his or his party’s making that bankrupted the province and forced Rae to create the unpopular “Rae Days” for employees of various governmental institutions that equaled forced, unpaid furloughs every so often… which was an act that greatly angered the public service unions and eventually led to Rae and his party being booted from office in the next election in favor of the provincial Progressive Conservatives who were promising the moon (and delivered deep public service cuts instead).

An acquaintance of mine says Rae could never be prime minister because he bankrupted Ontario – which is simply not true… and is something the Rae leadership camp needs to get out ahead of in the coming weeks and months: turning a generalist public opinion in Ontario from something unfairly negative into the actual reality that Rae did the best he could given the circumstances.

Once that problem is resolved, I seriously think the Liberals have a strong chance of rebuilding with Rae at the helm… or even one of the other candidates that are being bandied about like former federal finance minister Ralph Goodale – though I have to say the man lacks subtlety when interacting with the public, but that could in the end be a strength when running against the likes of Stephen Harper who never seems to get excited about anything.

But, for now anyway, we as Canadians are saddled with a brand-spanking-new parliament that – for better or for worse – we chose for ourselves.

It’s really hard to determine where the Government Of Canada is going to go from here on out since we haven’t seen an unconstrained Conservative party in power since the early 1990′s… and even back then, it was an entirely different party under the leadership of Brian Mulroney – a kinder, gentler group of politicians that was still known as the Progressive Conservative Party Of Canada which – by it’s very name -  seemed to imply an openness to outside ideas.

When Stephen Harper led the charge to reform the Conservatives (and in the process swallowing the Reform Party), he tossed out the “Progressive” name and moved the party from the right-of-center brand of politics to firm right wing entrenchment similar to their American Republican cousins – big on crime & punishment and friendly to big business interests through aggressive cuts to corporate taxes.

Since the Conservatives came to power in the 2006, they’ve always been kept in check due to their continual minority government status – having to rely on the Liberals, NDP, or Bloc Quebecois to achieve the number of votes necessary to pass legislation in the House Of Commons, which has kept the right wing agenda from dominating the Canadian landscape by continually adding more socially-minded items to budgets and other major governmental positions.

Now, heading into the middle of 2011, Harper & Co. have been given free rein to pass any legislation that tickles their fancy without any interference from other parties – a political blank cheque that will allow the Conservatives to implement laws, regulations, and spending cuts while swinging their arms akimbo if it suits them.

And while Prime Minister Harper came out fairly quickly after the election to say that he and his party weren’t going to change the way they did business from how they conducted themselves during minority government times, the average Canadian would have to be completely stupid/naïve to believe one word out of Harper’s mouth.

Harper has continually said his party has been chomping at the bit to implement the Conservative agenda since the 2006 campaign began… so how can we be expected to believe that, all of a sudden, Harper & Co. are going to learn the art of self constraint?

But… that’s how the war of politics is waged in a democratic system: the hopeful dependence on society’s short memory from election to election.

A democracy that we as Canadians just took part in… a democracy that we all voted for (well, at least more than 60% of eligible voters according to Elections Canada).

A democracy the Michael Ignatieff campaigned hard on – saying that it was time to fix democracy in Canada by voting Liberal and chasing the Conservatives from office that had been found to be in Contempt Of Parliament by the Speaker Of The House.

A democracy that turned on it’s supposed champions and made the Liberals a laughing stock.

Ah, well.

Democracy is great, isn’t it?

The Popularity Of Hatred

Has anyone noticed that since the interwebs became the primary communication tool for the human species that, as a society, we’ve all taken a turn towards the mean side of things?

And I’m not talking about the cyber-bullying swarms out there, but more about how quickly we jump on a bandwagon that’s draped with a banner proclaiming WE HATE ________________.

How is it that we’ve gone from a culture of the individual to a culture of joiners?

Where did we stop thinking for ourselves and switch to the blithely ignorant masses?

I present to you three cases of group hating:

1) Everybody hates Nickelback.

2) Everybody hates AVATAR.

3) Everybody hates Uwe Boll.

But when you boil everything down with facts, only one of the above bares out to be true.

Let’s start with the first item… about how everybody on the planet hates Nickelback according to the sentiment of the internet.

Fact: According to Pollstar, Nickelback is 6th on the list of touring bands last year.

Fact: Nickelback sells an average of 6 million albums per release.

And yet everybody online claims that they’re worse than the Black Plague – which makes no bloody sense when you take into account the cash they rake in since obviously a lot of people are buying their CDs, going to their concerts, and snapping up their merchandise.

Their Facebook page has 3,753,664 fans – nearly as many as Jay-Z.

If the internet hatred mills was correct, Nickelback would have a hard time booking third rate bars in nowhere towns like Buttfuck, Idaho – and that simply isn’t the case.

Alright, now on to the second item: the universal hatred for James Cameron’s AVATAR.

Despite being relatively new to the cultural awareness,  AVATAR still racks up the kind of seething hate that Nickelback does when you tour around the web’s various message boards, site forums, and self-styled movie review depots.

They poke fun at the CGI… say the story was ripped off from other movies… call Sam Worthington wooden, etc.

Ready for the facts?

FACT: Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time.

FACT: Avatar won a number of Oscars.

FACT: Despite the potentially enormous cost, 20th Century Fox has said okay to 2 more sequels to what is apparently the most hated movie ever.

Finally… on to the lats group.

Everybody hates Uwe Boll.

No… really… everybody does.

Uwe Boll is a movie “director” based out of Germany who buys up movie properties and then proceeds to destroy that property with completely inept, incompetent, idiotic, moronic, senseless movies that could be written and directed by drunken raccoons who had figured out how to turn on a camcorder someone left outside.

Boll’s reign of cinematic terror was enabled for a long while by a peculiar tax benefit that guaranteed any movie production to – at the bare minimum – break even so that no money was lost by any party involved… which meant that no matter how shitty your movie was, you’d still make your money back.

Needless to say, this removed Uwe Boll from the end consequences of his playing movie director – there was no danger to him or the people he bilked into investing – which would normally be something along the lines of being banned for life from anything resembling a video camera.

Five of his “films” are on the list of 100 worst movies ever over at RottenTomatoes.com
—

So… the internet loves to rage – and really, that’s no surprise to anyone who reads the comments on any randomly selected YouTube video.

The problem with “Haters” (those people who hate certain things for no discernible or logical reason) is they skew the internet society’s view of things and issues  – preventing someone new to the scene from trying something that they might actually enjoy by making that person feel they’ll be somehow unpopular by doing so.

Now… before anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog says “but you hate a lot of things!“, let me remind you that I always explain my particular dislikes – mainly because I don’t want to be seen as a Hater.

In the end, I think the problem of Haters is due to the “quick hit” mentality of the Internet Generation where people what the information they’re seeking fast – a deterioration in the type of objective thought that would have normally been engaged when confronted with a supposed fact… but that would take too much time in the Google age.

It’s surprising how an entire school of thought (or lack thereof) has spread from the redneck population to more than 1/6th of the world – and will continue to saturate the internet consciousness for the foreseeable future… or at least until it becomes cool again to think.

Wait… nevermind.

It’s never been cool to be smart.

Newsflash: You’re Fat Because…

…you’ve made certain choices in your life.

Now, before I go on here, I’m going to exclude all those of you out there who have legitimate medical reasons for being overweight from the following discussion – there’s no reason to feel bad about your body if there’s nothing you could/can do to stop your [insert malfunctioning body part here] from making you extra-large.

Everyone else… well, you’re exactly who I’m talking to.

When you wake up every morning and look yourself in the mirror, do you loathe what you see because your body is statistically extra-large?

Guess what got you there?

You don’t know? Or, do you think you do know?

As a blogger that is always trying to be helpful, I will explain to you why you’re fat in terms that I hope you understand – but it’s going to take a very healthy dose of reality checking and honesty with yourself.

Also, this blog is somewhat aimed also at the Sally DoGooders who live in the proverbial land of milk and honey – the United States Of America – who are taking it upon themselves to sue every purveyor of delicious food in the public retail spaces of malls, plazas, and corner shops all across the land.

First, let me get straight to the facts of the matter… the complete and total truth, no matter who might want to argue:

1. McDonald’s hasn’t made one single human on this planet fat.

2. Burger King isn’t responsible for making your neighbor chubby.

3. Wendy’s had no part making that guy at work rotund around his middle section.

4. Hostess – the maker of the venerable Twinkie – can not be held accountable for shut-in video gamers being so big that they have to wear a muumuu around the house.

5. Little Debbie is not at fault for your Type II diabetes.

6. Neither Coca-Cola or Pepsi (and their Frito Lay snacks division) is on the hook for your massive stored energy deposits.

7. Hershey’s is not answerable for your pudgy fingers.

8. And finally, the local movie theater is not to blame for your adding a melted stick of butter to your popcorn.

Wait… how can that be?

You hear every day on the news that So And So is suing these companies for making people fat… so surely there is some merit to what they’re paying public interest law firms to make a case for… right?

No.

Not a single claim by these people can be born out in a court of law without the court itself being corrupted by social shortsightedness.

See this guy here?

Not a single corporate employee or company policy is responsible for him being a fat tub of lard – and let’s be honest: he most likely doesn’t have a thyroid issue.

Nope… he’s fat because of what he’s doing in the photo i.e. stuffing his face with food that has very little (or completely zero) nutritional benefit.

As much as society would seek an easy scapegoat for it’s rising number of obesity cases, there is not a single person to blame but himself.

Look at that photo very carefully.

Do you see anybody forcing him to chow down on that massive burger? Is there a representative from The Burger Shack holding his family at gunpoint, promising him that they’ll be released without harm as soon as he consumes all those fats and carbs?

No.

Chubby McFatass there is using his own, God-given free will to consume that sandwich.

So tell me – please – why The Burger Shack, McDonald’s, or Little Debbie should be held accountable for the choices that YOU make?

Yes… the retailers make products that you feel compelled to eat – either for their taste or their affordability or both – whenever hunger strikes you, but in no way are you mandated by law to consume their wares.

You, the consumer, have every bit as much power to consume a bowl of fruit salad as you do eat a box of Chicken McNuggets and a side of delicious McDonald’s french fries.

The fact that you opt for the Mickey’s fare is completely on you.

Television advertising makes you eat it? Hmmm…. okay – let’s look at that.

Pundits would say that the commercials you see on TV up to 100x a day have brainwashed you into being constantly wanting fast food or the kind of junk offerings you find at the neighborhood convenience store.

I suppose this could be held out to be true… if there wasn’t a whole lot of other crap on TV that’s being marketed directly to you that you blissfully ignore: how many of you out there order everything you see in infomercials?

Raise your hand if you’ve compulsively ordered the Snuggie For Pets? C’mon… it’s only $9.99! Who can resist that kind of deal?

Or… how many of you ran out and bought that Head On headache reliever? You know… the stuff you apply directly to the forehead?

I’m going to wager not a lot of you did either of those things because you were smart enough to realize the products were pure crap – choosing not to waste money and hurt your pocketbook by being stupid.

Yet… you CHOOSE to eat vast amounts of fast food that you know are pure crap and are going to hurt your body in the long run.

Why is there such a disconnect between choice and result?

There is nothing simpler than what’s going on here: it’s cause and effect – one of the most basic scientific concepts.

You do one thing and you get the predicted effect – in this case, you stuff an entire 12-inch pizza in your face in a single sitting which causes the effect of you gaining a few pounds.

Of course, this is assuming you’re not a professional athlete like Michael Phelps that consumes massive amounts of calories to fuel their workout routine.

Which is the backside to this issue: your buttocks take up two seats on the airplane because you refuse to do to the physical exercise required to burn off all of those calories you consume.

You’re choosing in your life to eat a Double Big Mac, large fries, large Coke, and two apple pies – without also choosing to engage in the physical exertion necessary to scrub all of those calories and saturated fats out of your system… which leaves your body no choice at all but to store those things as fat around your middle/butt/legs/arms/neck/chin.

Sure, there are pharmaceutical alternatives to exercise… substances that will make your body burn calories at an accelerated rate, but they are no substitute for using your own muscles to naturally do what that pill does nowhere as efficiently.

And yes… there are radical surgical procedures to physically limit how much food you can eat.

But why?

Why take these pills? Why go under the surgeon’s knife?

When you can simply CHOOSE to not eat these things in such great amounts that you become the size of a small Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon?

Society needs to give it’s collective head a shake and stop trying to blame others for our choices in life.

You can not sue Burger King for your own laziness.

The fat guy you see mowing his lawn – wearing shorts and a wife beater tank top – can’t seek damages from Dairy Queen because he can’t be bothered to get on an exercise bike.

In closing, let me make this abundantly clear, in case you are still confused:

Nobody other than you can blamed.

So stop trying to take kid’s Happy Meal toys away because you think they’re what cause childhood obesity – it’s the parent’s choice to buy them the little box of fats and carbs and then let the child sit around the house all day playing video games instead of running around outside for 20 minutes.

Take some fucking responsibility for your actions in life, and leave people alone who are trying to make an honest buck.

It’s A New Year: 2011

So… we’re one year away from the foretold 2012 Armageddon, and what are we all promising to do this year?

Lose weight? Be kinder to hobos? Cutting back on the kicking of puppies?

Sure… why not? They’re all worthy goals!

However, I lack such moral inspirations… so I’m going to list the things that I can probably handle pretty well in the year Two Thousand & Eleven.

Stormcastle’s List Of Resolutions:

01) Eat more nachos – specifically, nachos with bacon. Sadly, I lived the entirety of 2010 without making contact with nachos of any kind.

02) Have more sex.

03) Eat less asparagus.

04) Drink less beer.

05) Take more road trips.

06) Legalize my name.

07) Buy more Blu-Rays.

08) Avoid blatant corporate pandering.

09) Be less trendy.

10) See more movies.

11) Take public transit to save the environment.

12) Spend less time making fun of Stephen Harper.

13. Buy more things made in Canada.

14) Find new ways to make interracial exchanges.

15) Eat less Kraft Dinner/Macaroni & Cheese.

16) Appreciate the special people in my life more.

17) Spend less money on music.

18) Wear cleaner socks.

19) Spend more time in Second Life.

20) And finally… try to blog more.

There you have it, boys and girls of the world – the ways that I’m going to change myself in the first year of the 2nd decade of the new millennium.

Now… what are you gonna do?

Is Marriage Obsolete?

In a word?

Yes.

Now… I’m not saying that people should stop getting married – it’s still a dream that’s impressed upon the youngsters of the world by various sources.

I’m here to talk about whether or not it’s a practical dream.

To really understand marriage, you have to examine it’s roots in history i.e. why weddings were invented in the first place.

Getting married was both a religious statement and a control point in social engineering when the human population was much, much, much smaller than it is now – designed to guarantee a steady line of baby breeding to bolster the local populace.

I know the above disregards the personal feeling involved, and that’s somewhat on purpose since I was only summing up the institution of marriage and not the per-person reasons.

The personal incentive for marriage was somewhat selfish: the odds of finding another compatible male/female was greatly reduced in the days of yore… and the amount of time you had in your life that you had to find that person was roughly half what it is today.

So you really felt the need to lock down that one suitable mate as soon as you found them or, otherwise,  your lot in life would be somewhat pointless and your social standing would be somewhat awkward (and we all know feeling awkward kind of sucks).

Also, marriage was born eons ago when the concept of sexual equality was non-existent: marrying ultimately was contract between a man and his bride’s father that transferred ownership and control of the woman in question – which still has an anachronistic throwback in today’s world in the form of more ‘romantic’ men asking their girlfriend’s father for permission to marry.

In fact, in certain populations today, marriage is still very much no different that buying a goat or a used car (in those areas of the world us Westerners deem to be less civilized i.e. much of the African continent, broad swaths of Asia, and various Pacific island nations) and love has nothing to do with it at all.

Which brings me to this: what does love have to do with it?

Is it impossible to love someone without wanting to marry them?

Of course not… and to say so is pure brain atrophy caused by religious brain washing.

Remember what I said about marriage facilitating breeding? Can you guess what parties benefited from there being more people in ancient times?

Churches and governments – and both for the exact same reasons, and those reasons are the same today as they were back then… and are why both priests and politicians still embrace marriage: taxes.

The more people there are in any given area, the more the local government makes in tax revenue.

The more people there are in any given church congregation, the more the church hierarchy makes in tithing fees e.g. 10% of your income going to church coffers.

How else are politicians supposed to pay for strippers and gay prostitutes?

How else is the Pope going to afford to wipe his geriatric ass with satin and velvet?

Blooming populations pay for those… at least in theory.

However, that theory is clearly broken in the Western world: 50% of first time marriages end in divorce (67% of second and 74% of third marriages).

Why?

Options.

There are more people alive on this planet than ever… more than the total number of people that have ever lived and died on Earth prior to 1900A.D.

7 billion choices for every man and woman – and given the rise of same-sex relationships, that is entirely accurate.

Sure… someone who lives in Seattle, Washington may not immediately have access to a relationship with someone in Brisbane, Australia when they’re born worlds apart – but now that the planet is largely wired and connected via the Internet, what’s stopping those two people from connecting in Second Life or on 4chan?

Also… marriage used to be the only place where you could legitimately have sex with another person without society condemning you as either a pervert or whore.

But in today’s age, the sexual revolution has done away with that almost completely in the Western world.

Hookups, booty calls, and ‘friends with benefits’ are increasingly the normal way of things in the population younger than 40 years old.

I’ve had sexual relations with upward of 35 women in my lifetime – and I’ve only married one of them (ended in divorce 8 months later), and got engaged to another (lasted 5 years on and off).

The rest of the women I’ve been with? Zero interest in marrying – and in fact, with each subsequent relationship, have had less and less interest in a formal relationship.

And this is generally the experience expressed by today’s generation: the overall softening of the relationship boundary.

Sure, kids today still want to have relationships, but the function of that relationship is rapidly changing.

In a wave of teens where ‘third base’ is now anal sex, relationships are increasingly less about emotional solidarity and more for exploring sexuality in a controlled environment.

What would marriage have that would interest these kids?

Being stuck with the same person for eternity is a notion frightening enough to give them an asthma attack.

In that world, marriage is an abhorrent concept – something antiquated… something that their parents and grandparents did, like talk on phones attached to a wall with a wire.

It’s not something that’s realistic – except in the minds of naive teen girls who have been spoon fed the marriage idea by a lifetime of Disney Princess programming and other ‘timeless’ cultural inputs that proclaim themselves to be the sole bastions of romance.

Is romance dead?

Honestly, no.

Romance is alive and well – but it’s upgraded itself for a new world.

However, romance has also been perverted by backwards thinking morons like Stephanie Meyer who are trying to enslave teen and ‘tween’ girls to a religious standard that no longer functions in the real world with antiquated sexual identities i.e. women are not complete without a man to control them.

Thankfully, the perversion of romance is a self-contained blip in the overall societal scope.

As romance evolves to veer away from the pre-programmed goal of marriage, various product vendors and cultural groups are forced to re-evaluate their stance – often in dramatically different ways and to varying levels of success.

Product vendors like Harlequin Romance have had to rethink their ‘literary’ platforms in efforts to snag new, young readers to replace the old and rapidly aging readers of yesteryear that got off on the sight of Fabio’s bare chest.

Many internet dating sites are seeing an increase in their ‘intimate encounters’ sections and less popularity in their traditional dating lines.

Wedding planners and other people associated with the marriage industry are pushing more and more elaborate packages to turn up the pressure on those people who would get hitched in an effort to mold the couple’s view into seeing getting married as a social event instead of a romantic ideal – especially focusing on young couples in hopes of selling the concept of wedding as a more personally tuned high school prom.

Changing the act of getting married from an act of devotion between two people to a dressy pageant that eeks out the couple’s position in their social circles.

Which begs that question again: what has love got to do with it?

Not a damn thing.

Love has nothing to do with marriage.

When you love somebody, and they love you, why complicate things?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

If two people are in genuine love with each other, then they don’t really need an antique label that only advertises what their friends already know.

A marriage is only going to push couples toward debilitating amounts of debt – both on the front end marriage ceremony and the better than even odds of divorce lawyers.

Is marriage going to disappear?

I don’t know.

It’s hard to say, really – given the global scope of things.

Churches are struggling to stay relevant in Western society – but that doesn’t mean that countries like Canada, the United States, and the U.K. aren’t going to have a constant influx of immigrants from countries where religion is still a big influence on people… and therefore bringing scores of new people who will be interested in getting married by default belief.

My best guess is that marriage will never completely disappear.

However, I can say with absolute certainty that marriage will never again be as important to current and future generations than it was prior to the 1950′s.

Is that a bad thing?

Well… anything that keeps divorce lawyers from getting richer is a good thing, no?

I Must Protest!

(NOTE: Edited with actual protester numbers on 8/30/2010)

Folks, I find myself writing this post in dire protest of protesters – but only those who congregate in less than critical numbers, and those who protest events worlds away from their selected protest site.

Am I the only one who finds it rather silly that 25 people 35 people in Peterborough gather up to protest a woman being stoned to death in Iran?

Is there some ayatollah in Iran who’s going to read about this little chanting session from a handful of attention seekers and say “Great Allah’s Beard! Why haven’t we seen the error of our ways before this moment? How could we have been so wrong?”

The notion is so clearly retarded that it makes my mind spin.

Before you say it, I must say that I do understand the underlying concept: protesting here will attempt to put upward social pressure on elected government officials who may actually have some influence on the world stage.

However, these people really need to be honest with themselves.

Nobody cares.

It’s a sad thing, yes… but none-the-less true: the woman who is being stoned to death has absolutely nothing to do with anybody this far removed from Iran (excluding any immigrants of an Iranian origin).

Sure… there are any number of bleeding hearts out there that will donate $10 to a $100 to an organization like Amnesty International to appease their conscience – but then they’ll move on with their day, completely absolved of responsibility and forget the whole thing.

At the end of the day, this sort of protest is as effective as protesting the sun or the moon.

Even if you blow the number of protesters up a thousand times, odds are that politicians still won’t listen.

The recent G8/G20 summit and it’s attached protests would be a great example of that: thousands upon thousands of protesters/rioters/all-around hooligans descended on Toronto to scream, shout, break windows, and set police cars on fire in protest of… what? The global economy?

They did all this for the government agents and representatives on hand, right? The ones that blithely ignored them?

Or how about the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire – burning to death calmly in protest?

Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức did this in South Vietnam to protest how Buddhist were treated – but this only resulted in lip service from the ruling government at the time.

For there to be any effect on governmental bodies, the protesters have to be a real and legitimate threat – threatening to take away the government’s power to rule through the election process: in a democratic society, every eligible voter gets one vote… and if enough of those votes are possessed by people protesting, that is an immediate danger to the politicos in charge.

To understand this, we have to go back in time… back to the American Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a truly awesome sight and one of the most effective protests that I can think of – nearly half a million people descending on the nation’s seat of power.

It showed the powers in Washington that the black man was now united in it’s desire for equality… that there were now millions of voters in the U.S.A. that would throw their ballots in the direction of whatever party and presidential candidate that would give them the right to stand up with pride and dignity in CrackerLand.

And while the results were not immediate, they were tangible: a year later, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

For protests to work, you need to have both numbers… a commonality… and authoritative body that can be threatened.

This can be easily demonstrated in many European countries where the governments actually fear the people e.g. France: if the French government passes some legislative charter that doesn’t sit well with the average citizen, a large fraction of the populace will take to the streets for days or even weeks until the government backs down.

Somehow, the North American populace has lost this power – and I have to say that we are poorer for it, but it is how it is.

However, I’ve been talking purely about democratic society and not those elsewhere that aren’t quite that free.

Let’s zero in on Iran where that poor woman is going to be stoned to death.

Yes… in theory, Iran has open and freely voted democratic elections – but the caveat is that the country is a theocracy ruled by ayatollahs, and that makes the presidential and governmental processes purely symbolic.

As much as we would like to heap hatred on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he is merely the mouth piece of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a puppet (a poorly dressed one) that spouts the religious party lines when the ayatollah can’t be bothered with the small details.

So, honestly, what are 25 people in Peterborough going to do against that?

Especially considering the entire frakkin’ UNITED NATIONS can’t get Iran to do squat?

The majority of U.N. members don’t want Iran to have any sort of nuclear energy whatsoever – in case it results in the development of nuclear weapons – but Iran just fueled up it’s first nuclear reactor with the help of the Russians (who also tend to do whatever they like).

If the world’s most powerful authority (at least ostensibly) can’t get certain nations to change their ways, what chance do a few attention whores carrying signs and chanting rhyming mantras have?

The Lift Lock Cruise

Taken on August 7th, 2010.

Click through to watch in 720p.

Grace Lake: The Return

After 12-15 years, I returned to what used to be my home – the shores of Grace Lake in the northern reaches of Central Ontario.

The view from the beach was the same as ever with the eye’s attention drawn to the ‘large’ island in the center (which is actually not that big when you look at it from the side or at it’s rear flank).

However, from the shoreline to the main highway a kilometer away, it’s very hard to pick out the features that are so ingrained into my memories.

Gone are the open spaces where you could roam around at will – replaced with trees and bushes so thick that they’re all but impenetrable.

All of the landmarks that I saw every waking day for the first 12 years of my life (okay – more like 10 years since I was two years old when my mother shacked up with my stepfather) were nowhere to be seen, and let me tell you, that is an incredibly disorienting feeling.

You folks out there who have been born and raised in urban centers can’t possibly understand what that feeling is like since it can’t really occur to you because no matter how much the city changes around you, there will always be something to help you find your way: a bridge, a street, a statue, a park, a landmark municipal building… none of these thing ever go away.

Sure, your favorite stadium might be torn down… or that crappy shopping plaza down the street from your parents house might have been razed so that a new movie theater and restaurant can be put in it’s stead, but the fact is that the road it fronts on to will still be there and you’re not going to get lost because you can’t see the busted sign for the dilapidated bowling alley.

However, imagine going away to college, then university, and then getting employed overseas – a journey through life that takes you 15 – 20 years before you make that trek back to where you started from.

Now imagine the entire city simply having vanished with nothing but a few broken bricks strewn about to even say there had been anything there.

How lost would you feel? How stupid would you feel for not knowing which way was what?

That’s how I felt upon returning to Grace Lake after my family’s property had been sold, divided up, and remade to the new owner’s visions – and make no mistake: the property that my grandparents sold to former MPP Chris Hodgson measured in multiple hectares.

Hell, I had to walk a kilometer just to catch the school bus every morning (and yes, I’m aware of sounding like an old timer when I tell you that).

That very road that I walked along through sun, rain, sleet, or waist deep snow now has homes built along it – each with sizable lots.

The cottage resort with 30 slots for recreational travel trailers was completely gone… not that I expected it to be there.

I knew that the wealthy had come and built a series of million dollar cottages on the shores of Grace Lake, but I had no idea that those buyers would let the land go to seed – that they would plant so  many trees that you wouldn’t even know that there was a lake to be seen if you didn’t already know it was present.

I had to access the shoreline via a family friend’s property, and even then, it was only about 15 – 18 feet of undeveloped trees and sand… looking out onto a breath-taking body of water that drew me into it’s grasp: I couldn’t control myself and waded out knee-deep into the crystal clear water that seemed to welcome me like a long lost relative.

But all I had to do was look to my left and see the perversion of what had been all mine: docks and floating piers supporting pleasure craft and luxury speed boats – instead of a pristine sand beach longer than the length of a football field or soccer pitch.

However, we all know that time stops for no one – no matter how we wish for it sometimes.

Every step we make, every breath we take, and every time we blink our eyes only moves us further and further along time’s highway… and it’s a highway filled with speeding cars and trucks that only go one way – so there’s no point in trying to thumb a ride back towards the beginning (at least not yet).

To borrow a lyric from Gordon Lightfoot – and one that seems to apply here: Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

As you’ll see in the attached video, Grace Lake has no shortage of waves, and they just keep rolling in without stop… furthering the days and years until there will be nobody left that remembers a cottage resort named Birch Villa – which is a certainty.

All that remains is the faces and the names… of the residents… of the customers… of 30 years or so of seasonal visitors.

Sure – there are photographs tucked away in dusty attics all over this continent that show what the lakefront used to look like.

But how long are those going to last? A generation past those who actually camped at the lake?

How long before those pics get shoved in a trash can by some kid in the future who thinks they’re lame – and kids already think the outdoors is a waste of time as it is.

It’s not like they can hop in a car and visit what’s in the photos in the grand tradition of road trips of self-discovery.

If it’s not going to be there for me – who lived there 24/7/365 – then it’s not going to be there for them.

All that’s left for me is a fading road sign that bares my surname…

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…pointing towards a lake that you can’t see.

Video Blog: The F-35 Goes To Canada

My video companion piece for the previous blog entry.

Take a look at what you’re buying, Canada!

Available in 720p HD if you click through.

The Joint Strike Fighter

Canada has said yes to the F-35 Lightning II.

What’s of particular note here is the F-35 is billed as the Joint Strike Fighter – and the ‘Joint’ is applied in many ways when you look at it on a global scale.

For purely U.S. purposes, the Joint Strike Fighter moniker is based on the fact that it’s a ‘joint service’ aircraft i.e. that 3 branches of the U.S. armed forces will be flying it – the Navy (carrier adapted), the Air Force (base variant), and the Marines (vertical take off and landing variant).

When you step back to a macro scale view and look at how the F-35 applies to the global fighter scene, Joint Strike Fighter takes on a new meaning.

Eleven countries from around the world have contributed money to the development of the F-35: the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Singapore, and the United States (which contributed the lion’s share of spending).

The idea behind this venture was to supply all the countries involved with a common aircraft that would make joint operations between the stated nations more seamless – as well as allowing each state access to cutting edge technologies that they may not have been able to afford independently.

The end part of the previous paragraph is where countries like Canada specifically come in to play: Canada has nowhere near the tax base or military funding to develop a cutting edge fighter that could dominate other world player’s planes.

I don’t say that in an effort to kick my nation’s pride, but to only state an honest fact.

Also, there is some doubt as to whether our southern neighbors would take kindly to our designing and producing an air superiority fighter that could easily compete with their own: think back to Canada’s one proud moment in fighter design history (the vaunted Avro Arrow) and you’ll see how tragically influential the United States can be when it demands to be the kid on the block with the best toys.

Regardless, Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18s are quickly going to surpass their ‘best before’ date as they are all part of McDonnell Douglas’s first production run of the F/A 18 airframe – first flying for Canada in 1982.

In comparison, the United States has mostly moved to the newer F/A-18 Super Hornet – which has many performance upgrades over the Canadian legacy models, including better avionics and softer radar signature which are derived from being completely new planes as compared to modified airframes.

Yes, our CF-18s have been subject to regular maintenance and technical upgrades over the years – but for all intents and purposes, they are dinosaurs when compared to the rest of the G8 countries’ air force assets.

There are anecdotal stories that kick around the global fighter pilot communities of how Canadian Air Force staff had to make the rounds and beg for spare parts during our fighter jet commitments to U.N. and NATO missions in places like Kosovo and missions like Desert Storm – such as asking the Spaniards for spare batteries, etc.

How are we – as Canadians – to take pride in our military forces when they have to depend on the charity of other nations when we get into a pinch?

Does that make your heart swell with patriotism?

On second thought, forget I brought that up…

Canadian F-18s are aging and will soon have flown so many flight hours that their air frames will be considered unsafe to fly by technical standards.

We can not afford to send our top-notch pilots up into the air against threats to our global and national interests if there is a real chance that the jet will disintegrate under the stress loads that tactical maneuvers place upon a plane.

So here we are in 2010, nearly 30 years after we acquired our last fighter.

Why are tactical fighters important to Canadians?

What else will keep the newly ‘assertive’ Russian bombers out of our air space?

How else will we be able to fulfill our duties to NORAD, NATO, and the United Nations when it comes to rogue states?

Are we to just send along Good Luck cards from Hallmark?

No.

We need our boys to be in the thick of it, pulling Canada’s weight when it comes down to the nitty gritty – when some nation out there needs it’s ass kicked and priorities straightened out.

For Canada to have a voice in those kinds of matters, we need something to punctuate our sentences.

And nothing says that like a heat-seeking missile up the bad guy’s tail pipe.

We, as Canadians, are a peaceful lot and desire diplomacy over war – that’s a given… and a lot of us may not find spending $16,000,000,000 on 64 planes (including maintenance costs) to be a very good deal.

However, to paraphrase a very smart man, war is diplomacy when all other means have failed.

Sometimes, you have to stop using the carrot and start using the stick.

Wouldn’t you rather have a bigger stick than our potential adversaries?

The F-35 is that bigger stick.

It will be the first time Canada has owned a stealth fighter – one that is all but invisible to enemy radar… which is a very good thing when our young men are up in the skies against deadly forces – as any advantage in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat can be the difference between a pilot coming home in once piece and coming home in a body bag(s).

No, the F-35 isn’t the razor sharp portion of the cutting edge when it comes to fighter planes – that would be the F-22, and the United States isn’t sharing that aircraft with anybody.

Also, I must acknowledge the fact that the F-35 is years behind schedule and has saddled the U.S. Defense Department with numerous cost overruns – but in the end, the technology is still sound: whereas the F-22 returns a radar signature equal to that of a metal marble, the F-35 bounces back a profile of a metal golf ball  – which is still smaller than most birds.

Plus, the jet comes with cutting edge sensor suites, futuristic situational awareness systems for the pilot, and more weapons carrying capability than any plane of similar size – which leaves the F-35 as a solid No. 2 contender.

And this is where I must part ways with my preferred Canadian political party and the official Canadian Opposition – the Liberals.

The current federal Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, says that the Defense Department should have tendered the contract out to more manufacturers – instead of just handing it to Lockheed Martin on a silver platter… perhaps considering the No. 3 contender, the Eurofighter Typhoon.

From a strictly business standpoint, that would be a prudent idea – but when you take that business to the level of a nation state, there are many other things to consider: jobs for Canadians… wise investment of dollars Canada has already spent… how our armed forces will operate when hand in hand with other global players, etc.

Canada’s interest in the F-35 was initiated by the previous Liberal government when it was in charge of Canada’s future – to the tune of more that $100,000,000.

To simply walk away now would be a monumental waste of money, and a missed opportunity of epic proportions.

Iggy calls it a boondoggle, and is threatening to kill the contract the second the Liberal party takes power again.

I’m sorry, Iggy… but I’m going to have to step back and call you an idiot who would prefer to use a think-tank approach to solving skirmishes.

In this one instance, I have to painfully concede that the conservative mindset is correct: the candle with the biggest wick wins.

This blogger may not speak for all Canadians at all times, but I’m pretty sure I speak with one voice when I say this:

We want to win.

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See video of the F-35 here

What Is The Cost?

Hey, you!

Yeah… you over there in the automobile.

How you doing?

You’re good?

That’s cool. Can I ask you a question?

Yes? You sure you don’t mind?

Okay, great.

Here it goes…

Just who the hell do you think you are?

What right do you have to cause this:

What’s that?

You didn’t cause the mess in that photo?

I, sir/madame, sincerely beg to differ.

That machine you’re sitting in now lives on the petroleum that’s covering them there waves.

In fact, so do the 1,074,355,233.333 other cars on the planet – which I’m sure are not all as gas-sipping as your SUV is.

I wonder how many times you’ve hopped into that beast – driven a distance that would have taken you all of 5 minutes to walk – only to grab something that you could have easily carried home… a carton of milk, maybe?

I’ll tell you: probably 500 times, and I’m being very lenient with that estimate.

Why do you do this?

Because you feel entitled.

You feel that it’s your God-given right to drive that motorized monstrosity wherever you damn well feel like.

Well, it may be your right by the laws of your city/province/state/country – but that right doesn’t supersede the entire freakin’ planet!

No… you didn’t have a direct hand in blowing up that oil rig.

No… you didn’t have a direct role in the shoddy design of the well head that’s leaking 5,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf Of Mexico every day since the accident happened – and will continue most likely for several more months until British Petroleum can get a new drilling rig on site and bore a relief well to suck up the oil that’s bursting forth from the ocean floor.

But yes, you are responsible!

How?

Because of that God damned entitlement you think you have to drive around a parking lot for 10 minutes looking for a parking space!

B.P., Exxon, Shell, Petro-Canada, and all of the other ‘big oil’ companies drill holes in the planet so they can harvest crude oil that they will process and sell to you and all the other miserable car driving assholes like you in the form of rediculously-marked up gasoline at your nearest gas station.

And because there are so many of you who abuse your right to drive so often that you burn twice or three times the amount of fuel than you really need, Big Oil has to make more and more of those holes in the earth’s crust to get at that precious Black Gold – and a lot of those wells are drilled in places that are ecologically sensitive.

This oil spill is already larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

If emergency crews can not get the leaking under control inside the next month, the oil will span an amount of ocean equal to the state of California.

Think of all the wildlife that will die so you can pick up your kids from school when they could easily walk home in under 10 minutes.

God forbid little Suzie and her brother Jimmy burn off the calories from all the McDonald’s food you buy them.

Think of the sea turtles that are going to die in vast numbers just so you can use your bank’s drive through.

All of the ocean birds that are getting coated in the thick, viscous oil slurry created when the waves and crude oil mix together – making it impossible for them to fly.

Imagine all the coastal wetlands along the Gulf Coast that are now being inundated with oil, killing everything from frogs to alligators that live in those areas where fresh water meets salt water.

Think of all the fish that are breathing this crap into their bodies with every movement of their gills – and some of these fish are the ones you depend on being caught for food.

No.

You won’t think of any of those things because you honestly don’t give a shit.

Some talking head will list all the damages on the nightly news and you’ll shake your head at the images on your TV screen – but as soon as the news has moved on to the latest celebrity cheating scandal, you’ll have forgotten the environmental apocalypse that you’ve had a hand in.

You’ll probably get up and go out to your SUV so you can drive down to the corner store and buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

You know what?

Fuck you.

History Blog: War & The Nuclear Option

Since we’re on the cusp of the anniversary of W.W.II’s end in Europe, I got on a bit of a history kick for a while there in my video studio – though very little of it had to do with the war in Europe.

Okay.

Moving on now.

Standby for a forthcoming rant.

History Blog: 1,517

That would the number of people who died in the Titanic disaster 98 years ago – at time far removed from today’s information-powered world.

Yet, even today, the disaster ripples through society.

It gives us all a moment a pause – whether outright or in our thoughts – on a scale that only few events in history can.

9/11.

J.F.K.

The World Wars.

The public at large remembers these, unlikely to ever forget entirely – forming an emotional resonance and attachment that is hard to equal in history.

People don’t really connect to the death of Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson the way they have to the epic tale of Titanic’s demise.

Why is that?

What is that secret ingredient that allows the world to mourn something forever?

It’s the common factor – how events effect the common person in society that matters in these instances.

The majority of the people who died aboard Titanic were of common stock – 3rd class citizens during the Edwardian era where the tragedy took place – who were the working poor, or those who could at least break even.

Sure, there were a small cadre of tycoons who met their doom – some by choice, other by the rules of a polite and enlightened society (women and children first).

But by and large, the dead were comprised of people who had nothing – who were traveling to the New World in hopes of a better life.

A better life that never came.

Dreams, wishes, and lives extinguished due to the hubris of a society who thought iron could do them no wrong.

So emboldened by technology that they flew in the face of fate – practically daring it to strike them down – and Fate was more than willing to engage them, sending the largest ship that had ever been built (at the time) to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Of course, as with many human dramas, money was at the heart of this terrible misadventure.

Despite the sheer opulence of the floating palace that Titanic represented to it’s 1st and 2nd class passengers, Titanic was built for one purpose: transporting mass numbers of 3rd class passengers to North America.

Back then, the large ships were meant to make companies like White Star Lines and Cunard Lines money by fulfilling the dreams of the poor to start their lives over in the land of milk and honey – much in the same way cattle are moved around from place to place in today’s commodity markets.

In fact, the 3rd class passengers were referred to as ‘steerage’ in the common industry parlance of the day.

Moving these dreamers in bulk maximized profits for White Star, so the push was for bigger and bigger ships was good for business – without the foresight to see problems in the design work, or the will to spend extra money of safety measures beyond the headline-grabbing technologies.

Yes, Titanic had the revolutionary water-tight bulkheads that made the literature of the day declare her ‘practically unsinkable’ – which was a fantastic feature given the era – but it also had design failures that were either not foreseen by the same authors, or were purposely left out of the articles after insistence by White Star.

The biggest design failing that was incorporated into the Olympic-class ships was the pitifully small rudder when compared to the length of the ships – which meant the ships couldn’t corner worth a damn, and meant Titanic could not steer her way out of a collision with an iceberg on short notice.

Of course, this is knowledge determined over nearly a century of hindsight.

The painfully obvious – and hammered upon in James Cameron’s movie -  fact was White Star’s refusal to install the number of life rafts allotted for in Thomas Andrew’s designs due to the unseemly appearance of a crowded deck where the 1st and 2nd class passenger would stroll about.

I’m sure this wasn’t an explicit swipe at the 3rd class citizens – who were quite disposable in that era’s social hierarchy, despite them carrying the upper crust on their backs – but more in line with the hubris I mentioned earlier.

Like I said, Titanic and her sisters were built with catering to the 3rd class in mind – not to endanger or belittle them.

It’s a common fact that White Star’s accommodations for the 3rd class passengers were classier than the competition – almost worlds apart, in comparison.

The dining areas of Titanic’s steerage sections were staffed by friendly people and appointed quite well: tablecloths, porcelain dishes, good silverware, and a fairly robust menu given the social circumstances.

White Star depended on the 3rd class enjoying their experience on Titanic so much that the menu cards that those passengers ordered from were designed with postcards on the reverse side – so not only would the people write home to their relatives in the Old World about how happy they were with their treatment aboard ship, the postcard itself would be an advertisement of what a prospective 3rd class passenger could expect to dine on during their trip (a rather ingenious marketing ploy – even by today’s standards)

Even the 1st and 2nd class appointments of Titanic were secondary considerations to the development of better and faster ways to deliver 3rd class citizens to America’s shores – designed to give social sizzle to the endeavor so it would stir the public’s imagination.

A ploy to give even the poorest of people dreams of what it would be like to move to America and make their own fortunes – fortunes that would allow them to book a return trip one day in that very luxury that inspired them in the first place.

However, in the end, it was all for naught – at least for Titanic’s passengers.

The mountain of steel and iron was no match for an equally massive mountain of frozen water – especially at the speed that Titanic’s owner, whom was aboard the ship on it’s maiden voyage (Robert Ismay), had demanded she be going.

All 46,328 tons of the ship were heading to the bottom of the ocean as of 2:20 A.M. in the morning of April 15th, 1912.

Never to be seen again – at least, not until the wee hours of the morning on the 1st of September in 1985.

Since that date, Titanic’s wreck has become a popular destination for those who are curious and who have the technological know-how to dive the 2.33 miles to the bottom – risking their lives in the process.

For many of the people who have been to Titanic’s grave (or a seeking a way there), the rusting hulk represents the human failure to realize that we as a species do not rule the universe – but it also reminds us of the pettiness that our society is capable of… how easy it is for us to belittle those who don’t have the same advantages in life that we do.

Titanic’s wreck is also a time capsule – a time capsule that is slowly dissolving away in the frigid depths far from the eyes of the everyday people.

It’s a view backwards through time – even if it’s a rust-coloured view – towards a time where there were no computers, no internet, no cell phones, no video games… towards a time where mankind sought to fashion technological wonders out of the Earth’s raw materials with his bare hands and the strength of his biceps (there were no robots and complex hydraulic machines to assist in Titanic’s construction – each rivet in her hull was brutalized into shape my men swinging massive hammers).

It’s a time capsule that captures the immense hopefulness that existed in the world prior to World War One and the following Great Depression – what humankind hoped that the future would look like.

However, the wreck is also the tomb and grave marker for those 1,517 souls – and this lends the Titanic’s remains a complexity that interests people on a fundamental level… a paradox in attitudes.

The man who led the team who located Titanic’s wreck, Dr. Robert Ballard, is of the view that Titanic should be left alone as the grave that it is – instead of being poked and prodded (and plundered by some).

Others insist the wreckage be archaeologically cataloged before it completely collapses in on itself – which is entirely inevitable – and becomes nothing more than a rust stain on the bottom of the Atlantic.

It’s a moral battle suited to philosophers, but often boils down to money and the will to do something.

The money flows in two basic directions: RMS Titanic Inc. and the Russian Academy Of Sciences.

RMS Titanic Inc. is the legal owner of the wreck and has the right to salvage anything that it finds of interest from the wreck, sending the collection of over 5,000 artifacts (including a 17 ton section of the ship’s hull) around the world on tour – allowing people to visually connect with the history and tragedy of the Titanic for a modest fee.

The Russian Academy Of Sciences is the go-to agency for hiring submersibles able to dive to Titanic’s depths – of which there are few – and business is fairly brisk at the pace of up to five expeditions a year departing from St. John’s, Newfoundland in Canada (the closest major port to Titanic’s resting place).

There are other people and agencies that profit from Titanic – mainly media corporations that create documentaries for the masses, and of course, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox who released the 2nd highest-grossing film in history based on the Titanic story.

So, again, Titanic boils down to money.

How tragic.

And yet… amusing when you consider the futility.

In the end, I’m asking that you ignore all my meandering in this blog, and for you to just set aside a moment and try to take your mind to a place that can truly appreciate the human tragedy of Titanic for a few moments since there’s not a single Titanic survivor left to do so.

As the old Native American saying goes, something exists only as long as the last person who remembers it.

Those 1,517 people existed because I remember them – and I hope you will remember them, too.

For more Titanic facts, please consult the following links:

http://www.titanic-online.com/

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/

http://www.titanichistoricalsociety.org/