Go Local, Go Sustainable, Now

There has been furious debate recently over the whole F-35 fighter jet program – it’s beginning to look like a millstone around Stephen Harper’s neck – but the real issue is this: Why are we buying it in the first place?

We should rethink what we expect of our military before spending more billions on military hardware. The subs were an expensive joke the UK played on us, and the F-35s have the potential to transfer many billions of Canadian taxpayer dollars to foreign military contractors, especially American.

1. Is the *primary* duty of the Canadian Armed Forces to defend the country against invasion? Of course.
2. Does the Canadian Armed Forces currently have the capability to carry out its primary duty? I think not.
3. How much does the F-35 (or any other fighter jet) enhance the Forces’ primary duty to defend the nation? Approximately 0%.

Why 0%?

• If a large nation invades, our 65 jets would be overwhelmed and annihilated very rapidly.
• If a small nation invades, we could drop grenades from Twin Otters; there are no small nations close and none with aircraft carriers, so they would be invading by ship with no air cover.*

Is there any way for the CAF to fulfil its primary duty of defending Canada against invasion, without relying upon the goodwill and military might of the United States of America? Missiles, surely:

1. Cruise missiles cost ~600K each; other missiles cost considerably less, but let’s say 500K/missile on average
2. The F-35 program was to cost 25 billion dollars, though certainly would have been much higher
3. 25,000,000,000/500,000 = 50,000 missiles

That’s a lot of missiles; that would repel most boarders, I would think.

What’s more, unlike jets or aircraft carriers, we can certainly build missiles in this country, especially if we’re building 50,000 of them. That means the entire $25 billion would stay in Canada and provide the Canadian Armed Forces the ability to defend the country.

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* It should be clear I’m being facetious here; obviously the Otters would have be armoured.

For those who still don’t understand, I don’t take the threat of invasion by a small nation seriously. A small nation would have a long way to travel and with how many troops at once? In the low tens of thousands in ships with no air cover…it’s not a winning proposition. A few well-placed missiles or torpedoes and their entire invasion force goes down.

I’m on the West Coast of Canada, where temperatures have been unusually cool: 4-5 C below ‘normal’ for weeks now. I used to live in Ontario, where temperature records are currently being blown away: 8, 9, even 12 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record.

Sitting in 6 C and rain sure makes the situation in central Canada look pretty good right now. Rather than 16 C, imagine 24 C – what a great March! However, think about this:

What if records are shattered in the summer by the same amount? For example, rather than a very uncomfortable (Toronto gets very humid) 37 C, what if the temperature hits 47 C? When I grew up in Ontario, very few people had air conditioning because it just wasn’t worth it for three hot and humid weeks in the summer. But 47 C is in another realm entirely.

The extreme temperatures have other consequences, too: thunderstorms – in Spring! – move from unheard of to likely. And how about farmers? There’s a lot of great crop land in Ontario, but a heat wave of 47 C will kill almost everything currently commercially grown. One week of weather like that could cost the entire Ontario crop.

We’re in for it now; the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mean that weather extremes are the new normal. Let’s see how we ‘adapt.’

Adam Goldenburg makes the very convincing argument that the real target of bill C-30, the bill that would give the government sweeping new powers to monitor Canadians’ internet activity, are judges. And then Reddit user itsthebishhop made this comment:

Contempt for Parliament, the Constitution, the Charter, and the judiciary; yet always talking about ‘law’ and ‘order’. It’s their ‘law’ and their ‘order’.

And that got me thinking to all the groups this government has targeted to shut down or silence, and it became clear he goes after those who could potentially check his power. And that is truly scary.

• Judges, as described in the linked article
• Scientists and even science, as in the muzzling of Canada’s scientists and completely ignoring climate change
• Parliament, through prorogation, deliberate attempts to sabotage the committee system, etc
• Media, through limiting access and questions that may be asked, closing the CBC, backing Sun TV, etc
• Other parties, through cutting the per-vote funding, etc
• And, of course, the internet, through laws like this, and therefore ultimately the citizens who use the internet to communicate…and organize

Ron Paul stands for a lot of things that I think are nutty, like his untried libertarian utopian ideas. Under normal circumstances, I would never consider urging my American neighbours to vote for a libertarian.

These are not normal circumstances.

The US has reached a point of political-economic crisis – you cannot separate the two – and as a result the responses are limited and non-ideal. In a crisis you must take decisive action or events may overwhelm you – they may anyway, as a crisis is by definition somewhere between bordering on chaos and all-out anarchy.

At this point, the urgent need is to neutralize the power of corporations and the rich over the US government or nothing else will matter. Yes, climate change, peak oil, the current depression, and so on are all serious crises. The sad fact is that they all exist to the extent they do largely because of corruption in the United States government.

Until this corruption is rooted out, there is little chance of serious action on climate, on oil dependency, or of the US and world economy recovering. If you disagree with me, please show me what President Obama has done that will make a real difference with these crises.

You can trade an Obama for a Romney/Gingrich/whoever and things will get worse faster, but either way the crises we face will not be addressed.

Ron Paul has some scary ideas and libertarianism is untried utopian lunacy, but because of the extent of the corruption in the US government, he’s the only candidate who has a chance of stopping the American slide – and they’re going to drag a lot of us with them – into a police-state plutarchy.

I don’t say this lightly; electing Ron Paul is potentially a dangerous step but far less dangerous than hoping for change from Obama or any of the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul is anti-empire, anti-police-state, and pro-Constitution, which Americans desperately need to remember matters before it’s too late.