Bear with me; I’ll be brief as I can.

1.  If the NDP win a majority in 2015, Canada stands a good chance of becoming Mr. Harper’s worst nightmare: European.

Or more accurately, more social democratic, like Germany or Norway. Once Canadians experience that quality of life, that level of security, we will not want to go back and he knows it. 6 weeks of vacation, tax-paid post-secondary education, worker representatives on the Boards of highly successful companies, a rapidly greening economy – it would be like going from our current legal minimum of two weeks’ paid vacation to none. An NDP government has the potential to focus Canadians on places like Germany rather than following the U.S.A. It would actually be a coming of age for Canada, a maturing of our relationship with the United States.

For those who doubt me, remember that it was a Liberal/NDP minority that “managed to bring in many of Canada’s major social programs, including universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan and Canada Student Loans, and established a new national flag, the Maple Leaf. He also instituted the 40-hour work week, two weeks vacation time and a new minimum wage.”  Thank you Wikipedia.

2.  Based on recent polling, the NDP stand a decent chance of winning at least a minority next election.

3. There are a lot of people who don’t trust the NDP and/or would really love to see the Liberals riding high again.

4. Justin Trudeau is the only leader I can think of that will swing a lot of voters to the Liberals from the NDP.

5. The progressive vote is split once again, and Harper will win a second majority. Instead of becoming more European, we’ll become more American, including their declining pollution regulations, corporate accountability, government accountability, and middle class.

Trudeau seems a nice enough fellow, and no doubt very intelligent, etc, etc. But the party he would lead is a mess and they are not particularly progressive. We’re not going to see any significant change in direction. This is the party that signed Kyoto…and then did nothing about it. This is the party that stabbed Stephane Dion, their leader, in the back over his “Green Shift.” The Liberals are not going to green the economy.

And is the rot gone from the Liberal Party? I very much doubt it. There are still plenty of old guard and their views will not be ‘shifted’ by a young leader. Not overnight, anyway, and certainly not enough before the next election.

All that said, there are enough Canadians who get dreamy-eyed at the thought of the Liberals rising from the ashes – led by a Trudeau! – that  if he becomes the leader of the Liberal Party, he will split the vote and Harper will get a second majority.

So close, we were.

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.

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.’

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

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.

The more immediate point is that the OWS protesters are saying the same thing, albeit less coherently, as many prominent economists and most religious leaders: Greed is a vice, not a virtue. We cannot build a stable, secure, prosperous economy or society on a foundation of greed and corruption. The longer we ignore this fact, the longer the recession will drag on, all-the-while the banksters and their cronies collect fat bonuses.

While the OWS protesters may be driven out, the problem remains: Our economy and even our society’s morality at the upper levels is founded on the vice of greed. (I speak primarily of the US economy; other countries have not elevated greed to such a high level and are thus more stable.)

Greed is not good. Taking greed as a primary virtue, as the ideology of libertarianism (think Ayn Rand) and the elites of the United States have done, means bad things will happen, and unfortunately not just to the greedy. If greed is a virtue, then selflessness clearly can not be, as it is in direct conflict. To be greedy means to be selfish, and greed knows no bounds; there is no ‘enough’ for a greedy man.

The greedy don’t want to contribute to society, they want to line their own pockets. They don’t necessarily want to steal from you and me for themselves, but ultimately they must to feed their greed. Greed, like all vices, is addictive; there is no satiation point, no enough. Like any addict, when the easy fix runs out, they must take from whoever and wherever they can.

Picture the heroin addict: perhaps at first he can support his habit from his income, but soon the need for a fix destroys his ability to work and he must rely on theft to feed his addiction. Late-stage addicts will lie to and steal from anyone – friends, family, gullible good Samaritans.

There is not much difference in this way between a drug addict and a money addict. Bernie Madoff ripped off those close to him even though he already had billions. Greedy bankers will – just about did – destroy the economy for their fix, even though many were fantastically rich already.

So while you may mock the OWS protesters, remember this: An economy built on greed will collapse, probably viciously. And while many of the greedy will escape with their billions to safer places, you and I will be stuck here in the smoking ruins of a once vibrant economy. If the Occupy Wall Street does not accomplish its goal of rooting out greed, our future is bleak indeed.

The usual argument is fear of economic collapse if the banks are allowed to fail, but that seems backwards. Rewarding incompetent or foolish investors harms the market. And how much truth is there to the bank failure fearmongering, anyway?

Look at it this way:

Imagine all the banks that loaned money to Greece are allowed to suffer the consequences of their bad decisions and some even go bankrupt:

• The average Greek will still owe, and be expected to pay, his or her mortgage, credit card debts, car loans, etc.
• The average Greek small and large businesses will still owe, and be expected to pay, their various loans, accounts payable, etc.

Goldman Sachs, which orchestrated a financial sleight of hand that enabled Greece to hide its extravagant ways.

Also aiding Greece’s debt habit were some of Europe’s biggest banks. By 2004 it was widely known that Greece had cooked its books and that its financial condition was not nearly as sound as advertised. Still, major banks like France’s giant BNP Paribas and Germany’s Commerzbank bought billions worth of the ill-fated bonds.

In other words, Europe’s big banks and pension funds bought Greek debt, ignoring the risks, because it was profitable.

There are three (3) blindingly obvious, common sense reasons why the U.S. would be very foolish to allow corporations to repatriate profits at a bargain basement tax rate. At least, they seem quite obvious to me, but if someone more knowledgeable than I would correct me, I’m all ears (and a fair bit of forehead these days, too).

[The idea is that U.S. corporations could bring home foreign profits and pay 8.5% - or less - versus the 35% they would normally pay.]

1. Last time, they just spent it on themselves. That is, the last time this was tried, corporations used the money to buy back their own shares and reward their CEOs with fat bonuses. There are lots of (extremely rich) people claiming “This time will be different, really,” but…fool me once and all that.
2. Corporations already have very large cash reserves and are not spending. And why would they, if there’s no demand for their product? Give them more, and why would they spend that?
3. It creates a perverse incentive to outsource jobs, because the tax rate on foreign profits would be so much lower than on U.S. profits. Allowing these corporations to ‘bring home’ the profits merely encourages them to send more jobs overseas.

The problem with non-violent resistance is that your opponents must be capable of both shame and empathy.

The financial elite of this world have neither.

So, without rioting or non-violence, what is left?

In my view, this is quite an interesting point when it comes to how we fix the corruption that has infected the highest levels, from greedy CEOs to the crooked politicians they buy. If the people at the top truly have a different morality – perhaps due to their inability or unwillingness to feel certain human emotions – then how do we defend ourselves and restore civil society?

Because they don’t care if you die. They are indifferent to it, as long as their position is maintained. Given this, nonviolence could still work but would require most of us working together and still a lot of people would die. I say it would work because I believe there are not enough sociopathic individuals to run any sort of economy (i.e., they need us or no food, never mind yachts or butlers), and they would constantly be trying to steal each other’s stuff. They’re sociopaths.

At the same time, to defeat them nonviolently we would have to shut down the means of production. It’s a reverse John Galt: Let the Job Creators flip their own burgers, make their own cars, pick their own fruit, put out their own house fires. Clearly it would never work; they need people to willingly or otherwise do all these things for them.

If we’re no longer willing, then conscienceless people must force us by any means necessary – they’re not concerned about the morality of their means. So nonviolent protests of any sort – mass demonstrations, strikes, rallies – would be put down. Lots of people would be killed, unless they could hide.

At what point would these sociopaths stop? I’m sure many in Syria and Egypt are wondering the same thing. You might as well ask the greedy man, How much is enough?

Given this, how do we right the ship? Because sociopaths can’t stop themselves.

Much blame is being placed on the thugs doing the damage. Fair enough; the idiots are wrecking things that others spent their lives building. That said, the rest of us have to recognize that when people grow up as self-entitled prats with very little hope of achieving a better future (social mobility is quite low in England), well, they may ‘act out.’

Some commentators have complained that these thugs have “weak moral fibre,” or are otherwise fundamentally defective. They may well have weak moral fibre, but moral fibre is something you develop over time by doing things that require moral fibre, and by observing that being honest, hard-working, and contributing to society is valued. It is quite clear by the behaviour of those at the top that this is not how you get ahead in our society; the ethic of those in power is “If you can get away with it, it’s okay.”

These low-level thugs are simply showing the brutish, crude manifestation of the same behaviour their ‘betters’ have been exhibiting for years.

Here’s a decent description of why this is happening, courtesy of strongmince on Reddit:

The looting, attacks on property and police are an entirely predictable and to an extent justifiable reaction to decades of rising deprivation, poverty, unemployment, lack or very poorly maintained social housing, police brutality, racial profiling and shit schools in many deprived areas in London with variable amounts of “regeneration” (read gentrification) there to attempt to fix these problems. In general the governments attacks on the youth in England (abolishment of education maintenance allowance, absurd rise in tuition fees) and attacks on the working class (harsh austerity measures finishing off what Thatcher started including privitisation of large chunks of the public sector, continual erosion of any remaining labour movements, erosion of labour rights, casualisation of work, underemployment, unemployment, the near constant spectre of crisis, poorly defined class enemies who seem immune to any attack, huge rises in energy prices, increase in VAT etc…..) need to also be considered. All coupled together, a disaffected youth with little to no future prospects, brought up in poverty living in supposedly one of the most prosperous areas of western Europe were given an opportunity to air their rage with little to lose.

Putting innocent people in danger is a big fucking no-no in my book (sorry insurrectionists.. j/k), but what I’ve seen seems to corroborate with my friends and others accounts of events that these fuckers are a minority. This is not a homogenous group of people with one motive, its a mixture of motives, opportunities and emotions. Denouncing all as acting like one generic “criminal” ignores the very reasons that will cause this to flare up again. Stating that these kids are “politically unaware” is ridiculous when you consider the items in the list above are all fucking political, they exist and are real things being felt directly by human beings.

Anyway, living in an area thats been under attack tonight, I’ve been running around helping friends and family who have been stuck getting home from work, scared etc.. so apologies for any incoherence.

The Guardian has some good background, too. A key quote:

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

The middle class is the foundation of economic and political stability. The extremes of rich and poor are both destabilizing, the former because their greed is limitless and the latter because they have no hope.

UPDATE:

Interesting the online response. Lots of people saying that the rioters are ‘yobs’ and essentially unredeemable. They don’t suggest a solution, but presumably it would be extermination or walling them off so they don’t harm the rest of us. I wonder if they feel the same about the bank CEOs who crashed the world economy in 2008? It would be easy to make the same argument that some of those banksters are irredeemable sociopaths.  In fact, as much damage as these ‘yobs’ are doing, the yobs running the world economy into the ground have done far more by many orders of magnitude.