Draw the correct lessons from Ottawa

Last week in Canada generated world-wide headlines for the dramatic attack on an honour guard soldier at our national war memorial and subsequent armed attack on our House of Parliament (seat of the Federal government in Canada).  Twenty-four-year-old Corporal Nathan Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Hamilton ON) was shot from behind and killed as he stood with an unloaded rifle at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a security guard (again unarmed) at the doors of the Centre Block was wounded trying to deflect the gunman as he charged into the building.

This was pretty crazy for Ottawa, but it was in fact the second attack on a member of Canada’s Armed Forces by a Canadian Muslim convert in that one week; see my previous post. This was another act of terrorism, and we have Sgt-at-Arms Kevin Vickers (head of Parliamentary security) to thank for putting the Ottawa shooter out of our misery.  We also still have PM Stephen Harper to thank for calling it the Islamist terrorism that it is.  There seems to be some opportunistic bill jamming-through, but I’ll leave that out of this.

Can we expect more of this sort of thing?  I would say “yes”, and it’s good that a lone-wolf (who could easily have done much more damage) was the first attack, to shake up security arrangements.  The vehicular attack on Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent earlier that week is the sort of thing you can’t really prepare for, except by paying more attention to your surroundings. I stayed away from this until the dust settled a bit, and now I have some observations.

Firstly, more preventative detention of people who express an interest in “jihad” is in order.  It’s all very nice to make lists of potential bad apples, but when they start killing people that practice is obviously deficient.  You “like” Islamic State on Facebook?  Go to jail for 10+ years for terrorism/sedition.  Yes, sure it might “drive them underground” (too many quotes in this paragraph already) but if you’re not going to stop them when they are operating out in the open that hardly makes a difference. 

Secondly, our security needs some tweaking but mostly on the enforcement side.  Canada is not completely clueless (at the pointy end at least) about the threats we face, but there must be political will to do something about it, and I must say from a domestic political standpoint, the current party/leader combination is the only one which looks like it might have the stones for that.   The Guards at Buckingham Palace carry loaded weapons and there has been talk of arming our sentries, but that won’t happen here due to jurisdictional issues. I have thought about this a bit over that last several days, and on balance it’s better it stays that way provided that the local police will guard them, as is happening now. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Now we know.  If I were running things I would give the sentries a loaded mag so that they are not helpless, but still leave the cops as the first line of response.

Thirdly, media and public reactions.  This implies no conspiracy, but I am going to very cynically say that these attacks are timed very well for the Canadian Armed Forces.  The years in Afghanistan are behind us and the military was largely losing relevance to the public, dissipating the high regard in which they were held.  Defence funding was slashed back to levels not seen since the “peace dividend” Decade of Darkness of the 1990s and it was obvious that even the supposedly CAF-friendly Conservative government had lost sight of the necessity to maintain what you have.  The Canadian public has rallied around Cpl Cirillo in particular, (WO Vincents’s murder was far less telegenic) and two attacks in short order have brought the home-grown jihadi problem into focus a bit more.  I have no illusions that forceful direct action will result from this, but it’s better than nothing.

Media response was well handled overall, but I feel that the hand-wringing about 22 October being “the day that changed everything in Ottawa” was overdone.  That day was in fact September 11^th 2001, and it changed everywhere else in the Western world that day too; a sense of perspective is in order here.  It’s now the week after and things are going back to modified normal just as they should be.  It’s time to stop reacting and start acting against the threats within our borders.  If these fucks want to go to Syria to get killed, let them go and cancel their passports as soon as they clear a European airport.  Pressure on them will push some in that direction, and if they don’t leave they go to jail.  I don’t give a shit if you were born here or not; if Canada isn’t good enough for you get out and don’t come back.

If it squawks like a duck, and kills like a duck…

First of all, my condolences go out to the family of the Canadian Armed Forces member killed yesterday, as do my hopes for the speedy recovery of the one who was injured.  

On Monday 20 October 2014 (yesterday as I write this) two CAF members were intentionally stuck by a car in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu QC, home to a military training facility.  One, as mentioned above, has now died of wounds suffered in this attack.  The driver then sped off, but fortunately there was a police cruiser on the scene (how stupid was this guy?) which gave chase.  After the offender (suspect my ass) rolled his car into a ditch he (apparently) came out with a knife and (fact) was shot dead by police. 

Good riddance to bad rubbish I say, but the most significant part of this whole affair was how the Canadian government handled it.  Immediately after the events, the Prime Minister (himself) called this a probable terrorist attack.  Turns out he wasn’t pulling it out of his ass, as he had been briefed by our National Security organizations about the perp’s background. This guy was a local convert, and had been gobbing off on Facebook or whatever about “going on jihad”.  Since Daesh put out their fatwa on everyone in the Western world, this guy must have felt he was doing his bit.   

It will be interesting to see how the CAF handles this, as I would argue that the member was killed in action.  The Americans by contrast bent themselves into pretzels to call Nidal Hassan’s jihadi killing spree at Fort Hood in 2009 “workplace violence” despite him yelling “Allah Akbar” when he started it.  This refusal to face and admit reality is a leadership failure. 

There will be more of this sort of thing, and in many cases (like this one) they will be essentially unpreventable since we don’t live in a police state.  I will accept that risk, and it’s made easier knowing that PM Harper, whatever his other faults, “gets it” and won’t pretend the problem away.  So, thumbs up to the police officer who settled this guy’s hash, and to our PM for not soft-pedalling the event or the general threat.  

Singularity-minded

What is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain is that there are far more people in this world than any plausibly functional model of our “economy” has a use for.  There are only so many “McJobs” and robots, as the linked article re-hashes, will take most of those. 

The question from there is what to do about that.  I do try in these posts to propose solutions, not merely rail against the myriad of “wrong” in the world, but this one poses a problem to even come up with something which would work, regardless of how unlikely it is to be implemented due to standard human failing and venality.  Here we go anyway.

The population problem is the biggest one.  Back when everything we ate came from family farms and c.80% of the population was occupied doing this, there were c. 1 billion people on Earth.  Now (in developed countries) significantly less than 10%  of the population is engaged in producing our food.

This doesn’t cover all “productive” forms of work, but it does bring the productivity gains of modern technology and organization into focus.  During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution everything was done by hand in a very inefficient but manpower-intensive fashion, resulting in rural depopulation as people rushed to the factories for work.  As time went on and clever people designed labour-saving machines to do unskilled work, those least talented were thrown out of work.  This process began in the 18^th Century and continues today.  Remember that women weren’t part of the workforce at that time (although children were); now we have twice as many people we need to find jobs for.

This frames the problem, but the only two solutions I see popping out of this are:

·         Remove the surplus population, or;

·         Smash our technological base and get us all back making buggy whips or subsistence farming.

It is to be noted that the second option will bring about the first, but without the productivity to make things work; in other words, complete civilizational breakdown.

Nature may soon do something about there being so many of us; Ebola is making its’ way out of Africa for the first time.  The ability of mass international rapid transit to vector diseases worldwide first really got attention during the SARS breakout in 2003, and that had nothing like Ebola’s death rate, albeit it spread even more easily.  Ebola comes in different variants with differing lethality, symptoms and incubation periods so we’ll be dealing with this for a while.  Just imagine if SARS came back too…

Getting back on track, we are in what I’ll call a “luxury-scarcity period”.  It is conceivable to feed everyone, and with very local and temporary exceptions this happens.  If you live in a warm climate (Africa, for example) that is most of what you need to survive; good thing too, given the limited to non-existent social and community housing expenditure there. While there are many people in Western societies who struggle to make ends meet, the number of actually homeless are statistically barely significant and are mostly people with serious mental problems who are essentially un-employable. 

The real question if things don’t completely collapse is: what do we do with the jobless?  I do not believe that there is any “self-evident right’ to anything produced by someone else, although many disagree.  My test of these ideals is how much effort it takes to achieve these “natural” rights.  In this case, it takes the coercive power of a government to make people pay taxes, and it has been always thus.  Breathing is about the only thing that I’d call free, everything else requires somebody to do some work.

“Tax the rich” comes out a lot, usually from people who can’t count past 100 but occasionally from hypocrites like Warren Buffet.  That will not work for the fairly obvious reasons that taxing something makes less of it, and that there isn’t that much money held by “the 1%” compared to what a country spends in a year.   Next year that money won’t be there as the (formerly) rich are confiscated from and those smart enough to see it coming (most of them or they wouldn’t be rich in the first place) will relocate.

There goes the Marxist-Anarchist solution, what next?  Expansion of the current welfare state would seem to be out as that “Scandinavian” model has proven itself unsustainable in the last 20 years.  Shorter work week?  The thing that this glosses over is that there is only so much money in a business to pay people.  If there are 40 person-hours per position and you cut that into 2 chunks, each of them will only be getting paid for 20 hours. 

What all of these ideas have in common is a lowering of living standards. Less money means less stuff, full-stop.  I’ve worked part-time, and it’s great for students or stay-at-home parents who want to generate some more household income while the kids are in school. It was a a time in my life when I had no responsibilities beyond myself and I most certainly could not have supported a familiy on that income. Time is traded for money in pretty-much any type of transaction you can name; the value of that time is highly variable, but however you slice it, ΔTime = Δ$.

Any kind of post-scarcity geek (or other) utopia is based on cheap and abundant energy.  With enough cheap (clean) energy you can do almost anything you want, and paying the heat and light bills of non-productive members of society becomes plausible then..  I am partial to the Culture books of Ian M. Banks as far as post-scarcity sci-fi is concerned, but that construct only works because nearly omniscient AIs are running everything.  The suspension of my disbelief for that is far less of a strain than to assume that people with no profit motive (Star Trek Next Gen) could create and sustain such a thing.

In case you somehow missed it, I am a small-r realist, and I do NOT believe in the perfectibility of Man.  “Pretend to pay them, they pretend to work” didn’t work for Communism so any version of confiscatory taxes intended to level the playing field will have a similar effect.  It takes money (or equivalent) to get stuff done, so I remain at a loss as to how to deal with computers taking our jobs.  It happened to me once already, but the consolations were another job and the fact that the program did a far worse job than I had.  These consolations will be in increasingly short supply.

The irony is that developed countries are just that, developed, and their decreasing birthrates are in step with increases in productivity with Japan leading the way in both.  These countries will not remain prosperous if they have to take in millions of unemployable (because there are no jobs) immigrants (Japan again, but an exception to this).  That is another issue, and panicky diseased epidemic migrants could scupper us all even before the robots do. 

Katie, bar the door.

There has been so much happening and all of it at a fair rate of change that I have had a hard time coming up with a coherent idea for a post here, but I’ll take a stab at it today.
Right now Da’esh is on the cusp of taking Kobani (spelling varies), a Kurdish village on the border with Turkey. Turkey has voted to take military action against Da’esh, bur are sitting on the border watching Da’esh overrun the town while preventing Kurds on their side of the border from getting through with reinforcements and resupply.

Turkey of course has a long violent history with the Kurds, but by their present actions they are ensuring that this continues. There are no simple solutions in that (and many other) part of the world, but if you want to move forward you have to change. Keeping the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” even under these circumstances is a sign of almost pathological hatred, and no good will come of it.
What I would do in Erdrogan’s place is push Da’esh out of a sizable chunk of the area contiguous with Iraqi Kurdistan and encourage as many Kurds as possible to move into it. This would give the Kurds what they want, rid Turkey of its’ more restive Kurdish population (non-violently) and put a stick in Assad’s spokes which Turkey is anxious to do. Looks win-win to me, certainly in relation to what they’re doing now.

The last seismic shift in boundaries in the region was WW1, this is the next one. There is no more “Syria” nor for that matter really any “Iraq”. The resulting vacuum (from failed revolution in the former and failed nation-building in the latter) will be filled by something, as Da’esh is doing right now. The one place where nation-building has a chance (few sure-things in this life) is with a self-identifying group, and the Kurds are one such. This sort of chaos doesn't have to benefit only the bad apples, but force will be required and eggs will be cracked for any such omelette. Mixed food metaphors, but you get the idea. I don’t see a good outcome to this as the will to take the action required is lacking in those who have the power and resources to make it happen.

Speaking of political will, we also have Ebola to deal with. Liberia is on the verge of total collapse, although with its’ recent history that was never too far off at the best of times. These local tragedies would be of scant concern for any other than humanitarian reasons were it not for a confluence of two features of modern life: air travel and Political Correctness.

It is abundantly clear that this is a deadly disease with a c. 40% mortality rate even if you get proper care, worse if you don’t. It’s no SARS in terms of transmission, but in the later stages of incubation all body fluids are vectors, and with fever, nausea and diarrhoea the main symptoms, there are many opportunities if you aren’t quarantined.

This is precisely what needs to be done: quarantine the region. That will be impossible to 100% enforce of course, but without an attempt it will spread everywhere. It has shown up so far in the USA, Spain and now Macedonia, and that’s just what I can remember with certainty right now. Screening measures are going into place but are easily spoofed by people taking standard anti-inflammatory meds or by people lying about their point of origin.

Some airlines have stopped going to these countries, but unless all of them do it won’t stop it. This is frightening enough, but it gets worse. Think panicked mass migration. "Katie, bar the door" indeed, but you won’t like what it would entail to do so. Positive enforcement of borders while ensuring zero entry of desperate and possibly sick people cannot end well and WOULD necessitate lethal force. The only thing which might dissuade someone facing something like Ebola from going where they think they’ll get better medical care is them knowing that they’ll be killed if they try it. What (Western) politician is willing to make THAT call?

Yeah, we’re screwed, but no change there. I may be laying in more emergency food supplies, but if I’m going to do so I’d best do it soon. Likely it won’t come to that here, but even if not I’d best lay in some ammo in case these Da’esh fanboys try to take a crack at us in our “bedrooms”.