Sounds like a case for Unconditional Surrender Man!

Tamils in this country have been camping out on Parliament Hill for the last few weeks, and the political angles on this just get more and more acute. There is nearly zero chance that our current government will change its’ policy toward the LTTE, but India and the UN are making noises now. Canada has no pull in that part of the world, so I leave it to your imagination the reaction of any Sri Lankan government officials to us telling them how to run things.

I get annoyed when we try to tell other countries (that aren’t attacking us or our allies) how to run their affairs. I may be some Westphalian dinosaur, but I wouldn’t stand for China (for example) telling us how to treat Quebec. If things are so bad that you think you need to intervene, e.g. massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc., send in the army. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, shut up.

As already mentioned, the Canadian Government is staying out of it, which is the only appropriate action. What I’d like to do here is simply put the political manoeuvring in context with the military situation.

War is messy; things get broken and people get killed. The (many, anyway) Tamils were happy as clams when their side was sticking it to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and they’d carved out an autonomous zone in the north. Now the underdogs are getting their asses handed to them and Tamilland (or whatever) is being rolled up and pulled back by the government.

Napoleon said something to the effect that in war the Moral is to the Physical as is 3 to 1. This is the same man who used the levee en masse to create the “Grande Armée” so I hold more with the old saw “Quantity has a Quality all its’ own” for him. In modern conflicts, Information Operations (IOs) are designed to work the morale angle, and the UN is helping the Tamils as much as it can in this regard.

The UN is claiming 6500 dead and 13000+ civilians killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, but then refuses to say from whence came these figures. It’s not quite “Highway of Death” in scope, but this has no proof and is quite possibly arbitrary. The great thing about making up numbers is that you can make up whatever ones you want to.

What does have the ring of authenticity to it however, is what the ubiquitous “rights groups” are claiming:

International rights groups have accused the government of shelling densely populated civilian areas in the war zone and accused the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields. Both sides deny the accusations.

Asymmetric warfare pretty much guarantees that both of these things will happen. The weaker side will use any advantage it can get, and the stronger side will try to kill the opposition wherever they hide. Again, the Laws of Armed Conflict (LoAC) have no problem with attacking a military target, wherever it may be as long as reasonable force is used. There is a lot of grey in the idea of what’s “proportional”, and the media really doesn’t like any sort of area weapon like artillery or bombing in a civilian area.

Here is the disjoint between the military and political imperatives. Politically the omelette has to be made, but rare is the (democratic) government that can take the media/political heat that will result from all the eggs that need to be broken by the military to that end.

I have no doubt that the Sri Lankan field commanders are not trying to kill civilians, and will avoid it where possible. I am equally certain that the LTTE are willing to incur some friendly deaths to make the security forces look bad. This is used to get the media, certain organizations, etc. on your side and/or applying pressure to the other side. The LTTE are on the ropes, and after all the fighting, bombing and bloodshed in Sri Lanka since this started, the government has a chance to knock the military threat on the head.

The time for political considerations to take the forefront is after your military objectives have been met. There is no ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres (at least not big or official ones; these fights can be nasty), it’s just a fight to the finish. The fighting will stop the day that the LTTE surrender, not when they need a breather to recover. At least that’s the direction things are going, and it’s the way I’d do it.

Yo ho, it's a Pirate's death for you.

There have been a lot of electrons forcibly arranged over this topic, but I've noticed a discrepancy between the media's hand-wringing and the comments of the (apparently) general public commenting on it.

I don't think I go out on too long a limb when I say that most people don't care what happens to pirates. I saw some analogies to attempted home invasion, and armed persons bent on committing illegal acts are subject to potentially violent interdiction under the laws of any country.

It is therefore a bit disquieting ('tho not surprising) to see all these clowns worrying about what the pirates will do in retaliation for three of them being killed while holding a sailor hostage at gunpoint. Do we not punish criminals because we're afraid of what their compatriots will do? Sure there's a bit of that on a local basis in a lot of places. In a lot of northern Canadian towns I've heard anecdotally that the minimal RCMP detachments have a live-and-let-live arrangement with the local organized crime figures within certain recognized behavioral boundaries, but this is certainly NOT policy.

People have police and military so that they can be protected from various threats. The idea that we are afraid to deal with a problem to prevent it from getting worse does not appeal to taxpayers, or, in this case, sailors and the companies that own the ships. Bending over and taking it doesn't make thugs go away, they just send their friends to get some too.

.50 cal HMGs (Browning M2 or DShK) are neither rare nor particularly expensive (ranging from big plasma TV to used motorcycle in real-world money terms) and one of those fore and aft on any ship and you can sort out any pirates you're going to encounter in the Gulf of Aden. I'm sure there are legal implications to the possession of these weapons, but if you shoot up a bunch of armed pirates on the high seas you are better tried by 12 than carried by 6. I'm not sure, but I think it being the high seas and all you can defend yourself as you see fit. If anyone knows for sure one way or the other, fill me in.

"Shoot on Sight" would do the job nicely, but in absence of arming the merchant ships, what are the options? Convoying is apparently out, as time is money and the devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of peacetime Just-in-Time delivery seems to spike it right out of the gate. I've read some stuff that advocates taking out the pirates' shore bases, but those too lilly-livered to shoot them in flagrante delicto will scarcely countenance preemptive strikes on fishermen.

That's not an irrelevant problem, but it's not mine to solve even if people actually listened to me. There may well be some escalation, and a good test of how "overstretched" the US military is will come if another US-flagged ship gets taken, especially if people are killed. A precedent has been (haltingly and painfully slowly) set, so things will be interesting to watch from a distance.

One last thing occurs to me on this; there is definitely a market here for military contractors (old term: mercenaries). If carrying your own weapons on a merchant ship is too problematic, hiring reputable professionals is likely cheaper and more certain than the insurance you'll need as this gets worse. Enterprising types could set up in some country along the route, and hook up in international waters bringing aboard any required weapons (heavy or otherwise), debarking at the other end, or switching to other ships headed back the same way.

Free enterprise isn't dead; the response to the pirates' version could be market-driven too. A few more swashes may have to be buckled before this scurvy crew decides to desist, it's just a question of who will be willing to do what's necessary.

Meltdown Shakedown

The following seems pretty straightforward:

Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years.

So far so good, I guess, but notice the fudging "most" and "could". Already not bearing up well to even casual examination. It gets worse.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 C above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

That amount of temperature increase had been expected by the year 2070.

A jump of 5C is a MASSIVE increase in average temperature, and would have been noted before now. That's the sort of temperatures from the Holocene that had trees well above our current tree line although there is now reason to doubt that this high-latitude warming was uniform across the globe. Anyway, I digress.

They expect the area covered by summer sea ice to decline from about 7.2 million square kilometres normally to 1.6 million square kilometres within 30 years.

Last year's summer minimum was 4.6 million square kilometres in September, second lowest only to 2007 which had a minimum of 4.2 million square kilometres, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 15 million square kilometres on Feb. 28. That was 720,000 square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.

"They expect"; who cares what these guys "expect", can you give me evidence for it? The bit below that was the attempt, but what does this actually tell us? Last summer suggests things are getting colder again, but a curve doesn't plot from one point. Also, if the six lowest maximums have come in the last six years, but last year's was the fifth lowest, what does that suggest to you?

I'd have to see the numbers, but this sounds to me like things are chilling again, and that is borne out by what has actually happened world-wide in the last year or so. The lack of raw data in a news post are hardly surprising, but red herrings like "The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels" show that people have an agenda and that mere facts are not going to stand in the way.

If you NEED something to worry about...

The Gore-ian panic about "Climate Change" (as it's being called now, since it's obviously NOT warming) is ebbing a bit. Not enough at this point, but it's remarkable what a collapsing world economy and a growing mass of contrary evidence will do to an idea that was never based on a proper understanding of natural processes in the first place.

As we wait to see if the leftists and the UN can successfully destroy the First World production base and economies, here's a (real) potential catastrophe we could actually be starting to do something to prevent.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Coronal Mass Ejections are not the product of some politically motivated agitator's agenda, but they are (at least on our time scale) rare. The benchmark is the Carrington event of 1859 and anything that can cause auroras at the equator has to be bad news for our electronics.

Technology trap anyone? We're certainly in one; 6.7B people can't be supported by a pre-industrial base, something that the Luddites at the UN and places like the Suzuki Foundation may or may not be thinking about as they work toward dismantling the cultures and economies that have gotten us this far.

My point is that we are wasting a lot of time, effort and money to prevent something that likely is beyond our influence, let alone whether it is actually a bad thing. A lot of people who actually know what they're talking about think we need more CO2 in the atmosphere, but I'll leave that for the moment. There are things we need to worry about, that have concrete solutions to them. I will go on record as saying that it is far more likely that our civilization could be brought to collapse by a big-ass solar flare than by the effects of respiration.

The state of the alienation.

The old blog is getting zero traffic these days, but I suppose I can't be surprised as I haven't had a lot to say of late.

A perusal of the news shows that the world continues on it's perennial voyage to heck in some hand-borne conveyance, but really no faster or slower than it has recently. The economy of the west is in varying states of distress which has it's trickle-down effect on everyone else. The more I read about how things are done in the USA and the piling-on of stifling government regulation, the more I doubt the US will ever get back to the status it's had for the 60+ years since the end of WWII.

News that should make me feel better is that it's more and more clear to the public that Global Warming is a scam. There are two main reasons that doesn't cheer me as it should; one, Obama's crew are moving ahead to classify CO2 as a pollutant (fine the trees then!) and two, if anything, it's going to get colder.

The latter is more likely to have an impact on me than the former, living in a northern clime (tho not in fact above the 49th //) but if the Americans succeed in completely destroying their industrial base it bodes not well for the rest of the hemisphere. I've read a good deal about how the present state of the US economy came about from off-shoring all manufacturing (mostly to China) and then having some sort of credit shell game to generate the money that would then be sent to the Chinese as well as the industrial base.

Quite the house of cards, and there are some arguments against unrestricted Free Trade that can be made (and have been), but not my forte so I won't wade right in. I will however go on record as saying that in a phone poll some years ago I was willing to pay a bit more for milk if it ensured we had a domestic supply. This doesn't work for everything, but it is obvious that the lifestyles most of us expect are unsupportable in the long term. The bubble has certainly burst in the States, so we should take some lessons from that.

Anyway, not the sort of vitriol my fans are looking for, and to that I just say that it's too bad I didn't have this kind of forum when I was 20. That being said, I've stayed out of jail, so maybe that's all to the good...

If anyone is still looking here, I like a challenge, so challenge me. Work, etc. is pretty hectic so I don't have the time I once did, but I work a lot better if motivated, so YOU can take that as a challenge. Find something that pisses me off enough to rant about it, and I will.

Both arms tied.

I would have to search for it again, but I saw yesterday some news extract that the Afghan MoD has asked NATO to refrain from the use of artillery or air strikes against the Taliban. I didn't see anything about tanks, but you can bet that's next.

For all of our technological edge over the opposition, our actual advantage boils down to one thing: Firepower. You can have all the sensors you want to tell you where the bad guys are, but you need effects. It used to be called the "sensor-shooter" link, but a telling change has that now as the "sensor-ACTOR" link. This politically-correct amendment might as well be to "observer" if you're not going to do anything with the info you gather. A "sensor-observer" link sounds redundant, and it is.

The only thing that gets the other side's head down in Afghanistan are things that go "boom", and the bigger the better. The walls of those compounds, grape huts, etc. are quite immune to small arms fire and of course our enemies know that. Removing the Guns and aircraft from our arsenal will level the playing field, which is NOT the plan in war. You want every advantage you can get in general, and more specifically you need heavy weapons to overcome defensive works.

It already takes an unreasonable amount of time to get approval for arty/air strikes, resulting in less effective operations as our guys get pinned down at best or dead at worst. I know where this is, but I'm not sure where it's going; there's a point past which it's not possible to achieve the desired results as out options are whittled away. We already don't have freedom of movement ('though those helicopters will help a bit), and if you remove our ability to defend ourselves and liquidate the enemy when we find them, we have well and truly lost.

"Lost" in this context only means our objective; stabilizing Afghanistan to no longer be a haven for those who'd do things like 9/11, the Madrid metro bombings, etc. Fighting these clowns is like playing "whack-a-mole" anyway, so I personally feel we've been in the 'Stan about six years longer than is in our National Interest.

I capitalize that because a lot of people forget that the government is supposed to look after it. Neutralizing Al Queda, etc. n'import ou is within our interest; pouring blood and treasure ad infinitum into a basketcase central Asian country is not.

Again, just me. Actually not; I haven't met any ISAF veteran in the CF that thinks (off the record) that we can in fact sort Afghanistan out. We keep going back because it's our job and the money's good. Some like the danger and excitement (when it happens), but more and more feel that we're wasting our time. Tie their hands more by cutting off tactical options and you'll see a lot more PTSD cases due to what they couldn't do that they should have. That is all me, but as unscientific as that statement is, I'll stand by it. It's not like it hasn't happened in Bosnia and on all those UN missions, and our RoE are headed in that direction.

Economic (and other) Collapse

Although insulated from the immediate effects of a collapsing/restructuring/whatever Economy by nature of my employment, it’s big news and I shouldn’t just ignore it here. Or maybe I should, but it turns out that I won’t, so lucky you.

Much attention is paid to the Stimulus Package although it’s obvious that no-one, especially not the people supposedly passing it, seem to know what all is in it. This is disturbing on this scale (there is undoubtedly a LOT of pork), but not my government, so what do I care, right?

Well, as Canadians we share a continent with what is (for now, at least) the largest economy the world has yet seen; I recall something about an elephant… It is plainly obvious to anyone not on the public payroll that our economy is taking a pounding as a direct result of what is happening in the US and to a lesser extent the rest of the world. Even China has a $600B stimulus package for its’ economy, as China has been severely punished by the implosion of American investments and the sub-prime (read: bad loans) housing bubble.

I know bugger-all about economics past the supply/demand curve and the guns-vs.-butter debate, but some things are apparent even to me. Bad investments of the sort Wall St. has been pushing of late (derivatives, toxic mortgage paper, whatever) are pyramid schemes on the largest scale. That scale is big enough to undermine major banks and wipe out smaller ones and many investment firms, while leaving the “Masters of the Universe” with the fruits of their ill-gotten gains.

Optics are important, and the above is how it looks to most people, especially the taxpayers on whose backs this will be paid off. A lot of people, including Vladimir Putin are less than enamoured of bailing out capitalists with public money, and I am one of them. If you’re running a for-profit enterprise (especially one that produces nothing) and you go tits-up, I fail to see where that’s my problem as a taxpayer. You tried, you failed, and the world will go on without you, trust me, so now go do something else.

For the Gain, something must be Ventured, and this implies risk. I have no objection to people making money by any legal and ethical (not always the same) means, and I’m known to take a few chances myself. No, I don’t have a gambling problem or anything like that, but I recognize that life is pretty dull if you don’t push your luck now and again. A bit of danger is great for focussing, so too much of a safety net makes it at the vey least an unsporting proposition.

If you can convince people to invest in junk of whatever stripe in order for you to make millions, well caveat emptor is the rule of the game and a reasonably regulated market will sort you out eventually. That is what happened here, although the reasonableness of the regulation in that market was questionable to say the least. What should be happening here is a lot of investors are poorer and (some of them, anyway) wiser, and the speculators and junk bond kings are out of business. Some banks fail, and the FDIC insures your deposits as long as you were a smart enough investor to know the limitations of that coverage. In Canada it’s up to $100K, and the US has in light of the current flap raised theirs to $250K. More money than that? Figure it out yourself, I say.

These institutions have been saved by the US government, although with strings attached. The big one right now is Obama’s executive pay cap of $500K for any firms receiving bail-out money. This may look good, and executives of companies suckling at the public teat certainly don’t deserve bonuses (though they were getting them while running their companies into the ground) but the law of unintended consequences kicks in with a vengeance.

It has been pointed out that $500K is not enough money for an executive of a major company to live on in places like New York, and I do have to say I agree with that. The first effect will be to drive the best and (supposedly) brightest execs away from these companies. The next will be more government involvement in everything.

Yes, bigger government, more government jobs, more regulation and less people actually producing anything. There was some talk of Protectionism out of all this, but that’s being pooh-poohed. Everyone loves Free Trade, but I’m beginning to think that countries had best start thinking of their own best interests again. There is a certain amount of market “survival of the fittest” implied, but that is not the same as big-fish-eat-little-fish which is what most people think of when they hear about evolution.

You need a big trade bloc to make tariffs work, but NAFTA could do that, especially if we build more nuclear plants and get off the imported oil and gas. More of an issue for the USA than us, but they drag is down with them. Inefficient companies fail, consumers (taxpayers) are protected, and the US sets out to rebuild itself. Prosperity breeds more prosperity and we benefit too. Some protectionism prevents the Japanese and Koreans from selling us cars that weren’t built here, so who would really care if the used-to-be-Big Three go under?

Nothing should be too big to fail, and market things should be left to the market to solve. The government’s only job there is to make sure things don’t get out of hand (i.e. slavery, etc.), certainly not to bail out banks that couldn’t be bothered to do due diligence. I say that, but it’s far more of a mess than that, as many of these banks were forced by the US government to take on these bad loans. That requires a more nuanced approach, but no matter what the government does to fix things, the laws should at the vey least be clear and understood by all.

Yes, I’ve wandered off whatever the hell it was I wanted to say. It was mainly personal and corporate responsibility and transparent government, but I suppose I should be concerned that I even had to talk about that. Comments or critiques can as always be addressed to me here, but other than mental exercise for myself I’m hoping to make people think critically.