The nanny state is ever-vigilant in its coercion for a purer life for you and your children. Whether it be mandating what children should learn, how they should think or what they should eat, the nanny state relies upon the fundamental precept that it knows how to raise your child better than you do. Nothing exemplifies this better than the oft-floated theories that table salt should be banned or fast food outlawed. At the college I recently attended the vending machines even have a tri-colour smiley face system for the foods. Happy green for the healthy choices, yellow ambivalent for the moderately healthy choices and, of course, red unhappy for coca cola.

In one Chicago public school the nanny state has been taken to its logical extreme, making it illegal to bring food from home. This is the progression, of course, from such allergenic bans as peanut butter and nuts.

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

When I was a kid I used to eat a bag of chips and drink a can of coca cola every day. As a baby I was a vegetarian. Neither seem to have any present effect on my health.

The problem is that Canada is an even more likely candidate for this sort of nonsense than the United States. With universal single-payer health care there’s a very strong argument to be made that the state is already responsible for our health choices since we’re all collectively responsible for the health of our society. It’s the reasoning behind handing out alcohol to alcoholics and needles to drug addicts, donchaknow.

So I can foresee a Canada where the government packs your lunches, fortified with Vitamin B12 supplements so that no animals have to actually be killed in the production of the food. And since the argument can be made that childhood obesity is straining our medical resources, it’s only logical that the government will step in and feed everybody.

It’s a brave new world, and it’s being run by collectivists.

The CBC is reporting that the U.S.’s vaunted new security apparatus that takes a naked body scan of airport travellers failed to detect an undercover TSA agent who carried a gun through it several times. Which just goes to show that you can spend $7 billion a year on counter-terrorism but the system breaks down at the minimum wage positions.

Here’s my favourite part of the article:

None of the TSA security personnel who failed to spot the handgun in the body scans was disciplined, according to the source cited by NBC.

And a few choice quote from the CBC comments:

The use of airplanes to make terrorist attacks dropped off the map the day the cockpits were locked up. All that has ensued is hysterical, fear-mongering from our “representative” governments.

[...]

In any situation where you have poorly-trained people performing boring, repetitive actions, where the chance of a “hit” or unexpected outcome are extremely low, you will find that the effectiveness and efficiency drop to near zero.

It’s pretty scandalous to find out these quarter-million-dollar machines are still fallible after the “grope-a-thon” of 2010.

The recent assassination attempt of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has shocked the North American continent like nothing since the terrorist attacks nearly a decade ago. And rightly so. That sort of prolific violence in America is usually relegated to the drug war or organized crime.

The reaction from media has been predictably voluminous. I don’t mean that in a cynical or disparaging way. The story hits on all points for news interest — timely, significant, proximal, prominent and human interest. The fact a nine-year-old victim was born on 9/11 was one of the more tragic aspects of the affair.

But nearly a world away, this sort of story happens far more frequently. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, political leaders, policemen and tribal elders are targeted and assassinated by the Taliban with little media fanfare in the west.

It’s important that I clarify this isn’t meant to be a scolding of western media’s coverage of Afghan mayhem, though it certainly has its share of shortcomings on that front. I merely want to put into perspective the scope of reality for which an Afghan citizen might consider normalcy.

The truth is that part of the reason it’s been difficult to really keep Afghanistan in the spotlight is that it fails some of the points for newsworthiness listed above. Afghanistan is as far from Canada as can be, taking three days travel by airplane, particularly if the jumping point is the Eastern United States.

Significance and prominence of such events tend to be fairly difficult to judge, given the frequency with which people are killed in Afghanistan. Sadly, a murdered government official over there isn’t very significant in this part of the world.

It’s also no small fact that Afghanistan is a war zone, so our expectation of such events are fairly routine. We’ve become accustomed to reading about large numbers of people being murdered on a daily basis without raising so much as a “what a shame.”

It doesn’t make us heartless. But it does explain why sustaining interest in Afghanistan has been so difficult. Could it be that if the country were as near as the United States that events would have as much resonance as the Arizona murders? It’s certainly plausible.

Though by now everybody is probably aware of a heretofore relatively obscure congresswoman, there are a lot of people who would have no idea who Salman Taseer is. If you’re one of those people, don’t feel bad. He was the Pakistani governor of Punjab, gunned down in a market in Islamabad on Jan. 4.

Canada’s large Sikh community has contributed to the increased awareness of this assassination, but news articles bearing mention of it pale in comparison to the Arizona shootings.

Though the definition of targeted assassination and random suicide bombing seem blurred in the violence of Afghanistan’s troubled southern provinces and Pakistan’s western frontier, the bloodshed has been significantly greater than anything we’re likely to see on this side of the world.

On Christmas day, a suicide bomber murdered 46 people in a United Nations food center in the Bajaur region of Pakistan. On Nov. 11 while people in the west were remembering the fallen of past wars, a truck bomb killed 18 and wounded hundreds in Karachi, Pakistan. Those are only a couple of what the military refers to as “spectaculars”, large explosions designed to maximize casualties and cow political leaders into acquiescing to extremist demands.

But a simple google search involving the terms “Afghanistan” or “Pakistan” and “bomb” reveals a near daily toll of Arizona-shooting-sized casualties.

It isn’t that we should weigh tragedy with artificial equality; proximity will always be the prism through which events affect us. But it does offer a clue as to our fatigue in the Afghan war.

The breaking news is that U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was assassinated by a gunman only an hour ago, and the news wires are alight with the fire of that story. As of right now, there is no indication of who killed the congresswoman or why.

The CBC ran the story here, and allowed their comment board to be open. I want you to see the first comment they approved:

Note that it says comments are pre-moderated. Which means that somebody working for the CBC looked at that ridiculously inappropriate comment accusing the right of supporting acts of murder and terrorism and happily clicked the approve button.

Wake up CBC! Have some integrity!

UPDATE

More comments pre-moderated by the CBC include:

“The consequence of right wing gun nuts and the neo-conservative politics of hate??” — 18 agree 3 disagree
“The Right Wingers will rejoice at this madness.” — 17 agree 17 disagree
“So this is the end result of the Rupert Murdoch Tea Party/Fox news ranting and raving. I wonder who is next.” — 35 agree 16 disagree
“Extremely tragic news. Probably a politically motivated shooting. Is the right so afraid of the left that they have to resort to assassination?” — 23 agree 12 disagree
“Republican extremist. Bush voter. Dangerous.” — 0 votes

What’s worse than that is all the Canadians showing ignorance by proclaiming gun violence some kind of American value.

UPDATE 2

Let’s address this for a moment:

This is the infographic that the left are alleging has incited the (attempted) assassination of a congresswoman. But let’s think about this for a moment, shall we?

Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying, targeting if you will, areas of the country that a political movement believes its members should become active in? Only the most simple-minded person would interpret such an infographic as an invitation to literally assassinate anybody.

As the chart below illustrates planned production for the US services keeps slipping away.  Though I’m not convinced the aircraft is in a “death spiral” as the author of the post at Flightglobal suggests:

Johan Boeder, a Dutch defense analyst and editor of jsfnieuws.nl, has compiled a chart showing how the Department of Defense’s planned F-35 orders have declined since contract award in October 2001…

Learning curve theory posits that manufacturing costs decline by 12% each time output doubles. With each new delay that results in a further production cutback, the F-35′s affordability challenge becomes more difficult…

	2001	Sep-06	Nov-06	Apr-07	Nov-08	Aug-09	Jan-11
FY05	10
FY06	22
FY07	49	5	5	2	2	2	2
FY08	82	18	16	12	12	12	12
FY09	108	52	47	16	14	14	14
FY10	156	70	56	30	30	30	28
FY11	170	98	64	43	43	43	32
FY12	170	133	103	82	82	82	32
FY13	170	143	135	90	90	90	42
FY14	170	157	157	116	110	110	62
FY15	170	160	160	130	130	130	81
FY16	170	160	160	130	130	130	108
Totals	1447	996	903	651	643	643	413

Earlier:

F-35s for our Air Force in 2016? Good flipping luck

Canadian Government has no idea what the F-35 will cost…

Mark
Ottawa

…to train police. Further to the Update here,

Media out! Of Afghanistan/People’s Daily Online Update

the latest:

THE HAGUE — The Dutch cabinet agreed Friday to a police training mission to Afghanistan, 11 months after the last government collapsed in a spat over military deployment to the conflict-torn nation.

“The cabinet decided today to send an integrated police training mission to Afghanistan in the period 2011 to 2014,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced after the weekly cabinet meeting.

“In total, the mission will entail 545 men and women,” he said, adding it would have a “strict training objective. No component of this mission will be involved in any military offensive.”

The decision comes some six months after Dutch troops withdrew from Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)…

NATO’s request for an extension of the Dutch deployment sparked a political row that led to the centre-left government’s collapse in February last year, precipitating the August pullout.

The governing coalition at the time was led by the Christian Democratic Action, which is now part of a right-leaning minority government in a loose alliance with the anti-Islam PVV, which is opposed to the training mission.

The government “needs a majority in parliament” to send the mission, said spokesman Henk Brons.

That means Rutte will need support from opposition lawmakers in the face of the PVV’s disapproval.

The prime minister said Friday the purpose of the new training mission would be “the strengthening of the civilian police and justice system in Afghanistan” and the “advancement of the constitutional state”.

The mission would include 225 police trainers in Kabul, Kunduz and Bamiyan.

“We will also retain four F16 (fighter jets) in Afghanistan. The F16s play an essential role in finding roadside bombs and boosting our security on the ground,” he said.

That will involve technical support personnel, including medical and logistics experts, as part of the team, said Rutte, arguing that the Netherlands’ work in Afghanistan “is not done”…

Rutte, who insisted the decision was “thoroughly deliberated” and based on the outcome of two fact-finding missions to Afghanistan, said the security of the Dutch trainers would be ensured by troops from Germany, the lead ISAF nation in Kunduz.

More from AP via the CBC website (will our other major media cover the news?):

…
The government says in a letter to parliament the mission will involve 225 police trainers and 320 military support staff who will be stationed in the capital Kabul and the northern province of Kunduz…

Plus earlier from Radio Nederland:

…The Dutch trainers would be deployed under the auspices of the European Police Training Mission (EUPOL)…

…Four Dutch F-16s would have to stay on in Afghanistan to provide protection to the troops. The jet fighters would have to be relocated from the southern province of Kandahar to the north of the country. The F-16 unit includes about 120 troops, bringing the total number of personnel for the mission to about 500…

So much for those quittists hoping for a grand Western bug-out. And aren’t those F-16s just a hoot?

…
Our government…has not been willing to employ our CF-18s in Afghanistan to support the CF and allied forces there even though urged to do so by our allies.  Too fearful of political and media reaction if a bomb or missile killed some civilians accidentally, don’t you know…

H/t Terry Glavin.

Update thought: The real message here, what with Canada’s also retreating to a training role, is that only two NATO members–the US and UK (plus the Danes)–are willing to engage in extended combat in Afstan.  Pathetic.  And why the Brits have a real special relationship with the Americans and we do not.  The way of the real, not Byers and Staples, world.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to,

…F-35 Update

this is what our government is saying:

Canadian officials defend F-35 jets

Canadian officials leapt to the defence of the controversial F-35 military jet Thursday after significant concerns were raised with the stealth fighter earlier in the day in Washington.

While U.S. concerns are specific to one particular vertical lift model, Canadian critics say ongoing cost overruns and lengthy delays should raise a red flag for a Conservative government determined to spend billions on the U.S.-made planes.

“I say without hesitation … this is the only aircraft for the future,” said Major General Tom Lawson, assistant chief of the air staff, who insisted the proven conventional model Canada is buying should not be confused with the short takeoff vertical landing (STOVL) under the gun in the U.S.

The Harper government is pushing ahead with plans to buy 65 F-35 jets at a total cost of $9 billion, which could jump to about $16 billion when service costs are factored in. Delivery of the first jets is not scheduled until 2016.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates earlier told a news conference the joint strike fighter program has received special scrutiny given its “substantial cost” and “ongoing development issues” as part of the planned U.S. military budget cuts.

Gates announced the Marine Corps’s F-35 STOVL version has been put on a two-year “probation” to get it back on track in terms of performance, cost and schedule…

Lawson said development of the conventional F-35 has been advancing well and “it’s from that that I take great promise with this program and great confidence in it.”

The general said Canada is “buffered somewhat” from any further delays in the delivery of the F-35s because the recently upgraded CF-18s provide “manoeuvre space in when we would purchase aircraft. So, if required, we might be able to extend the final date of service of the F-18 [bit of hedge there].”..

The Parliamentary Budget Office is to issue a report next month on Canada’s proposed F-35 purchase.

“We are monitoring developments regarding F-35 development. We will look at input and life-cycle cost estimates. We are working with colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K.,” parliamentary budget watchdog Kevin Page told the Star…

That should be very interesting. It is true that the F-35A the government intends to purchase has had a lot less testing trouble than the F-35B. But now for some serious details, not reported in our media, that will affect delivery dates and almost certainly increase the cost of the planes– since production will ramp up more slowly–in 2016 (or whenever, depending on how well F-35A testing does progress in reality).

1) Defense Technology’s “Ares” blog:

…Gates has decided to keep FY2012 (Lot 5) low-rate production of the F-35 to 32 aircraft, the same level as 2011, versus the planned 42 aircraft, although progress of the F-35A and F-35C has been “satisfactory”.

Update: Satisfactory or not, the completion of systems development and demonstration (SDD) is delayed to early 2016, versus mid-2015 as planned in the restructuring of the program early last year.

SDD finishes with the conclusion of development testing and precedes initial operational testing and evaluation, so this probably pushes initial operational capability into 2017 [emphasis added]. (The individual services are assessing their IOC dates.) This will cost an additional $4.6 billion.

The production ramp will also be flattened out, cutting another 124 aircraft out of LRIP, through the ninth batch, in addition to the 122 removed last year.

A total of 41 more F/A-18E/F Super Hornets will be acquired [emphasis added, see here also], alongside 150 life-extended F/A-18C/Ds, to fill Marine and Navy squadrons as a hedge against late JSF deliveries [and note that the Navy's F-35C has had "satisfactory" progress]…

2) Fort Worth (where the F-35 is built) Star-Telegram:

Defense secretary proposes cutting 124 F-35 purchases

Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined a five-year plan Thursday to reduce defense spending by $78 billion, including a dramatic cut in purchases of the F-35 joint strike fighter.

After more than a year of reviews of the oft-delayed and over-budget program, the Pentagon now plans to order 325 jets between 2012 and 2016, 124 fewer than anticipated a few months ago.

Gates’ plan would significantly slow production increases at Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth factory and likely affect the company’s plans for hiring workers over that time.

Lockheed has been anticipating about 200 foreign orders during that period, but most of those nations are also dealing with budget problems and worried about rising F-35 costs… [But not our government, at least publicly.  And it still claims up to 5,000 F-35s will be built, from which Canadian industry will make huge bucks.  That's the real reason the government, as opposed to the Air Force, wants the plane--the hoped-for jobs and votes.]

Gates’ proposals will be included in the proposed 2012 defense budget submitted to Congress next month. Of the money saved by buying fewer jets, $4.6 billion would pay for continued development and testing…

The Pentagon now has 61 early-production F-35s on order. It was expecting to buy another 43 with the 2011 budget, but Congress has not yet appropriated the funds and has indicated wanting fewer planes…

Yet our government professes to see blue skies ahead.

Update: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

First, from an earlier post:

…
Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

…

Now Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, much brighter than most of our dim pundit herd, makes the point that our Conservatives are hardly conservative compared to US Republicans–or Democrats sometimes (in fact much more often than Mr Gardner recognizes, see above):

…our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate — which is to say, sweetly Canadian — and are getting steadily more so…

Yes, Conservatives and Republicans may both be “conservative” but they are remarkably different creatures. Name the issue. Health care? If the most right-wing member of the Conservative cabinet gave a speech about his government’s policies to Republicans, he’d be tarred, feathered, and put on the no-fly list. Multiculturalism and bilingualism? The Conservatives have said nothing that would offend a San Francisco city councillor. God, gays, guns? Stephen Harper is slightly to the left of Barack Obama on all three [emphasis added].

And so on down the list…

On economics, there’s an even bigger gap.

“Appropriate, well-timed stimulus measures have yielded dividends in jobs and growth,” Stephen Harper said in a press release this week. Got that? In effect, Harper said, “our Keynesian approach worked!” If he were a Republican, he would have been excommunicated.

To today’s Republicans, economic policy begins and ends with tax cuts. No matter what the circumstances may be — boom, bust, surplus, deficit, whatever — the solution is always the same. Always. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” Republican Tom DeLay once said.

But not just any old tax cut will do for Republicans. The focus has to be on cuts for the rich…

Much to their credit, Canadian Conservatives seem to recognize that cutting taxes won’t magically erase the deficit. And back when they had a surplus to spend, they took two points off the GST, which made the overall tax burden more progressive. In supply-side terms, that’s heresy. But supply-side is a religion with few followers among Conservatives…

Mark
Ottawa

Unfortunately not Canadian:

A Marine Corps squadron recently returned to the United States after a historic deployment as the first of the service’s F/A-18 Hornets to operate from a ground base in Afghanistan.

With Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 operating out of Kandahar Air Field, the unit’s pilots were much closer to infantry troops than they were during previous deployments when they operated of off naval aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf.

Their proximity to ground fighting during their last deployment allowed them to be more responsive and increased the number of successful combat missions, according to unit leaders.

That “feet dry” presence let pilots flying the squadron’s dozen F/A-18C Hornets and a couple of twin-seat F/A-18Ds work closely with some dozen ground combat units operating around Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province.

Sgt. Deanne Hurla / Marine Corps Cpl. Scott Esker, a plane captain with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232, directs Capt. Daniel Tongson, a VMFA-232 pilot, into a parking space at Kandahar Airbase, Afghanistan. The squadron became the service’s first to operate from a land base in the country, rather than from Navy aircraft carriers…

Our government, for its part, has not been willing to employ our CF-18s in Afghanistan to support the CF and allied forces there even though urged to do so by our allies.  Too fearful of political and media reaction if a bomb or missile killed some civilians accidentally, don’t you know.  Yet our Air Force supposedly needs stealthy, initial attack, bomb-truck F-35s while the US Navy, in addition to planning to buy F-35Cs, continues to acquire new Super Hornets.

Update: Latest F-35 scuttlebutt:

U.S. to detail $100 billion in Pentagon savings, cuts: sources
…
The Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is facing another restructuring that could extend the program’s development phase by up to two years, said a third source familiar with the plans.

The program was already restructured last year, adding 13 months to the development phase…

If the program is so delayed there is no way Canada will start getting the planes in 2016 as the government has claimed. Nor will they cost in the $70-$80 million range. See this earlier post:

Canadian Government has no idea what the F-35 will cost…

Also recent and relevant:

F-35 Begins Year With Test Objectives Unmet

Upperdate: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, presided over the largest government-sanctioned sexual assault program in American history this year. Under the pretenses of “airport security” the DHS, with a success rate of catching terrorists of zero per cent, molested, groped and sexually assaulted thousands of travellers all over America.

The assaults were so invasive, in fact, that the American Civil Liberties Union has created a database of the most shocking stories of their experiences. Here are a few selections (you can see the whole list yourself at the link) that include graphic language and allegations of vaginal penetration:

The pat down was so invasive that the woman doing it stuck her thumb through my jeans into my vagina, significantly more than simple resistance.
…
She then rammed her hand up into my crotch until it jammed into my pubic bone.
…
She went under, in between, and on my breast. It was more intense than my monthly breast exam.
…
In the four times she explored the area where my inner thigh met my crotch, she touched my labia each time, and one pass made contact with my clitoris, through 2 layers of clothing.
…
I would not hesitate to say that I felt sexually assaulted by the agent.
…
This was, by far, the second most humiliating, and personally violating event in my life – the first being a date-rape in college.
…
I said “no, I don’t want you to touch me like that, I think it’s worse,” to which she snickered and replied, “well there’s a good chance we’re gonna do that anyway.”
…
She touched my limbs, my torso, my breasts, and rubbed my vagina with her fingers three separate times.
…
And most disturbingly, her hands karate-chopped their way a full two inches up into my vagina through my slacks.
…
As I got closer to the scanner, I could clearly hear him say “got a cute one, some DD’s.” … I was appalled and decided at that point to “opt out” of the scanner…. I was then put through the pat down procedure which I only can only describe as sexual assault.

All of this, and for what? Because a Nigerian kid, whose own father warned the Americans he was a terrorist, got a flight to the United States without proper identification? What happens when the next terrorist manages to get past security with a bomb material inserted in an orifice? Will there be rape rooms in airports?

This idea that people can be hired for meager wages and are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner, is patently ridiculous. Of course you’re going to get the closet pedophiles, sadists and sexual predators applying for the jobs. Making it legal to see people naked or grope them and still get paid for it has to be a huge perk for some twisted individuals.

The frightening thing is that the Obama administration is nothing if not even more paranoid than the last one that was mocked for their ridiculous colour-coded terrorist alert system. An intelligence network that has failed as many times as the U.S. has no business assessing risk. Napolitano even floated the ridiculous idea of moving the pat-downs to trains, buses and ships.

It’s a cliché bordering on pop culture humour but it’s true. The terrorists have definitely won.