Heed the threat and awesome power of the mighty Pentagon
Heed the threat and awesome power of the mighty Pentagon
You know who sucks? Customs goons at the CBSA. Tell me they make sense in 2021. They’re goddamn Stuff Cops. They just look at mail all day and determine how much it will cost to ransom your shit. If you were a huge Canadian corporation you’ve probably greased enough palms to pay no duty or tariffs on industrial inputs or equipment. Are you a working sucker who bought an iPad from the wrong seller on Amazon? Fuck you, pay your government $55 dollars or no iPad. Stuff Cops are worse than regular cops, I will stand by this forever.
For the use of future peoples, I have invented the most significant intellectual academic philosophical tool since Derrida discovered that being abstruse makes you seem smart: I call it the McNamara Quotient.
In one fell swoop I have solved political science. I’m submitting myself for the Nobel Peace Prize. Like Barack Obama, you all don’t know that I’ve really done anything at all and I don’t have access to Hellfire missiles so I feel good about my chances. Here’s how it works:
In any conflict your average international bystander wants to know who the baddie is. This is important because World War 2 had a pretty clear antagonist (sorry about Dresden) and people think better in binaries. The problem with modernity is that we have a lot of information, and a lot of that is planted for our consumption to one end or another. When it comes to Israel trying to trample Palestinian territory into dust anyone living in North America has by ideological ambiance absorbed stories of Hamas atrocities. They fire rockets! They kidnap! Suicide bombings! It complicates the narrative when the Israeli Defense Forces topples an apartment building filled with kids. We called ahead, they shrug. Maybe the Palestinians asked for these dead kids?
The answer to the doubt is the McNamara Quotient, or McQ Score. The McQ is based on the amount of NATO and American military aid, in adjusted U.S. dollars, purchased or granted in total to a nation-state. To keep things simple these will be publicly reported dollars, not CIA black dollars funneled to whomever might stir the pot to support continued military aid to whomever or whatever country. Just take the Billions, lop off the zeroes and you’re done, you have the McQ for a country.
To stay topical, take Israel. According to the Congressional Research Service the government of Israel has received $146 billion USD in military aid since 1948, so their McQ score is 146. By comparison, the state of Palestine has received, to my knowledge, none. No M1 Abrams tanks, no Predator drones, no AGM-86 ALCM cruise missiles. No training, cash, or bullets. So their McQ score is 0.
On the ground the result is obvious - a Palestinian throws a rock at a concrete wall, their head explodes from a round fired by a H-S Precision Pro Series 2000 HTR sniper rifle. A Palestinian fires a rocket from Gaza into an empty field, Israel blows up a school with a M109A6 mobile artillery platform firing a 155mm shell. This has been the case for some time, but now you have a McQ score to see who is in the wrong.
See, comparing casualties is nothing compared to comparing capability. High casualty rates between McQ comparable nations or groups could just be one side being very good at war! But with McQ, you can get a great idea of whether the fight was fair, one-sided, or a complete and total mismatch between an advanced first-world military and a group of prisoners fighting with literal sticks and stones. If there is a gap of 50 McQ or more, the stronger side might be doing war crimes!
My hope is that the McNamara Quotient - named for that hallowed thinker that vaulted war into the modern world of statistics and number-crunching quantitative analysis - will lay to rest false and stupid appeals to nuance. Anybody with a boot on their neck will be inclined to pry it off. If you respond to fingernail scratches in the leather with a burst from a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machine gun, your sense of morals might be flawed! With a clear scoring system you never again have to trust your senses, your facts, or your principals. The score will set you free to never consult those parts of your personality ever again.
🥃Stay the fuck away from Banff.
🤠The UCP is imploding but, as our local equine comrade pointed out, the NDP is focusing on Kenney as the problem, not conservative policy. After his ouster the UCP will be darlings again.
🍧I’ve been reading about the Hydrogen Future for 20 years. It wasn’t true out of Popular Science Magazine then and it’s not true now out of Suncor. Get that seed money out of Kenney though, I won’t shame a hustle that will work.
🎺Sean Chu remains an ignorant moron.
🏉Your family might have been impoverished and more layoffs are on the way, but Cenovus was able to report strong earnings and value for shareholders. You should all be proud.
🍿CNRL makes a shit-ton of money, took almost $200 million in federal COVID subsidies, and still can’t stop hundreds of their employees from getting sick.
🚦Just ignore the byline and send this to your parents when you talk about wellsite cleanup and unemployment in Alberta. Just glaze right over it, hold your nose, and paste it into the group chat. It’s good to convince them using the words of a boomer cosplayer.
👺A statistic to keep an eye on: physiotherapy engagement in various jurisdictions. Long COVID sufferers seem to be heading to them in droves.
⛳️Kaycee Madu should resign.
🚨Turns out selenium does not give you the talent and vocal range of a Mexican-American tejano singer.
🎻Brazeau County man flies flags demanding his neighbours commit acts of property damage on his home whenever possible.
🕹RCMP officers? Folks, they’re nuts.
🎥Climate change will open up new and bigger areas of the planet for vampires to fuck up.
🪔Like police unions, police time theft does not get our support. Respect the effort but, you know, cop. Sorry.
💋Greyhound is dead, and just before electric busses and automation might make the century-old business a bit more viable again. Maybe. Perhaps if we put the busses on tracks and made them very fast?
🎎Doug Ford is still much better at being a bastard than our local hucksters.
🧸Keir Starmer is an M15 op. What an absolute loser. The man is pure Cream of Wheat. Whoever voted for him to be leader of the Labour party should have their marriage instantly annulled. There is no way they contain actual blood or a pulse. They’re dead! Just declare it! In better times Keir (fake name, good God) would open his belly with a katana and have Russell Brand cut his head off if he lost his nerve.
🧛♂️Do you think one bridge falling down on a major highway in the U.S. will make Infrastructure Week actually accomplish something? What about the closure of a major bridge over a huge fucking river? No?
✒️Joe Biden will definitely support open-sourcing COVID vaccines and will aw-shucks with his whole body when it’s blocked by this or that bullshit body. NAFTA court? Some UN shit? Somebody will spike it and he will be SOOO sad!
🎴The collected mercenary hires of Canadian mining companies could probably just roll the Canadian Forces and take over the country.
🔉The Modi government is engaging in genocide on the poor and using COVID to do it.
👾Long Live Scabby.
🦺Billionaires should become un-billioned, and pronto.
🙀I can’t remember if I posted these before, but Alberta Advantage comrades have been in the pages of Jacobin recently writing about Canada’s carbon tax and the Nova Scotia coal industry. Both are great pieces by beautiful people and they deserve your eyeballs. Give them to us, to add to our Eyeball Vault, so that we may trade retina futures.
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📉Have you ever dreamed about nuking Alberta? The government of Alberta has. A great new episode on the pod.
🎧Harbinger has added three brand new shows and you are a Grade-A patoot if you don’t subscribe and support Canadian leftist media!
🔇Never buy a book written by a neocon dork and never watch the movie adaptation. Kino Lefter has your back.
🎚️The relationship between Doug Ford’s Conservatives and Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board should probably not be a thing! This month on Harbinger Society Presents.
🧶Go protest the murder of Palestinians in a city near you over the next few weeks.
👢If you have a moment, send an email to Alpha House and tell them to stop union busting for one damn second.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
