A Bit More Detail

Tumblr’s lostmuskrat linked to Winslow Wheeler’s Foreign Policy article about the existential failings of the F-35. The cause of significant pricetag-related issues in Canada, it’s all the more problematic for the country that’s actually building it.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35′s cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost — a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment — the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however — they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don’t expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program’s cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion — and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

[. . .]

A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion — making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain. And that estimate is wildly optimistic: It assumes the F-35 will only be 42 percent more expensive to operate than an F-16, but the F-35 is much more complex. The only other “fifth generation” aircraft, the F-22 from the same manufacturer, is in some respects less complex than the F-35, but in 2010, it cost 300 percent more to operate per hour than the F-16. To be very conservative, expect the F-35 to be twice the operating and support cost of the F-16.

[. . .]

The F-35 isn’t only expensive — it’s way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is “to be determined.” A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony — almost 10 years late.

If the F-35′s performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications — and it will not — it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

[. . .]

The design was born in the late 1980s in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon agency that has earned an undeserved reputation for astute innovation. It emerged as a proposal for a very short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft (known as “STOVL”) that would also be supersonic. This required an airframe design that — simultaneously — wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine (STOVL), and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines.

President Bill Clinton’s Pentagon bogged down the already compromised design concept further by adding the requirement that it should be a multirole aircraft — both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. This required more difficult tradeoffs between agility and low weight, and the characteristics of an airframe optimized to carry heavy loads. Clinton-era officials also layered on “stealth,” imposing additional aerodynamic shape requirements and maintenance-intensive skin coatings to reduce radar reflections. They also added two separate weapons bays, which increase permanent weight and drag, to hide onboard missiles and bombs from radars. On top of all that, they made it multiservice, requiring still more tradeoffs to accommodate more differing, but exacting, needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

I made a brief post in 2008 referring to the phenomenon of modern immigration by Canadian Francophones to Florida, a migration driven not by economic incentives but rather by the attractiveness of Florida’s tropical climate. (The similar contemporary migration to Maine, also driven by tourism, is less noteworthy inasmuch as Maine has been a destination for Francophone immigration since the late 19th century.) An extensive post at New Geography by UQAM’s Rémy Tremblay describes the community’s development and questionable future in detail.

It is hard to pinpoint the origin of the word “Floribec” but it appears to have been adopted in the 1970s by Quebec residents wintering in Florida and made official in a study by Louis Dupont in the 1980s. According to him, French Canadians began immigrating to Florida in the 1930s. This immigration came in the wake of spending by the United States government, which, in an effort to resolve the 1929 economic crisis, undertook to build a network of canals through the marshland in southeast Florida and, notably, to open the Intercoastal Waterway, a navigable canal hundreds of kilometres long. At the same time, the government was also attempting to develop the infrastructure for tourism. Thousands of Americans travelled to the “Sunshine State” to work on this vast construction site. Among them were Franco-Americans from New England, some accompanied by their French-Canadian cousins. Once the construction work was completed, rather than going home, many of the French-Canadian workers took up permanent residence in the Miami region, particularly in Surfside, on the Atlantic coast, and in North Miami. After the Second World War, there were 67,000 French-Canadian and Franco-American families living in the State of Florida. These new permanent residents of Surfside and North Miami and of Sunny Isles generally found work in the tourist industry because Florida, especially Miami, was the holiday destination of a growing number of wealthy French-Canadians. This initial wave of Quebecois mass migration to Florida began at the end of the war and continued until 1960.

The period from 1960 to 1970 saw a second wave of French-Canadian, mainly Quebecois, migration to the Miami region, with the appearance of a new type of immigrant: the investor. Two of the factors contributing to increased immigration were the liberating effect of the Quiet Revolution and the growth of wealth in Quebec. The fact that these two phenomena occurred simultaneously appears to have encouraged the people of Quebec to look beyond their borders. Expo 67 and a number of other Quebec cultural events made the rest of the world more aware of the province and, as well, the people of Quebec used this period of cultural vitality to increase their travel to foreign destinations.

At the same time, the tourist industry was experiencing rapid development in Florida with the arrival of the major airlines, the construction of the United States freeway system, and the north-south shift of economic and political power, which sparked phenomenal growth in the cities of the Sun Belt, including Miami. Miami Beach and its suburbs of Surfside and Sunny Isles became the favourite seaside destinations of the Quebecois. Recognizing the opportunity the situation presented, the Floribecois set up businesses in the area to cater mainly to Quebecois tourists, building French-language motels, restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and various other services to meet their needs.

From the 1970s onward, most businesses were established in Surfside and Sunny Isles, especially along Collins Avenue, whose location less than a kilometre from the beach offered increased customer traffic. The favourite tourist destination of the Quebecois was now affordable and there was no longer any language barrier. During this period, the Thunderbird, Suez, Waikiki and Colonial hotels were familiar to any Quebecois who travelled regularly to Florida, and even to those who were merely thinking of going there. Cultural life was vibrant because of the continued presence of such artists as Gilles Latulippe and other popular Quebec comedians and singers, who performed to sold-out audiences in the most popular hotels. The localization of these cultural activities in the gathering places of Quebecois tourists would serve to establish the physical boundaries of Floribec as a transnational tourist community.

[. . .]

Floribec constitutes an interesting chapter in the history of modern Quebec and it represents an intriguing and unique pocket of French-speaking America. This transnational community came into being as a result of people patronizing numerous businesses and other community-building venues situated in a relatively small geographical area on the Atlantic coast. These sites played an essential role as centres of community life for French-speakers who were living in or visiting the greater Miami area. Today, certain community practices formerly associated with Floribec can still be found; however, they are dispersed over a much wider area and signs of any Quebecois presence in the Florida landscape are increasingly difficult to discern.

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster raises the possibility of bringing an asteroid into lunar orbit, for scientific and space-settlement purposes both.
• Daniel Drezner is pleasantly surprised that the situation of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng hasn’t led to anything like a breakdown of Sino-American relations.
• Eastern Approaches notes the Polish holiday of “Flag Day” on the 2nd of May, commemorating the substantial Polish participation in the conquest of Berlin in 1945.
• Far Outliers’ Joel discusses the Canary Islands and the role they played in the emerging imperium, both vis-a-vis Portugal and the later imperial strategies of unified Spain.
• Geocurrents describes the Sino-Soviet border disputes in eastern Siberia in 1969 that killed hundreds of people, nearly led to a Sino-Soviet war, and played a critical role in deciding the future of the world.
• Language Hat starts a discussion about the depressing plight of non-Russian languages inside Russia that quickly expands to include discussions of Turkish immigrants in Russia, the situation of Gaelic in Ireland, and Canada’s own language situation.
• Laywers, Guns and Money reviews a book describing how environmentalism in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen helps to legitimate anti-immigrant sentiment.
• At NewAPPSBlog, Mohan Matthen makes the contrarian argument–compelling, but I think ultimately incorrect–that a “Oui” outcome in the 1995 Québec referendum would have been good for Québec and rump Canada both.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell discusses the consequences of Bo Xilai’s wiretapping of other officials in China, in the context of ubiquitous state surveillance generally.

Jon Trumbo’s Tri-City Herald article chronicling a Japanese enthusiast’s efforts to document the possibility of prehistoric migration between Japan and the United States, inspired by the controversial Paleo-Indian remains of Kennewick Man and claims of Jomon/proto-Ainu influence across the Pacific, is an interesting artifact.

(Myself I suspect that most migrations that took place between five and ten thousand years ago aren’t at all likely to ever be connected to surmised cultures, but hey.)

By week’s end, Ryota Yamada hopes to slip his sea kayak gently into the Columbia River at Clover Island, embarking on the first leg of a 10,000-mile adventure to Japan.

The retired scientist who did nanotechnological research intends to paddle downriver to the ocean, then via the Inland Passage north to Alaska, and eventually across the Bering Strait to the Asian continent.

It will take him four summers, but if he succeeds in reaching his homeland, Yamada said, he will have shown that Kennewick Man could have made his way by boat 9,300 years ago from Japan to North America.

“That is my main purpose,” he said Monday from his temporary camp on Clover Island in downtown Kennewick.

The 42-year-old Japanese native who lives near Tokyo said the story of Kennewick Man, whose skeletal remains were found on the shores of the Columbia River near Kennewick in July 1996, inspired him to attempt the adventure of a lifetime.

[. . .]

Kennewick Man’s bones, which are being held for research at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum in Seattle, are controversial.

While the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Nation believe Kennewick Man is one of their ancestors, researchers believe the ancient bones are not Native American in origin, but may be genetically linked to the Ainu people, who have lived in Japan for thousands of years and appear to have a genetic link to Northern Europe.

A professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, C. Loring Brace, told the Herald in a 2006 interview that Kennewick Man’s heritage likely connected with the Ainu of Japan, or the Jomon people, who were ancestors of the Ainu.

[. . .]

Yamada said he has been collecting the necessary equipment for his trip since arriving in Washington. He used a rental car to go to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he purchased a new sea kayak that is about 20 feet long and weighs barely 20 pounds.

It will take Yamada about four summers to complete the journey, paddling about 2,500 miles on each leg. He expects to get as far as Whitehorse in British Columbia this summer, including a side trip of about 50 miles up the Yukon River.

I’ve blogged in the past about churches, mainly from the perspective of photography but sometimes from the perspective of an observer commenting on the collapse of the old denominations’ churches through the attrition of their congregations.

Mark Oppenheimer’s New York Times article describing the collapse of some churches in the United States, not mainly through lack of interest as in Canada, but rather also via the consequences of the American real-estate bust, is interesting. I wonder: will the disappearance of these churches lead to former members switching to other churches, or perhaps will some drop out of organized religion altogether?

David and Mary Raphael are real estate agents who deal only in church buildings. It’s a rare specialty. They could think of only two other real estate agencies in the country that do what they do, one in Texas and one in Northern California.

As they gave a tour of the sale property here, which is listed for $1.9 million, the couple talked about their calling.

“We’ve been doing only religious buildings since 1979,” said Mr. Raphael, wearing a windbreaker on an unseasonably cold and rainy day. “We tried houses, and we thought, well, some of these people are telling us things that aren’t the truth, so maybe we should try churches.”

[. . .]

The Raphaels met in a square-dancing class at Long Beach State University in 1971 and married the next year. They were both raised Presbyterian, Mrs. Raphael in Marysville, a small town near Sacramento, and Mr. Raphael in Bellflower, in Southern California. They have two children — a son who is a collegiate debate coach in Hawaii, and a daughter who is a public school teacher in Compton.

The church world in which the Raphaels were raised seems distant from the exurban sprawl of Azusa, filled with industrial parks and strip malls.

[. . . A] lot has changed, including preferences in church architecture. “They don’t want the traditional look anymore,” Mrs. Raphael said. “They’re going for the industrial look.”

She said that because city ordinances require one parking spot for every three seats in the pews, parking is essential. In industrial spaces, “you can often get permission to use parking from adjacent lots on Sundays,” when the neighboring businesses do not require the spaces.

[. . .]

The Raphaels have six listings now, and while they say the market for church buildings has held up better than the residential market, times are still worse than they have ever seen.

In their first 31 years in the business, they say they never saw a church foreclosure. But in the last two years, they have worked with 10 churches on foreclosure issues.

“We’re getting calls like, ‘We can’t pay our loans, we have to refinance.’ And now you can’t even get financing at all,” Mr. Raphael said. “It’s always been hard, because for churches they want 30 or 40 percent down. But now even the Christian credit unions aren’t lending.

“The members are out of work,” he continued. “They’re not tithing, and the churches have gone through their reserves, and now they can’t pay the mortgage.”

Miki Meek’s New York Times article about the seasonal tourist migration of Amish and Mennonites from their homes in the northeastern United States to the Florida community of Pinecraft, near Sarasota, describes an interesting phenomenon of Amish/Mennonite tourism. I don’t think it surprising that tourism is a collective phenomenon for these tight-knit ethnoreligious communities given their basic history.

From December through April, Amish travelers pack charter buses making overnight runs from Ohio to Florida. Stiff black hats are gingerly stowed in overhead bins as the bus winds its way through hilly farm country, making pickups in small towns like Sugarcreek, Berlin and Wooster.

[. . .] We were headed to Pinecraft, a village east of Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. What started out as a tourist camp around 1925 has evolved through word of mouth into a major vacation destination for Amish and Mennonites from all over the United States and Canada. Some 5,000 people visit each year, primarily when farm work up north is slow.

On the bus, older passengers reminisced about going down to Pinecraft as children when roads were just sand and dirt. One man wistfully recalled a great-uncle who hitched a ride down in a Model T. But I didn’t fully understand the town’s popularity until we reached the end of our 1,222-mile drive, at a church parking lot, where we were greeted by 300 people under a hot Florida sun — bus arrivals are a community event in Pinecraft.

Walking around Pinecraft is like entering an idyllic time warp. White bungalows and honeybell orange trees line streets named after Amish families: Kaufman, Schrock, Yoder. The local laundromat keeps lines outside to hang clothes to dry. (You have to bring your own pins.) And the techiest piece of equipment at the post office is a calculator. The Sarasota County government plans to designate the village, which spreads out over 178 acres, as a cultural heritage district.

Many travelers I spoke to jokingly call it the “Amish Las Vegas,” riffing off the cliche that what happens in Pinecraft stays in Pinecraft. Cellphone and cameras, normally off-limits to Amish, occasionally make appearances, and almost everyone uses electricity in their rental homes. Three-wheeled bicycles, instead of horses and buggies, are ubiquitous.

“When you come down here, you can pitch religion a little bit and let loose,” said Amanda Yoder, 19, from Missouri. “What I’m wearing right now, I wouldn’t at home,” she said, gesturing at sunglasses with sparkly rhinestones and bikini strings peeking out of a tight black tank top. On the outskirts of the village, she boarded public bus No. 11 with six other sunburned teenagers. They were bound for Siesta Key, a quartz-sand beach about 8 miles away.

[. . .]

Pinecraft Park is a melting pot of Amish and Mennonite America. Old order, new order and nontraditional congregate. Clothing choices clue you in to hometowns: Men from Tampico, Ill., wear denim overalls; girls from Lancaster, Pa., cover their dresses with black aprons; and women from northern Indiana have neatly pressed pleats on their white bonnets.

“All these groups can mingle down here in a way they wouldn’t at home,” said Katie Troyer, 59, a year-round resident who left the Amish church but still embraces the culture. “That’s a puzzle people have been trying to figure out for ages.”

Just over 3 feet tall and always riding around on a bike with a camera, Troyer is a beloved fixture in Pinecraft known for discreetly taking pictures of daily life that she posts on her blog, Project 365.

• A BCer in Toronto’s Jeff Jedras argues that the Liberal Party should try to become the party of federalists, inside Québec particularly.
• Centauri Dreams links to astudy suggesting that elliptical galaxies, older galaxies with less dust than our Milky Way, could still support planets and potential life.
• Geocurrents reports on the various problems–economic, environmental, political–facing the timber industtry in the Russian Far East.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen questions Ross Douthat’s arguments about the decline of religious practice and its imports in the United States by wondering how, given the social and economic changes of the post-war period, this could have been prevented.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes issue with a recent New York Times article on the sex trade in Spain. Unquestioned narratives are not good analysis.
• At Personal Reflections, Paul Belshaw considers definitions of the Enlightenment and civilization as seen from different places–West versus non-West, England versus Scotland–with links.
• Registan’s Nathan Hamm comments on the unseemly ties between Susan G. Komen Uzbekistan Race for the Cure, a breast cancer charity that recently featured in the American culture war, and various charities run by Gulnora Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator.
• Torontoist’s Jamie Woo makes the point that Rob Ford’s disinterest in doing anything with Pride doesn’t speak to his being very up-to-date.
• Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy notes that the background of the emergent war between the Sudans over oil pipelines proves that clear property rights can diminish conflict.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters linking to some interesting posts, one on Brazilian migration to the United States, the other on the stable and relatively high sex ratio of Siberia, the last on the sex trade and migration in Spain. Go, read.

• 80 Beats notes that the failure of North Korea’s satellite launch has had huge negative consequences for that country: diplomatic, economic, and, of course, internal.
• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton is thankful that, on the eve of the conservative Wildrose Party’s victory over the apparently not-conservative-enough Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, he doesn’t live in that province of Canada.
• Language Log has a guest post by one S. Robert Ramsey defending the esthetics of Korean script vis-a-vis Chinese as part of what seems to be a backhanded attack on Chinese script for its excessive (?) complexities.
• Marginal Revolution links to an interesting new report identifying urban growth in developing countries as the main driver of economic growth in the coming decades.
• Noel Maurer points out, in a defense of Rachel Maddow’s new book on American militarism against one criticism, that in the pre-Second World War era just as now the United States was constantly fighting little wars.
• At Savage Minds, Christopher Kelty is unimpressed by the Archaeological Institute of America’s opposition to open access for papers.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that anti-gay groups are upset with Canada’s BioWare game developer for including the potential for same-sex relationships in its online games–Star Wars is mentioned, but Mass Effect 3 also includes some.
• Towleroad takes apart the argument that the apparently orderly evacuation of the Titanic a century ago was achieved because of Christian values which have now vanished from our godless culture. Where to begin?
• Zero Geography reproduces a map of the top Twitter-using countries and finds that the United States and the United Kingdom rank alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Malaysia. Twitter is global, it seems.

David P. Ball’s Vancouver Observer article makes the claim that the Conservative Party made use, illegally, of the services of an American political strategy company (and its workers) with close ties to the Republican Party in multiple ridings where there are allegations of electoral fraud.

Thoughts? I’m inclined to say this is mostly all ado about nothing, but, hey, who am I to judge?

In at least two Conservative-won ridings with reported election irregularities, Front Porch Strategies had US staff on the ground – possibly against Elections Canada rules barring foreign campaigning. In the wake of the “robocall” voter suppression scandal, the Republican-tied U.S. firm hired by 14 Conservative campaigns admitted on Friday to having had U.S. staff working “in the trenches” during the 2011 elections, in an apparent violation of the Canada Election Act which bars foreign political involvement.

Americans PJ Wenzel and Matthew Parker — director and CEO of Front Porch Strategies, respectively – participated directly in at least two Canadian Conservative campaigns, according to social media updates and a photograph from the successful election campaigns of associate defence minister Julian Fantino and MP Rick Dykstra, immigration minister Jason Kenney’s parliamentary secretary.

The revelations contradict Conservative party claims that Front Porch Strategies’ only role during the election was to conduct telephone town halls.

“Matt and PJ headed to Toronto tomorrow to campaign for Conservative Candidates!” Front Porch Strategies posted on their official Facebook page on April 18, 2011. “Nothing like getting in the trenches with terrific people who are going to make a difference once elected.”

Below the photo was the caption: “Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA),” followed by a Front Porch Strategies comment three days later: “We need to get VoIP [Voice Over Internet Protocol] phones up there… dialing numbers is so ‘old-fashioned’…. we need to get them the ’21st Century Technology.’”

On April 20, a Twitter comment from the firm’s account, @FPStrategies, announced, “Knocking doors for MP Rick Dykstra. People don’t like liberals here!”

Although Front Porch has not been linked to any illegal phone calls or robocalls made in the last election, citizens in both Fantino and Dykstra’s ridings have reported irregularities in the campaigns. Those allegations include reported misleading calls in Dykstra’s riding (St. Catherines). Although Front Porch volunteered and made phone calls for Fantino in hopes of winning a contract, he did not hire them.

Under the Canada Elections Act section 331 (Non-interference by Foreigners), it is illegal for a non-resident to directly participate in election campaigns in Canada:

“No person who does not reside in Canada shall, during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting or vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate unless the person is (a) a Canadian citizen; or (b) a permanent resident.”

If the violation was intentional, the offence carries a summary conviction, according to the Act.