Chinese Dissident Says We're Becoming Just Like Them

Chinese artist and persecuted dissident, Ai Weiwei, has an interesting take on the U.S. NSA Prism scandal in today's Guardian in which he says America is behaving like China.

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

Of course, we live under different kinds of legal conditions – in the west and in developed nations there are other laws that can balance or restrain the use of information if the government has it. That is not the case in China, and individuals are completely naked as a result. Intrusions can completely ruin a person's life, and I don't think that could happen in western nations.

But still, if we talk about abusive interference in individuals' rights, Prism does the same. It puts individuals in a very vulnerable position. Privacy is a basic human right, one of the very core values. There is no guarantee that China, the US or any other government will not use the information falsely or wrongly.

...we have never exposed ourselves in this way before, and it makes us vulnerable if anyone chooses to use it against us. Any information or communication could put young people under the surveillance of the state. Very often, when oppressive states arrest people, they have that information in their hands. It can be used as a way of controlling you, to tell you: we know exactly what you're thinking or doing. It can drive people to madness.

When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.

To limit power is to protect society. It is not only about protecting individuals' rights but making power healthier.

Civilisation is built on that trust and everyone must fight to defend it, and to protect our vulnerable aspects – our inner feelings, our families. We must not hand over our rights to other people. No state power should be given that kind of trust. Not China. Not the US.

The More Things Change....

Back in the mid-70's I managed to snag a quick interview with the head prosecutor of the Quebec crime commission while the fellow was in Ottawa.

I thought I'd hit him with a "gotcha" question.  I mentioned something about how, outside Quebec, Canadians had a perception that Quebec politics were riddled with corruption.  Then I asked, is this really true?   I was floored by his response when he said, "Yes, but it's getting better." 

That memory came flooding back when I read this morning that Montreal's "anti-corruption" mayor, Michael Applebaum, had been slapped with 14-corruption charges.   The charges are said to include fraud against the government, breach of trust, conspiracy and municipal corruption.  WTF???

Applebaum only got the mayor's job last November when he stepped in to replace the former mayor, Gerald Tremblay, who resigned because of ...corruption.

Who's next?

plus ça change, plus c'est la même

Why Canada Should be Wary of U.S. Missile Defence

There has been talk that Ottawa might jump aboard the U.S. missile defence programme out of fear of a rogue missile launch from North Korea.

Before we do, let's make sure it works.   There are plenty of dirt cheap reasons to think otherwise.

America's hyper-expensive missile interceptors (does that sound familiar, ...cough, cough, F-35) are essentially untested.  Okay, they've been tested with reasonable success against target missile warheads.   They have not, however, been tested against the sort of warheads a 21st century enemy would use, warheads equipped with counter-measures, decoys.  From Reuters:

American scientists have repeatedly pointed out these weaknesses since the 1960s. Yet they have not been addressed, much less corrected.

The new director of the Missile Defense Agency, Vice Admiral James Syring, cited this key problem during House Armed Services Subcommittee hearings last month. Syring talked about “the very difficult problems of lethal object discrimination, limited inventory and cost per kill.”

He explained that the defense system is both costly and ineffective. If the missile interceptors can’t discriminate between the lethal object — the warhead — and the decoys, then limited (and costly) inventory is used up chasing fakes.

The Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, Michael Gilmore, reaffirmed this challenge. “If we can’t discriminate what the real threatening objects are,” Gilmore said, “it doesn’t matter how many ground-based interceptors we have, we won’t be able to hit what needs to be hit.”

And what sort of high-tech countermeasures are involved?  You know those silvery balloons from your kids' birthday parties?  They'll do nicely.   Lightly inflated in the vacuum of space, they'll fly at roughly the same speed as the warhead itself, drawing missile interceptors off their target.   Balloons are dirt cheap while missile interceptors are very, very costly and in limited supply.

How did an untested and unworkable technology make it so far in the Defense Department procurement process? A recent Government Accountability Office report reveals that instead of flying before buying, the Missile Defense Agency has been doing the opposite. Its cart-before-the-horse methodology has resulted in “unexpected cost increases, schedule delays, test problems, and performance shortfalls.” (Sound familiar, F-35 fans?)

The agency’s “tests” are more like rigged “demonstrations.” The intercept team knows all the incoming missile’s parameters ahead of time — a luxury it won’t have during a real attack. Even with this, however, many “demonstrations” ended in dismal failure.

Unfortunately in a Canada in which our defence policy has been decoupled from our defence needs and, instead, has become politically driven (see Afghanistan War, failure of) we have developed a remarkable appetite for high-end junk that doesn't work.   Why does it feel like the Pentagon has become staffed by door-to-door salesmen?

MAJOR UPDATE: Exposing the Link between Climate Change and Our Government's Digital Surveillance of Us All.

 Does climate change and the fear of public unrest explain why Western governments have sharply ramped up domestic surveillance of our digital communications?  According to The Guardian, that's precisely what's going on.

Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance":

"Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances."

Other documents show that the "extraordinary emergencies" the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.

 [In 2008], the Department of Defense's (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new "era of persistent conflict" due to competition for "depleting natural resources and overseas markets" fuelling "future resource wars over water, food and energy." The report predicted a resurgence of:

"... anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

In the same year, a report by the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to "disruptive domestic shock" could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside "catastrophic natural and human disasters" or "pervasive public health emergencies" coinciding with "unforeseen economic collapse." Such crises could lead to "loss of functioning political and legal order" leading to "purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency...

"DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance."

That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to "domestic catastrophes" and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents."
The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.

Are dissenters to be seen as "enemies of the state"?  Is protest now deemed subversion, terrorism?  Well if it has anything to do with bitumen pipelines, the answer is a big, honkin' YES.   The Harper regime has made no secret of the fact that they consider opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline to be eco-terrorists.  They have even established a secret police force comprising officers from the Calgary and Edmonton police, the RCMP and the national spy agency, CSIS, to keep watch over pipeline opponents and who knows what else?

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Trans-Canada, the company that will operate the Keystone XL pipeline has been indoctrinating federal and local police officers on how to crack down on environmental activists, even how to arrest them under anti-terrorism laws.

What's perhaps most disturbing in the bitumen battles is the apparently seamless melding of governmental and corporate powers.  It becomes difficult to spot where one leaves off and the other picks up.  Perhaps there is no dividing line any longer.  They've teamed up and we, the public, are, in their approach,  the opposition, the threat, the adversary.

This echoes of a recent analysis of this metadata harvesting that has rocked the United States and we now discover is being done in many other countries, including Canada.  It is said that this mass intrusion into our privacy shatters the bond of fidelity between government and the people, digitally transforms us all into suspects, and reduces us to foreigners in our own homelands.

UPDATE:I

Colleague Troy Thomas linked to a comment from "Badtux" who believably claims to work in the "big data" area in Silicon Valley.  This is his assessment of metadata mining and what it's really for.  It's chilling and you need to know this:

"We’re working on the sort of technological pipe dream that would be able to detect something as nebulous as “terrorist patterns”. But here’s the thing: WE CAN’T DO IT. And if we, with billions more in R&D dollars and hundreds of thousands more smart people than the NSA could ever dream of having, can’t do it, and if the NSA is *still* coming to us hat in hand to buy our technology even though it won’t do much of what they want to do, what does that say for the claims by President Obama that this massive data dragnet is about “catching terrorists”?

It’s not. It can’t be. We just don’t have the technology to churn through that massive pile of data for something as nebulous as “terrorist patterns”. The technology we do have is impressive, and frightening in its implications, but those implications will play out over the next ten year cycle of security technology upgrades. Right now, we aren’t there.
 
But one thing we *can* do, and can do quite easily, is associate pieces of data with *specific* people. That’s what Google does, after all — shards and indexes massive quantities of data so that you can find out everything related to a specific person, place, or thing. In short, this data pile is useless for the purpose of catching unknown terrorists, but extremely useful for the purpose of surveillance of known dissidents. Because once you know who you’re wanting to track, it’s just an index lookup (a massively distributed one across piles of data, but still, just an index lookup) to pull in everything about that person that you’d ever want to know.

How many of you have things that you’d prefer not to see the light of day, even if they’re not illegal? The impact of this on democracy cannot be understated. Potential opponents of the Hegemons must stop and think about what facts about their life that might be spun to be embarrassing or humiliating before they step forward to oppose the Hegemons, and for all but the most pure, that exercise will lead to them slinking away in humiliation rather than stepping forward in opposition.
 
So this isn’t about terrorists. This is about dissidents. That’s all we have the technology to do today — and you can’t convince me that the NSA is going to build a massive system that is useful today only for surveillance of dissidents only on the future promise that it might some day, somehow, be possibly capable of identifying “terrorists”. While government boondoggles of that sort aren’t unknown — remember “Star Wars”, which never had a chance of actually working to shoot down Soviet missiles? — those were clear crony capitalism with no use outside of enriching crony capitalists. 

But if a system has been built with one clear *current* use that actually works, then it makes sense to assume that it will be used for that use. Which is surveillance of dissidents.
 
Welcome to 1984, citizens. Please salute Big Brother as you pass the nearest video camera. Thank you."

Brit DefMin Concedes - Afghanistan Is Our Vietnam

British Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, says the miserable war in Afghanistan has been his country's Vietnam.

Britain is experiencing a ''Vietnam phenomenon'' as the mission draws to a close, the Defence Secretary said in an interview during a trip to Afghanistan.

His candid assessment comes as Britain tries to wind down its mission in Afghanistan at the same time as Western leaders edge towards greater military intervention in Syria.

''I suspect that the British people - and not just the British people - will be wary of enduring engagements on this kind of scale for perhaps quite a long while,'' he said.

Speaking at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand province, Mr Hammond said: ''You might call it the Vietnam phenomenon: when an engagement turns out to be longer and more costly than originally envisaged, there is often a public reaction to that.''

You're right, Phil.  There's also a public reaction to a war to prop up a criminal enterprise running a failed, narco-state that drags on interminably, squandering lives and treasure, without any hope of success of any description.

Who should be held to account for this?  We could begin with the military leadership who lied us into this war with empty promises of what they could do.   Where is the long safely-retired Randy "The Big Cod" Hillier these days?

Naked Citizens

A short documentary that reveals what lies in store for the innocent when digital, robo-surveillance, gets it wrong.

It's Only a Rumour, But It's a Dandy

Did Tony Blair break up the marriage between 82-year old Rupert Murdoch and his 44-year old wife, Wendi Deng?

BBC financial correspondent Robert Peston, who is close friends with many of Mr Murdoch's key lieutenants, including News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, kicked the rumour frenzy off when he tweeted yesterday: "Am also told that undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping - & hate myself for wanting to know what they are."

Happier Times

Murdoch's biographer, Michael Wolff, added on his Twitter account: "I'm hearing the WHY, the big reveal, the scandal details, could come tomorrow."


He added ominously: "Rumor about the big B is everywhere except in print."


He confirmed "B" was Mr Blair after Mr Blair's spokesman issued a denial to The Hollywood Reporter.


"Tony Blair has denied an affair with Wendi Murdoch, so open discussion officially begins," he tweeted.


It is no secret that Blair is close to Murdoch and Deng.


Mr Blair, who was British Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, is godfather to their two children, Grace, 11, and Chloe, 9. He has been married to his wife Cherie for 33 years.


Ms Deng, 44, is reportedly close to several powerful men, including Mr Blair and Google chief Eric Schmidt.


Ever since she intimated to the New York Times last year that she and Mr Murdoch were living independent lives, speculation has mounted that their marriage was on the rocks. 

Eeny, Meeny, Miny...

Capturing Alert

Sit back, go "full screen" and enjoy a preview of Charles Stankievech's photographic odyssey filmed at CFS Alert, the world's northernmost permanently inhabited outpost.   The images are truly astonishing.

Will Robotic Killing's Real Victim be Democracy?

Science fiction writer and futurist Daniel Suarez explains the danger, to us and to our very democracy, from the rise of autonomous lethality, killer drones.  Get your weekend paranoia fix here.

Selling Global Warming - Local May Be the Key

Let's face it, people really don't give a s**t about the devastation global warming is bringing to the people of the sub-Saharan Sahel.  We don't readily find the nexus by which we're linked to the troubles in distant corners of the world when most of us couldn't find these places on a map if we tried.   Maybe it's time to change the conversation.

There seems to be greater success getting through when global warming is addressed as a local issue.   Sort of like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg did earlier this week in a speech delivered from a Brooklyn lighthouse damaged last fall by Hurricane Sandy:

"By mid-century, up to a quarter of all New York City’s land area, where 800,000 residents live today, will be in the flood plain,” he said, and “40 miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis just during normal high tides.” We no longer have the luxury of ideological debate, he said. “The bottom line is we can’t run the risk.” 

Bloomberg used the speech to unveil a $19.5 billion adaptation programme mainly designed to protect the city from the worst impacts of sea level rise and to reinforce hospitals and essential infrastructure to withstand flooding.

Perhaps focusing on real-time adaptation strategies, real measures, concrete, tangible is essential to moving the conversation along into mitigation - serious emissions reductions, weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and shifting to alternative, clean energy.

The impacts we're seeing now (you know who I mean, Toronto) are from just 1 degree Celsius of warming and, while we're already reeling from them, we have to think of ourselves as boxers in the ring.  That's just one punch, one of many to come.  You've got twelve rounds to get through... if you've done enough sparring, enough conditioning, enough cardio to stand a chance.  What's that?  You haven't done any of those things?  Oh dear.

This real time, local approach does seem to be catching hold.  In Pennsylvania, for example, the PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center has released a report entitled "In the Path of the Storm."  It brought home climate change truths such as how, since 2007, nine out of ten Pennsylvanians have experienced at least one weather-related disaster in their home county.

In Newfoundland & Labrador the provincial government has released a report into the short- to mid-range impacts of climate change showing a mixed bag of impacts.  Among the positives are fewer frost days, shorter winters, longer growing seasons.  Among the negatives are severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity, the migration of invasive pests, flooding and coastal erosion.

There is an enormous volume of truly powerful, easily accessible information coming online now.   For example, Google Maps now allows a satellite view of how your neighbourhood or any part of the world has changed over the past 30-years.   You can access it at the link above.  Navigate to your chosen spot, zoom in, and run the slider at the bottom to view the changes that have occurred every year since 1984.   As these systems improve we'll have a helpful tool to help reverse some of the landscape amnesia that impairs our ability to recognize the scope and severity of change we have experienced even over the recent past.

In the eastern U.S. people are now having to come to grips  with the reality of  living without flood insurance in an era that promises heavy flooding of increasing severity and frequency.  A study released this week by FEMA, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, warns that mega-floods are not only here to stay but they'll worsen by yet another 40- to 45% over the course of this century.   The report also warns that sea levels will rise by about four feet during this century.  The NOAA predicts up to a six foot sea level rise.

Private insurers long ago abandoned the flood insurance market in the eastern U.S., forcing the federal government to come through for all those soshulist-hatin' Tea Baggers with a government  programme, NFIP,  the National Flood Insurance Program.  Hurricane Katrina put NFIP in the hole for $16-billion.   Hurricane Sandy increased NFIP's deficit another $25-billion and still counting.  The FEMA report warns of massive future losses, concluding that losses on each insured property could increase by 90% over the course of this century.

There's a debate underway in the States over whether FEMA and NFIP relief actually worsen the future situation by encouraging people to rebuild and resettle areas that really ought to be abandoned to the sea and to the ravages of climate change.  It's unfathomable that a place as treasured as New Orleans could be abandoned but the city continues to subside, sink, even as the sea level rises and major storm events become more frequent, more severe.  There are a lot of people who claim the city cannot be defended forever.

What the Americans are being forced to come to grips with is a critical point that is usually overlooked - our frailty.   We can consider climate change in the context of a single major event - say the flooding that has recently hit southern Ontario.   But, like the boxer in the 12-round title fight, it's not a question of how we take that hard punch, what matters is how many such punches we can absorb before we hit the mat.

The Newfoundland & Labrador report, for example warns that once a century storms will now become once every fifty years or even once every twenty-five year storms.   What had been once in 20-year storms will become one in five or even one in two year storms.

Across Canada we will be coming to grips with the cumulative effects of climate change, not because our governments are inclined to that sort of thing - they're not, but because we (they) won't have any choice.  Whether it's sea level rise and storm surges, sustained drought or severe flooding, the cumulative impact will take a major toll on our societies on a regional basis and we won't be able to afford not to respond.

Each locality is going to have to weigh its vulnerabilities on both single event and cumulative impacts bases.   In British Columbia, for example, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, face many climate change problems that are different and often greater than the situation that faces other parts of the province.  Parts of the Lower Mainland have a subsidence vulnerability.  Parts have a sea level rise vulnerability and the related storm surge vulnerability.  Parts of the Lower Mainland have an annual flooding vulnerability from earlier and more intense melting of interior mountain snowpacks.  Logic dictates that parts of the Lower Mainland should be abandoned or cleared and rebuilt on stilts but the political will and economic imperative are not there - yet.  And, despite all these growing vulnerabilities, the population of the Lower Mainland continues to swell.

Each region of each province has its own set of challenges whether it be the north, either coast, the prairies or central Canada.  And it's on that regional and provincial scope that the reality of global warming will be anchored.  And it is on that regional and provincial level that demands will finally be made on Ottawa to deal with global warming mitigation, i.e. major GHG emissions reductions, spurred on by the painful knowledge that while we can't undo much of what we'll have to endure from existing global warming, we can still make the ordeal very much worse for the future.

Well, Ladies, He's Back on the Market

Get him while he's hot - or at least still warm.  82-year old media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has filed for divorce from his wife of 14-years, Wendi Deng.

Murdoch, who is a sprightly 38-years Deng's senior, cited "irreconcilable differences" as his grounds for divorce.  What that means to a guy who needs help to tell his testicles from his shoe laces is anyone's guess.

Your joke here:

Is It Insane If We All Do It?

We are seriously mentally ill, as individuals and as a society.  If you don't believe it, just look at all the self-destructive things we do, often with a sense of achievement and invariably without thinking them through.

A fellow by the name of Jim Harris writes that modern economics is a form of pathology.  He notes how furiously we're working to liquidate our natural capital, rebranding it "income" and congratulating ourselves for our wonderful success.

Jim's right when you give it just a little thought.   If resources are non-renewable why are we so intent on depleting them to the point of exhaustion?   What of future generations who might have some need for them?   Is that just their tough luck?   Should we leave them a note saying "Sorry but we sucked out your country's resources because we could.  By the way, would you mind looking after those deficits we bequeathed to you?"

We play this very game with our bitumen pits.  Our Tar Sands boosters proclaim bitumen to be (to quote Ignatieff) the "beating heart" of the Canadian economy for the 21st century.   Without the Tar Sands we're what, nothing?  Just a bigger Albania?  We have all this education and all this wealth, especially from our renewable resources, but we're defining ourselves by a sludgy hydrocarbon?

Been doing a bit of reading lately about consumerism and consumption and if you want any proof that we're mad, there's plenty to be had in that discussion.

University of Colorado epidemiologist and behavioural scientist, Warren Hern, has formulated a theory that mankind's burgeoning population and ever increasing consumption footprint is creating conditions that operate very much as a malignancy on the planet.  We have, as a species, become a cancer or at least replicate all four main characteristics of malignancy:

-  Rapid, uncontrolled growth;
-  Invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues;
-  De-differentation (loss of distinctiveness of individual components); and,
-  Metastasis to different sites.

"The human species is a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic species engaged in a global pattern of converting all available plant, animal, organic and inorganic matter into either human biomass or into adaptive adjuncts of human biomass.   This is an epiecopathological process that is both immediately and ultimately ecocidal."

It's madness, to be sure, but does that mean our leadership will even speak to it much less do anything about it?  Hardly.  It's not for want of intelligence.  It's not for want of education.  They have those qualities in abundance.  No, their deficiencies are far worse and far more dangerous.   They're wanting in courage and in decency and that goes for the lot of them.

They still rely on consumerism to fuel our economic engine and they harness that engine in the insane pursuit of perpetual growth.  We're not only adding massively more people but we're adding massively more people with ever greater consumption patterns.  That's our malignancy.

We live in a deranged world dedicated to the cause of maximizing consumption and growth for the purpose of constantly increasing production and growth.   We grow so that we can grow ever larger, ever faster.   That sounds awfully malignant, doesn't it?

Can you imagine putting a moratorium on the depletion of non-renewable resources?   What if we were to place those non-renewables in trust for future generations?   What if we said we've been depleting those resources so rapaciously for the past two generations that we've had our share and what remains is rightly the property of generations of Canadians yet to come?   That would be denounced as heresy, madness, perhaps even treasonous.  I can't think of a reason why it should, of a single moral argument that could be maintained against it.   Yet I know - as do you - that the mere suggestion of these things would elicit nothing but indignation and outrage.   That's what mad people do.

Recent Offerings from the Tweet of God

Imagine if God had a Twitter account.   Apparently He does!  From it he dispenses divine observations and wisdom to we mere mortals.  Here are a few of His latest offerings:

I support marijuana. I created it for you. In fact the Garden of Eden was full of it. That was Eve's downfall. She got the munchies.

John 3:16. Matthew 3:17. Luke 3:18. It was a very close race.

Once you go black hole, you never go back. That is literally true.

Even on the first day of Creation I remember thinking to Myself, "I hate Mondays".

The NSA knows more about you than I do.

Every time you sing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" I'm reminded how much I disapprove of My son's friends.

The reason I ask for so much money is I have a child to support.

Not feeling too good. May call in nonexistent tomorrow.

Child molestation! THAT was what I meant to outlaw in the Ten Commandments. Oh, and rape.

I support the separation of church and reality.

My love for you is unconditional, provided you do and think exactly as I say.

One thing makes Christianity superior to Judaism and Islam: grilled cheese with bacon.

If you think about it, the fact that people swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the Bible is pretty funny.

It's not that 10% of you came out wrong, it's that I'm 10% gay.

As of today I'm officially off sneeze duty. You want your mucus blessed, bring it to a priest.

When I work in mysterious ways it's called grace. When you work in mysterious ways it's called grounds for termination.

The question is no longer "What kind of world are you leaving for your children?" but "Why even bother having children?"

Am I pro-life? Yes, but if you're familiar with My work you know I'm not exactly anti-death, either.

God is good?" Only in the same way that Bob is boob.

Your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. It takes an average of 70-80 years.

I am perfect, omnipotent and all-knowing. Nevertheless, this world was the best I could do.

If the Earth swallowed you all up whole there's not a court in the universe that wouldn't rule it self-defense.

For Mother's Day, Jesus said he wants to get Mary something she's never gotten before. I said, "How about laid?"

In the beginning" is a mistranslation of "Once upon a time".

Quebec's End-of-Life Care Act Online

CBC's web site has the English-language version of Quebec's End-of-Life Care Act.

The Quebec approach differs from that of Vermont, Oregon, Washington and Montana where the terminally ill patient can obtain a prescription for a life-ending drug.

The Quebec approach would have a physician administer the lethal drug following completion of a series of safeguards.

Having delved at some length into the Oregon Death with Dignity Act and the state's experience of it over many years, I think the American approach is far superior.

In Oregon, the terminally ill resident has to go through a careful and somewhat elaborate series of interviews and safeguards to qualify for a prescription for life-ending drugs.   From there on the dying person is in complete control of the process.   The prescription need not be filled and often is not.  If the prescription is filled the individual need not take it and often does not.

It is precisely because many prescriptions aren't filled and many that are will not be taken that the American approach is superior.  Just having the option is quite often enough to help those facing death endure the ordeal.   For these people it relieves the fear of having to go through an unendurable agony of death.   They can indeed have a natural death, if that is bearable, but on their own terms.

Quite frankly I don't care what religious superstition you cleave to but you and your religion are monstrous if, on that basis, you seek to deny others a compassionate, serene end of life.   Do whatever you choose but don't impose your religious views to tell someone else how they must die.

Wherein Lee Valley Tries to Help You Get Your Freak On

This was just too good not to share.   Head shaving or tattoos not included.

How We Once Distinguished Democracy from Totalitarianism

One of the great themes of the Cold War was individual freedom from state prying and oppression.  Unlike the Communist world, democracy ensured we were free to go about our affairs, to speak our minds, even dissent, openly and freely.  On the other side of the Iron Curtain, however, there was no such freedom.  The state monitored its citizens, spied on them, forced people to speak to each other covertly in hushed tones if at all.  We were free from our government, they were not.

That critical distinction of the past is fading fast now.   Even in Canada our government harvests what is called "metadata."  Consider it an archive of who contacts whom, when, how and how often - at least if the communication is digital.

This is said to be the equivalent of looking at an envelope and recording particulars of the addressor and addressee, how it was transmitted, when it was transmitted, and how big was the transmission.   Put enough of these together and you can discern patterns of communication and follow those through to further communications these two parties may have with others.

But, and here's the thing, you also get the contents of those communications only you don't read them, supposedly, at least not without a warrant.  Right.

One of the best recent analyses of this metadata harvesting noted that it dissolves the bond of fealty between citizen and the state, automatically placing all citizens under a form of digital suspicion, transforming us all into foreigners in our own land.

Oddly enough a great many of us (in the U.S. a modest majority) seem to be okay with this.  We have become so promiscuous with our personal privacy that this spying seems tolerably benign.   We, or at least plenty of us, have this fairy tale faith in our government not to abuse this power they have taken over us without our consent or even foreknowledge.

An unremarkable but wise man once warned me to always be vigilant in defence of our rights.  These, he said, had been dearly paid for, often more than once, quite often in blood.  And, of them, he cautioned there wasn't one that, for want of vigorous defence, would not be taken from us.  For he warned that our rights are of incredible value, usually unappreciated by those who hold them, but understood full well by those who would strip us of them.

What he warned of is what we are experiencing right now.

The Great Undoer

Canada's next great leader will not be a doer.   Our next great leader, if we are lucky enough to have one, will be an undoer - a leader who will systematically cut out the rot that has beset this country slowly for decades and then very quickly, very powerfully over the last decade.

Canada doesn't need reforming.   Canada needs restoring, rehab if you like.

We need to rehabilitate Canadian democracy.   Stephen Harper has shown us how easily one man can undermine our democratic freedom.   He has shown how even a country with solid democratic traditions can be subverted to the will of a ruler with despotic instincts.

Our American cousins have shown us the absolute corruption that follows in the wake of corporatism.   The executive and legislative branches fall and, eventually, the judiciary falls.   The working classes, blue and white-collar, once known as the Middle Class, become what the powerful are willing to openly call the "Precariat."   Political power is captured by the Few and then wealth and power are transferred from the many to that Few by their "bought and paid for" political apparatus.   Democracy is quietly suffocated.

We need to restore our faith in ourselves which begins by restoring our faith in our institutions.   That means undoing the myriad of ways Stephen Harper has sequestered our institutions and transformed them - the public service, the armed forces and, now, even the national police - into his personal, partisan political agencies.   No longer can any prime minister's office be the gatekeeper that blocks the public's access to their own institutions.  There will be no next great leader who fails to reconnect the public with their government.

Our American cousins have given us reason to worry about these things.   Barack Obama was supposed to be a great undoer of the mind-boggling excesses of the Bush/Cheney era.   In many aspects he has simply failed.  In others he has worsened the deplorable situations he inherited.   Obama would certainly get an A+ rating of approval from someone like Ronald Reagan.

Like America, Canada has undergone a shift to the right across our political spectrum.   Harper, with the helpful assistance of people such as Ignatieff, Layton, Mulcair and Trudeau, has already achieved his prime directive - permanently shifting Canada's political centre far to the right.   What had been a proud party of the Left is now the Latter Day Liberals.   What had been a proud party of the centre is now the Conservative Lite Libs.   This is not to say that Canada may not drift even further to the right in the years ahead.  Indeed we may, particularly with the anchor to the Left gone.   There is no force to pull us back, to even our political keel.   And Obama has shown that we will have no great leader, no grand undoer, while our nation lists this badly.   We have to make a conscious choice to reverse this, to restore what we once had.

The next great leader will not meekly, apologetically defend the Left, he/she will champion the Left and the Centre-Left.  You cannot fight corporatism that undermines our democracy from the Right.  You cannot fight to break the corporate media cartel that undermines our democracy from the Right.  You cannot fight the growing challenge of inequality of wealth, income and opportunity from the Right.  You cannot restore Canadian democracy from the place where it never was when it was healthy.   All of these fights and all of these goals lie at the heart of progressivism.

Undoing all this is a progressive fight, one that has to be fought from the Centre-Left.  The next great leader won't have to be told that.

Will Quebec Fire a Rocket Up Harper's Fundamentalist Ass?

All eyes should be on Quebec's National Assembly where the government is expected to table its bill on medically-assisted death.

The debate, said to be fierce, shows how emotionally-charged and religiously-loaded the subject is.  To some it's murder by physician.  To the other side it's death with dignity or terminal sedation.  It's a subject that almost convulses with emotion, especially fear.   There are many quite willing to deny others who stand on the cusp of death, as we must all do, the opportunity to escape the "Great Agony."   And those who work so hard to deny the dying this humane, compassionate alternative always claim the moral high ground, usually on the strength of some book of ancient fables.

Those who oppose this should at least look into Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, and the nearly two-decades of experience since it was enacted.  The record speaks for itself and utterly disposes of all the critics' grounds of opposition except for the religious, the superstitious ones.   This is one of those situations where freedom from religion must prevail.

Will the F-35 Be Obsolete Before It Reaches Canadian Hangars?

Here's a question no one has yet asked.   What is the F-35's anti-stealth capability?

Way back when America's stealth fighter, the F-22, and its poor cousin, America's stealth light bomber, the F-35, were conceived it was envisioned they would be operating against non-stealthy aerial opponents.   One side had stealth, the other side didn't - advantage stealth.

But, as the stealth programmes became bogged down in endless delays and cost overruns (as is to be expected with any radically new technology), the world once in the F-35s designers' vision has changed.

What's changed?   Plenty.   First of all, the Americans allowed a lot of Lockheed's stealth technology to fall into the bad guy's hands when the Iranians were somehow able to force land an RQ-170 stealth drone in November, 2011.  It didn't take the Chinese long to show up in Tehran to collect samples of materials, onboard stealth electronics and design features.

Then it dawned on the Russians that, while America's stealth technology was indeed pretty good at defeating the standard, X-band radar sets used on fighter aircraft, it was far less effective against the old, long array, L-band radar technology.  And then it dawned on the Russians that they could fit those long L-band radar arrays in their fighters' wings.   Oopsie.

And then it was the Chinese again hacking into Lockheed's and other defence contractors' computers and helping themselves to masses of F-35 data and secrets.

And look who else is already flying their own stealth fighters?  Why, Russia and China and the Chinese, like the Americans, even have two stealth designs flying (one of which happens to look an awful lot like the F-35 only with the added advantage of twin engines).    Plenty of other countries are also getting in on the stealth act - France, Britain, South Korea, Turkey - and who knows which nation will be next?

America's stealth warplanes are offensive weapons.   The F-35 in particular is designed to penetrate heavily defended hostile territory, make a beeline to some high value target (hopefully undetected), bomb that target and then get out again just as quickly as possible.

The F-35 is not designed to loiter around for an aerial brawl.  It has limited fuel and limited weaponry, just enough for the bombing job and that's about it.  Worse still, the F-35's stealth is "straight line" stealth, frontal aspect only.  It's quite detectable, even to X-band radar, from the sides or the back which, coupled with its single-engine vulnerability and other shortcomings, means it's not very good for the turn'n burn, Top Gun stuff.  It also lacks the Holy Grail of 21st century super-fighters, Supercruise, which leaves it really vulnerable when it has to try to outrun pursuers.

The Joint Strike Fighter is already a bit long in the tooth.  The development contract was signed in 1996.   Lockheed got the nod in 2001.   Now, in mid-2013, the F-35 is still in development and is not expected to be fully-operational until 2019.

The F-35 already has a weight problem.   This is something that happens to many warplanes over the course of their service life as new gadgets come along that have to be added.   With any luck the aircraft becomes more capable even as its performance slides a bit.  Not so with the F-35.   Lockheed has already fought the weight problem by removing fire-suppression equipment, stuff that's really not needed until it really is needed.

Another thing we don't really talk about much is how stealth performs in offensive and defensive roles.   It might be far more helpful to the defender (i.e. a Chinese pilot), operating over home territory, than to someone flying an F-35 to a bombing target in enemy territory (i.e. China).  The defender, after all, has less of a fuel problem and just needs to get in position to fire a missile or two or six and then go refuel and get more weapons.   For the attacker, it's a come-as-you-are party.   He doesn't get to refuel or re-arm.  And, once he has dealt with the defender, he still has to proceed on to his bombing target and then get all the way back out again provided he has enough fuel, weaponry and luck to get out at all.

It all began as such a simple proposition - if he can't see me, he can't hit me and I can do as I like.  It sounded like such a great idea at the time but the calculus has changed over the past dozen years and it will probably keep changing before the F-35 ever sees a Canadian hangar years from now.

Are We Heading for Despotism?

The first thing that someone stealing your privacy will tell you is "don't worry."  That's the standard line after they have been exposed stealing your privacy.   That, in turn, is reinforced with suggestions that you don't matter to them anyway, you're insignificant and that they have netted so much data they don't have the means to really snoop into what you're saying and thinking, not little old you.

What they don't tell you is that if they did, for some reason perhaps known only to them, they could very easily snoop into just about everything you've been thinking and doing provided you've been communicating to someone about it.

Their bottom line is "trust me."  In other words, trust me with your privacy and I'll use that power only against the bad guys.  I promise. Trust me with the most important right you have, the one upon which hinges most of the other rights you might recognize and many that you don't.

In April of last year, The Guardian's Henry Porter contemplated whether democracy itself can withstand state snooping.

The millions who suffer under dictatorships will be astonished that we are about to let slip – with so little protest – the freedoms for which they continue to sacrifice so much.

Privacy from state snooping is the defining quality of any true democracy.

The law of function creep means that oppressive measures passed to address terrorism and crime are invariably deployed in much less threatening contexts. For example, the spread of surveillance under the last government's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act resulted in local councils using counter-terror methods to mount undercover operations against fly-tippers and those suspected of lying in school applications.

Once the intelligence services and police have these powers to insist that internet and phone companies hand over our data without our knowledge, in a crisis it will be a short step for the same people to argue that they need to start reading our communications.

How long before messages between trade unionists or those legitimately engaged in protest are subject to routine interception by the authorities, because their activities trouble the state?

...Why not just let the state have all our information? Is it worth fighting in an age when Google and the phone companies know so much about us already? The answer comes from the German philosopher Wolfgang Sofsky, who wrote: "Privacy is the citadel of personal freedom. It provides defence against expropriation, importunity and imposition – against power and coercion."

The more practical objection is that police and security services are capable of getting things wrong, as well as abusing a system that allows such power over ordinary citizens. There have been prosecutions of police officers for misuse of the police national computer and the ANPR surveillance system. Given the countless cases of police misconduct and present worries about the standards of Britain's police, it is probably wise not to hand them such an intrusive tool.

This surveillance system is the instrument of a Kafkaesque state that grants itself the right to universal suspicion, while enjoying the protection of a new law, brought in by a lawyer, that allows evidence of official misconduct to be heard in secret.

Canada's federal government understands the power of privacy at a pathological level from which arises a blanket of near-complete and utterly despotic secrecy.  Here then a few passages from a speech by Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin:

The need for information is compounded by the inevitable tendency of governments, and those exercising powers on behalf of the government, to disclose only as much as they deem necessary. 

Despotic secrecy is the historic norm. Democracy sets its face against this. Yet, unchecked, the tendency is always there. And unchecked, it will inevitably undermine democracy.

This proposition has been recognized by statesmen and scholars.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau said this:

...the democratic process requires the ready availability of true and complete information. In this way people can objectively evaluate the government’s policies. To act otherwise is to give way to despotic secrecy.³

In milder form, James Madison, one of the American founding fathers said:

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and the people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.⁴

And Professor J. R. Mallory, in his seminal work on the Canadian system of government, stated simply this:

...[the] major problem in modern constitutional democracy is to obtain effective control, by public opinion and by legal restraints, of the apparatus of the state which continually expands.⁵

In sum, in any system, democracy included, the apparatus of the state must be controlled. Without controls, the natural tendency to increase power will not be restrained. And without information, the necessary controls, whether at the ballot box or through judicial challenge, are absent. Constraining the “apparatus of the state”, to borrow Mallory’s term, depends on the people being informed about what government is doing. 

In other words the same people who tell you to "trust me" with your privacy are those least willing to trust you with theirs.  This is powerful evidence of rising despotism and a process of deliberate, steady and covert dismantling of our democracy.   That this seems to be standard practice in 21st century petro-states ought to, if nothing else, put us on our guard.

Is Pam Wallin the Ultimate Tory Piggy at the Trough?

Pam Wallin is, by most standards, flush.   In addition to the hefty pension benefits she likely racked up from her broadcasting days, she has plenty of other revenue streams - atop her tidy Senate stipend.

Pamela Wallin has a lucrative life outside politics, where she has been entitled to roughly $1 million in fees and stock options for her role on corporate boards since being appointed to the Senate.

The Star looked through public company profiles, her disclosures to the Senate ethics office and expenses related to her former role as chancellor at the University of Guelph to paint a picture of her non-political activities in advance of the release of a review of her travel expenses by the forensic accounting firm Deloitte.

The Star reported last month that a preliminary review of expenses by external auditors displayed a pattern of claiming Senate expenses on personal business, including her involvement with boards, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity in the absence of authorization to discuss the matter. 

In other words, Pam's outside gigs are worth about three times her Senate takings - if you exclude her travel expenses on the Senate tab for her to rake in that outside income.  I smell bacon!

An Obituary for the Left

CounterPunch recently carried a lament for The Silent Death of the American Left.  It offers useful insights for the gristled remnant of Canada's once proud political Left that has now fallen happy victim to the black hole of political compression, the flaccid centrism that afflicts us today.   The question stands for us as well - is there really a Left movement in Canada any longer?


There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?

Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?


Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.

This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.

We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.

Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.
Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.

Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.

Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.


The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. 
And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.

Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.

How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…

One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.

We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.

China Stakes Its Claim to the Arctic

It's our fault if we don't listen for China has been loud and clear that it considers it is entitled to a powerful, potentially military presence in the Arctic and a stake in Arctic ocean resources.

To date, China’s economic ambitions in the Arctic have been largely thwarted by Arctic states wary of the country’s claim that the Arctic “is the inherited wealth of all mankind,” and that China has a role to play in its future because it is a “near-Arctic state.” 

Iceland, for example, twice rejected a Chinese plan to buy a 115-square-mile farm along its northern coast for a proposed golf course resort; the island nation, which is located at the confluence of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, feared that the proposal was part of a thinly veiled plan to build an Arctic port.

Canada has also been unsettled by China’s reluctance to recognize its assertion of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage.

 “It’s not because the Arctic countries have stopped being suspicious of Chinese ambitions,” explains [Rob] Huebert [of the University of Calgary and a member of Canada's polar commission]. “The reality is that China is too ambitious and too big to ignore. The fear is that they would just continue going after what they wanted in the Arctic even if their application was rejected. Who is going to stop them?”

How effectively members of the Arctic Council will be able to influence or constrain the ambitions of China and other Asian powers in the Arctic is an open question.

“The Chinese know that they need us for the resources, but they have also made it clear that when it comes to their core interests, it doesn’t matter who their friends and allies are — they will do what they need to do,” observes Huebert.

Officially, China, whose northernmost territory is as close to the Arctic as Germany’s is, says it does not covet the Arctic for its resources, but rather has a genuine interest in the fate of the region.

Chinese resource companies have invested $400 million in energy and mining projects in Arctic Canada [Harper gave China an Arctic toehold when he approved the Nexen takeover] and they’re promising to invest $2.3 billion and 3,000 Chinese workers in a mammoth, British-led mining project in Greenland.

Chomsky on Our Appetite for Self-Destruction

Has civilization finally reached our Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde moment?  Noam Chomsky maintains mankind has fallen into two camps and Dr. Jekyll's side is winning.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.
And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction.  So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

The question is: What are people doing about it?  None of this is a secret.  It’s all perfectly open.  In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions.  There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them.  If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.  Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada.  They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed. 

They Really Are Frankenfish

It's only a question of  when, not  if, genetically modified Atlantic salmon, popularly known as "Frankenfish" escape into the wild.  Oh it will be some horrible mistake to be sure.  No one, we'll be told, could have foreseen what happened.  Yeah, right.

Canadian scientists decided to run a little experiment to see what would happen if genetically modified Atlantic salmon, Frankenfish, escaped and wound up with other species, in the case of their experiment, ordinary brown trout.

Their research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, reveals that not only did the two species successfully interbreed but they produced a hybrid Frankenfish.

“When the fish were placed in a mocked-up stream inside the laboratory, the researchers found that the hybrids were out-competing both the genetically modified salmon and wild salmon, significantly stunting their growth,” writes Rebecca Morelle, science reporter for BBC News.

“They’re like the super offspring,” said George Leonard, director of strategic initiatives, Ocean Conservancy.

The would-be Frankenfish producer, AquaBounty, responded by saying they'll only be producing females and even that will only be done on facilities on-shore.


Yeah, for now.

Just the Sight of Joe Oliver Makes Me Want to Punch Him in the Mouth

backpfeifengeseicht?

Not that I would, mind you.  I do not resort to violence - ever.  That said, I sure would like to give Joe Oliver a knuckle sandwich in his greasy cakehole.

Joe's a business guy - well, a business guy and a damned lair - no, that's redundant - a business guy will suffice.  That has come through loud and clear in his barrel-scraping smears of opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline and the outrageous lies Joe lays on thick in support of the bitumen superhighway.

You know who wouldn't be surprised that Joe's such a chronic, persistent liar?   Adam Smith, that's who.   You know, the Adam Smith who wrote the 18th century masterpiece, the Koran of Free Enterprise Capitalism, The Wealth of Nations.  It was this same Adam Smith who warned of the "order of men" like Joe Oliver.

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.  It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

A corporatist government in the modern Canadian petro-state is an integral component of the business community Adam Smith envisioned.  It introduces laws and regulates commerce on terms that both deceive and oppress the public and the public interest to instead suit the interests of that order of men it serves.

There's a subtle difference between Joe Oliver and Enbridge in which of them tells the most outrageous lies over the bitumen boondoggle.   Neither of them hesitates to spew out any sort of nonsense that crosses their minds that they think might skew events their way.

One example is the now shopworn business about how Canada is losing countless billions of dollars in bitumen revenues be being unable to access Asian markets.  It's a lie that has been repeated so often by the bitumen traffickers and by their federal and provincial minions as to have become part of the national folklore and, like most folklore, it's bullshit.

Many Canadian politicians have invoked the argument that because western oil is landlocked it’s not fetching international prices and therefore is being sold at a discount. If Canada could build more pipelines such as Keystone XL or the proposed Northern Gateway through British Columbia, it would reach tidewater ports where it would attract world prices, the so-called Brent and West Texas Intermediate prices.

The second part of the discount comes from backlogs at U.S. pipeline terminals that can result in lower prices for some Canadian heavy crude oil.

But is there any truth in the “double discount”?

Energy economists say that the situation is not nearly as cut and dry as the politicians pretend. Some call the claim “bogus.” World prices are based primarily on quality and so Canada’s bitumen, which has the lowest quality of the heavy oils, naturally fetches lower prices. Sending the oilsands bitumen to Gulf Coast refineries is not going to change that fact, they note.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Michal Moore, an energy economist at University of Calgary, said of the discount argument. 

“Anything that does not meet that quality standard is going to trade at a discount relative to Brent.  All that discount means is that any refinery owner is going to pay less for something they have to spend more time and energy to upgrade. That’s all it means.”

Moore noted that Canada already tests international markets when it pipes thousands of barrels of bitumen daily to the Gulf Coast through existing pipelines. There is no indication this oil is attracting higher prices because it is reaching tidal waters, he said.

B.C. Energy economist Robyn Allan, who recently wrote a report on the pricing of Canadian oil, said “the discount has been used by the federal and provincial governments to shadow out the fact that by shipping raw bitumen to U.S. refineries, Canada is also shipping jobs.”

So where did Oliver and Horner get their figures from?

Christopher McCluskey, who is Oliver’s media aide, said the minister took his $50-million figure from a CIBC report of March 2012 that coined the phrase “double discount” and mentioned the $50-million-a-day figure.

After Postmedia questioned McCluskey about the use of the CIBC report, he replied on behalf of Oliver that the government is in fact using an average annual price differential between Brent and WTI prices that implies a $45-million-a-day discount on Canadian crude.

But Moore said this is not a logical comparison because Brent is a better quality sweet crude than WTI and therefore refineries are willing to pay more for it. He added that it is “just crackers” and “not realistic” to think that Brent-WTI pricing can be applied to lower quality Canadian heavy crude.

“The most desirable mix on the block is the Brent,” he said. “So anything that does not meet that quality standard is going to trade at a discount relative to Brent.  All that discount means is that any refinery owner is going to pay less for something they have to spend more time and energy to upgrade. That’s all it means.”

When people in positions of power, like Joe, can't begin to speak honestly about the bitumen issue, when they have to resort to blatant deception in flagrant breach of their public duty, when they have to smear those who oppose their plans because they have no interest in addressing their legitimate concerns, they powerfully confirm Adam Smith's warning that they be treated with the "most suspicious attention."

Oh Yes, Another Scandal, Another Line Crossed

This time it's Elmer MacKay's dull boy, DefMin Peter, himself no stranger to clumsy scandal.

It seems enough Harper slime has rubbed off on the defence minister that he's been using the military's National Investigation Service to "investigate journalists who wrote or broadcast embarrassing information about MacKay and the Canadian Forces leadership."

Question:  what can you possibly write about Peter MacKay and the Canadian Forces leadership that they wouldn't find in some way embarrassing?   This bunch has gone out of their way to make themselves embarrassing.

The latest incident concerns the Ottawa Citizen's defence correspondent, Dave Pugliese, and a recent naval exercise, RimPac 2012.   Pugliese reported details of the Canadian navy's participation in the exercise, information he had garnered from a U.S. Navy press release.  The article gave the source, repeatedly.

Dimbo MacKay smelled a rat.  He was sure someone inside NDHQ was leaking secret information to Pugliese and so he demanded the NIS get to the bottom of it.

Citizen editor-in-chief Gerry Nott said the conduct of the NIS “would be humorous if it wasn’t outrageous. For investigators to be tied up chasing a phantom leak of publicly available information speaks to both paranoia and incompetence.”

In an email, Jay Paxton, MacKay’s director of communications, said the minister’s office “disapproves of the unauthorized release of information that can be damaging to the defence team’s ability to communicate with Canadians and views any release of unauthorized information as a breach of ethical conduct.”
“Such a breach of conduct includes information that is damaging to the activities of the defence team or individuals of that team.”

Paranoia and incompetence, yes, it's not hard to see Peter MacKay with an abundance of those.   Yet I found that "defence team" business a bit disconcerting.  It suggests a seamless blending of the political and the military as though the military is now part and parcel of the Conservative "team".  

We saw evidence of this sort of thing back when MacKay was caught using an Air Force helo to ferry him from a fishing camp.  When that blew up in his face he set Air Force officers into a search, scouring records to find evidence of similar abuses by opposition MPs.

To use the military's criminal investigative service as a tool against those who embarrass MacKay and senior military commanders is a deeply disturbing and flagrant breach of the critical line that separates the military and the civilian world in any legitimate democracy.  This is not benign and it is certainly not trivial.  And it's certainly not just the work of a dim-witted minister in over his head.

Former Chief of Staff, General Walter Natynczyk, set the NIS hounds on the media when a CTV reporter got the skinny on Walt using government jets to fly to hockey games and a Caribbean vacation.

Ottawa lawyer Michel Drapeau said the NIS investigations involving the news media that were obtained by the Citizen provide disturbing examples of how the military police force can be misused. “When you call in the cops because a journalist has written something embarrassing to Peter MacKay or the military leadership, then I would see that as intimidation,” said Drapeau, who has written legal textbooks on military law as well as the Access to Information act. “It has nothing to do with national security; it’s all about sending a warning to those inside the military that they are to keep quiet.”

He said the NIS should be disbanded and Canada should adopt the British system where the military’s police investigation unit is made up of civilians who do not report to the chain of command.

“The NIS has become a personal police force for the ranking military officers and there are no checks and balances,” Drapeau said.
The Harper gang seem to have a real fondness for their secret police.  We saw that when Harper set up his own bitumen pipeline secret police force comprising officers of the Edmonton and Calgary city police, the RCMP and CSIS.   More recently there was the move, by RCMP Commissioner Paulsen, to gag his senior officers and cut off communications between them and opposition MPs.

It's time to do an audit of the Canadian Armed Forces and their National Investigation Service.   If they don't understand the line - and they don't - we have a real mess on our hands.