Lies with a tee-emm . . .

REALLY. From Michele Bachmann's Facebook page “Christians For Michele Bachmann”, an oeuvre apparently paid for by Christians for Michele Bachmann™. Love the tee-emm. The FB slogan is “Changing lives, one BachFann™ at a time”. More tee-emm.

Dear 800 pound gorillas at Facebook...

You are displaying all the attributes of complete morons.

Apparently, Facebook, that faceless social networking giant that really wants to be the market square, inner-city pub and urban playground of the world, doesn't like the idea of someone depicting the image of an infant being fed by its mother.

In fact, Facebook deleted the artwork of Kate Hansen because... well, why don't we let her explain. We'll wait here.

Ms. Hansen's art is, at least by my reckoning, hardly what I'd call hateful, threatening or obscene. Yet that is the only explanation Facebook provided Kate for removing her artwork: That somehow it fell into one of those categories.

The women in Kate's art aren't even fully nude. There are no body parts showing that you can't see at a christian temperance league barbeque and beach gathering.

What is it that Facebook thinks is hateful, threatening or obscene? Could it be the actual act of breastfeeding?

Time to give Facebook some dairy queen time.

Hat tip - Gregor

Facebook Wars - by the numbers

Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament - 155,000
Canadians Who Don't Care if Harper is Proroguing Parliament - 163
I Support the Prorogation of Parliament and the Prime Minister of Canada -713

Stephen Harper - 29,452
Michael Ignatieff - 28,822
Jack Layton - 27,697

and just to be a cow about it :
Canadians Against a Liberal/NDP Coalition Gov't - 126,681
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When Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament started up on Facebook last week, supporters of last year's Canadians Against a Liberal/NDP Coalition Gov't were all very dissy about it : We got 127,000 members in less than a week - crowed BloggingTory Stephen Taylor - the largest Canadian FB group evah!
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Of course now that CAPP membership has topped 155,000, they've gone all 'well fuck facebook then', with the National Post plumping for the 163 Canadians Who Don't Give a Rat's Ass About It.
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As CC has already pointed out, it's the prorogue FB support group that are of course the actual competition to CAPP and not the old anti-coalition group, but Susan Delacourt highlights an important difference between anti-prorogue group and the anti-coalition group for us anyway (h/t Dammit Janet) :

"This new Facebook group is counting on people to educate themselves about parliamentary tradition, practice and principle. The old Facebook group was organized around the notion of 'never mind parliamentary rules about majority/minority and confidence, this thing is wrong.'

In other words, you have to understand basic rules of Parliament to understand why this prorogation is unusual; you had to ignore parliamentary rules to argue the coalition was wrong."

And right there Susan Delacourt nails the basic difference between progressives and the ReformaTories.
Well, that and the lying.

EDIT : Perhaps the Con supporters happily joining the Don't Care FB group should take another look at the Admin's statement. I hadn't and have now edited this post accordingly, taking out my snarky renaming of his site as "Don't Give a Rat's Ass About Democracy".

If you Facebook . . .

IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE FACEBOOK FLOCK, this little item by Robert Lemos, on MIT's Technology Review site may be worthy of your attention. 

Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a browser plug-in to help users keep their information private from prying eyes and from social-network providers as well. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science, and his colleagues say the plug-in replaces sensitive information in a user's profile and news feed with meaningless text that can only be unscrambled by trusted friends or contacts. Dubbed FaceCloak, the tool assures its users that sensitive data stays private.

The University of Waterloo researchers attempt to hide which users are encrypting their data with FaceCloak by replacing the hidden data with arbitrary text taken from sources on the Internet. "Users who submit encrypted information stand out, both to Facebook and to other users who can see the profiles, and therefore might raise suspicion," Hengartner says. "By using fake information, we can avoid this problem."

SPP : "We're getting better all the time."

Stockwell Day, the RCMP, Bell Canada and Microsoft will soon be partnering on "a national cyber-security strategy that will seek to protect key infrastructure as well as Canadians' identities".

"A high-level security conference being hosted by the Conference Board of Canada" will take place on Nov 5 and 6th.
The Conference Board of Canada, you may recall, partnered with the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to launch the North American Future 2025 Project , "to help guide the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership". At their conference in Calgary last April their agenda noted : "the overriding future goal of North America is to achieve joint optimum utilization of the available water."

So you'll excuse me if I cast a jaundiced eye on whatever new plan to protect my "Canadian identity" they might be hosting this time round because one of the original objectives of the SPP was "improving the coordination of intelligence-sharing, cross-border law enforcement".

At least Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has been invited this time and will be addressing the conference on "Balancing Privacy with Cyber Security".

In May there was a "Server in the Sky" meet-up in San Francisco to discuss the FBI's proposed shared database of biometric information - our fingerprints, palm prints, and iris scan data to be exchanged among the International Information Consortium of US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and eventually the EU.
Ms Stoddart only heard about the conference by reading about it in the British press.

As Ms Stoddart said on CBC in response to that meeting in May : "Canada has a very weak 25 year old Privacy Act with no human rights standards built in to our agreements with other countries." Additionally she was alarmed by "the conflating of criminals and suspected terrorists", the lack of oversight of the biometric info once it passes to other countries, and the rise of "a surveillance society".

One of our partners in the International Information Consortium is already well on the way to becoming a surveillance society:
The Daily Mail via Statism Watch :

"Every person in Britain could have their internet history, email records and telephone calls tracked under a proposed £12 billion plan by ministers.

The system would see hundreds of hidden devices planted to tap into communications on the internet and via mobile phone providers.

And a national database would be created to store the information which officials say would help in the fight against terrorism and organised crime."

I thought we already had Facebook for that.

From the blog of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada :

"In terms of Canadian participation [in Server in the Sky], our citizens rightfully expect that their personal information remains safeguarded and understandably, could be reluctant to see that information freely shared with two countries that were ranked near the bottom of Privacy International’s ratings of privacy protection round the world."

David Black, manager of the RCMP's cyber infrastructure protection section, says of the Bell/Microsoft/RCMP plan for "the protection of critical cyber infrastructure and the convergence of technological and physical security", presumably to be shared in due course with the other members of the FBI's International Information Consortium :

"We're getting better all the time."

Cross-posted at Creekside