Another day in the fantasy of Harper fiscal prudence

Greg Weston pulls another Harper-floated piece of waste off the surface.

A federal agency created by the Conservative government to mediate complaints about Canadian mining operations abroad has spent more than $1.1 million in the past two years, but has yet to mediate anything.

At the same time, the agency — the Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor — has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel, entertainment, training, meetings, reports and other expenses, documents obtained by CBC News show. Renovations to a federal government office to accommodate the agency's three employees alone cost Canadian taxpayers $189,000.

You should read the whole thing. And in case you miss the best part, here it is.

Trade Minister Ed Fast said he sees no problem with it, calling it a "common sense approach."

These people seem to treat tax revenues like cash in a birthday card from your old aunt. Once you've got it in your hands it's yours to spend any way you want.

From the Ministry of Truth . . .

Dots

Connect them.

This dot, then to this dot, then to this dot.

And off in the periphery Vic Toews, under the guise of administering "public safety" has you expecting to believe a great many things which, when held to the light, are unbelievable.

Also too, he's claiming he wasn't aware of the provisions of section 17 of Bill C-30. And now he's making himself out to be a victim.

We touch the side of our nose.

Big Victor . . .

The most dangerous legislation ever placed before Parliament

And if you don't recognize what Vic Toews was (and still is) attempting to do, you're not paying attention.

Toews had (and still has) every intention of sending "inspectors" into your Internet Service Provider to dig up anything and everything without need for reasonable suspicion of a crime and without a warrant. Child pornography has nothing to do with it as evidenced by the lack of such definition anywhere in Bill C-30.

Terry Milewski has identified the portions of the proposed legislation which are most egregious and which so violate the norm of decency in a democratic country as to be near treasonous.

But, then, there's Section 34. After reading it, you wonder whether it's just pandas we're getting from China.

Among other things, the bill requires ISPs to install surveillance technology and software to enable monitoring of phone and internet traffic. Section 34 is there to make sure ISPs comply. So what, exactly, does it say?

Essentially, it says that government agents may enter an ISP when they wish, without a warrant, and demand to see absolutely everything — including all data anywhere on the network — and to copy it all. If that seems hard to believe, let's walk through it.

First, Section 33 tells us that, "The Minister may designate persons or classes of persons as inspectors for the purposes of the administration and enforcement of this Act." So we're not talking about police officers necessarily. We're talking about anyone the minister chooses — or any class of persons. (Musicians? Left-handed hockey players? Members of the Conservative Party? Sure, that's absurd — but the bill allows it...)

Next, Section 34 spells out the sweeping powers of these "inspectors." And, if they sound Orwellian, welcome to the world of Section 34.

The inspectors may "enter any place owned by, or under the control of, any telecommunications service provider in which the inspector has reasonable grounds to believe there is any document, information, transmission apparatus, telecommunications facility or any other thing to which this Act applies."

And, once he or she is in, anything goes.

The inspector, says the bill, may "examine any document, information or thing found in the place and open or cause to be opened any container or other thing." He or she may also "use, or cause to be used, any computer system in the place to search and examine any information contained in or available to the system."

You read that right. The inspector gets to see "any" information that's in or "available to the system." Yours, mine, and everyone else's emails, phone calls, web surfing, shopping, you name it. But, if that sounds breath-taking enough, don't quit now because the section is still not done.

The inspector — remember, this is anyone the minister chooses — is also empowered to copy anything that strikes his or her fancy. The inspector may "reproduce, or cause to be reproduced, any information in the form of a printout, or other intelligible output, and remove the printout, or other output, for examination or copying."

Oh, and he can even use the ISP's own computers and connections to copy it or to email it to himself. He can "use, or cause to be used, any copying equipment or means of telecommunication at the place."

In short, there's nothing the inspector cannot see or copy. "Any" information is up for grabs. And you thought the new airport body scanners were intrusive?

Read it all. I mean it.

Vic Toews was (and still is) intent on becoming nothing short of Reichsleiter fur die Internet, or at least, appointing one. Remember what this bunch has already done.

And if you don't like the outright linkage to Nazi Germany you can go stand with Vic Toews.

 More at DAMMIT JANET!

Sheep, look up . . .

Investigate what?

I tend to agree with pogge. There is nothing that has been posted on Twitter about Vic Toews that wasn't already a matter of public record. His demand for an investigation, (and the releasing of the Harper party's howler monkey in residence, John Baird), is nothing more than an attempt to distract people from the real issue - Toews does and has demonstrated a complete disregard for the rights of Canadian citizens.

In short, Toews is a typical conservative authoritarian. He won't be happy until you're all curled up in a ball and he's putting the boots to you.

The point, however, is the crap produced by the Ottawa Citizen.

An IP address connected to what is known as the Vikileaks30 Twitter account originates within the House of Commons.
In a bid to determine the origin of the account, which details personal information about Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, The Citizen undertook an investigation on Thursday.
An email was sent to the writer of the Vikileaks30 Twitter account, containing a link to a website. The website was monitored by The Citizen and only the author of Vikileaks30 had the address of the website.
About 15 minutes after the email was sent, Vikileaks30 opened the link and visited the page, leaving behind an IP address that belongs to the House of Commons.

Well, that little process proves four-fifths of just about fuck-all. 

For a detailed explanation of what the Ottawa Citizen's ridiculous little exercise actually produced ... we have Catelli. It's important that you read that because if you don't, you might continue to buy into the BS flowing from the Ottawa Citizen. 

Any investigation capable of producing a result would have to involve interviewing everyone whose traffic flows through a common server farm. Good luck with that. 

And just as a demonstration, this kind of thing shows up on this site about 30 times per day from the House of Commons. 

Oh yeah. What Boris said.

The base . . .

POOR, WHITE AND REPUBLICAN: a comment from George Packer, published by the New Yorker. PLEASE read it.

F.D.R. called him “the forgotten man,” but that was long ago. By 1972, he was a member of the silent majority and had become a Democrat for Nixon (he wore a hard hat with an American-flag sticker). 1980 produced the Reagan Democrat (this time he came from Macomb County, Michigan, and was discovered by the pollster Stan Greenberg). By 1994 he had curdled into the Angry White Male (he elected the Gingrich Congress). In 2008, he was simply the working-class white—by then he was no longer forgotten, and no longer a Democrat of any kind; he was a member of the much-analyzed Republican base. The television godfather of the type, of course, is Archie Bunker, but you can also trace his lineage more darkly through the string of hard-bitten blue-collar movies that begins with “Joe” (Peter Boyle, 1970), goes on to “Falling Down” (Michael Douglas, 1993), “Gran Torino” (Clint Eastwood, 2008), and, in a rural context, “Winter’s Bone” (2010). He’s a descendant of the thirties Everyman played by Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper, except that in the intervening decades he lost his idealism and grew surly, if not violent, consumed with a hatred of hippies, immigrants, blacks, government, and, finally, himself.

Cheap thrills . . .

HOMELAND SECURITY loves body scanners. According to Jalopnik, that's how the security staff gets their jollies. Erin Gloria Ryan's report, "TSA Agents Singling Out Sexy Women For Multiple Body Scans" is rather disturbing. Travel is enough of a hassle, now, women are being sexually assaulted in the name of "security".

Among the other complaints they found— "I feel I was targeted by the TSA employee to go through the see-you-naked machine because I am a semi-attractive female." and "TSA staff ‘trolling' the lines looking for people to pull out was unprofessional." and "When I looked around, I saw that there were only women that were "told" to go through this machine. There were no men."

Stay home.

OK, this is your brain on drugs

And this is a Harper Conservative's brain on pure room air

 

Now read Cathie ...

Then Kady.

Stevie's Paradise . . .

POVERTY MAKES ME ANGRY. Rich people make me angry. But even in spite of Stevie and his marching morons, the spark of human love prevails. It may take decades, but we will repair the Stevie damage to our people.

H/T — Daniel

How do we prevent that from happening here?

Prevent what? We'll get back to that.

I remember taking something of a thrashing for even suggesting that Harper and his coalition of degenerates were the most dangerous group to have ever occupied the precincts of federal government in this country. Not just from right-wingers, whom I dismiss out of hand, but from a colourful bouquet of politically-aware people who refused to believe that the people of this country could be forced down a path which would tear the fabric of this country to shreds.

So, what prompted this?

Well, for one thing, this. And it's only just begun.

What about that title, you ask?

Yes, well consider this: extremist governments, right-wing or otherwise, do not survive in an atmosphere of honesty and transparency. When persuasion and propaganda do not succeed in bringing the masses around to support the extremist view, they resort to other means. In short, they build an apparatus of "laws" and "enforcement" to control and suppress opposition to their ideology and grip on power.

The title?

Someone among the battalions of people now surrounding Harper's hillbilly government, while watching something unfold before the world, saw something terrifying. It was people with access to communications which, even mildly unfettered, gave them power. And, aware that their so-called "majority" would actually collapse if a real majority of people woke up and actually went to the polls, asked the question.

How do we prevent that from happening here?

some Valentine's Day advice

Crossposted from The Woodshed

The Stevie List . . .

USING RED HERRINGS is a key part of the exercise — in this case, kiddie porn. The way Vic Toews has it, Canada's very existence is threatened by countless hordes of deranged males downloading kiddie porn and he's just gotta have access to your e-mail and your browser history, to be sure, whenever he feels the need.

The danger to your civil liberty is clear and present. The danger to truly dangerous people and groups? Not so much, because they know things about the web and computers and routers and networks to be invisible. For them, the web is sort of like a super TOR Anonymity On-Line (which I recommend) for the malevolent. 

The Japanese know a thing or two about fascism. Accordingly it is not a surprise that the CBC reports that 

Canada is the the only country in the G8, aside from Japan, that does not require telecommunications providers to provide a back door for law enforcement to intercept digital communications

Before Stevie, Canada was such a wonderful, free country. We will re-build eventually, and dismantle the fascist add-ons and retire their gauleiters. It appears we can even ask the Japanese for advice, when the time comes.

A deck full of loose cannons in a gale

Cathie asks, "Who do they think they are?"

I ask, what are they up to?

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Carl Gustav Jung

And given what they are and how they behave, you can expect them to go nuclear very soon.

Which brings up another quote:

The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.

Dr. Joseph Mengele

Something of value . . .

— the epitome of the Prancing Horse —

32 MILLION DOLLARS for a 1964 Ferrari 250 GTO. It's the second-most expensive car to be sold, according to AUTOBLOG:

Word has it that a private treaty sale – the only way vintage machinery of this caliber ever moves – of one such 1964 model has yielded a purchase price of £20.2 million – $31.8M in equivalent U.S. currency– just shy of the $30-40 million said to have been paid in 2010 for a 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic. In other words, this is the second most valuable car ever sold, and the most expensive ever sold in Britain. Or, at least, whose sale has ever gone on record, as many of these exchanges remain secretive.

Gee, I was pleased to buy a jug of antifreeze for my old Sunfire . . . no secret exchange at the Crappy Tire. Check out the site, for some fine pictures of this GTO and others at the Laguna Seca Corkscrew. At that price, it would take something like 15 GTO's to equal the cost of 1 Canadian F-35 . . . something of value?  O/T, but Something of Value was a fine novel, IMHO, even if the movie sucked.

Nasty perspective . . .

— Chuckie Cheezie —

CHARLES MURRAY HAS RE-APPEARED. Odious? Maybe. Peter Schmidt, from The Chronicle Of Higher Education reports in "Charles Murray, Author of 'The Bell Curve,' Steps Back Into the Ring", that the outrage has started:

Publishers, forget about carefully reasoned, nuanced discussions of the issues of the day—that stuff is for college professors, or yuppies off yammering away in their salons. If you print politically oriented books and you want to make the big bucks, you need to think like a boxing promoter and stage fights that will get attention. And nothing, but nothing, draws hype like a match-up between liberal pundits and the man they love to hate, the belligerent behind the The Bell Curve, the warrior against welfare, the proudly politically incorrect Charles Murray.

Mr. Murray's newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), makes a pretense of making nice. It bills itself as an attempt to alleviate divisiveness in American society by calling attention to a growing cultural gap between the wealthy and the working class.

Focused on white people in order to set aside considerations of race and ethnicity, it discusses trends, like the growing geographic concentration of the rich and steadily declining churchgoing rates among the poor, that social scientists of all ideological leanings have documented for decades. It espouses the virtues of apple-pie values like commitment to work and family.

But Mr. Murray, a Harvard and MIT-educated political scientist, seems wired like a South Boston bar brawler in his inability to resist the urge to provoke. In the midst of all of his talk about togetherness, he puts out there his belief that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men and morally loose women who have kids out of wedlock. Moreover, he argues, because of Americans' growing tendency to pair up with the similarly educated, working-class children are increasingly genetically predisposed to be on the dim side.

(This is the point where heads turn, fists clench, and a hush is broken by the sound of liberal commenters muttering, "Oh no he didn't.")

Oh yes, he did. Peckerhead: morals are for those who can afford 'em.

Catching out Enbridge

My friends and colleagues over at Tidal Station have taken the time to chop into the "marine plan" issued by Enbridge for their northern gateway pipeline transfer terminal at Kitimat.

While most mariners would understand exactly what's being said, the point that is being made is that Enbridge, which produced the plan as though it highlighted an embracing of a new standard of tanker safety is actually only planning to meet the standard.

There are indications that the "improvements" to the north coast land-based radar system, (which does not exist at all right now), are nowhere near a stage of planning which would have it in place by the time Enbridge wants to start shipping liquefied tar. In fact they haven't even figured out who's going to pay for it.

Enbridge cheerleader, Harper, gets a warning too.

If Stephen Harper is such a proponent of the Northern Gateway project and demanding it be built, despite any objections, he'd better be prepared to put his money on the table. The entire central and northern BC vessel traffic management system is need of attention now. If the upcoming federal budget fails to address the requirement to increase vessel safety on a huge scale it is a demonstration that the Harper government is not terribly serious about the Enbridge proposal or it is ignorant of the inherent risks or it just doesn't care.

Really, read the whole thing. 

Bee battering . . .

BEE COLONY COLLAPSE is scary — without pollination, food becomes a problem. GRIST is concerned with how we live, proclaiming itself to be a "Beacon in the Smog". Well, there's a report by Tom Philpott that's rather disturbing, "Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists' red flags".

An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which Bayer racked up €183 million (about $262 million) in sales in 2009.

Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds pre-treated with it. Like other members of the neonicotinoid family of pesticides, clothianidin gets “taken up by a plant’s vascular system and expressed through pollen and nectar,” according to Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), which leaked the document along with Beyond Pesticides. That effect makes it highly toxic to a crop’s pests — and also harmful to pollen-hoarding honeybees, which have experienced mysterious annual massive die-offs (known as “colony collapse disorder”) here in the United States at least since 2006.

The colony-collapse phenomenon is complex and still not completely understood. While there appears to be no single cause for the annual die-offs, mounting evidence points to pesticides, and specifically neonicotinoids (derived from nicotine), as a key factor. And neonicotinoids are a relatively new factor in ecosystems frequented by honeybees — introduced in the late 1990s, these systemic insecticides have gained a steadily rising share of the seed-treatment market. It does not seem unfair to observe that the health of the honeybee population has steadily declined over the same period.

Marketing mishaps . . .

CRACKED IS DELIGHTFULLY IRREVERENT, which helps with these trying times. Danny Gallagher has an entertaining post, "The 5 Least Surprising Toy Recalls of All Time".

#5. The Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kids Doll

#4. Kinder Chocolate Eggs

#3. Sky Dancers

#2. The Easy Bake Oven

#1. Lawn Darts or Jarts

What were they thinking? Check out Danny's post.