Stevie and Brazil . . .

 — A protest in Vancouver over our mining operations in Tibet —

WHY WOULD STEVIE TARGET BRAZIL? According to Dave Dean at Vice, “75% of the World's Mining Companies Are Based in Canada”. Maybe that's why Stevie wants to know what the Brazilian Ministry of Mines is planning?

All over the world, companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and run out of lawyer’s offices on Bay Street or skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver (whose real financiers may live in Australia or Nevada) are handling the mining game at home, throughout parts of Asia, South America and surprisingly, even with all the talk of China’s investment in Africa, it turns out that it’s Canada, not China, who is quietly dominating and exploiting African mining. All told, almost 1,300 mining companies based out of Canada are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in over 100 countries around the world.

Well, well, time to do some rat removal. These are not nice people, and they do nasty things to people in their way.

In Central and South America, Canada’s reputation is being dragged through the dirt to the point where in some countries, it’s apparently better for travellers to say they’re American than Canadian, and it’s not hard to see why. Vancouver-based Pacific Rim is suing the government of El Salvador, a country with a GDP of $23 Billion (Canada’s is $1.7 trillion) for $315 million dollars because they didn’t let them follow through with a mine that threatened to pollute the Lempa River—a watershed that accounts for 60% of the country’s clean water.

As if that’s not enough, a region of Guatemala was militarized last month—and the right to protest or form meetings has been suspended by the president—following clashes between local protesters who are concerned for their drinking water and employees of Vancouver-based Tahoe Resources inc.

While most companies probably do operate ethically and to the best of their ability—while maintaining healthy and sustainable relationships with local cultures and their environments—unfortunately these few stories really are the tip of the iceberg as far as Canada’s mining reputation that is beginning to be noticed as the worst in the world.

Security considerations . . .

A copper wallet insert shields your credit cards from RFID skimming.
Image: Adam Harvey

Get a Faraday wallet. Something with a lining made of copper, or steel mesh or even aluminum foil. Or add aluminum foil to the inside of the wallet you have. With one of those, “they” can “ping” you as you walk about, and the RFID’s in your credit cards and sometimes, Driver’s Licence, are shielded, and they stay silent. 

As well, street gangs and other low-lifes are getting into using ’em to identify targets to pick off, and it is alleged that they have the ability to even get through the RFID card security, get the data, and dupe an RFID card with your data.

You see, it occurs to me that the NSA could easily have all the banks' credit card data, and that means the banks' credit card RFID's chip ID’s for each account. 

So, it could be possible for “Security” to put RFID scanners all around, like TTC station exits, parking-lot doorways. Computer scan the passers-by and RFID’s belonging to “people of interest” could trip alarms. 

Similarly with your phone and its GPS, even “off” may not be off enough, and having a Faraday container will ensure that nobody can track you through your phone's GPS or by the phone's link-up with the cellular phone system. You may not be able to use your phone, but you will be a lot more “invisible” on the street, if you’re about something that you’d like to remain private.

WIRED has two reports worth checking out: Liz Stinson has an overview of security-oriented products, with an article and a Stealth Wear picture gallery, “Wanna Buy a Parka That Makes You Invisible to Drones?”, and a How-To Wiki, “Make a Faraday Cage Wallet”.

Duct Tape RULES!

An opportunity presents . . .

YOU CAN BECOME PART OF THE PROBLEM, from the perspective of the NSA. MOTHERBOARD runs a site that generates keywords that they suggest the NSA will find magnetic. HELLO, NSA is a kind of oblique, my-hovercraft-is-full-of-eels buzz-word generator that you can click on for a new chunk of jabberwocky.

The government is listening to your internets. Generate a sentence with some of the keywords they're looking for. Tweet or share and you could earn a new follower in Washington.

“They don't bust balls in Juarez. They bust Mexicles.” Now, that's funny, and they say the NSA gets excited about Jarez, bust and Mexicles. Mexicles. Go figure.

Caveat: Now, if you do a lot of travelling into the US, you might reconsider. Look at it this way: if the US government puts you on a list, you might be thankful you were just denied entry, rather than get into their building for a deep cavity search and an orange perp-suit fitting — and that's just for starters.

A look behind the curtain . . .

THANKS TO ED SNOWDEN, we have a look at the Bush-Cheney paranoia, and it's scary, a GOP/neo-con attempt to create a fourth Reich with a Stasi on steroids. William Saletan has an article in SLATE that's a fascinating read, "The Taming of the Spook", click on the link to check out the whole thing. According to him, it could have been much worse.

On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since 2001. This year, the report, classified as top secret, was leaked to the Guardian by NSA defector Ed Snowden. On Thursday, the Guardian published it.

The Guardian’s correspondents, Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, see the report as further evidence of runaway government surveillance. They note that the program extended data collection to U.S. persons, that its use of email metadata went beyond billing records, and that surveillance continued after President Bush left office. “NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama,” says the Guardian’s headline.

But in many ways, the story told in the report is really about the mellowing of the surveillance state. An ill-defined, unilaterally imposed, poorly supervised spying operation was gradually brought under control. The surveillance program didn’t just become domestic. It became domesticated.

Domesticated means built-in, won't go away, and that's the danger. Thanks to Ed Snowden, we have a chance to look at how this bundle of snakes came to be.

We're going blind

Literally. We have, over the past five decades, gone from being in awe of space-based instruments to relying on them as an everyday piece of the picture of life.

Except that we're letting them die.

Ninety is the combined number of Earth-observing instruments on NASA and NOAA satellites that are currently monitoring our planet. And that number is about to plunge, according to a National Research Council report released in May 2012. By 2020, there could be less than 20 instruments in orbit, and the total number of missions is expected to fall from 23 to just 6.

I can make book on the fact that you don't care. The technology, the data and the knowledge is, as far as most people are concerned, well outside their daily limits of concern. 

That's not wrong-headed, unless the weather is of concern to you. Or perhaps the fact that your house may be swallowed up by salt water in the next 50 years. Or, maybe, you need to know when a volcano erupts. Forget it. You'll know about it when the ash kills the engines on your trans-Atlantic flight.

If you're so inclined, take a read of this paper. A Midterm Assessment of NASA's Implementation of the Decadal Survey. If not, well, be assured that the authors are issuing a dire warning - without proper space-based instruments we will have no idea of what is happening on our little blue planet and we will have no idea how to deal with changes. (The global warming deniers can go find another place to suck their thumbs). 


Funding, from all countries, for space-based research is drying up because the legislative bodies of those countries see little political value in supporting it. It gets to the bottom line - it's too expensive to know how this planet is doing.


But they do support spying on you. Big time. It's never too expensive to ignore the health of the planet and develop the capability to read your last email instead. 


So, while the US lets NASA starve, and the Harperites fail to fund space-based research, we go blind while the government gets big new ears.