The secret sell-out . . .

STEVIE'S SECRET SELL-OUT: according to Sunny Freeman and Daniel Tencer at HUFFPOST BUSINESS, in an article “Trans-Pacific Partnership Chapter Released By WikiLeaks”, it's so secret it took WikiLeaks to get the details. And truly, the Devil is in the details.

A trade agreement Canada intends to sign will have “far-reaching implications for individual rights and civil liberties,” WikiLeaks says.

The group known around the world for publishing state secrets has released a draft chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal being negotiated under what it calls an “unprecedented level of secrecy.” Critics say the agreement favours corporate interests over consumers.

The leaked intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement proposes sweeping reforms including to pharmaceuticals, publishers, patents, copyrights, trademarks, civil liberties and liability of internet service providers.

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons,” WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, said in a press release.

There are 11 areas of concern. Click on the link to find out why you should get perturbed. Love liberty? Stop Stevie. It's that simple.

Marketing adaptation . . .

While Dubya scares the bejeezus out of you, ponder Puma’s new plus size logo… from The Meta Picture. I guess pouncing porky puddies are a possibility. 

You've always wondered ...

How could George W. Bush reconcile the financial destruction of his country over the invasion of Iraq?

The "weapons of mass destruction" myth has long been buried under mountains of proof of manipulated and invented "intelligence".

The conquest of an oil-state was pretty obvious. Think though. Is George W. Bush really smart enough to get his head around that concept?

We have always held in the greatest skepticism the possibility that it was a religious crusade. People shake in their boots when they consider such a thing could have happened in the 21st century. They give it a pass with a shrug because it's just too terrible to absorb.

And how did Tony Blair get sucked in? He didn't seem to have a constituent group of fundamentalist Christians driving him forward.

Until Blair was dumped from the political spectrum and he suddenly decloaked. Turns out Brother Tony is a tambourine-bashing fundamentalist Roman Catholic of the type that scares, well, other Roman Catholics. He was as much of a religious nut-ball as Bush.

Well, take a look at what George W. Bush is up to now.  Then take a quick read of Ophelia.

Absorb that.

Hellfire . . .

DEATH FROM ABOVE. GQ has an article by MatthewPower, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior” that is worth reading. “Drones” have been effective, but there's a human cost paid by the young folks who do the killing. They're good at that, and it gives them nightmares, and no wonder the Taliban have been freaking and using their political influence to get this curtailed.

By the spring of 2011, almost six years after he’d signed on, Senior Airman Brandon Bryant left the Air Force, turning down a $109,000 bonus to keep flying. He was presented with a sort of scorecard covering his squadron’s missions. “They gave me a list of achievements,” he says. “Enemies killed, enemies captured, high-value targets killed or captured, stuff like that.” He called it his diploma. He hadn’t lased the target or pulled the trigger on all of the deaths tallied, but by flying in the missions he felt he had enabled them. “The number,” he says, “made me sick to my stomach.”

Total enemies killed in action: 1,626.

Remembering the fallen. Part 2

In part 1 I offered the suggestion that people who were busy, uncomfortable or simply found it inconvenient to attend a Remembrance Day event should do what makes them feel comfortable. Certainly no thinking veteran will find fault in any decision along that line, keeping in mind that any and all are welcome at cenotaphs across the country.

I also included a sketched CV, so I won't bore you with it again.

This year, as in all years since 1919, a particular "class" of person will most certainly attend: politicians. (Please understand that I want to spit when I say or write that word).

The Canadian political class of the 21st century attends Remembrance Day services for one reason: optics. While there may be a numbered few who actually hold attendance at such an event a matter of sincere personal feeling, the majority, a huge majority, do not. They are there to be seen amongst the crowds, near the uniforms and to gain political traction. Too often they are offered a place of prominence or worse, a speaking part.

That has veterans rankled this year like no other year in the past. I have spent the past year communicating with thousands of my fellow veterans. I can count on one hand the number of those veterans who believe the political class of this country has any interest whatsoever in the welfare of veterans. When the question of the duty of the federal government to live up to its obligations to veterans is brought up there is one resounding answer: Failure.

The Harper government, for all its bellicose "support the troops" rhetoric, has been responsible for the worst treatment of veterans in the modern era. Denial of pensions, clawbacks of benefits and the perpetuation of lawsuits to quash legitimate claims by the wounded are just a few of the abuses heaped upon veterans by Stephen Harper and his ministers. Harper has publicly smeared veterans who attempted to voice their complaints, all the while making sure he gets a photo op amongst "the troops". And, if all that didn't make veterans mightily angry, Julian Fantino, the newly-minted minister of veteran's affairs, sealed the deal and generated pure rage when he tried to redefine a veteran to include himself.

Julian Fantino is not a veteran. Stephen Harper, who took it upon himself to lecture reporters on the conditions in the trenches at Vimy Ridge, has not one day of service. But you can make book on the fact that both of them will show up on Remembrance Day expecting a position of prominence and a speaking part.

There are approximately 900,000 living armed service and RCMP veterans in this country, a vast majority of whom find themselves enraged at the actions and words of Harper, Fantino and, to be completely frank, politicians generally. The current Veteran's Charter which is responsible for hacking disability benefits to veterans was introduced by the Liberals, supported by the NDP and implemented by the Harper Conservatives. No party is clean.

So, while I have heard a loud suggestion that politicians should stay away from Remembrance Day ceremonies and I understand the sentiment, I would disagree. No one should be refused attendance.

However, they should take great care as to how they appear. A place at the back of the crowd would be most appropriate but that's not likely. What is not appropriate though is a place in the front or on a podium. Given their abysmal treatment of veterans they would do well to keep a very low profile. If they intend to deliver a wreath they should do so in absolute silence.

And, if they think a speaking part is due them because of their high office they should be aware that a movement is in the works to have groups of angry veterans turn their backs on them.

Right now an elected school board trustee would have a tough time gaining political traction with veterans and it gets worse as one works up the political back-stabbing pole. Given the recent behaviour of prominent politicians most veterans have one wish for the Canadian political class: A plague on all your houses; you have broken faith with us. 




The print version is here.


Thanks to Alison for the video link.

Remembering the fallen. Part 1

Remembrance Day, when we are all expected to observe a time to pay our respect to the fallen of the wars past, is near upon us. As the 11th of November approaches some of you will be feeling the pressure to attend a ceremony at a local cenotaph. And, I know, some of you are feeling uncomfortable or maybe just inconvenienced about the thought of pulling yourself out into the bitterness of a Canadian November day to do that.

I understand. Before I go any further however, let me give you a sketch of a CV ... just so no one else misunderstands anything I'm about to tell you.

I am a long service veteran, now retired. I have served the same sovereign in three naval services. I have fought in two clearly definable wars, both of them much smaller in scale than either the Great War 1914 - 1918 or the 2nd World War 1939 - 1945. In fact, both were shorter in duration and the expenditure of resources than the Korean conflict. I have served on peacekeeping missions during which I saw some of the horrors humanity can serve upon itself when the distinction of power is reduced to possessing a bag or bags of UN distributed flour. I have been called upon to engage in "discrete" operations which were no less than close quarters combat engagements with an enemy intent on preventing me from completing the task I was attempting to undertake. I have had young men under my command killed in action and more wounded in action. I was wounded during an engagement. I have shared the post-combat depressions which plagued most of the people with whom I have served.

During all of this, I can't ever recall reminding myself how I had signed up to do these things for my country or your freedoms. That may have been a corollary effect, but believe that you were never on my mind - at least not in any guiding sense. My motivation came from pride in my fighting comrades, my ship, my commando or that larger organization which gave me the strength of an established unit. It came from a sense of belonging - belonging to something uniquely distinct from the mainstream of the society from which I had emerged. And there were occasions when my motivation was purely self-preservation.

So, Remembrance Day. What would I expect you to do?

How about, whatever makes you feel comfortable. If I choose to attend a ceremony and demonstrate remembrance for my fallen comrades does not mean I expect you to do the same. In fact, you can't. I can no more tell you what a trench in 1916 Ypres was like than you can tell me what it was like spending months away from home with my finger on the trigger during the Cold War. I spend more than a single day remembering the things that culminate in Remembrance Day. I would be close to accurate if I told you I think about my fallen mates every single day of my life. You can't possibly do that, nor should any rational person expect you to.

Do I expect you to stand there on a cold November day for me or my comrades' benefit? No, I do not.

A huge number of you wear a paper poppy. That little bit of time you took to pin it on and the contribution you made to get it is enough for me. To know that for a moment you participated in a small gesture and wear that little emblem demonstrates all that I need to know. You do understand and you're showing it.

Does this mean I don't want you to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony? Far from it. I would love to see huge crowds at every cenotaph in the country. If, however, you cannot do so, or feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced it's just fine if you don't attend. No one can force you and you should not feel pressured just because somebody else thinks it's "proper". Remembrance is a personal thing and you can do it any way you like. Sometimes that will be the thought you feel when you remove that paper poppy from your coat.

A group we can guarantee will attend Remembrance Day ceremonies will be the politicians. Unlike you, they participate for completely different reasons. While my words to you, in this post, are provided in absolute sincerity, Part 2 will address the cadre of politicians who are there to gain political traction.

Fallout. The result of Tony Clement's nuking of the federal public service.

I've watched in awe at the decade-long performance of Tony Clement. He's lied, he's laughed at the fatal results of a tainted food supply, he's misappropriated millions of taxpayer dollars to feather his own electoral riding with pagodas and pools, he's created the most inept "red-tape' elimination formula known in the developed world and then he was let loose to destroy the federal public service as only a freaked-out refugee from the Mike Harris "Common Sense Revolution" could - with no foresight and no thought of consequences. He creates wreckage with no plan beyond that which his single-firing synapse has developed over a five minute period. Clean-up, adjustment and adaptation? Not his problem. Anyway, it's just too hard for him. The perfect conservative.

So, if you haven't read Sooey Says today, you need to.

Harper's fishing partner. As grand as his senate appointees.

Always remember ...



Now head on over to Creekside. Once you've had a bit of Alison's humour you might not want to swallow that litre of bleach.

Take five . . .

CHILL WITH A QUADRACOPTER. Full-screen delight for the soul, nice soundtrack, called the In-Between by A New Normal. Way, way cool . . . Now, imagine the transistor had never been invented. What would it have taken to capture the same thing?

HT — Seboua, thank-you!

A sign of remembrance . . .

FOUND ON GOOGLE MAPS: a satellite photograph you see here. Do click on the link to find out more.

Something evil this way comes . . .

THERE ARE NASTY CRITTERS OUT THERE. BadBIOS is one of ‘em, according to Dan Goodwin at ArsTechnica, who has an article you should read, “Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps”. Jumps airgaps? This is truly dangerous.

"We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of a sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys."

It seems that even your speakers can pass on the nastiness:

For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.

• • •

Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility that it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed the internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped.

Now, this is scary . . .

ACCORDING TO Bruce Wilson at AlterNet, “Almost Two-Thirds of 18-29 Year Olds Believe in "Demon Possession" What Is Happening to America?”. Just like in medieval times, superstition is probably eternal.

Over one half (63 percent, to be exact) of young Americans 18-29 years old now believe in the notion that invisible, non-corporeal entities called "demons" can take partial or total control of human beings, revealed an October 2012 Public Policy Polling survey that also showed this belief isn't declining among the American population generally; it's growing.

Kinda like the PMO . . .

Arctic speculation . . .

STEVIE'S STEALTH SNOWMOBILE: the Harper concept of the future of Arctic conflict. Now as we know, the CONs are not the sharpest tools in the drawer and the acquisition of equipment for promoting our Arctic presence has been a Stevie problem.

And with global warming opening the Arctic waters, the future could be very interesting. Annalee Newitz has a post at io9, “The war that comes after global warming will blow your mind in new novel Arctic Rising” that is worthy of your perusal. 

A lot of science fiction about the Earth's warmer future is dystopian, showing us drowned cities and people reduced to Road Warrior desperados. But Tobias Buckell's new novel, Arctic Rising, offers a far more complicated and realistic picture of what the world will look like when the poles melt. 

It's a breakneck eco-thriller about "Arctic Tiger" nations like Canada clashing with green mega-corporations over what to do about the Earth's climate. At every turn, Buckell will surprise you with plot twists that fly in the face of conventional wisdom about environmental issues, and with cool ideas about how people will adapt to life on the Arctic Rim.

Do check it out. S-F has a funny way of turning into reality. In 1963, as a teenager, I read John Berryman's “The Trouble with Telstar”, about an astronaut sent up to fix a satellite. Thirty years later, I get to watch a Shuttle crew repair the Hubble space telescope on the TV in my living room. Two years ago, WIRED featured the airship you see above, in a post, “Airships Could Prove a Lifeline in the Arctic”. They might even make an appearance next year. Somehow, Stevie's stealth snowmobile just ain't gonna cut it.

Airships may soon soar in the cold skies of northern Canada and Alaska, bringing supplies to remote mining communities where planes can’t always fly and roads are cost-prohibitive.

British airship manufacturer Hybrid Air Vehicles has announced a major contract with Canada’s Discovery Air Innovations to build airships capable of lifting as much as 50 tons, delivering freight at one-quarter the cost of other alternatives. Though various militaries have expressed interest in airships, this is HAV’s first commercial contract. The first ship is expected by 2014.

Reefer sanity . . .

A Uruguayan man smokes cannabis during
a demonstration in Montevideo in May.
A senate vote to legalise the drug
is expected in November.
Photograph: Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty Images

Uruguay sets price
of legalised cannabis
at $1 a gram

Uruguay sets price of legalised cannabis at $1 a gram, according to The Guardian's article by Uki Goni, who reports that

Uruguay is set to become the first country in the world where the sale of cannabis will not only become legal and government-controlled, but at around $1 a gram probably also the one with the most affordable marijuana anywhere.

Jesse Staniforth brutally rips Rex Murphy a new one ...

And a very well-deserved one it is.

Rex Murphy's opinion piece isn't just ignorant, it's totally vacuous, the product of someone who literally seems to know nothing about the subject he's railing against.

But then, there's the rub. Murphy is educated in the art of the word; not the projection of knowledge. He is the perfect right-wing shill, bereft of information, ignorant of history and mortally afraid of scientific fact. Murphy's way of dealing with the discomfort of science and now, history, is to simply deny it and invent a simplistic, emotional and inaccurate cultural meme to fill the vacuum between the ears of the Harperite base which forms his constituency.

Not good . . .

OUT OF CONTROL: when the RCMP pepper spray unarmed elders. According to Cari-Lee Raven Veilifter, who can be found on Facebook at #‎ElsipogtogStandOff‬:

“the elder the RCMP are pepper spraying is our elder Doris Copage of Elsipogtog (short hair/gray jacket). Doris is one of the kindest and most helpful people I've ever met. She cooks for and looks out for everyone. Of course she was completely unarmed and only had her rosary beads in hand when this happened- so they had no reason to spray her.”

Ya gotta wonder where the Tasers were. PRESS CORE is concerned about all the heavy-duty firepower; it seems that some of it might not be the RCMP, like the dude below. Do check out the site for some interesting pictures.

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.

Foil hat time . . .

BOOGITY-BOOGITY. “Adolf Hitler -- Agent of Zionism and Freemasonry”. Yup. Really. Must be true, it's on the web. 

A natural wonder . . .

The view from a small window in the wall
of the vast Niubizi Tian Keng in the Er Wang Dong
cave system, where clouds form inside the huge spaces.
Three tiny explorers can be seen negotiating
the heavily vegetated floor

“The cave so huge it has its own weather system: Explorers discover a lost world with thick cloud and fogs trapped inside” according to The Mail Online.