Yokels with pitchforks (2)

One particularly obnoxious commenter at Jay Currie's redoubt has accused me of using code in a recent post of mine: "yokels with pitchforks," he avers, means "Westerners."

Not so.

One counter-example? Lowell Green and his dittoheads, right here in Ottawa. An even better counter-example? Toronto, the centre of the universe, Toronto the sophisticated, Toronto the liberal, appears set to elect arch-yokel Rob Ford as its next mayor.

The Right may find itself in a bit of a bind over this one. How can it continue to slag Toronto when the place will likely soon be run by a mouth-breather like Ford? The man is everything the pitchfork crowd loves--sufficiently nyekulturny, in fact, to satisfy the most discerning bumpkin.

I, bigoted against Westerners? Utter nonsense. Tommy Douglas was a Westerner, as were the working-class heroes of the Winnipeg General Strike. The On to Ottawa Trek was a western protest movement. The CCF got its start out there. All the Western provinces but Alberta have had NDP governments. So this false grievance-mongering by the commenter--about whom I shall have more to say anon--is fairly wide of the mark.

But anti-intellectual, boorish knuckle-draggers? That's a different story. They do not, however, form a "community" by themselves. They are ubiquitous and toxic. Every place and time has had 'em, unfortunately: heretic-hunters, illiterates, idiot-proud know-nothings, flat-earthers, xenophobes, homophobes, anybody-o-phobes. The duty of all citizens is to rise up and counter this tide of brutishness with firmness and vision: to be intolerant, in a word, of intolerance.

This is not, by the way, another call to arms in the so-called "culture wars." As is the case with a battle of wits, a culture war is not a war at all when one side is virtually unarmed. Instead, it is a call for reason and good judgement. And in this post, gentle Westerners, I am talking to the good people of Toronto--even if some of you, for whatever reason, "think this post's about you."

Conservative College: August 12 Lecture Schedule

Anthropology 204: Professor Wendy "Buy Me Meds and a Computer Instead of Wasting Money on Haiti" Sullivan explains that "in cave man days", it was the women that used to hunt because women excel at "killing for flesh", and therefore shouldn't be working.

Anne - OR IMAN?? The Islamonazification of PEI !!

In a transparent effort to brandish the mailed fist of Islam in the face of God-fearing Christian Canadians, radical Islamists are now threatening to build a Mega Mosque in the very heart of Canadian confederation - Charlottetown, PEI, a mere jet flight away from Ground Zero in Manhattan.

Zapped!

Taser International gets a well-deserved jolt:

"The petitioner’s alternative argument before me was that the Study Commission Report’s conclusion that conducted energy weapons have the capacity to cause death was patently unreasonable and unsupported by any credible evidence.

"I find no merit in this submission. It is quite clear to me that there were presentations made to the commissioner by medical experts and others to the effect that such weapons can cause serious harm and even death in exceptional circumstances."

Jenny Paycheck

shows you how it's done in 2010.

UPDATE: (August 11) Oh, well, good while it lasted (h/t reader Mandos). Remember that the original Johnny didn't really quit his job either.

The Gitmo Kanga-ruse

Sitting in judgement on Canadian citizen and former child soldier Omar Khadr, Colonel Patrick Parrish wears his colours brightly on his sleeve. This latter-day Roy Bean has demonstrated bias from the get-go: he's plainly of the "first the trial, then the hanging" school of the American Wild West.

As the presiding officer at Khadr's drumhead "trial," Parrish replaced Col. Peter Brownbank, who had fallen afoul of the military powers that be for allowing too many defence motions (e.g., permitting the defence to have access to the evidence).

Parrish quickly proved more pliable: he immediately moved to ban photographs in court that Khadr's defence counsel at the time, Lt. Commander Bill Kuebler, considered vital evidence. Kuebler was blunt, when asked why Parrish had so ruled: "Because they show he's innocent."

It didn't seem to pose a problem for Parrish, however, that the prosecution had already introduced doctored evidence against Khadr.

More recently, Parrish continued to show his shocking bias. As I noted at the time:

Khadr is blind in one eye and has shrapnel in both. He has been suffering grievously of late, but no qualified medical assistance has been available to him in Gitmo. Parrish casually dismissed defence objections to his having to wear goggles while being transported to the court in a windowless van, and threatened to run the proceedings in Khadr's absence. Yesterday afternoon, Khadr was in court, in obvious physical pain.

It should be no surprise to anyone, therefore, that Parrish has now ruled that the prosecution may introduce statements made by a 15-year-old boy under torture. "Tainted evidence" doesn't begin to cover this: "putrid" would be more apt. Parrish's very presence in a courtroom perverts the notion of justice. He is a disgrace to his office.

But he will have his way. And Stephen Harper and his minions, who have been praying for this moment to arrive, will be delighted.

This isn't a trial in any recognizable sense: it's a judicial lynching. "We're just embarrassing ourselves by being here," said Khadr, who appears to be the only realist in the room while the sordid farce plays itself out. His counsel Dennis Edney tries to remain optimistic, but he's faltering at this point (and who can blame him):

"It's our intention and our hope during this trial to shame this judge -- which may be impossible," Edney said. "We hope we can shame the jury so they can really get a true picture of what Omar stands for."

Good luck with that. Parrish is already twisting the hemp in his hands. And our own Prime Minister is part of the mob.

Shaking down Greenpeace

Free speech warrior Ezra Levant figures he has found a way to shut Greenpeace up.

Why prosecute just the kids who hang banners off buildings, asks Ezra over at KoryMedia, when a little lawfare in the form of a novel use of the Criminal Code provides for punishing the Greenpeace senior execs.

First, Greenpeace must be redefined as a "criminal organization" :

A criminal organization is defined as one whose main activity is the “commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial benefit, by the group.”
Break and enter, for example, is considered a “serious offence.”

To be convicted under Section 467.1, the crime organization’s leaders don’t need to know the exact details of the offences being committed, or even the identity of the people involved.

The list of factors for courts to consider includes the repeated use of a name (Greenpeace banners always feature their logo); the receipt of a benefit (Greenpeace always fundraises off their stunts); and repetition of these activities (almost a half-dozen times in the past two years).

Last year Mr. Levant wrote a book of anecdotes detailing the use of such "legal mechanisms as weapons" called Shakedown. But his much-vaunted commitment to free expression has always been curiously one-sided.

(h/t Waterbaby by email)

A Short Pictorial History of Communism

It's funny how life writes its own script. Last year Mrs. Dr. Balb and I took a month and tootled around the Mediterranean - and it was only when we got back that we realized we had effectively done a Tour of the Peoples of the Book, from the Vatican to the Blue Mosque to the Great Synagogue of Brussels.

This year we did a month of wandering around the Baltic. When we went back to our journals and photos and looked for this year's theme, our unwitting, retrofitted leitmotif surprised us once again - The Rise and Fall of Communism.

Sleepers

(DawgNews, Ottawa, August 9). A number of Conservative sleeper agents have been discovered in the House of Commons. Known collectively as the "Liberal Caucus," and led by Russian-American ex-pat Michael Ignatieff, most have now been returned to their party and are currently being debriefed in the Langevin Block. Ignatieff, however, is presently a fugitive, fleeing by bicycle.

"We suspected it all along," said Paul Dewar, foreign affairs critic for the NDP. "It seemed almost strategic the way they'd fold at the slightest opportunity, never press an advantage, support the government in key votes dozens of times."

Dewar noted that the Liberals had ended up opposing pay equity, defending the genocidal Colombian regime, hyping the Alberta tar sands and even arranging to lose a crucial vote on maternal health. "They just never seemed to have a principle they thought was worth defending," said Dewar. "Now we know it was more than simple opportunism and incompetence."

Liberal Gerald Kennedy said re-joining the Conservatives "would take some getting used to," but Bob Rae was more positive, saying that "it's not really much of a change for us, frankly, although it's a little embarrassing." He looked forward to working more openly with PM Stephen Harper, calling the latter "a leader for the times," and noted that there would be "no election in the foreseeable future. No way. That's not how we roll."

Some outraged constituents across the country have demanded resignations and by-elections. "We were tricked," said David Emerson, 64, a Vancouver businessman. But Harper's Chief of Staff, Guy Giorno, strongly defended his party's actions. "It's not like they were ever meant to be a real alternative," he said, "but people voted for them anyway. Nobody forced them to." Welcoming the agents in from the cold, he said, "Never mind 'crossing the floor.' We seek unity, not division."

What remains a mystery is how the agents were finally exposed. Some have speculated that the time was ripe. "After the long-form census, the Afghan detainee cover-up, the G-20 and the unreported criminals stuff," said former broadcaster and now Conservative Senator Mike Duffy, "we realized we could pretty much get away with anything. I figure the government deliberately blew its own cover. No need for it anymore."

His colleague Pamela Wallin agreed: "Honesty is the best policy," she said. "We've had a good run, but you really can't fool all the people all the time."

Off with his head

Our country needs an election. We've crossed the line. Pre-scientific mediaeval primitives are running the government, and they're wrecking our home and native land. Magic thinking has trumped science, a crude far-right ideology subbing for spells and potions. Real scientists get purged; real mathematicians resign. And real people are getting hurt.

Unlike the case a few centuries ago, millions of Galileos are now railing impotently against our sovereign, who has decreed that the sun orbits the earth. King Stephen I enjoys, however, the fervent support of yokels with pitchforks who can see this for themselves every day. They don't need a telescope to know which way the sun goes.

Killing the long-form census is like excising a portion of the brain in order to induce amnesia. In medicine, that would be called criminal malpractice. In politics, it's malfeasance. Vandalism. Our Supreme Ruler has all the destructive urges of a foul-tempered little boy in a sandbox. There will be serious consequences for ordinary folks, but the King will just put up a few more portraits of himself. He must be thanking his angry old testament God that the Liberals put the hapless Iggy-Jiggy in charge, a man without a discernible principle, position or plan, presently munching barbecue and pretending to be what he isn't.

All taxes are bad taxes, says the King, but he has no difficulty looting the treasury to pay for the continued stimulation of the population's reptile brain.* $9 billion for a brand new prison system to warehouse unreported criminals; another $9 billion for jet fighters (with an untendered contract), no doubt in case we have to go to war over Hans Island; $1.2 billion to finance that dry-run for police state politics, the G-20; and a few million more to produce a voluntary long-form census of no statistical value.

Even some on the Right are asking a few of the proper questions, summarized here as WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF?

A creationist with anger issues heads up Science and Technology, a mendacious statistical illiterate is in charge of the now-headless StatsCan, and another creationist, as noted, is planning to build prisons to house invisible felons. And a crude, loud-mouthed thug has now been appointed House Leader to shriek and bully any dissenting plebs into silence.

If it weren't for the harm done to our country, including the legitimation of unrestrained police violence in Toronto and the loss of our corporate memory, we might allow ourselves to be mildly amused by a government that resembles, policy-wise, a mash-up of the Keystone Kops and the Inquisition. But our foreign policy has become an embarrassment, and our domestic policy is in tatters. Ministers routinely interfere with arms-length agencies, or attempt to exile Canadian citizens,(claiming "royal prerogative" with entirely straight faces), while the King padlocks Parliament--or just tells it to go fly. The man who laughs has simply not yet heard the terrible news.

It's nothing less than our civic duty to run this horrific gang of subliterate hoodlums out of office, by any means necessary and as soon as possible, to get the hands moving clockwise again. We're in serious trouble, folks, and it's time for the craven politicians of the Opposition to gird their loins.

Here's one post-modernist who suddenly has a hankering for a swift return to the rule of law and the security of statistics and the scientific method. (Somewhere my late father and sparring-partner, a rationalist to the end, is smiling.) I'm not just angry; I'm terrified. And I happen to believe that a majority of my countrymen and women are feeling the same way about now.

Get off that stupid bicycle, Iggy. Help end this waking nightmare. As for the rest of us, who says we can't pick up a torch or a pitchfork ourselves when the occasion demands?
_______________________
*"Lacking language, its impulses are instinctual and ritualistic. It's concerned with fundamental needs such as survival, physical maintenance, hoarding, dominance, preening and mating. " Sound like anyone you know?

Identity politics: IOKIYAC

From the horse's, er, mouth:

It's...extremely problematic that Judge Walker is a practicing homosexual himself. He should have recused himself from this case, because his judgment is clearly compromised by his own sexual proclivity. The fundamental issue here is whether homosexual conduct, with all its physical and psychological risks, should be promoted and endorsed by society. That’s why the people and elected officials accountable to the people should be setting marriage policy, not a black-robed tyrant whose own lifestyle choices make it impossible to believe he could be impartial.

--Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association

Mmm...K. How quickly the dyed-in-the-wool opponents of identity politics can take a U-turn. Funny how that works. From now on, may we demand that Catholic judges recuse themselves when pedophile priests are brought before them? Black judges, when affirmative action is challenged?

And then there's that so-called mosque (actually a Muslim cultural centre) to be built in New York, not at Ground Zero, but two blocks away. Never mind: a Muslim is a Muslim. Just don't build any Christian churches anywhere near the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Fair ball?

Trickle up economics

From self-proclaimed former economic hitman, John Perkins.

In North America we've mostly been ok with this stuff happening to the rest of the world but gradually we are seeing more of it come home to roost. The Gulf spills, Katrina, the tar sands, the G20 fiasco, the increasing gap between rich and poor.

My brother just got back from a holiday in the States. The parks are untended, he said, no one is grooming the trails so they're growing back in again, and did I know that in some states schools are open less than six months of the year now to save money?

I was just reading about it in the New York Times, I said. They're also shutting down public transit systems and streetlights and libraries and auctioning off police helicopters to save money, but somehow there's still billions in tax dollars available for "policing" the rest of the world and handing out massive bonuses to the same banksters who wrecked the joint.

Trickle up economics, I believe it's called.

Equality before the law comes to California

Margaret Somerville, the Islamists and assorted so-con bloggers won't like this.

Which alone makes it worth celebrating.

Holocaust-denial defended

...at a prominent conservative blogsite.

First it was frequent commenter "john begley," claiming that Jews ran up the Holocaust numbers to get higher reparations out of the Germans. (Hardly a word against this obscene comment was recorded from the regulars at Jay's place. But the side-stepping and fancy dancing were something to behold.)

Now it's Gerry T. Neal's turn:

"Holocaust denial" is in many cases, a defense mechanism on the part of people of German background in response to post-WWII German bashing. It is a shield to protect Germans against anti-German racism far more often than it is a sword to attack the Jews. It is not good history but it is not the sin Dr. Dawg makes it out to be either.

Umm...OK. Confronted by real anti-Semitism, your first response is to defend it by claiming it's merely defensive in nature. Whatever, Gerry.

Taking a brief respite from continual Muslim-bashing, Jay's regulars are beginning to let us know what we knew already: anti-Semitism is, and always has been, a disease of the Right. And, for the record, that Right includes the social-conservative, religious agenda of the Islamists. Amazing that they haven't joined forces with the small army of homophobes and anti-choicers who infest the starboard side of the blogosphere. If the latter could only give up their xenophobia, they might help create an electoral bloc to be reckoned with.

By all means, keep fighting for free expression but against minarets and burqas, Jay. And go on denouncing criticism of Israel by progressives as "anti-Semitic" while the real thing gets a continual pass at your house. But, if I might gently suggest, the Whitman defence only works for poets.

Stockwell Day, crime shopper

Doris' cheery crime shoppers philosophy on prisons seems to be : If you build them, they will come.

According to Shockwell Doris and JusticeMin Rob Nicholson yesterday, we're going to need more prisons to deal with the "alarming" increase in "unreported crime" ... that was last reported six years ago.

Well, you can see their point, can't you? If more people aren't reporting crimes, then unreported crimes must be going up and we're going to need somewhere to put all them unreported criminals!

And why aren't people reporting those crimes? Via The Jurist :

"(A Statistics Canada) analyst said the No. 1 reason given by individuals for not calling the police about a crime is that they believe it was not serious enough. Only two per cent said they feared retribution, and one per cent said they felt the police may be biased.

Statistics Canada reported in their last General Social Survey (GSS) that an estimated 34% of Canadians who are victims of crime still aren't reporting the crime to police, including: - an estimated 88% of sexual assaults; - an estimated 69% of household thefts, and - and (sic) estimated 67% of personal property thefts."

Kady advises us that Doris is basing his claims about unreported crime on the 2004 International Crime Victimization Survey.
Three years ago I had a look at that survey. Here are some of the more buckety questions in it :

Under Spousal violence : "Puts you down or calls you names to make you feel bad"

Under Stalking : "Sent you unwanted email messages"

Under Property Damage : "During the last 12 months did anyone deliberately damage or destroy any property belonging to you or anyone in your houshold, including a window or a fence?"

Puts you down? Unwanted emails? Broken fences? Holy crap! Build more prisons!

Meanwhile back in the real world, here's the reported 2004 Statscan crime stats from the year Doris is still bleating about. Yup, going down since 1991. And if I may be so rude as to bring up something a bit more current, like for instance this year's report : crime still going down.

Deal with it, Doris.

Conservative illiteracy

Kate McMillan's place is good for a laugh through the yawns once in a while. Here's one of her guest bloggers, EBD, snorting with indignation about Errol Mendes' column in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday. First, Mendes:

What the government can't do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy, is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies.

Then Kate's comprehension-challenged assistant:

Yes, you read that right: it's up to public servants to decide whether they will accept or not accept the policies of an elected government, and they have a right to determine whether or not a particular policy is "in the interests of Canadians."

Actually, old chap, I did read it right. And Mendes is spot on: it is immoral to seek advice from public servants and then misrepresent that advice to the public. Some of us knew perfectly well that Tony Clements was telling porkies about the "support" he allegedly received from StatsCan on the long-form census, but it took the resignation of Munir Sheikh to drive that home to Canadians in general.

Ask for advice from those who have expertise: take it or not. You're the gummint. But don't lie about the people who gave it to you. And then make feeble attempts to jam your lie down the memory hole.

PS: To satisfy your clinical curiosity, be sure to read the comments. They never disappoint.

WikiLeaks vs Project Vigilant - the end of privacy

WikiLeaks' mandate is to make public those documents purposely hidden by information gatekeepers. Their goal is justice through transparency and, as Julian Assange recently put it : "I enjoy crushing the bastards".
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At the other end of the scale you have snitch hackers like Project Vigilant - logo on left. According to Andy Greenburg at Forbes, the 600 member organization "monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers and hands much of that information to federal agencies." Its roster includes members from NSA and DARPA.
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Project Vigilant Director Chet Uber announced Sunday that he was the guy who convinced one of PV's researchers, the hacker Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about Bradley Manning's alleged part in leaking to WikiLeaks the U.S. Apache helicopter footage of the killing of civilians and two journalists in a Baghdad suburb -what we now know as the Collateral Murder video -after Manning spilled his guts to Lamo in an online chatroom.

"In June, Uber said he learned from Lamo's father that the young researcher had identified Manning as the video's source, and pressured him to meet with federal agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks' whistleblower."

It was Uber who then contacted the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigation on behalf of Lamo.
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What an amazing coincidence, eh? - that 22 year old intelligence officer Bradley Manning should happen to spill his guts to a member of Project Vigilant in a chatroom .
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But how can Project Vigilant(e) legally harvest info off the internet about the rest of us?

"...because the companies (the Internet Service Providers, or ISPs) included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies.
A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can "develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address."

So although there are some safeguards on what info the US government can collect about you - remember the stink about TIA and TIPS? - a private sector organization like Project Vigilant can take over that job for the government.
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In the comments below the Forbes article, Chet Uber takes issue with Greenberg over his use of the word "employee" to describe the Project Vigilante "volunteers", and says "BBHC Global (which certainly has an interesting website ) is an NGO classified as a "Not Just for Profit" entity".
Uber is also a founding member of InfraGard. According to its website, IfraGard :

"is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector. InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States"

What absolutely amazes me here is that a lot of people went absolutely ballistic when WikiLeaks revealed to them what their governments are up to, and yet it's apparently just fine with them when the info is going the other way and government surreptitiously outsources the collecting of private information about them to.
Their motto seems to be : Knowing about your government - bad; your government knowing about you - good.
This is surely the total acceptance of living in a surveillance society - when you are willing to defend not only that surveillance, but your own complete ignorance of what it consists of.
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Meantime, best have another look at that end user licence agreement you signed with your ISP.
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Monday night update: Greenwald : Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy

Thursday update : Greenwald retracts : Re-visiting Project Vigilant.

PV probably all bs, including influence on Lamo.

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Update 2 : A commenter at Creekside : Jugiter Viglio? What, they couldn't summon sufficient eternal vigilance not to have a spelling mistake in their own logo?

Critical Government Functions Outsourced

I've watched as the Harper government dismantles our environmental monitoring and management programs, abandons the concepts of food and water security, quietly dismantles Health Canada's capacity to protect health standards, undoes the Parks Act, cripples its own data collection and analysis, deregulates transportation safety, and generally abandons any notion of regulatory limitation on revenue generation.

But this is going too far.

Paranoia

An article proving once again that conservatism is not a politics, but a diagnosis:

Well, what’s the big deal about it making [the census] voluntary, then?

This question astounds statists. “Voluntary” defeats the purpose. The census is about coercion. Information is almost incidental. The long form’s function is to accustom respondents to being wards of the authorities.

Social engineers are prepared to put on a velvet glove if the Harper-government insists, but how can they plan, redistribute, regulate and expropriate without the iron fist? Long forms elicit information to serve the purposes and ideals of the centrally planned state. They have to be intrusive and obligatory.

Expense, statistical inadequacy, sample bias are all irrelevant. It's a plot. In the good old days, Hungarian ex-pat George Jonas would have appended the adjective "Communist," and mumbled about fluoridated water.

Stockwell Day was right. We walked with dinosaurs--and we continue to do so.

Knowledge is power.

By the time two individuals reach the point where they're joyously, frantically, gratefully or athletically (or any combination of those qualifiers) sharing bodily fluids, a number of mental, emotional and physical processes have preceded "la chose". (As in - porté, portée sur la chose.)

Example: for a vast majority of men, receiving a blow job from a skilled, gifted and enthusiastic practitioner of the art is a dream come true. However, it matters to most of them whether the person who bestows this pleasure upon them is female or male. Why? It shouldn't be a factor, if sex if purely physical.

The model of an ideal sexual contract would involve explicit consent from both individuals and the only criteria required to ascertain its fulfillment would be the responses to: "Did you come?" and/or "Was it good for you?".

Life is rarely that simple or uncomplicated. Sexual activity means a multitude of things for different people at various points in their lives.

Individuals who withhold information about their gender, their age, their health condition, and a range of factors which could determine whether someone consents to sex with them are acting selfishly, irresponsibly, unethically and in some situations, committing a crime - fraud or sexual assault.

Since most countries overtly or covertly support sexist and gynophobic institutions, whether traditions or religious organizations, women are more likely to be exploited by a sexual predator or opportunistic men.

A few years ago, in order to raise students awareness of the real threat that sexually transmitted infections represented to their reproductive health, a pro-condom campaign was launched in secondary and post-secondary schools by educators. The theme was: "Men lie."

Implicit was the rest of the observation ... "because they want sex and they'll try to get it any way they can." Which is not a fair statement, because not all men will lie about the things that would make a woman think twice or three times about initiating sex or consenting to it.

Knowledge is power. Often childhood survivors of emotional and physical trauma find it difficult to trust, yet may eroticize power imbalance because it is a familiar scenario.

Sharing information creates a level playing field and helps to establish some ground rules. And that foundation can produce some powerfully satisfying interactions, that can be recreative or procreative, carnal or comforting, raunchy or romantic.

Otis Redding sang "Try a little tenderness" - how about trying a little honesty?