Harper's mentor, on child porn

An aside from Indian-fighter Tom Flanagan:

But that’s actually another interesting debate or seminar: what’s wrong with child pornography — in the sense that it’s just pictures? But I’m not here to debate that today.

And here, revealed in all its splendour, is the concept that lies at the rotting heart of social relations under capitalism--commodity fetishism. The rupture between consumption and production has become so wide that a picture is no longer a picture of someone, but just a fantasy aid. An object for sale.

Let's have that debate, Tom. I guarantee it'll be the last we hear of you.

[H/t Confessions of a Liberal Mind]

If only his name had been Mohammed

...the media would be using the t-word. Or at least bothering to report on a neo-Nazi bombfest in Calgary.

Police are looking for the jerk in the white tee. Note the presence of a "free speech activist" in the crowd, or so he is described by a Free Dominion regular.

As usual, the Anti-Racist Collective is miles ahead of the curve. This may in fact have been internecine warfare. If so, I can't help hoping that both sides win.

UPDATE: (November 29) Whoops. I guess I should let ARC continue to do the heavy lifting on the neo-Nazi file. But I'm sure neither gentleman would be particularly bothered.

Torture--with gags

Greg Weston has a column this morning that should put to rest any illusions some may still retain as to whether the Conservative higher-ups--and by that I mean the PMO--were unaware of what they were facilitating in Khandahar.

The article is timely, even if it contains little that we didn't already know. Noting the government's incessant manoeuverings to thwart the Military Police Complaints Commission, which has been trying for eighteen months now to investigate reports of our complicity in torture, Weston reports that a large number of civilian and military officials have been overtly threatened by the Harper government:

On July 28, the federal justice department wrote to 28 high-ranking government and military officials with knowledge of the Afghan detainee file, warning that their testimony could damage their reputations and potentially put their colleagues' careers at risk.

The letter "strongly" recommended they all retain the justice department as their legal counsel.

Not surprisingly, most heeded the pointed advice -- after all, it was coming from their employer.

In fact, only one person retained his own counsel and agreed to co-operate with the commission.

That was diplomatic whistleblower Richard Colvin, formerly acting ambassador in Afghanistan, and now deputy chief of intelligence at the Canadian embassy in Washington.

And then the sting in the tail: with its hallmark mean-spiritedness, the Conservative government is taking yet another slap at Richard Colvin. As Weston points out, it advised witnesses to get themselves legal representation --but is now refusing to pay Colvin's legal costs.
_______________
*I posted last month on the impending Tory underbussing of another person of integrity, Peter Tinsley, the current head of the MPCC.

Nostalgie de la boue

Readers will note that, in general, I raise topics in the news, comment on them and invite debate. I don't spend a lot of time these days at the bottom of the blogospheric lake where the mudfish slurp and spawn. But every now and then an example of mudfishery arises that is simply too perfect, too complete in and of itself, too instant-classical to ignore.

Ladies and germs, I give you--Patrick Ross, he of the blog that is, to all intents and purposes, eponymous.

If anyone wants to watch the rapid self-demolition of a mudfish, as I did with with clinical fascination, go here. Read. Read it all. Take notes. Plot graphs. Enjoy, or, if you are ultra-humane, commiserate. Either way, this is not to be missed. That is all.

[H/t CC.]

I was wrong (again)

Now that the weekend has passed and the cries of “the arse is really out of ‘er this time” have echoed throughout the stratosphere, the hacked e-mails turn out to not reveal much of anything (the only exception is possibly the alleged deleting of e-mails in regards to an FOI request) – or so I thought. I was feeling fairly smart when I came across the smoking gun!

I must now say that I was wrong. There is strong evidence of alleged fraud in the e-mails from the CRU hack. I stand corrected.

That is me on the right.

Harper's stimulus, a ground-level view

A tale from Kanata, at the western reach of the Ottawa megacity: why not grab some federal and provincial stimulus funds and run a road through wetlands and woodlands?

A Kanata road project that could severely harm several protected species of plants and animals is being fast-tracked so the city can get millions of dollars from short-lived economic stimulus programs to help build it.

The project is an extension of Terry Fox Drive north of Highway 417, taking it four kilometres through woods and wetlands. The city is due to get $32 million in federal and provincial money to help pay for the work, but because the funding programs are meant to push money into the economy quickly to help the country and province recover from the recession, the road needs to be finished by March 2011.

If it goes ahead as planned, the new road will kill the resident population of the threatened Blanding’s turtle — an animal that is supposed to be protected by federal and provincial endangered species laws — says the lead turtle scientist with the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

--

According to a draft environmental assessment screening report, prepared for the city by Dillon Consulting, the Terry Fox Drive extension will cut directly through a swampy area identified as “Vernal Pool 14+600,” which teems with wildlife and forms “critical habitat” for the Blanding’s turtle, as well as breeding habitat for sensitive amphibians.

“Filling in this large vernal pool/wetland will result in the direct loss of 0.69 ha of amphibian breeding habitat, fragmentation of the habitat and the probable displacement of area-sensitive, pollution intolerant herpetofauna as well as other potential wildlife species,” the report states.

One of the problems all along with the stimulus measures has been the encouragement of this sort of hurried project with its attendant hasty and inadequate planning. Because there will be no further federal or provincial funding for projects left incomplete after March 2011, corners are being furiously cut.

There's no time in this case, for example, to do the up to two-year assessment of the migration and hibernation sites of the Blanding's turtles in the area, considered essential by turtle expert Brad Steinberg of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. Ripping up the forests and laying down asphalt for more cars and more development is the priority for the City of Ottawa, and wildlife, even endangered wildlife, be damned.

I support fiscal stimulus when we're in recession--it makes good sense. But surely some measures could have been put in place to approve only those projects that meet all of the appropriate criteria at the outset, including unrushed environmental impact studies.

As a coda, the print version of the Ottawa Citizen reveals an internal memo with a possibly telling comment:

"Are we saying that wildlife populations would decrease?" Biologist Shawn Taylor responds: "Yes, it's likely that the populations would decrease (many birds, deer, porcupine, fisher, turtles, salamanders, wood frogs all need internal forest conditions), but as above, rather than saying this is a significant cumulative effect we are softening the blow so it is approvable. Shawn."

A city manager insists that "softening the blow" refers not to spin but to proposed mitigation measures, already branded inadequate by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. One way or the other, it looks like lights out for the Blanding's turtle in these parts.

Peter MacKay comes clean?

This was back in April, and passed almost unnoticed. Freudian slip?

Torturegate North: the "6,000-mile screwdriver"

The phrase above is used in military circles to describe far-flung command-and-control systems. And we now know who was turning that tool as far back as 2007: Stephen Harper.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office used a "6,000-mile screwdriver" to oversee the denial of reports of Afghan detainee abuse when the scandal first erupted in 2007, according to a former senior NATO public affairs official who was then based in Kabul.

The former official, speaking on condition his name not be used, told the Toronto Star that Harper's office in Ottawa "scripted and fed" the precise wording NATO officials in Kabul used to repudiate allegations of abuse "at a time when it was privately and generally acknowledged in our office that the chances of good treatment at the hands of Afghan security forces were almost zero."

"It was highly unusual. I was told this was the titanic issue for Prime Minister Harper and that every single statement that went out needed to be cleared by him personally," said the former official, who is not Canadian.

"The lines were, 'We have no evidence' of coercive treatment being used against detainees handed over to the Afghans. There were very clear instructions for a blanket denial. The pressure to hold to that line was channelled via Canadian military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul. But it was made clear to us that this was coming from the Prime Minister's Office, which was running the public affairs aspect of Canadian engagement in Afghanistan with a 6,000-mile screwdriver."

The Americans, of course, set their usual "Abu Ghraib" standard:

"The Americans in particular were not remotely squeamish on this. To them, everyone was an enemy combatant."

And as for diplomat Richard Colvin, who, it has been suggested, might someday be remembered as the man who ended our war in Afghanistan:

"Richard Colvin behaved as a straight-up-and-down person, completely honest and doing his job to the best of his abilities," the former official said.

"He had to be terribly careful. He couldn't speak to us about this. But it was clear that the tone at the Canadian Embassy had changed. It became far more politicized – and it was clear that Richard Colvin was struggling enormously to do his work on the question of detainees." [emphasis added]

Not hard to read between the lines there.

Far from showing any signs of moving to page two, this story may prove to be Harper's Waterloo. It has more legs than a centipede, and if I might extend the metaphor, new shoes are dropping every day. Colvin's credibility, never at issue, is being continually reinforced. Other well-placed individuals, appalled by the crass attacks on him by baying Conservative hacks, are now emerging, one by one, to have their say.

Canadians are not normally moved sufficiently by international issues to change their votes. But this isn't really about Afghanistan any more. It's about the brutal perfidy of the Conservative government, its gall, its utter lack of class, its willingness to cover up, to prevaricate, to temporize: hell, to lie its way out of a tight spot. It's a character issue. The electorate seldom rewards such flagrant political turpitude.

Attacking Richard Colvin, the messenger? Is that the best that wretched lot can do at this point? Even Harper's old mentor Tom Flanagan is showing signs of unease. It's like lighting a fuse. Guy Fawkes isn't in the parliamentary cellar these days: he's sitting in plain sight on the government front benches.

But still no word from the ever-elusive former human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff. To borrow a phrase that I've used before in this connection, the present Liberal "leader" never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And that may be the only thing that ultimately rescues this government from the fate it so richly deserves.

[H/t the ever-more-impressive Impolitical, via CC]

No E-mails please

Damn - I see that the good Doctor beat me to it! Well, since we are all talking about the hacked e-mails from the CRU, I suppose I should post about it as well. There are three points that I want to raise.

First, I think this is one of the most despicable acts I have come across. The e-mails contained personal opinions and observations. Who among us has never written an e-mail which they would not want someone else to read. Regardless of what you think of the content, you have to give full credit to the way they have handled the broadcasting of such personal information.

Second, from what I have seen, there is no smoking gun here and the documents have been around long enough for someone to develop a searchable index of them. To begin with these appear to be a sample (and a small sample) from e-mails involving a number of people over a period of about 10 years. Without all the e-mails a great deal of context is lost. This means that the remaining posts are misunderstood.

Just one example (although others will probably come up in comments) it is claimed that the e-mails show that:

Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data".

While this appears to paint Dr, Briffa in a bad light, the actual e-mail provides more context:

>through high CO2 or nitrate input) . I know there is pressure to
>present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented
>warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in
>reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don't have a
>lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at
>least a significant number of tree proxies) some unexpected
>changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I
>do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.

So what Dr. Briffa actually says is that the "story" is not tidy and it should not be presented as such.

Third, and most important, there is nothing in here that even begins to address, let alone challenge, the underlying science of global warming. Nothing that says we're not causing CO2 to rise, nothing that shows that our understanding of radiation physics is wrong, nothing that says the natural greenhouse effect is wrong.

My prediction is that nothing of substance will be found in the e-mails and in a month the big story is how the media and others ignore the "clear proof" of fraud. To those loyal readers who are still with me, here is a bonus link. I won't provide any description except to say it is related to the topic of this post.

Conservative Party logo, updated

[H/t]

The Great Global Warming Conspi...whoops

One of the usual dolts asks, "Where's Dawg?"

Here I am, after faithfully observing the 24-hour rule. Don't you wish you and your cadre of bloviating denialists had done the same?

You've had your day. Great big searchable files. Where's the smoke? Where's the gun?

Any proof climate change isn't taking place? Any proof that AGW isn't happening? Any proof of fraud? Any proof of a cover-up? Any proof of a conspiracy?

Well, er, no. So you're reduced to empty rhetorical manoeuvres, like parsing the word "trick" for all you're worth.

Nice trick.

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

At issue were sets of data, both employed in two studies. One data set showed long-term temperature effects on tree rings; the other, thermometer readings for the past 100 years.

Through the last century, tree rings and thermometers show a consistent rise in temperature until 1960, when some tree rings, for unknown reasons, no longer show that rise, while the thermometers continue to do so until the present.

Dr. Mann explained that the reliability of the tree-ring data was called into question, so they were no longer used to track temperature fluctuations. But he said dropping the use of the tree rings was never something that was hidden, and had been in the scientific literature for more than a decade. “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

In addition, other independent but indirect measurements of temperature fluctuations in the studies broadly agreed with the thermometer data showing rising temperatures.

Here's what one of the denialist meemies has to say (and note the venue).

Here's what the saner folks are saying:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Surprise, surprise. Scientists dispute, tussle with data, have a low opinion of cranks.

And this CRU hack is supposed to herald "The Death Blow to Climate Science?" It's "not a smoking gun [but] a mushroom cloud"?

Good grief, get hold of yourselves.

Meanwhile the melting--and the real science--continue.

The Maple Leafs

...forever.

A couple of winters ago we had more snow in Ottawa than most folks could remember. We suffered, and shoveled, and grumbled, as windrows grew to twenty feet or so. Then we learned that we were literally inches from the all-time snowfall record.

You guessed it. We prayed for a storm that would put us over. (And it didn't come!)

Go, Leafs. I just can't seem to wrench my gaze away.

Brother Gil

I can't add a single word to this moving tribute to my union brother (although sometimes he seemed more like an uncle) Gil Levine, a legendary trade unionist in these parts.

A mensch indeed. Rest easy, old friend.

Ñakaq attack

A bizarre story out of Peru today--with the backstory almost entirely missing, and the lede truly buried.

Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.

Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn't the only one doing such killings.

Col. Mejia said Mr. Castillejos recounted how the gang cut off its victims' heads, arms and legs, removed the organs, then suspended the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as fat dripped into tubs below.

Six members of the gang remain at large, Col. Mejia said. Among them was the band's alleged leader, Hilario Cudena, 56, who Mr. Castillejos told police has been killing people to extract human fat for more than three decades.

--

Col. Mejia said police received a tip four months ago that human fat from the jungle was being sold in Lima. In August, he said, police infiltrated the band and later obtained some of the amber fluid, which a police lab confirmed as human fat.

On Nov. 3, police arrested Serapio Marcos Veramendi and Enedina Estela in a Lima bus station with a litre of human fat in a soda bottle. Their testimony led to the arrest of Mr. Castillejos three days later at the same bus station.

And then:

Police dubbed the gang the “Pishtacos” after a Peruvian myth dating to pre-Columbian times of men who killed to extract human fat, quartering their victims with machetes. [emphasis added]

Here is more--a lot more--about the pishtacos (pistaku), an alternate word for a monstrous figure in folk mythology in Peru: the ñaqak, Quechua for "slaughterer" or "sacrificer". (I'll return to that throwaway word "mythology" below.)

According to anthropologist Peter Gose's 1986 paper "Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes,"* the ñaqak is a fearsome figure, very often (but not always) a fair-skinned person residing locally. In the crudest version of the story, the ñaqak lies in wait on country roads to kill unwary travellers, hastens them back to a cave or mineshaft, and hangs them on hooks upside-down, catching their fat in receptacles.

More recently, variants of the tale include the use of a special machine from the US to extract the fat more efficiently. The grease thus collected has several applications: in metallurgy, for lubricating machinery, and in pharmaceuticals. (It is easy to see why a number of commentators have been tempted to see the ñaqak and his practices as a metaphorical rendition of global capitalism, although Gose, in his dense and complex analysis, disagrees.)

Virtually every visiting ethnographer in rural Peru has at one time or another been suspected of being a ñaqak. A mestizo truck driver told Gose that he had picked up a Japanese medical student once, who began to make "discrete inquiries" about obtaining human grease in the area.

The first notion of a grease-gathering demon is in fact post-Columbian, emerging during an uprising against the Spanish called the Singing Sickness that occurred in the period 1564-71. The Indians believed that a certain illness had broken out in Spain, and that Spaniards in Peru had been sent to collect their grease as a curative.

Beth A. Conklin, in Consuming Grief: compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society, raises the possibility that this could have been grounded to some degree in actual European practices. The consumption of bodily substances for health reasons was commonplace then, although it was never considered "cannibalism." K. Gordon-Grube notes** that the purchase of the fresh blood of prisoners who had died on the scaffold--thought to be a curative for epilepsy--was a feature of the culturescape at the time. And so was the consumption of "mummy," especially from those who had met violent deaths.

But continuing on with the account:

Dr. Adam Katz, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia medical school, was incredulous when told about the Peruvian ring.

“I can't see why there would be a black market for fat,” he said. “It doesn't make any sense at all, because in most countries we can get fat so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate that I don't see why there would ever be a black market for fat, of all tissues.”

"It doesn't make any sense at all." And yet, oddly, it does. There is a perfect blend here of mythology and "reality" in all of these accounts, wherein it becomes impossible to separate out one from the other. Put a different way, the two categories have no "objective," fixed ontological status.

Perhaps the "origin" of the "myth" was a onetime European demand for bodily substances. Perhaps the Japanese medical student was imagined; perhaps he existed, knew of the local tales, and thought there might indeed be a store of human fat around. Perhaps the gang in today's news story believed in the tale enough to recreate it. Perhaps they are innocent, given the implausibility of a black market in human fat.

But there are points, as this story illustrates, at which the useful commonplace distinction we make between myth and fact, between metaphor and "reality," is revealed to be a construct. And it is precisely at such points that we have the opportunity to reflect more fully, and with much less of a sense of certainty, on the human condition.

References:

*Gose, Peter
1986 "Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes." Man, New Series, v.21:2, 296-310.

**Gordon-Grube, K.
1988 "Anthropophagy in Post-Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism." American Anthropologist, v.90, 405-9.

[H/t]

UPDATE: (December 19) Another twist in the tale: "reality" vanishes once again into myth.

Torturegate: the Liberal leader's vanishing act

The Liberals drop the ball again.

The Invisible Man is too busy reconnecting, it seems, even if he never actually connected in the first place. His descent into utter irrelevance continues.

Man with a conscience

Everything has by now been dragged into the sunlight. The Harper government, beyond all reasonable doubt, has been complicit in the torture of Afghan civilians, and the Canadian Forces' leadership and assorted conniving bureaucrats have joined this government in their complicity, and assisted it in trying to cover it up.

I have little to add. But I would like to salute the man who blew the whistle on these banal evildoers--Richard Colvin:

Counter-insurgency is an argument to win the support of the locals. Every action, reaction or failure to act become part of the debate. In Kandahar, Canada needs to convince local people that we are better than the Taliban, that our values were superior, that we would look after their interests and protect them. In my judgment, some of our actions in Kandahar, including complicity in torture, turned local people against us. Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada’s detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.

Putting aside his career aspirations, refusing to keep silent, refusing to be silenced, Colvin held nothing back yesterday on Parliament Hill. A righteous man, surrounded on all sides by excuse-makers, cover-up artists and venal politicians, finally permitted to speak after the government had attempted to gag him--and heckled for his trouble by brainless Conservative magpies.

Colvin stands for all of the values that we as Canadians allegedly share, but too often put aside out of convenience, fear or apathy. Those who would attack this man's credibility merely shred the last remnants of their own.

Richard Colvin is a man who can sleep soundly at night, and who can look at himself in the mirror when morning comes.

Kudos.

UPDATE: The Conservatives further debase themselves:

MacKay painted Colvin as having been duped by the Taliban and said Canadians are being asked to accept the word of prisoners "who throw acid in the face of schoolgirls."
--
Conservative MPs dismissed Colvin's testimony as being based on second- and third-hand information and suggested his allegations were part of a disinformation campaign. [emphases added]

More at Impolitical. Excellent collection of background links from Aaron Wherry, via POGGE.

And still no word from former human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff. Nor, come to think of it, from the Torchers.

UPDATE: (November 20) Damian Brooks, of The Torch, has put up a post on the issue. His interview with the CBC, in a quasi-debate format, may be found here.

There ain't no-flys on me

...yet.

For the gentle folks who wondered if I was overreacting by suing for a retraction recently, this news:

Transport Canada maintains its own no-fly list. The people in charge of your fate consist of a troika of representatives from CSIS, the RCMP and Transport Canada, and a Deputy Minister who was, at least until last February, "signing [recommendations] in a completely blind fashion." Decisions are not subject to appeal.

Once again, as in the case of a woman found guilty by a bank teller of depositing a small cheque, the swarthy are at special risk. Consider the case of Canadian author and playwright Jaspreet Singh, who was subject to lengthy and intimidating interrogations by airport security officials to the point that he had to cancel out of attending two literary festivals.

Ever-helpful Air Canada staff suggested that he change his name. Don't laugh. Some folks actually end up doing just that. See the security problem here?

It took a lot of personal lobbying on Singh's part, and an outcry in the artistic community, to get airport security off his back. It seems that a "J. Singh" was included in the Transport Canada list. To get an idea of just how mind-numbingly stupid this is, check your telephone book. "Singh" is a more common surname among Sikhs than "Smith" is for anglos. The Ottawa telephone directory alone lists no fewer than ten "J. Singh"s.

This sort of onomastic racial profiling, not surprisingly, is common south of the border, whence our own securibots seem to get all their ideas.

A full report from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group on the operation of the Transport Canada no-fly list will be issued in three weeks. I can hardly wait.

The Prisoner [updated]

The remake of the cult series that starred Patrick McGoohan, he of the one facial expression, begins tonight on AMC, continuing tomorrow and finishing Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it.

I watched "The Prisoner" originally as a re-run on TVO (or was it PBS?), avoiding most of Warner Troyer's insufferably pretentious post-show commentaries (a parasitical series called "The Prisoner Puzzle"). For once I just wanted to watch, not analyze. But no doubt I'll have some insufferably pretentious things of my own to say at the end of the three-part opus.

In the first series, a secret agent found himself in an odd and alarming place called The Village, where people had numbers, not names. The agent was Number 6. Why was he there? Supposedly because he resigned abruptly from the shadowy government outfit he worked for, and The Powers That Be wanted to know why. So various TPTB minions, a veritable parade of fungible Number 2's, tried ingeniously to worm it out of him, at what must have been a considerable cost to the taxpayer. Why didn't they just torture him? Wouldn't that have been cheaper, more efficient and the way real agencies of that sort behave?

But of course we are actually dealing with our existential plight in a world of simulacra and signs. (There I go.) So the re-make effortlessly replaces the secret agent with a corporate consumer-trends spotter. The same questions, however, apply:

Are we free or controlled? Do we think our thoughts or do we only think we think them and they are really put in our minds by others? Is love real or a product being sold to us? And so on.

The ghost of Jean Baudrillard--the godfather of The Matrix, even if he thought the movie got him wrong--will likely tune in tonight, and so should you, my fellow Villagers.

Comments on the series as it unfolds are strongly encouraged by Number 1.

UPDATE: (November 17)

Good grief, how flabby was that?

A combination of David Lynch's myriad loose ends in Twin Peaks, making the inability to construct a coherent narrative into a virtue, and the moralistic stupor of The Outer Limits. I half-expected a voiceover to read us the lesson of the day.

Worst remake ever. Anyone catch the hommage to the original? Hint: it was in the strip club.

The war against terror, Ch.3014

In which our banks give whole new meaning to the word "teller."

Depositing a cheque could see Canadians entered into a government database of suspicious financials based on the colour of their skin and the whims of the local teller, warns Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, according to one of two new audits released today.

The commissioner audited the little-known Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) and found it was collecting more information that it is allowed to by law. In one case, an individual deposited a cheque from a law firm yet was entered into the database because of a notification by the bank.

“The institution was satisfied that the individual had provided legitimate reasons for the source of funds, but decided to notify FINTRAC anyway because of the individual's ethnic origin and the fact that his [sic] person had visited a particular country,” states a press release from the commission. [Emphasis mine]

Why bother with state surveillance when we can just report on each other? From bank to databank with the touch of a keyboard. From facecrime to skincrime in a mere quarter-century!

[H/t commenter Holly Stick].

Hasbara by juxtaposition

One story is a report on anti-Semitic graffiti sprayed by vandals in Calgary, the city of whites-only nightclubs and apparently a place for up-and-coming Nazis to prosper. No surprises there. Nevertheless, Calgary Police Inspector Richard Hinse is being prudent:

This could be kids who have no hate in their hearts to have done something like this or it could be a group that does. So really it's classifying this after we've had a chance to talk to those who have committed it.

And nestled right in there alongside, the foolish commentary of a witness appearing at the bogus "inquiry" being run by HUAC North:

ANTI-SEMITIC VIEWS GOING 'MAINSTREAM'

OTTAWA–Anti-Semitism is creeping from the shadows into the mainstream and even onto university campuses, a parliamentary committee heard Monday.

U.S. experts told the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism that officials in some countries and even students are using anti-Israel tirades to mask their anti-Jewish views.

--

The experts pointed to the rise of rallies against so-called Israeli apartheid at Canadian universities. Supporters argue they're denouncing Israeli policies. [emphases added]

Geddit? Critics of Israel are the same as Nazis.

Stay classy, Star. We keep Stephen Harper around for that sort of thing.

UPDATE: (November 18) Via commenter Holly Stick, this classic example of political symbiosis. Stephen Harper is now out to paint the Liberals as "anti-Semitic," as he trolls for votes in Jewish districts.

And more hasbara follies, as the Jewish Tribune "reports":

B’nai Brith Canada was overwhelmed by the positive feedback it received as a result of the public service announcement waking up Canadians to the dangers confronting us as a result of radical Islam.

It would appear that Canadians were waiting for a leading human rights organization to come forward and finally tell it like it really is. The phone calls and emails have been most encouraging and pleading with us to continue this proactive advocacy. [emphasis added]