Sure we should wonder what Stephen Harper was doing having lunch with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York last year. And of course the CRTC was right to refuse Quebecor a Category 1 specialty TV licence for its proposed SUN TV News Channel, which would force cable and satellite companies to carry it. Kory Teneycke’s dream of a right-wing news outlet should have to muddle along like any other niche channel, which is what it will be anywhere outside Calgary.

However, the Margaret Atwood-endorsed campaign against SUN TV sponsored by Avaaz.org is so over the top that it ought to offend even the most inveterate cause-whores. It’s not the petition itself that’s the problem so much as the bumpf accompanying it. “Prime Minister Harper is pressuring the Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to approve plans for a ‘Fox News North’,” it reads. “If successful, this would bring American-style hate media to Canadian airwaves, and be funded by our license fees!”

You may have noticed that Avaaz spells “license” the American way. That’s because it’s actually a New York-based outfit that grew out of the success of MoveOn.org in the States. And it does a lot of good work, such as its current fundraising for flood victims in Pakistan. But it’s tone deaf on the SUN TV issue. First of all, the Sun newspapers are more blue-collar than neo-con — if the TV channel follows suit, its most popular program is liable to be the weather as forecast by a SUNshine girl. But ideologically the Sun papers have always been conservative soft-soap. In fact, some of the best reporting on the abuses of the police at the G20 summit came from the Toronto Sun.

And personally, I find Avaaz’s export of this sort of strident, demonize-your-enemy tactic to Canada as offensive as anything Fox News could come up with. It’s a style that Canadians typically reject — both the Conservatives and the Liberals have been forced to pull attack ads after a public backlash — and if SUN TV tries the same thing, it will fail, as I expect its proponents know. Meantime, they have every right to reject Avaaz’s silly bleating. “Fox News fuels hate,” its petition states. “While constantly claiming to be ‘fair’ and ‘balanced,’ it allows hysterical anchors like Glenn Beck to compare Obama to ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Hitler’.” All of which is true. But is comparing a network that hasn’t launched yet to Roger Ailes’ demonic creation any better?

The publication ban on Project Samosa, the RCMP’s latest salvo in the war on terror, has the media scrambling to get unnamed sources and security experts to augment and substitute for accounts of court proceedings. By a happy coincidence for war on terror fans, this allows for far more pants-pissingly terrorfying conjecture than mere straight news would allow.

So far, “sources” have told one security expert, an ex-RCMP and CSIS operative quoted at CTV, that the accused:

1) “would have targeted the Parliament buildings and Montreal’s public transit system with bombs”
2) “that the ringleader went to Afghanistan and to Pakistan to receive training”
3) “some of their suspected accomplices could be in Iran or in Dubai”
4) “were assembling components for one or more bombs and had raised money for al Qaeda and the Taliban”
5) “the ringleader was about to take a trip abroad, maybe to deliver the money himself”

This last is the reported reason for the arrests. After a year of watching them:

“Police say a terror attack was likely still months away when they pounced on the plot, but they moved because they feared the men were about to start sending money to other terrorists in Afghanistan.”

Last I heard, “terrorists” in Afghanistan were already rolling in US tax dollars and drug money, but whatever.

A year ago the Star ran an excellent piece on the media’s relationship with their “sources” in the Arar case when he was the terrorist du jour: Learning from media mistakes in Arar case

Canadian Press journalist Stephen Thorne quoted an official source who linked Arar to “a suspected member of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.”

Robert Fife, CanWest’s Ottawa bureau chief, “cited an anonymous official who described Arar as a ‘very bad guy’ who had received training at an Al Qaeda base and that intelligence received from Syria had helped the CIA avert an attack on the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.”

Craig Oliver at CTV News was “offered a photograph of Arar training in a camp in Afghanistan” Oliver: “The source wanted me to use the information without showing me the photograph. That was a very solid source . . . This experience has made me more skeptical . . . I knew these people very well.”

Ottawa Citizen’s Juliet O’Neill was fed a story headlined “Canada’s dossier on Maher Arar: The existence of a group of Ottawa men with alleged ties to Al Qaeda is at the root of why the government opposes an inquiry into the case.”

Even after Arar’s return to Canada, “Robert Fife was once more the vehicle that Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials used to inform the public that they were ‘100 per cent sure’ that Arar trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.”

Some of these reporters have since stated they were used and have apologised to Arar; some have not. The point is they were all used to disseminate false information from anonymous government and police sources to the public. Something to bear in mind when “sources” are once again where we will be getting most of our information on this newest batch of alleged terrorists, given it will likely be months if not years before they go to trial.

Could Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel have been any more humourless in his response to Lady Gaga’s cheerful twit-pic from Rexall Place on Saturday? (That’s it to the left.) Crews had removed the letter “O” from a sign to position a spotlight; our lady, or one among her entourage, grabbed a shot of the result and sent it off to her 5.8 million Twitter followers, with the message “Holy mother of laughter.”

“Harrumph, harrumph,” responded Mandel, doing his best imitation of a mayor from central casting. “Some things are disgusting and you shouldn’t have to say they’re disgusting. I think it demeans them more than anything else.”

Look, Edmonton, it wouldn’t hurt you to be known for something other than hockey and mega-shopping for once. Not everyone is exactly down with that “Oil Country” thing anyway, what with the Gulf still recovering from its recent lube job and the oil sands getting the kind of PR once reserved for Tiger Woods. A change to “Oil C untry,” with the world’s most glam pop star as your spokesgrrl, couldn’t hurt for awhile. As for your mayor, his response should be to point out that Ms. Gaga came to Edmonton for two shows while bypassing Calgary altogether, thus proving that, while Calgary may have all the head offices, Edmonton still has éclat. That is all. No more needs to be said. No, really.

Do you still have that “City of Champions” sign on the outskirts? I recommend you switch it up immediately. You know with what.

The massive article, “Anatomy of the G20,” published by the Toronto Star last Friday, is a curious document indeed, especially coming from a newspaper that has taken a hard editorial line against the police’s actions that weekend. It feels like one of those articles that has gone all wonky as higher-ups got their hands on it and started messing around for political reasons.

For example, why, in an article that purports to be “The story from both sides of the fence,” devote the lede and end to police explanations that are intended to be exculpatory? One reason might be that this is an old journalistic strategy to give an article a point-of-view without actually articulating it. About 200 words in, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair is depicted as heroically marching into the TPS command centre and, despite his concerns about subverting standard operating procedure, ordering that the protestors and assorted bystanders kettled at Queen and Spadina be released. “I went to the command centre and I said, ‘I believe now is the appropriate time to end this thing. End this thing,’” he declaims.

Blair was apparently a widely-admired police chief before his lost weekend; with PR like this, it won’t take him long to regain his standing, or at least his self-image.

Later, this:

“The black bloc was growing. And for police, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Just two blocks north, a military repatriation ceremony was underway. The body of Sgt. Jimmy MacNeil, killed in Afghanistan on June 21, was being transported to the coroner’s office, just north of where the boisterous rally was headed.

“According to Blair, about 30 black-clad protesters began breaking off from the crowd and moving north toward the coroner’s office.”

And:

“Police say their lines were stretched thin; officers could not disengage from their responsibilities. At one point, police were facilitating the transportation of a kidney to a downtown hospital, according to Insp. Scott Weidmark, a planner stationed at the command centre.”

So there you have it: not only were Blair’s forces protecting the city — sort of — they were also protecting the remains of a Canadian soldier and making sure those raving anarchists didn’t steal the kidney of a needy recipient. I’m not suggesting the Star is in the propaganda business — but it might consider it as a hedge against declining journalism revenues.

My favourite bit: “Officers ordered people to move out of the way but Emomotimi Azorbo, a deaf man, failed to hear police demands and was arrested.” He failed to hear them? Damn those deaf people; they’ll just have to try harder to hear.

Look, the Star has acquitted itself better in reporting and following-up on the G20 than any other of our major news organizations. It has certainly done better than the CBC, which was hopelessly weighed down by the hardware of television, or Maclean’s, which revealed that it really will put anything on its cover. But that doesn’t forgive the basic failings of this piece, which are most evident in the questions it begs but doesn’t pursue. “By early afternoon [on Friday], police were already ringing the site, searching people’s bags and confiscating potential weapons”? Er, um, weren’t those searches illegal? And what potential weapons did they confiscate, given that they had nothing significant to show the press days later?

“Two undercover agents had infiltrated [the Blac Block]“? Why then did Blair not know “beforehand of the intent of this group to engage in criminal acts away from the summit site”? And if the answer is, well, you can’t know everything, how is it police were so sure, once the vandals allegedly melted into the crowd at Queens Park, that “they weren’t done,” and used that as a pretext to attack peaceful protestors?

A police cruiser was abandoned on Queens because “A handful of black bloc members — now revealing a cache of golf balls and hammers — engulfed the lone car and began smashing its windows and lights”? Okay, but what about that other “abandoned cruiser” with “‘murderer’ scrawled on its hood,” the one at King and Bay? If anyone’s explained what it was doing sitting there, I’ve yet to see it. The Star doesn’t ask.

There’s a lot the Star doesn’t ask.

While the paper’s columnists continue to hold authorities to account, per Thomas Walkom’s“The G20 protests and judicial farce,” it’s prominently played big pieces such as this one that tend to seep into the public mind and become the accepted version of events. If the Star’s going to take them on, it needs to do the job properly — or at least not let them become vehicles for authorities trying to explain away their criminal behaviour.

Remember that two year Environment Committee study on the tarsands that was ultimately shredded because the four parties at the table couldn’t agree on the wording of the witnesses’s testimony? The Lib members of that committee have now released their own report on the testimony and, as Andrew Nikiforuk reports at The Tyee, it is “scathing.”

~ Athabasca River is being polluted
~12 barrels of freshwater required to produce one barrel of crude
~world’s largest man-made dams contain 170 square kilometres of toxic mining waste and they’re leaking
~steam plants could affect aquifers over an area the size of Florida, using 3½ to 6 barrels of groundwater to extract one barrel of bitumen

Most alarming is the report’s contention that science-based policy has been replaced by “bureaucratic compromise,” with the federal government entirely abrogating its responsibility to monitor and protect our water supplies. The Alberta government just flat-out refused to appear before the committee at all.

You’re shocked I’m sure.

Wait. Did I say our water supplies?

A year ago Alberta Energy spokesman Tim Markle said: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta.”

He was referring to tarsands in northern Alberta being developed by the Chinese state investment fund in partnership with Calgary-based Penn West Energy Trust. China National Petroleum Company obtained 11 oilsands leases and the Chinese Offshore Oil Corporation invested $150 million in Calgary-based Meg Energy. Sinopec has bought into Syncrude. PetroChina, also state-owned, holds a 60% majority stake in two oilsands projects, and has also signed a memorandum with Enbridge to take up to half the space on its proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline from Alberta to the port of Kitimat in BC.

In comments under Nikiforuk’s Tyee article, commenter Ed Deak weighs in:

The opposition can jump up and down, they won’t get anywhere, because they’re attacking the effects and not the causes.

Attacking other political parties, this is also true for BC, and anywhere on Earth, is a waste of time, because politicians are nothing more than pimp/executioners of and for the criminal neoclassical market economic theory, being taught in our universities as a “science”, that’s destroying the Earth and humanity.

Unless our politicians will one day get enough gumption together to attack the causes they’re part of the problem, regardless of the hot air they’re blowing.

The tar sands crime wave is part of the “growth” and the “GDP”, without any deductions for damages and no politician would dare to question it, as it would bring panic to the almighty stockmarkets.

Then, when the Chinese bring back the money we’re paying them for killing our manufacturing infrastructure, praised by economists and the WTO, to buy the country up from under our feet with our own money, it is called “wealth creating foreign investment” that helps to pay for the billions spent on “defence”.

Afterthought : An Alberta Energy spokesdude says: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta” and yet back in March we were all apparently shocked shocked shocked when CSIS head Richard Fadden casually mentioned China in his remarks about “foreign interference” on “possibly unwitting” Canadian public servants and politicians here in the West.

We pretty much behaved as if we were teenagers horrified to discover that our parents have sex. I mean obviously we know they must have but we don’t much like to hear about it. And given the public pillorying Fadden received for it, I don’t imagine it will be brought up again.

Jane Danzo, in her letter of resignation as Chair of the BC Arts Council and in various exit interviews that followed, has confirmed what most of us already suspected: that the Liberal government now sees itself as arbiter of all things cultural in the province. At last, we can begin to see the future.

In her bombshell fare-thee-well, Danzo told Minister of Ineffectuality Kevin Krueger that the Council’s job is “virtually impossible to accomplish because the Board’s relationship to government is not at-arms-length.” The Victoria Times-Colonist reports that her resignation was prompted by “a meeting late last month at the ministry” that “confirmed that the arts council does not have an independent voice from government, something Danzo once understood it did.” Or, as she tells straight.com, “it was made very clear that the ministry speaks for the arts. So I feel the council is hampered in its role as an advocate not to have an independent voice.”

Come, come, Ms. Danzo, why so glum? Sure, that whole “arms-length” thing is imperfectly understood by the Liberals — but imagine the riches to come!

For example: the world premiere of My Fair Gordon, produced by the Kruegerrific Dinner Theatre, in which a lowly Mayor’s assistant is taught to say “Take Axes to the Taxes of those what Backs Us” and becomes Premier, before being presented to high society at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

Or the upcoming exhibit at The Vancouver Art Gallery and Dollar Store: Images of Rich, in which photographs of the Minister of Housing and Social Development in his many fine suits serve as a metaphor for photographs of the Minister of Housing and Social Development in his many fine suits.

Or Triumph of the Bills, a specially-commissioned documentary film in which the province’s bankers and CEOs assemble in BC Place, where they are showered in what at first appears to be confetti but is soon revealed to be the proceeds of the HST.

We knew the government had something very special in mind for us when it announced its first foray into artistic production, the Spirit Festivals, earlier in the summer. These exciting events, Liberally-funded with the millions of dollars no longer being given to lesser artists like, well, artists, are intended to “build provincial pride” — and what’s more likely to do that than an event dreamed up by the former Minister of State for Mining? But they will be just a hint of what is to come now that the state has decided to find a barn and really put on a show!

And it’ll do all this on the lowest per capita arts funding of any province in Canada — $4, compared to an average $26 elsewhere. Now that’s talent.

So buck up, Ms. Danzo. Shelley described poets as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” so who’s to say legislators, in turn, can’t be poets? And who knows? If we’re really lucky — maybe they’ll quit their day jobs.

“They don’t bother us. It’s just that they are annoying,” a “senior Conservative official” told the G&M’s Dear Jane yesterday about the public’s uproar in reaction to the Cons’ scrapping of the compulsory long-form census.

“Census freedom,” this same anonymous Conbot amusingly called it.

Apparently we the public are “annoying” to Steve now.

And not just the Lib/NDP/Green/I-don’t-fucking-vote-for-any-of-those-bastards public either. Not even Con voters support Steve’s “Après moi, le déluge” style of government.

According to Angus Reid, only 31% of people who voted Con last time “side with the government’s argument that the long form census is intrusive,” while 53% of previous Con voters “believe that the long form census yields data that is important to make policy decisions in all areas of public service, and should remain mandatory.”

Jane’s column header today is Clement digs in heels and gains a supporter on census. The “supporter” turns out to be a rightwing radiohead.

Okay . . . that’s one. I dunno, Jane, I don’t think you’re helping here.
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Over the weekend Feschuk took the piss out of Jane’s many columns consisting almost entirely of quotes from anonymous “seniory super-inside long-time party whatever” Con sources. Lols.
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For a decent column on the census containing actual, you know, facts : the incomparable Zerb.

Freedom^TM is the sequel to Daniel Suarez’s book Daemon which I reviewed previously, giving it four stars out of five. The sequel likewise is a very good read, progressing logically from the foundation laid in the first novel.

The reason I didn’t give Daemon a full five stars is that towards the end it degenerated a bit into an action/adventure screenplay complete with extended car chase. I was afraid that Freedom^TM would carry on along those lines, leaving the most interesting part of the story in the first two thirds of the first novel. Fortunately, Suarez pursues the emerging subject of social organization among the daemon’s followers.

In fact, in the second book, the daemon is less a main character than a background force existing primarily as the creator and facilitator of the “Darknet,” the network its followers are all connected to via eye displays.

The Darknet is like a social networking application that augments reality by overlaying data on a scene using GPS coordinates for placement. By such means data can be made to hover over people (thus providing information about them), architecture can be augmented with details unseen by anyone not wearing the visual display, and avatars — sophisticated computer characters — can wander the earth like ghosts.

The daemon is a very sophisticated distributed program — not a true AI but as close as a genius gaming programmer could come. For all its sophistication, it is just a heartless collection of algorithms responding conditionally to data input, mercilessly achieving its preprogrammed objectives without any concern for cost in human lives. Consequently, in the first book, there is some ambiguity with regard to just who the good guys and and the bad guys are. As it fades into the background and the Darknet society comes to the fore, that ambiguity is resolved. The theme of human ideals and aspirations emerges.

The Darknet is not social networking in the sense of something like Facebook. It is social networking elevated to the level of direct democracy, where participants rate each other’s reputation in terms of stars, and where information is modded up such that issues of the greatest collective concern are quickly apparent and resources can be allocated to them. In Darknet society, the people rule. When this is contrasted with the corporatocracy that is the mainstream of society, it isn’t difficult to pick sides. And the corporatocracy quickly recognizes the threat of a society it doesn’t control and whose Darknet credits convert to US dollars at higher and higher rates of exchange.

Like the first book, Freedom^TM features lots of action and violence. It is still very much a story that wants to be made into a movie, though the thrills are better integrated. And character is still not Suarez’s strong suit. I give Freedom^TM four and a half stars for its vision of a potential non-dystopian future where corporatism, not technology, is the prime threat. In the end it’s really all about fascism vs. democracy: Will the people rule? Can the people rule?

Published by Dutton. Hardcover $26.95 (US), ebook 12.99

Four “Rethink Alberta” billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis proclaim the “Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster” is worse than the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. There’s also a vid.

 
Alberta Preme Ed Stelmach is pledging $268,000 to mount a public relations offensive against the ads and has settled on a most unusual strategy:

“Of 350 million Americans, 330 million of them probably don’t even know where Alberta is,” the premier said. “Let’s not ramp this up too much because that’s the kind of exposure the group wants.”

Of course not all of that $268,000 in public tax money is going to be spent on strategically ignoring the ads. At the alberta.ca website, Stelmach promises to counter the ads by telling “the real Alberta story”:

“disturbed land area actually smaller than London!”

He then links to nine already previously available vids on the Gov of Alberta Oil Sands page. Some quotes from those vids:

“50% of our oil in Canada is produced from oil sands and that’s going to grow in the future. We think in about 10 years it will be about 75% of Canada’s oil production and a large part of our exports will be oil sands derived crude.”

“Virtually no more water will be used out of the Athabasca River”

“We do extensive water monitoring quality of the Athabasca River; we take thousands and thousands of water samples. We’ve been monitoring since the 1960’s and so far we’ve not been able to find any impact from the tailings ponds itself.”

“Over the last 10 or 15 years the air quality has been rated good 98% of the time.”

“There is the perception out there that it’s the largest industrial footprint on the planet. Actually it’s one-tenth of 1% of global GHG emissions.”

And so on and so on.

Stelmach’s vids include footage of scientists gathering snow samples along a river and that reminded me of the testimony given to the Environment Committee on March 30 by Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta. He said he had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River. Testing at 31 locations he found:

“Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well.”

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research. Schindler contends the oil companies’ reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada, who used to do that research themselves before handing that responsibility over to Alberta and the oil companies, but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public. The oil companies, whose first allegiance is to their stockholders, are of course not obliged to do so on their own.

And then the Environment Committee scuttled its own tar sands report.

Andrew Nikiforuk has an excellent article at The Tyee on what else the Environment Committee heard that it subsequently decided not to tell us about:

What Those Who Killed the Tar Sands Report Don’t Want You to Know

and then takes on the many claims made by the scientists and spokesies in Stelmach’s vids:

Alberta Hides Dirty Truth as US Demands Tar Sands Facts

One thing’s for sure in the Tar Sands vs. Gulf Oil Spill Disasters comparison: our government, Environment Canada, and the Environment Committee are doing no better job at regulating the tar sands than the US Minerals Management Services did in overseeing the oil rigs in the Gulf.

Doris (”Stockwell”) Day’s cheery crime shoppers’ philosophy on prisons seems to be: If you build them, they will come.

According to Shockwell Doris and JusticeMin Rob Nicholson, 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 the 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 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?”

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

Meanwhile 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: crime still going down. Deal with it, Doris.

Also at Tuesday’s presser, Doris addressed

“crimes like home invasion with aggravated assault, which has to be one of the most grievous types of crimes you can think of, people’s houses being broken into and people, in many cases, senior citizens, being grievously assaulted”

But while one senior’s home invasion is indeed one senior’s home invasion too many, you can see why the Cons, in their efforts to shore up the wrinkly vote, are not too keen to use statistics in this case either:

Statscan: Police-reported robbery in Canada, 2008

Break and enters were at their lowest level in 40 years, dropping by 9%.

In 2008, 6% of victims involved in a home invasion were 65 years or older, compared to 3% who were robbed on the street or other outdoor public location and 2% who were robbed in a commercial or institutional establishment. About 2% of victims of total violent crime in 2008 were 65 years or older.”

Yeah, screw the stats, let’s just go with feelings.

Day continues on about home invasions:

” . . . previously there were too many cases when those were addressed with what’s called conditional sentencing. That means the criminals in that case get sent home. They don’t have to go to jail.”

John Geddes at Maclean’s asked Day’s office for material supporting his statement about conditional sentences. Amusingly they sent back StatsCan data that refutes their position:

“So far, they have only passed along the broad Statistics Canada data on criminal courts, which shows that 4.4 per cent of adult criminal convictions result in conditional sentences. There’s nothing in the data that I can see, though, to shore up Day’s version of reality.”

Just another day in Day’s version of reality.