Tuesdays of the Lake on 16th September 2014 - Sam Hopkins

I have the rare privilege to participate in the Three Musicians collective bringing quality live music to the patients in St. Mary's of the Lake complex care ward in Kingston, Ontario. We're running a concert series Tuesday evenings, and last night we were pleased to present Sam Hopkins backed by Spencer Evans, Zak Colbert, and Mike Sakell, true Kingston A-list musicians.

The Three Musicians project is supported by the Kingston Arts Council, and by extension the City of Kingston. We're very happy to be in a position to bring the joy of music to the long and short term residents of the complex care ward at St. Mary's. It is a true pleasure.

My role has been helping deal with the production side of the series. After I got all the gear set up and mixed nicely last night, I took some videos with my phone. I'm a huge fan of all the musicians on this gig, and I'm happy to share some of these with you here.

Some Assembly Required

I've not posted here in a long time, but this is both important enough and will have to be long enough to not fit in on Twitter or Facebook, so here I am. That said, I'm going to try to keep it short. The right to assemble is guaranteed in our Charter. Why is this right so important it's enshrined in our governing documents like this? It's so we can change the government when we can't afford to wait for the next election to do so. We're in just that situation. This has become an emergency. We need to assemble to change the government of Canada. It's time to go to Ottawa and let them know that what is happening in there is not acceptable.

The reason there's a distinction between the right to assemble and the right to association in the Charter is because association is what allows people to team up to accomplish things, while the right to assemble allows associated people to change the government when the usual rules by which we change governments means we can't at the moment and we can't afford to wait for the rules to work.

Here's how it works. The people come to realise we're in a situation where the usual rules about how we change government are not sufficient; we can't wait until the next election because the people in the government are egregiously damaging the nation. The people assemble in front of the parliament to demand a change in government. If enough people feel strongly enough about it and there are enough people assembling in front of the house of government, it makes continuing its operation impossible. While the powers that be are very stubborn and will attempt to use police and military forces to suborn the expression of that right, if enough people assemble on Parliament Hill for long enough it will result in a changing of the government.

A good recent example of this is what happened in Iceland after their banking crisis, when the people of Iceland assembled in front of their parliament to demand a change in government after they realised what the government was going to do; make the debts of private institutions that had been criminally run the liabilities of the people of Iceland, rather than the people that had actually accumulated those debts. It was an emergency that did not allow the usual mechanisms of democratic control to work, so the people of Iceland took the exceptional step of assembly to stop it.

I think we're in just such an emergency right now. The reason why I think this at long last is because of the FIPA with China. Harper has just "ratified" the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement. Now, I'm not a constitutional scholar or anything, but I was under the impression that it required more than just Cabinet agreement to ratify treaties like this; parliament must pass enabling legislation, as well as legislation putting its terms into force of law. Because of these lacks it's possible that this is an illegal agreement anyway, but I don't think we can depend on that possibility to save our bacon. The fact that this agreement was negotiated in secret and "ratified" by a tiny group of people who've used all the usual spin tricks to get it to slip under the radar upon its announcement (Friday right before quitting time, short written announcement, right at the same time the Ford brothers were playing their game of musical municipal positions) tells me they hope no-one really understands what's in there. There has been no parliamentary debate, no public debate, no opportunity for Canadians to discover just what is being agreed to. It's being presented as a fait accompli; something that's a done deal and that we shouldn't really worry our pretty little heads over, and I'm sure the legislation to enable it and give it force of law will be brought in the next budget omnibus bill where it'll be buried along with a thousand other tiny little changes just as it's been for the past few years.

This agreement is so lopsided that even the elite investment organ The Financial Post and its editor Diane Francis think it's a terrible idea. This woman is not generally known as a person who is onside with outfits like Greenpeace, or unions, but she clearly thinks it's a terrible idea, and here's why: If a Chinese firm (either private or public) decides they don't like that your town doesn't want to allow something to happen within it, they can sue your town for the value of the project. Basically, if your town decides they don't want to let a firm like (for example) Ting Hsin International Group to pump out all your groundwater for bottling and shipping to China, they can sue you for the profits they expected to make. This means that this agreement hands control over your water to any Chinese firm that decides they want it and can find someone local to agree to help hand it over.

It really puts all those "we need an agent in your country" spam emails that you see from Chinese firms into perspective, doesn't it? They're looking for people to work locally so they can get the in to say "give us what we want or we'll sue you into oblivion with the full weight of the Chinese state behind it." As soon as they can find someone to act locally for them as an agent, they'll be able to sue if the local government decides they don't want to permit it, whether that government be of your municipality, province, or even the government of Canada. This basically hands over control of how we live to the Chinese investor class.

If you think this is just about resources, you should also consider that they'll probably be happy to sue over things like minimum wage laws, unionization rules, workplace safety regulations, local infrastructure requirements for facilities, waste disposal regulations (have you seen what it's like in the Chinese industrial heartland?) and so on and so forth. This agreement is about taking control of how we live in Canada away from us the people and handing it to the global oligarchical class. I don't recall agreeing to be governed by the norms of Chinese state-owned enterprises or the Chinese investor class, and I'm willing to bet that even the people who voted for the Conservatives didn't either. I've been cranky about how things have been going in Canada because lately we've been governed by the norms of our own investor class and they seem to think treating the people that do the work poorly is a-ok... but it's nothing like what you can expect to see from Chinese investors: you should think about what it's like working for Chinese firms in China before you think it's okay to let them sue over these issues when democratically decided by the people they affect. My grandfathers must be rolling in their graves to see this happening here.

It's very clear that Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada have no respect for the rules of our democracy, the norms of our democracy, or the Canadian people. They are not democratic in any meaningful way and are attempting to govern by executive fiat as if we were an authoritarian state, rather than one where the power of the state flows from the permission of the governed. They are taking Canada into a race to the bottom so we can all enjoy the working and living conditions enjoyed by the Chinese labour class, and doing so gleefully.

So, what to do? We don't have much time, and there will be no election between now and two weeks from now when it goes into force. This is a political emergency by any definition of the word... and assembly is how we as Western democracies deal with political emergencies like this.

It's time. It's an emergency. There's only one way to deal with this. We need to assemble on Parliament Hill in front of the Centre Block.

McChrystal, Afghanistan, and what we should do.

The United States under Barack Obama is getting ready to ramp up its commitment to Afghanistan, after years of neglect by the Bush administration. Part of that effort has resulted in the firing of General McKiernan by Obama as the head of the US efforts there, and his replacement by Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The story I've linked to notes that there are two main issues that have some people in the US concerned about McChrystal's appointment: the coverup around the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, and detainee abuse in Iraq.

The first is pretty much an internal scandal that was big in the US, as Tillman quit a pro football career in the NFL to volunteer after 9/11. When he was shot by one of his colleagues, the Bush administration decided to make propaganda lemonade by portraying his death as a heroic one in battle, similar in principle to the way they "rescued" Jessical Lynch from the hospital where she was being treated for her injuries after crashing the truck she was driving. This is interesting in the sense that it helps show the mendacity of the Bush administration in their ongoing attempts to sell the US public on a war of choice in Iraq. However, it is the second that is far more relevant to us here in Canada, as we have soldiers operating within Afghanistan, in one of its most troubled provinces.

While the NPR article only mentions detainee abuse once, it appears to be far more serious than detainee abuse would describe. Here's part of what Bloomberg has to say:

McChrystal’s background is in overseeing special forces, including counter-terrorism units such as the Army’s Delta Force. From September 2003 through August 2008, he led the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command, which manages units in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

He orchestrated the manhunts that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and the air strike in June 2006 that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Joint Special Operations Command was a special unit that was separate from the usual services (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force) in the US military. Seymour Hersh has reported on how it was organised and on where they got their orders from.

Seymour Hersh says that Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing and the head of the wing has just been named as the new commander in Afghanistan.... According to Hersh, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was headed by former US vice president Dick Cheney... On July 22, 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled "No blood, no foul" about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was Camp Nama, which was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), under the direction of then Major General Stanley McChrystal.

Camp Nama (the name is Iraqi, but the US military there have taken it to mean Nasty Ass Military Area) is particularly deserving of attention, because of the potentially terrible consequences it could have for Canada's efforts in Afghanistan. To give a general idea of what Nama was all about, I've placed an image of a placard that was known to hang there. Earlier this month, a US soldier, now retired, who served with McChrystal in Iraq had this to say:

Obviously writing from the seat of retirement, and with absolute respect and gratefulness for LTG McChrystal’s aggressive leadership, personable demeanor, and unwavering mentoring, I envy the guys that are soon to find themselves sharing the same mess hall, weight room, and helicopter as The Pope. The man is unstoppable. Demonstrably more committed than most. More open, in fact insistent, on creative and innovative ideas from his subordinates to fight the war on terror. From my perspective, our rules of land warfare, our respect for human life, and our strategic constraints handcuff us to the point that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. But, with LTG McChrystal at the helm now all bets are off.

I really like how he figures that only by removing rules of war, respect for humans, and strategic constraints can their handcuffs come off and victory be assured.

From the same article:

The black room was 12 by 12 [feet]. It was painted black floor to ceiling. The door was black, everything was black. It had speakers in the corners, all four corners, up at the ceiling. It had a small table in one of the corners, and maybe some chairs. But usually in the black room nobody was sitting down. It was standing, stress positions, and so forth. The table would be for the boom box and the computer. We patched it into the speakers and made the noise and stuff. Most of the harsh interrogations were in that room. . . . Sleep deprivation, environmental controls, hot and cold, water.

...

He was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold. They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, you know, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walking back and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

The following is from a Human Rights Watch interview with another soldier who spent time in Camp Nama:

• HRW: Was there any discussion of the Red Cross coming?
• Yeah, they said that the Red Cross would never be able to get in there at all.
• Abuse.184 HRW: Why would somebody bring that up?
• I think because the Red Cross and a couple other agencies were going around different places around Iraq, different facilities, and they were getting access. So somebody brought it up to somebody else. I think the colonel, or somebody in charge. You know, will they come here? It was the colonel, yeah. And he said absolutely not.

Jeff explained that the colonel told them that he "had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in." Jeff did not question the colonel further on how these assurances were given to those in command in CampNama.

He explained that they were told: "they just don't have access, and they won't have access, and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating. Even Army investigators."

Jeff said that he did see Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, visiting the Nama facility on several occasions. "I saw him a couple of times. I know what he looks like."

I'm sorry, but I don't have a link for that particular passage. I got it from Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, at The Atlantic's website. Those that know him know that he's not what you call a lefty radical... I disagree with him on a lot of things, but the simple truth that since it became clear to him that the Bush administration was using torture widely and indiscriminately in pursuit of their international and domestic political goals he broke with them... which makes him a person with whom I can both disagree and respect.

Let's make sure we're very clear on what really was going on there... stress positions, sometimes for days, waterboarding, temperature extremes (hypothermia as well as baking), and physical abuse that violated even the barest restraint enumerated in that poster (no blood no foul). Furthermore, it's also known that at least two of their prisoners died under questioning... in short, they were strung up, beaten, frozen, baked, and waterboarded until they died... they were tortured to death.

So, what are we to make of all this? Obama has basically appointed Cheney's chief torturer and executioner to helm the American war in Afghanistan. Here is what I think will have to happen.

1. Our PM must make it very clear to his counterpart in Washington that we will not tolerate those kinds of activities in a theatre of war of which we're a part.
2. He should make it very clear that at the first sign that any torture is going on, that we'll be gone... and that we'll make it very clear to the tribal leaders in Kandahar why we're leaving; that we have to leave because we've learned that the US is doing things that we cannot countenance and that we must leave to maintain our own moral standards of what we think is right.
3. We won't wait until some ridiculously high evidentiary bar is met to make that decision, nor will we wait until the Federal Court of Canada rules that our forces must leave to maintain our own obligations under the Geneva Conventions nor under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
4. Then, if we in fact find out that those techniques are being used to elicit false confessions and justify using aerial drones to kill people in villages without regard to their status in the conflict, he has to stick to it.

Any less will be a betrayal of what our (and my) ancestors fought for in conflicts in the past.

Interesting spam patterns and Tibet

I'm working for a telecommunications company specializing in email to SMS text message services. A large part of my responsibility is to help deal with the non-stop flood of spam that constantly arrives at our doorstep, hoping to snare the naive mobile customer into taking viagra three times a day at THE BEST PRICES AVAILABLE!!!!!!11!!!!1!!!111!!!.

Lately, we've been seeing a lot of spam offering low-interest loans from China. I imagine that these are more aimed at the U.S. market than they are here... but I suspect that most sub-prime lenders in China don't really see the distinctions between the Canadian and U.S. desperate-for-money markets. However, that's not what this post is really about.

One of the major techniques used to keep spam from landing in your inbox is a technique known as Bayesian filtering. It is used by many different products, both free and commercial, and it has some effectiveness at eliminating the spam. In an effort to defeat these filters, spammers have taken to including large blocks of text that aren't relevant to their message, but are likely to score low in the Bayesian filter, in the hopes that this will allow their message to make it through the filter. To give you an idea, while penis, p3nis, p3n1s, etc are all terms that score high in the filter, by including a lot of spurious text (darkly dreaming surrealism) they hope that the overall message scores low. Eventually, these messages are caught, and the filters get trained in the new terms so they become high scorers. I'm sure you've all seen these; the messages that have that block of text that make no sense whatsoever.

Lately, the large number of Chinese "borrow money now" spams have included text that are politically relevant, if not relevant to usury. They are including text from wire news reports about the Dalai Lama and the protests in Tibet... and I have, as I have to, been training them into the new spam filters. However, there is a fairly predictable side-effect of doing this; it can lead to legitimate messages about buddhism, the Dalai Lama, Tibetan buddhism, and the current protests in Tibet and around the world as it follows the Olympic torch being caught in spam filters. As an information warfare technique, it is certainly interesting, and it's also interesting that these are being promulgated by parties that don't appear to be state actors... though I have to admit that I'm skeptical that the use of this new technique isn't being motivated by state actors.

It certainly looks to me that the Chinese government is attempting to extend the Great Firewall of China to the rest of the world's email system by exploiting an unintended consequence of the Bayesian techniques of spam filtering.

A problem for the Republican candidate for president of the U.S.?

I've noticed that the United States is claiming that constitutional protections for persons (you know, quaint things like fair trials and security of the person) don't apply to the "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay because they are not on United States territory, despite the fact that they are housed on a U.S. military base, because the base is located in another country.

If this is so, it would seem to indicate that John McCain is not eligible to run for the U.S. presidency, since he was born on a military base in Panama, and therefore is not a person born in the U.S., which is a requirement for the job... a very hard requirement, seeing as it was included in the very first drafts of the U.S. constitution.

So... which is it boys, do the detainees get their rights protected by the U.S. constitution, or is John McCain ineligible for the job of President of the United States?

U.S. Administration tries to spread the blame

Recently, ex-CIA operative Michael Scheuer suggested that Canada was complicit in the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar to Syria. This strikes me as a gross oversimplification of what happened. Until such time as he is willing to say who was complicit and what they did, we cannot take his words seriously; without concrete details, it is only an attempt to spread the stain around in the hopes that people won't notice it where it's darkest.

I would like to encourage him to name names, so that we may prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law, for participating in such an act is clearly a crime in Canada, regardless of their position. I'd also like to take some of the newspapers of record in this country to task for dismissing his claims out of hand. Instead, they should be calling on Mr. Scheuer to tell us who in the Canadian government and/or security services participated in Mr. Arar's extraordinary rendition so that we can expose them and drag them and their actions out of the shadows and into fresh air and sunlight so they may decompose.

In the meantime, it is hard to take him (and his former agency, and his country) seriously when they continue to hold another one of our citizens, taken as a child soldier, prisoner under conditions that are clearly in contravention of Western norms of justice, not to mention the certainty of daily torture, in Guantanamo Bay. Even ignoring the fact that the "special" court system set up by the U.S. at Guantanamo clearly fails to meet even token requirements for a legitimate trial, the falsification of the evidence against him makes any attempt by the U.S. to portray his trial as having any legitimacy no more than a gossamer veil over the empire's naked paunch.

Name names and say what happened, Mr. Scheuer.

Moderate muslims and family ties

I just finished reading this article by Robert Fisk, a well-known journalist who writes for The Independent in the United Kingdom. It's called The Fearful Lives in a Land of the Free, and demonstrates why it's a good idea for all interested citizens of any grouping to actively seek out and find perspectives from outside their own sphere... as I like to argue to my friends in the United States 'we are your best friends, whether you realise it or not; when we start telling you something is a bad idea (like the idea of invading Iraq was a bad idea) it's not smart to just reject it out of hand.' At the same time, it behooves us as Canadians to also think carefully about what others say about life and situations here.

I have heard many people in our media through articles, columns, and letters to the editor complain about why they don't hear "moderate muslims" excoriate the leadership of jihadist organisations for their positions and actions. This article goes a long way to explaining this in the context of our multicultural country. It is actually quite complimentary of Canada, except for certain institutions: in particular, CSIS and the RCMP. This article contains some very serious food for thought about how we are handling our responsibilities to our citizens in the Global War on Terror, in particular our intelligence agency's credulous reactions to information sourced from the secret police of anti-democratic corporatist regimes from the Middle East, and considering the West's wider support for many of these regimes because of how they help some of our institutions I am forced to ask what and how we are to react.

The explanation offered by some of Mr. Fisk's companions on his trip to Canada call the prosecution of some of our own "home-grown jihadis" into serious question, and the secrecy shrouding their prosecutions beg some questions... if in fact the majority of the evidence against them has been sourced from the secret police of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia (an autocratic military state and an autocratic monarchy, respectively), how are we to know that this evidence does not originate in a regles des comptes from within their own communities in Canada?

One of the basic foundational ideas of our justice system is that justice must be done, and that justice must be seen to be done; it is the basic idea behind some of the oldest and most important of our civil rights such as habeus corpus, and the transparency of our justice system. With such important proceedings being kept from the eyes of the public due to the oft-cited importance of national security, how are we as citizens to judge that our institutions have lived up to their own stated ideals?