Anderson Cooper Joins the Liars

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Well, it's finally happened. Anderson Cooper has succumbed.

Lowered himself to the crassest elements of the Lou Dobbs syndrome. Blatantly re-parsing and re-framing. Falsifying the context of another person's statement.

He has lied.

Dem. Congressman Steve Cohen recently cited Goebbels as the progenitor of the most fundamental tenet of modern propaganda: make up a simple, tactical lie, repeat it ad nauseam, and in time the audience will come to assume it's true.

That is the meaning of Goebbelism in common vernacular. The tactic is as true and attributable to Goebbels as are fridge for refrigerator to Frigidaire, xerox for photocopier to Xerox, or kleenex for tissue paper to Kleenex.

They are elements of contemporary idiomatic English.

When Congressman Cohen recently suggested that the entire Republican, Tea Party and neocon right-wing of American political debate spent 2010 applying that tactic ruthlessly and shamelessly to Obama-care and Government-run health care, he was factually, politically and idiomatically correct.

But when Anderson Cooper repeated no less than 20 times in the space of a mere 14 minute segment that Cohen had thereby "compared Republicans to Nazis" and "abused the holocaust", Cooper himself descended into filth. Logical fallacy and rhetorical rot. For minutes on end he supplemented that audio with a capitalized ticker-subtitle shouting DEMOCRAT COMPARES GOP 'LIES' TO NAZI.

In a segment cynically titled "Keeping them Honest", Cooper didn't even have the decency to let the word 'LIES' stand on its own without the single quotation marks! Congressman Cohen had not used the word tongue in cheek, nor as metaphor; he had knowingly and deliberately called them LIES!

As Cohen parried each repetition with the simple fact that the issue and the lie were over 'insurance', not 'care', Cooper progressively raised his voice and simply shouted the congressman down with ever sharper assertions that Cohen had "... compared Republicans to Nazis".

Before our eyes, using the slimiest sort of reality-TV by example, Anderson Cooper used the very syndrome Steve Cohen was decrying, thus joining the Goebbelsian hoarde.

Shame!
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The Power of Brevity

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My overly wordy rants about the hidden distortions and presuppositions in mainstream media have been put to shame by Jay Rosen's frugal summaries.

His recommendations for four segments on CNN during prime time better express what I have tried to convey over recent months.

Here are his mouth-watering descriptions:

7 pm: Leave Jon King in prime time and rename his show Politics is Broken. It should be an outside-in show. Make it entirely about bringing into the conversation ... people who are outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media and who think the system is broken. No Bill Bennett, no Gloria Borger, no "Democratic strategists," no Tucker Carlson. Do it in the name of balance. But in this case voices from the sphere of deviance (to) balance the Washington consensus.

8 pm: Thunder on the Right. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational liberal that mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition… and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning. The television equivalent of the the reporting Dave Weigel does.

9 pm: Left Brained. Flip it. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational conservative that mostly covers liberal thought and the tensions in the Democratic party…. and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are left leaning.

10 pm: Fact Check An accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements to find the dissemblers and cheaters. The week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month, season, year or era. CNN’s answer to Jon Stewart.

11 pm.: Liberty or death: World’s first news program from a libertarian perspective, with all the unpredictablity and mix-it-up moxie that libertarians at their best provide. Co-produced with Reason Magazine.

Now that is a line-up that could rival Al Jazeera's equivalent, program's like Listening Post, People and Power, Riz Khan One-on-One and Rageh Omaar.

All that would be missing then would be an equivalent to AJE's Witness.

We would finally have an effective antidote to what Ashis Nandy calls "a world where the idiom of dissent is increasingly being defined at the centers of conformity."

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Knock Knock. Hugo's there?

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Remember when Hugo Chavez wrinkled his nose from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and claimed to detect a whiff of sulphur in the room? A sign of the recent presence of the imperial devil in the form of George Shrub (Bush Jr.)?

Three-quarters of the assembly giggled loudly, as was intended. They recognized the Michael Moore or Jon Stewart style of irony. The entire American delegation walked out, however, in what was obviously a rehearsed and planned move. They then launched a ferocious campaign depicting Chavez as some sort of unstable whacko. He must be bi-polar at least, right?

Can you imagine what hemispheric relations might be like if an American President had the presence of mind to join in the laughter and invite Hugo to Washington for some tough minded honest debate? Do you really think the likes of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Brazil's Lula da Silva could spend hours in conversation with an idiot, if Chavez were just that idiot? There must be something more to the fellow than we are led to believe by our mainstream media.

One possible source of additional information, Oliver Stone's new documentary "South of the Border", isn't showing anywhere near me yet. The DVD won't be out until October. Funny, I had no problem getting to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" when it was released. Care to speculate on the difference?

In the meantime, assuming neither Oliver Stone nor Michael Moore are scheduled to read this blog today, I will ask anyone who knows them both to make the following suggestion.

Take one part "Inconvenient Truth' using the format of a TED-like lecture with giant graphs showing the numbers, perhaps with Paul Krugman playing the part of Al Gore; add a zest of man-in-the-street or women talking around a kitchen table interviews to illustrate the realities of life, somewhat the way residents of France did in "Sicko"; now add a double shot of Oliver Stone doing the kind of intimate interview with Paul Volker that he did with Fidel Castro in "Comandante'; juxtapose that segment with Fareed Zakaria facing a panel of three: Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Jesse Ventura, not as the host, but as the guest for a change, with Fareed on the hot seat to answer questions concerning his own proud capitalistic economic assumptions; and finally, perhaps as a special feature on the eventual DVD release, have Noam Chomsky lay down a voice-over audio track analyzing and restoring the deep structure underpinnings of a good number of the ambiguous statements likely to merge from all the preceding.

Oh, what is the theme for all this you ask?

I suggest the title be 'Confounded Interest' and that the task be to show the role and impact of compound interest on human behaviour. Whether on credit card debt, national and international debt, mortgage debt, or the crowbar wielding friendly neighborhood loan shark.

Oliver, Michael, I dare you. Nobody could do it the way you two could. Jesse is there to protect you.

Don't worry about distribution.

I'll pitch it to Tony Burman for you.

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Why Fidel? Why not Lula instead?

Friends are asking why I follow Fidel Castro's blog so faithfully and why people like Oliver Stone are giving the likes of Hugo Chavez any benefit of doubt. Why not Lula da Silva instead, the remarkable President of Brazil?

That is a legitimate question, more subtle than we think.

Is my harping on Fidel naïve or ignorant of reality under that controversial regime?

I certainly hope not. For those who might not know, I speak Spanish fluently and the perspective of Cuba in this blog is based on pretty close interest since 1962.

I am not oblivious to the fact that a significant minority, perhaps even a majority of Cubans are keen for domestic change. The same old faces and political leadership can seem pretty dreary to us after as little as eight or ten years, let alone after 51 years, which is the case in Cuba.

What I still find fascinating in the midst of this disquiet, however, is how insightful old people can become when they no longer need to embellish the truth for tactical effect. They begin to tell it as it is. That is what I am hearing from friends in Cuba who are old enough to remember life before the revolution, some who have supported the revolution, grown fed up with it at times, but still see powerful and truthful elements in its rationale.

Now even Fidel has begun to comment more philosophically on foreign policy at least. Few of us ever expected him to soften because he has been so stridently defensive about his domestic record over the years, but he is surprising us recently with some pretty pithy cracks about his own political naïveté, especially as a proxy during the Cold War.

I think his speech to the National Assembly on August 7th should be taken in that context, as one more in a sequence of recent blogs he's written that differ substantively from anything prior.

The speech was framed as a direct plea to President Obama to deviate from standard military dogma on nuclear confrontation, especially when married to the Bush-Cheney approach to pre-emptive intervention. Fidel pleaded with Obama to explore alternative scenarios that include more third-world and southern hemispheric perspectives.

What seems sincere in Castro these days is his placing such pleas in a context of environmental and historical concern typical of someone who is now looking beyond the immediate, someone considering longer term human and planetary considerations. He is indeed sounding more like an old warrior digging deeper into even his own motives and earlier justifications for the preemptiove use of force.

In a somewhat ironic twist, I think he has been influenced as much by the likes of Lula da Silva and other modern southern leaders as he might have once inspired them.

A whole new generation of leaders has emerged in the southern hemisphere and in parts of Asia that the industrial empire and media have yet to understand and that emerging alternate information channels such as Al Jazeera English and Internet social media are now by-passing.

Yes, Obama recognizes the inherent danger of so many nuclear weapons and he has made efforts to reduce that arsenal. But his most ardent supporters are concerned by the apparent impact on him of the remorseless daily briefings from a Defence establishment permeated by precedent, wealthy vested interests and, most of all, deep secrecy camouflaged from civilian oversight.

Hence the drama over the recent WikiLeaks documents.

The reason WikiLeaks so easily fought off ferocious accusations of betrayal and troop endangerment last week is the sinister and cynical disregard for the truth to which the world grew accustomed during the Nixon and Cheney dynasties in foreign policy. Truth be known, the deception has been pervasive in all imperial regimes and we goof badly by dismissing such allegations as mere neo-con ranting or off-beat whacko conspiracy theory. A case could be made that only Eisenhower and Carter were honest American brokers in the last century

Careful semantic, syntactic and logical analysis of the utterances of our current crop of leaders and their legions of lobbyist sponsors would expose an immense subconscious maze of pre-supposition and deception to which we, the consumers of that propaganda seem oblivious.

That stupor is the cause of my increasignly strident diatribe against our press and commercial massmedia. If this blog has any dominant obsession, it is that our paid language professionals are failing utterly in their duty to expose the underlying presumptions and breaches of logic in the public and democratic dialogue.

The challenge for me in this blog, now that I've identified that as a scope and theme even when I no longer have such an easy target as Lou Dobbs to pick on, is to gradually morph from merely saying the media are perverting democratic dialogue to explicitely demonstrating how they do it.

That is what I aspire to over the next two to three years, drawing examples from local, national and international reportage.

In the interim, placing the contemporary speeches of Fidel Castro side-by-side with those of other world leaders is not a bad place to start given the themes Fidel has decided to highlight in his 'legacy' years.

21st Century Treason - Sins of Omission

It's getting harder and harder to turn back to CBC/ABC/NBC/CBS, CNN, or even BBC after watching the English version of Al Jazeera for a few weeks.

It's not so much the news casts at the top of each hour, although they are a breath of fresh air too. It's the in-depth follow-through documentaries that run from the bottom of each hour that remind us of what journalism used to be like when the news could be bad, yet the reports reassuring in their honesty. Fault Lines, Witness, The Vault, Inside Story, Empire, People and Power, The Rageh Omaar Report, 101 East, Riz Khan's One-on-One.

The only program I can't bear to watch is "Inside Iraq". The host is irritating, obnoxious and shrill to the point of blocking out any meaningful content from the invited guests. (Note: the female anchor of the last two weeks seems an improvement, perhaps even an over correction. She's a little too bland. Not sure whether she is permanent or merely convering for an absence.)

Either way, a week's exposure to AJE will leave you in a state of shock on discovering all the stuff our broadcasters leave out. It's as if a veil were lifted (pardon the horrible pun) to reveal the lies and misinformation we are routinely fed.

I could illustrate the point with examples from each of the above programs covering issues from Iran to East Timor, from Myanmar to Afghanistan, climate, energy, finance, food and pharmaceuticals, from Beijing to Mumbai, then London and finally back to Washington again. Like a fish who remains oblivious to water until it lands on the angler's hook, you would feel like you'd been pulled out into air and then released back into the water again, wondering, "What the hell was that?!"

The most revealing of all is AJE's coverage of the press itself. That is my passion. That is what, in our western media, keeps me burning inside.

It isn't any one incident. It isn't the embroidery. It isn't just the suface assertions we get from our own broadcasters. The shock of a week waching AJE is the devastating contrast between it and the all pervasive fabric of lies about the rest of the world that our own northern media sell us on behalf of their political and commercial sponsors.

How much time have you spent over the last week listening to accounts of Shirley Sherrod being fired? Endless streams about what the NAACP said, what the USDA said, what Barrack Obama is imagined to have said.

None, I repeat, none examined in detail what Ms. Sherrod had actually said or compared it to what the neocon attack dogs said she had said. Not a single mainstream press outlet in all of North America transcribed the two versions, mounted them side by side on the same page, added bright clear highlighting to show the differences, and demonstrated exactly where the liars had altered Ms. Sherrod's speech.

Instead, the very programs that are supposed to critique the media and hold them to a higher standard proceeded to commit the same treason of ommision themselves. With insufferably self-exculpatory tones of tut-tut and oh-my-gosh, they castigated the USDA, the NAACP and the White House for not going to the source, for not exposing the deceivers.

In other words, these mainstream media critics did exactly the same thing themselves!

Neither Howard Kurtz with his clique of like-minded word merchants on CNN's 'Reliable Sources' nor Noel Sheppard billing himself as a 'News Buster' in his 'Media Research Center' bothered to detail the actual crime. Not even the usually reliable Huffington Post. They were too preoccupied with reposting ad nauseam the likes of Naim Saban's vitriol against Oliver Stone.

No, Euro-America's vaunted media critics did nothing but repeat the sin of ommission they decried in everyone else.

They diverted our attention onto derivative incidents, onto circus performers and talking heads, and completely avoided the root cause. The details of what Shirley Sherrod had actually said and the treasonous agenda of the GOP and neocon warriors who edited her into saying something else, were neither emphasized nor explicitly examined.

And in that omission, you have the sine qua non of No We Can't, Never Under Obama, and Siempre Nada, the dreary anthems of the GOP armies and their barely arms length Rush-to-the-Tea-Party-Limbaugh logic vandals.

And why, you might ask, would all these media dilittentes so determinedly avoid covering this root cause?

Because it is the very basis of the entire Euro-American and northern hemispheric media cabal that they do it every day on behalf of their stakeholding business sponsors and they are terrified that we, the great unwashed electorate and consuming public might wake up to how deeply we have been betrayed.

Pick your topic of choice. Any one will do. Public option health insurance, the role of nuclear technology in electricity production, our disappearing aquifers (water tables), the looming water-related violence coming soon to a city near you and, above all, compound interest gathering on debt that is keeping the world's working and middle class people in a state of perpetual employment anxiety in order to perpetuate macro-economic deception.

The mainstream democratic public square in which we are supposed to be able to talk to each other honestly is now broken at its core, poisoned with the bias of its criminally self-centered corporate stakeholders. Howard Kurtz and his carefully chosen little clique of pretend analysts are only rhetorical whores hired to divert our attention away from the underlying deceit into the circus of talking heads and soap suds.

There was a time when I might have expected more of Frank Sesno.

Now I can only recommend AJE's "The Listening Post", hosted by Richard Gizbert, as a partial antidote and urge you to supplement your reading with social media rooted in alternate points of view.

AJE is available in North America over the Internet through Livestation. You can safely download the free Livestation Desktop Player as there is zero garbage attached. Then simply add AJE to your carousel of available channels. There is also a free Wifi App on the Apple iPod and iPad. Finally, if you are lucky, AJE might be available through your cable TV provider, such as Ch 516 on Bell Expressvu in Canada.

If you have any residual doubts about the legitimacy of AJE or wonder about the integrity of those who try to dissuade you from it, I strongly recommend listening to this discussion with its Managing Editor, Tony Burman.

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Conservatives: Fiscal, Social, or Foreign

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Arianna Huffington recently penned a eulogy for left-right dialectics, declaring them to be inadequate - going on useless - as a tool for political analysis in the 21st Century. Conversely, one of the better status reports on the US Republican party made pretty good use of it to send Sarah Palin and Pit Bull Romney to the penitential corner of our democratic classroom for an overdue time out.

Truth is, most of us have no trouble at all deciding whether a politician is a fiscal or social conservative. We are even pretty good at mixing the two. "Oh he's a (lower-taxes-no-matter-what) fiscal conservative, but he's an (innocent-children-of-immigrant-abortionists-might-need-welfare-for-a-while) social prograssive

The one that keeps us all stumped, however, is foreign policy.

Arianna Huffington's hunch from the middle is nearly correct, but she's still holding onto the fence a little.

You see, the further East we go, we find people are more protective of their privacy. Europeans might live next door to each other for three generations and never see the inside of their neighbour's living room or kitchen. Centuries of war and invasion have left them thinking that sovereignty is epitomy of peace and respect. They were so reluctant to internvene in Kosovo.

But as you travel further West, especially into George Bush and Dick Cheney's wild West where survival more recently depended on blurring those boundaries a bit, people don't need an invitation to charge into a neighbour's house to help extinguish a fire, or rescue an invalid, or punch a bully in the mouth for beating up his children. A certain amount of vigilante collective action has been more acceptable in the wild West as a way of dealing with both tyranny and tragedy.

If George W. Bush had stuck to those cowboy roots of his and simply belted Saddam Hussein one right in the kisser and walked away instead of proliferating such weapons of mass distrust, how differently might the world feel right now?

In fact, I bet Europeans and North Americans would be having a much more intelligent discussion about whether our species on this planet can succeed in dealing with global issues on a purely bilateral basis rooted in concepts of national sovereignty. Might we not agree that there are some issues facing the planet right now that warrant the occasional Neighborhood Watch type action where free people might nonetheless sometimes impose a minimun standard of decency when rogues threaten our children's right to a little peace and quiet?

That is where the confusion comes from, between left and right, between east and west, between Republicans and the Tea Party, and between Muslims and modernity.

The American Empire made a terrible mistake when they allowed their admirable penchant for wild west generosity to be co-opted and misused. Rather than keeping Neighborhood Watch strictly en garde, to be used solely on occasions of universally recognized brutality or disaster, they have twisted the meaning of 'freedom' and premptive deterrence into a missionary mandate to dictate self-serving terms for global commerce.

We keep hearing claims that a rogue minority have hijacked global Islam. Ok. What of global Christianity?

And there you have it. Collossal Weapons of Mass Distrust. (C-WMD)

Just when the world most desperately needs a trusted kind of global Neighbourhood Watch to lend a hand with environment, energy, female genital mutilation, and usurious international bond bandits... nobody trusts anybody.

That is the real legacy of the recent American Empire. Insufficient trust for humanity to collaborate on issues that simply cannot be resolved unilaterally or bilaterally.

Gawd forbid I should have to quote Hillary Rodham Clinton, but dammit, it does take at least a village!

As for my beloved Canada, we do have conservative politicians, mostly wed to the Bond and Data Bandits. Bad enough that they want to stop collecting census data lest that expose their weak policy arguments, now we learn they have knowingly shredded the final report on the Tar Sands?

In whom do we trust?

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Popping the Fiscal Balloon

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It was one of the most electrifying moments in modern political television... for those who had ears!

"Should we lower the debt or flood the world with trillions of dollars in cash?" asked Fareed Zakaria.

In the red corner, Nobel sanctioned economist Paul Krugman was advocating more money, lots of it, now. In the blue corner, word-merchant historian Niall Ferguson countered for immediately reducing the debt.

In case you missed it... and many did 'miss it' even though they watched it on CNN's GPS, here's the layman's translation.

Imagine your brain sprung a leak to the outside of your skull, you would die if the hole weren't plugged. On the other hand if only one artery developed a bubble inside your skull putting pressure on the surrounding tissue, you would poke a hole in the bubble, relieve the pressure, then strengthen the artery so it wouldn't happen again. That's called an embolism. The rest of the brain would be fine. Embolisms can be fixed.

In economic terms, Ferguson is warning us that rampant debt is a financial leak threatening the entire system.

Krugman, on the other hand, counters that debt is just part of the economy. The real threat is cumulative charges, interest and profit on the debt, an expanding embolism, susceptible to regulatory popping and remedial cauterization.

But Krugman goes farther. Much farther! He calls it the "phantom in the room".

Brrr, feel the chill of fear?

The financial community is loath to talk about this ghost because we ordinary mortals might actually begin to understand. The high priests dare not give it a simple name, like profit, for fear we masses will lose faith.

Like a magician who slips and nearly reveals how a trick is done, Ferguson almost blew it. He euphemized so accurately, so close to the truth, you could almost feel the collective fiduciary scrota shrinking around the globe. Millions of high finance testes running for pubic cover, wincing in anticipation of this catastrophic blow to their semantic groin.

"Fiscal Credibility", Ferguson intoned. "Nasty Fiscal Arithmetic". "Domestic appeasement of local interest (lobby) groups". "Once you find interest rates rising..."

The phantom stirred.

Then Zakaria rescued him. "So what's the solution?"

Caught in his own dangerous rant, Ferguson scrambled for cover. "Radical fiscal reform". "Flat tax". "Cut entitlement programs". Gawd forbid we should reduce our profit. A flurry of semantic transformations to re-bury the deep structures of the daemon he had nearly exposed.

The world's banks must have heaved a huge sigh of relief. Krugman wasn't in the studio at the same time to pounce on the gaff, to expose the lie, to dress the naked emperor.

An embolism of what ... greed? Good grief!

What might Krugman have said?

Except for natural disasters like the recent one in Haiti, countries rarely fail to repay their real debt, the actual amount they initially borrowed. Every other instance of fiscal collapse in the history of the world has stemmed from an inability to keep pace with ballooning compound interest on the debt, not the debt itself.

Insatiable greed.

Krugman had been brutal in anticipation. He whisked so close to naming the beast himself. "Bond Vigilantes" he called them at one point. The viscerally corrupt curia of collusion among the banks and the insurance companies who are siphoning the wealth of humanity into gated backwaters of privilege and impunity.

Of course, there are legitimate costs incurred by those who lend and those who insure us against unforeseen misfortune. They are also entitled to make an income. However, those costs should be calculated transparently based on the true actuarial risk of default or accident. Far from such a fair return, the current banking and insurance industries, no matter how low interest rates appear to be right now, continue make obscene profits from the cumulative effect of compound interest. Interest upon interest, upon interest... ad infinitum.

That is the phantom in the room!

It is the omnipresent and never-to-be named threat, not from the borrowers, not from the actuarial risk of capital default, but from the arbitrary whim of exponential greed that cranks the interest rate up to whatever the market will bear in good times, or simply threatens to do so in bad times.

Krugman's "Phantom in the Room".

Decades of political advocacy and activism haven't a fraction of the power and influence of thirty seconds of reversing an embedded pre-supposition.

Fareed, I dare you. Just one minute a week. Have an impartial and professional semanticist analyze a single utterance from the week's news coverage. Maybe just before your closing soliloquy and book recommendation. You might go down in history as having single handedly rescued democratic dialogue, and governance..

It's time someone stuck a linguistic finger down our throat and induced a little purge to clear the bullcrap.

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Cyber War

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I first noticed Richard A. Clarke when he claimed to have warned Condoleezza Rice and George Bush Jr. about the threat of 9/11. He was The Shrub's principal advisor on national security at the time and was ignored.

Clarke has just written a new book about the next threat to global security.

The first half of that book, Cyber War, won't surprise computer professionals much. It might even seem rather ho-hum. They already know this stuff. It will and should upset a lot of lay people, however, including Presidents and Prime Ministers.

The second half is mandatory reading for professionals and ordinary citizens alike.

I was drawn to this book by Fareed Zakaria's May 9th interview with Clarke in which he, a professional on the side of security and intelligence, far from smooching with Dick Cheney, surprisingly accused the executive branch of government of using 9/11 as an excuse to breach the US Constitution and unnecessarily trample on civil rights.

I am one of those who think Michael Ignatieff's little book, "The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror", is the seminal guide to thinking about this topic. (I refer here to the distinguished and principled former historian, Michael Ignatieff, not Mickey Iggy the gutless and Pablum-spouting current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.)

I was hoping Clarke would situate his arguments squarely in that context.

Not quite.

Before walking Ignatieff's philosophical and constitutional tightrope to meet this newest threat, Clarke urgently wants to first convince us the threat actually exists. Not only does he succeed in this, he goes on to suggest that intelligent reaction to the threat is being undermined by the same gridlock that hijacked the American discussion of health insurance.

We need to protect critical infrastructure such as power, water and transportation facilities, which might require regulating some elements of business, especially Internet business. Anathema to conservatives.

Other requirements, if abused, might violate our understanding of privacy. Anathema to liberals.

Meanwhile, the threat speaks for itself. All current governmental efforts at so-called cyber security, including the US Patriot Act and Homeland Security are designed first to protect government and defense establishments. They do little to save the rest of us.

Our financial, electrical, agricultural and transportation systems are owned by private sector conglomerates whose conservative governments and lobbies eschew regulation just as vehemently as liberal lobbies rant about any use of profiling.

I won't spoil the read by giving too much away. Let's just say that the days of treating cyber crime like break-and-enter are long gone. Security incidents no longer drill out the locks, shatter the windows, or break down the doors. Most of all, they don't remove anything from the premises. In fact, they leave no sign of having entered at all.

They just walk away with the knowledge of how to remotely overload and burn the bearings on our power generators, confuse civilian radar and air traffic control, shut down water distribution, and paralyze the control systems on our ships, trains, and airplanes.

While we were all blissfully surfing eBay, Facebook and YouTube, the stalwarts of western civilization such as Ontario Hydro, WalMart, ScotiaBank and Air Canada began monitoring and interconnecting their (our) generators, refrigerators, stock markets and control towers using the unprotected Internet.

China, Cuba and Afghanistan have not.

(To be continued, when I've finished reading the second half ...)
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Pakistan - Pointedly Missing the Point

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Here we go. That silly cartoon nonsense again. This time its from a Pakistani court feeling insulted on Prophet Muhammad's behalf.

From literalist clerics I might understand, but Judges? I hope their understanding of the Law is better than their grasp of theology because, with this latest heresy, they have avoided the most significant issue facing Islam this century. The logical fallacy at very root of symbolic thought itself.

If Muslims the world over would confront this issue honestly, with actual thought rather than droning dogma, they would leap into the 21st Century in a single bound.

A much deeper question precedes any debate over freedom of expression.

Ayan Hirsi Ali, the international press, Irshad Manji, countless American pundits, Jewish academics, the Roman Catholic Church, and now Pakistan's Lahore High Court have all been fooled into thinking the issue is Blasphemy. Free speech concerns the Auditory firewall against misconceptions of primordial substance.

This gigantic fuss over cartoons is not about sounds, it's about images and, therefore, we should be centering the discussion on Idolatry.

Among all of Abraham’s children, limitations or admonition against using sound to represent deities is not addressed until the second Commandment. The First Commandment deals with an a priori and much more fundamental fallacy, the inherent trap in symbolic thought itself, and it uses the visual representation system to make the point first.

Contemporary fundamentalists, Muslim, Christian and every type in between including secular atheists, stand in breach of that First Commandment. They think it forbids, or suggests it is inappropriate to draw or cast images, whether of Muhammad or Jesus. The fact is, when correctly stated, it only points out that you can't represent It-All in a single image anyway and advises against deifying any image after it has come into being. Symbolic images are only fleeting analogies for aspects of that which is represented. They are not con-substantial with the whole of existence.

The outrageous idolatry at the root of Islamists threatening to assassinate Dutch cartoonists, or a Pakistani court trying to block Facebook from an entire country, isn’t in their believing cartoons can insult the Prophet, it is in allowing that any image could depict the divine in the first place!

Those Pakistani judges are as guilty of the sin of idolatry as were the Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai / Jabal Musa. Moses smashed the tablets in frustration at this truly original sin. Jesus mocked and derided the pretentions of Pharisaic posturing rooted in this same confusion of symbol with what it represents.

It is time for Twenty-First Century Muslims to do their homework.

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Tiger Moving to Havana?

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Imagine a sand box.

Make it a good sized one. About three meters on each side, with walls about 30 cms (one foot) deep. Fill the box with clean, dry sand.

Now, gather a dozen soup bowls, fill them with small pebbles or gravel, and sink them upright into the sand so that the lip of each bowl is about a centimeter below the surface. Get a large watering can and carefully fill each of the bowls with water. Lastly, cover each one with sand to hide it below the surface.

Begin calling the bowls 'aquifers' because you are about to earn a quick PhD in fresh water management policy.

Here's the deal.

Your kids want to germinate some seeds in the areas of the sand box where there are no bowls. You tell them they are allowed to push a single straw through the sand into each bowl and suck out as much water as they want to use on their seeds, but you will only allow one cup of relacement water from the kitchen tap to be added to each bowl, per week, and they must start calling that new water 'precipitation'.

Your final exam consists of a single question.

How much water can the kids suck out of each bowl per week during July and August if the plants are to keep growing in the blazing sun until Labour Day?

Pretty obvious, eh?

No more than a cup, the replacement quota, and likely less because each bowl will lose some water soaking to the surface sand above it. That is probably where we should have put the seeds in the first place.

The lesson to be learned is that you can never remove more water from any one bowl than can be replenished from the weekly re-supply. Break this rule and the entire sand box will run dry in a matter of days.

That is what has been done to the Kalahari desert and to much of the South Western USA.

Now Cuba has decided to ask foreign developers to build golf courses?

Raul, good grief!

Fifty years of heroic sacrifice and defiance by a long suffering people now betrayed on the eve of global ecological catastrophe ... and deprived of vindication.

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Al Jazeera English - on ExpressVU!

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Al Jazeera English has been added to Bell ExpressVu today.

Superb journalism.

Harkens back 20 - 30 years, to when even the mass media were still fiercely committed to the principles of real journalism.

Al Jazeera English (AJE) should be mandatory viewing for every student and every buck reporter out trying to earn their stripes.

If we could now just convince Bell to also add TeleSUR, the pan-latin-american equivalent.

Just as AJE have culled the finest reporters from national broadcasters all over the world, including BBC, CBC, Australia, and Asia ,etc., TeleSUR has done the same with reporters from all over Central and South America.

What a breath of fresh air compared to CBC, CNN and yes, even BBC!

If you are interested in giving AJE a whirl, call ExpressVu in the normal way at 1-888-759-3474, and if the agent who answers seems oblivious to the new channel, just ask to be escalated to Level-2 regarding Channel 516.

The service is so new (today - late yesterday) the agents have to use a manual (hard copy) registration form and pass it through to programming manually. They call it an 'Add On' and it costs just $3.00 per month.

The whole registration process is refered to internally by ExpressVu staff as an 'Offline Request' because it hasn't been entered in their automated ordering system yet.

In addition to the basic news service each hour, I strongly recommend figuring out when 'Witness' and their other documentary series are scheduled. You will be astonished. It's like finally having a 'Fifth Estate' or 'W-5' type program from the rest of the world instead of only from our often monotonous North American and Euro- Centric point of view.

If we can add TeleSUR, we will only be a half-continent short of a truly global broadcasting service: sub-Saharan Africa.

Would appreciate comment from any of you who share this prespective.
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The Architecture of Consent

Sitting at supper one evening many years ago in Metz, France, I asked a Canadian military acquaintance how he planned to vote in the upcoming Canadian federal election.

"Same way as last time", he replied rather curtly.

"Yes but how was that?" I ventured.

"For the retention of the secret ballot!" he growled.

I looked up sharply from my supper plate expecting some sign of humour, but found myself peering into the cold, almost belligerent stare of a man who had killed and nearly been killed flying Spitfires in Malta in 1942, had faced the Viet Cong and been shot at again while a member of the Truce Commission in Viet Nam in 1956, and was now (1962) senior intelligence officer for the RCAF in Europe as the Berlin wall went up, the Cuban missile crisis was in full swing, and DeGaulle was being threatened (by elements of his own military) with assassination for pulling out of Algeria.

At a time when there were thought to be only two legitimate monopolies in democratic society, the authorization to bear arms and the right to print money, here was a military man saying he was willing to lay down his life, willing to die, to keep the keys to the gun locker in civilian hands!

For me, there was no more stark illustration of the difference between democratic and totalitarian regimes at the peak of the cold war.

Today, there is another battle underway that is every bit as pitched and critical to human freedom as was control of the arsenal sixty years ago.

Along with armaments and currencies, control over citizen identity is about to become the third leg in the proverbial barstool of core principles underlying democracy itself. It must remain in un-biased hands.

When the Internet first revealed its enormous potential for convenient transactions, most engineers assumed that citizen data would have to reside in unimaginably huge, centralized databases. The very thought of such repositories today, containing all personal identifiers on all citizens, has both civil servants and politicians silently and very uncomfortably squirming.

At best, some wonder if a new credibility for government itself might emerge from the fact that citizens trust them marginally more than they do vested commercial interests like Microsoft, Oracle or Computer Associates to hold all this data.

But lo-and-behold, in this era of executive exchanges between private and public sectors, and the blurring of boundaries within government in what Donald Savoie describes as the diminishing distinction between the roles of politicians and civil servants, it seems we must consider an entirely new paradigm in this area.

Visionaries among information technology professionals have taken up this cause of re-anchoring human identity and citizen consent, not with vested-interests in the private sector, nor even with the purportedly more altruistic public sector, but rather smack dab back in the hands of each and every individual citizen!

How can this be possible?

We can't even begin to understand this third pillar of democratic governance without first understanding that it is inextricably linked to anonymity.

The most fundamental insight of both psychology and philosophy is that human perception itself is contingent on contrast. Whether up-down, in-out, over-under, light-dark, night-day, hot-cold, male-female, or life-death … the human brain cannot even detect any of those singularities except in juxtaposition with their concomitant opposites.

That fact leads to an extraordinary question: "Can we develop an architecture of citizen identity and consent that is thoroughly rooted in a fundamental right to anonymity and yet so practical it can be embedded at the very core of all 21st Century transactions whether personal or electronic?

A brief Guide to Anonymity

Free people expect to consent before actions are taken on their behalf.

When we take a quiet stroll in the park, we consent before our cell phone discloses our GPS location. If we ask for tomorrow’s weather forecast on the Internet, the weather service has no need to know who is asking. If we want to access the cockpit of a fully loaded commercial airliner, however, we will be asked to surrender our left index finger print or the innards of our right eyeball for detailed examination.

The rule is very simple. The greater the potential damage that could arise from mistaken or fraudulent use of our identity, the more rigorously we should demand proper authentication before we consent.

The Players

Relying Party

If you were my doctor, I’d expect every pharmacist to make sure my prescription really came from you before acting in your name. And if you were my pharmacist, I’d sure want you to make sure the person trying to get the prescription filled really is me. In each case, the pharmacist or the doctor must rely on some trusted party to vouch for the doctor being a doctor, for the pharmacist being a pharmacist, for the prescription being a real one, and for me really being who I say I am.

In this context, the pharmacist and the doctor have to rely on someone they trust during their part in this transaction. The question then arises. On whom can they rely?

Authoritative Party

Currently, pharmacists rely on the College of Physicians and Surgeons to vouch for doctors and they rely on a Provincial Health Care Plan (HCP) to authenticate each patient. During a prescription-filing transaction, the College and the HCP each become an ‘Authoritative Party' at their appropriate stage in the transaction.

Identity Agent

Which leaves you and me, as citizen or consumer, to decide whether we even want these two parties talking to each other about us in the first place!

What are the conditions under which we authorize the pharmacist to check on us with the HCP, or to check on our doctor with the College of Physicians and Surgeons? Only if each of these preliminary transaction are completed with our consent, should the pharmacist then be permitted to dispense the drugs.

Credentials

In the context of identity and authentication, the trusted instrument that we use to express our consent is called a credential, something you, and your doctor, and your pharmacist trust to authenticate the person asking for the prescription in your name.

How trustworthy are your credentials? Do you think your pharmacist should trust anyone who tries to use your health card? Does your health card have your photo on it? How about your driver’s license? Even if it has a photo on it, how easily can it be faked? Can the photo be changed? Can the Provincial Licensing Office be fooled into issuing a credential with your name on it but a different photo? Can pharmacists or police officers trust that people using your credentials are really you?

In order for a credential to be trusted, the credential itself must come from an authoritative party who has taken sufficient time and effort to ensure you really were you in the first place, when the credential was issued!

For example, if a credential has been issued by someone who insists on meeting you in person, who keeps a recent address and photograph of you on file at all times, who has checked your finger prints, taken a retinal scan, or even demanded a DNA sample, then such a credential might not only be trusted in the first instance, but in fact might be trusted by other authoritative parties as a ‘Foundation Credential’ to be used when applying for other trusted credentials. That role, issuing Foundation Credentials that are so reliable they are trusted by other credential issuing parties, would seem more appropriately handled by a government you choose and hold accountable.

Currently in Canada, birth certificates, health cards, and even driver’s licenses are not yet trusted as Foundation Credentials because relying parties can’t be sure the issuer has taken sufficient care in authentication before issuing. And once issued, have they used the latest techniques against tampering or altering the credential?

Using the right words

Before going any further, let’s define three key words: Person, Identity and Credential.

The person is you! The physical you. Your actual flesh and blood.

Your identity is a collection of data that begins to accumulate from the moment of birth. It often starts with a hospital footprint taken within sight of your mother and stored with the names of your family, your date and place of birth, your given names, your ethnicity, and your blood type. With every passing day after that, more and more data is generated and accumulated: with doctors, dentists, schools, churches, recreation affiliations, motor vehicle bureaus, financial institutions, health care plans, employers, taxation records, passport offices and, eventually, a cemetery.

A credential is an instrument or document containing as little as possible, but just enough of the above identity elements for the type of transaction in progress. A confirmed, tamper-proof photograph might be enough for Hertz, Avis, Budget and the highway patrol, but to enter a Level-4 epidemiology research lab or the national intelligence headquarters might need you to surrender your index finger and your right eyeball!

Least Means and Minimum Data

These examples illustrate a powerful and essential constraint on how your credentials are used. Modern credentials should not only require your consent each time they are used, they must be 'smart' enough to only disclose to the Relying Party the absolute minimum amount of information required for the specific transaction in progress. That means the fewest and least intrusive elements of your identity needed to safely obtain the service based on a practical, unexaggerated calculation of the potential damage that could result from mistaken or fraudulent use of your identity.

Your annual income is not a necessary element of your driver’s license. Someday, your age and eyeglasses prescription might be.

Surprisingly, the more robust the credential, the less data might actually be divulged. To convince a security guard to let you enter a Department of Defense research laboratory, you might only need your right eyeball. Nothing else. The Commissionaire guarding the door has absolutely no need to know your name, job title, or where you live.

The architecture of consent

Putting this all together yields the master question facing democratic society: "What will 21st Century transactions look like when they require the full consent of all parties and when the flow of information comes to a mandatory stop without the consent of the real person receiving the service?"

When foundational anonymity becomes the universal starting principle at both the ballot box and the automated teller machine, we will have answered George Orwell, and rather proudly so.

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Trash talk ... Kikes, Chinks and Pakis

Overheard in the Human Resources section of a Government department recently, a staffing consultant referred to a fellow employee as prejudiced in their hiring decisions. When bandied about carelessly and long enough, we lose trust in such clichés. They require too long a pause in the flow of conversation to ensure they are being used accurately, sincerely, in context, and not just as rhetorical diversions.

We have lost so many useful words and powerful expressions through such careless use. Could 'prejudice' and 'anti-semitism' be about to join them? Are we tiring of having to parse them so meticuloulsly everytime we hear them?

Certainly the Holocaust remains despicable stuff. Yet the reason other diasporic peoples sometimes resent Euro-America's institutionalized and reflex references to anti-semitism is precisely that, outside its Euro-centric context, it can seem ... well, euro-centric.

Having migrated away from where they were the majority, each diaspora must adjust to new circumstances as a minority. Initially excluded by the majority from leadership roles in politics or the military, what is a bright young 'Kike' in Europe, 'Paki' in Africa, or 'Chink' in Polynesia to do except excel in those domains left open to them: academia, the arts and business.

The original stereotype within European anti-semitism centered on banking, credit and trade, but Jews in the European diaspora also reveled and excelled in the most exquisite refinements of national literature, music and science in each of their host countries. When those national arts rose to transnational significance to become part of the global legacy, the human canon, Jews, like most diasporic peoples seemed disproportionately represented among those elites and, eventually, were disproportionately resented as well.

Have we so easily forgotten the Indo-Pakistani diaspora in Idi Amin's Uganda. Care to examine the social undertones among Philippinos towards even third and fourth generation Chinese? How about the attitude of local academics toward the rise to prominence of Japanese scholars at the University of Hawaii in the 1980s? And what was the ratio of so-called 'Asian' admissions to Harvard last Fall compared to their proportion in the overall US population?

I have a friend who is fond of saying, "Beware jargon! It usually indicates a repository of power." That reminder seems especially appropriate when discussing prejudice of all kinds, whether as part of the rage over new Arizona immigration policies, or resistance to Nunavut's Inuit Employment objectives.

While true clichés merely wilt to benign insignificance, the most insidious are co-opted as jargon into the service of organized deception. Whether we call it a 'lobby' or a vested interest, they deliberately marry semantic subterfuge to political correctness in order to contaminate public discourse and cut off debate.

The irony?

Such silence and censure, over the long haul, end up hindering the desired outcomes of those very lobbies that provoked them.

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Hockey night in Jerusalem

Back in the days before cable television, Ottawa was an unusual place on a Saturday night.

Just far enough from each of Canada's intensely rival non-capitals, sport fans had a choice between watching the Montréal Canadiens or the Toronto Maple Leafs on CBC's Hockey Night in Laurentia because neither game was blacked out in the Ottawa area.

An even more remarkable opportunity arose on those rare Saturday nights when the two giants played each other.

Riveting and highly partisan play-by-play was available from announcers René Lecavalier in French for Montreal or Foster Hewitt in English for Toronto, delivered over separate broadcast feeds. They were nonetheless based on a single on-ice reality, emanating from a single venue.

That profound lesson in unified field theory lies at the root of much Canadian impatience with unilingual North America's failure to fathom 'Other'. Multilinguals can generally pound each other to a pulp during a debate, or a debacle, yet sincerely share a joke afterwards. As I have discussed in previous posts, however, can you imagine holding a genuine world championship in health-care, or baseball, based on alternate narratives coming from Washington and Havana?

Then there is Jerusalem.

Talk about two communities who cannot abide each other's narrative.

What is the proper role of the intellectual in society if not to constantly observe the playing field, analyse our varying narratives and either trace our roots back to the common source, or provide a third way... preferably forward?

Isn't that the philosophical basis of freedom? One, you are stuck. Two, is a dilemma. Choice, begins at three.

For the moment, intellectual debate in Washington has stopped at one, while Tel Aviv is in a state of perpetual oscillation.

That leaves new, innovative, choiceful options on so many global issues more likely to come from Mumbai, Shanghai, Rio ... or Iqaluit.

　

Muslims - Missing the Point

The western democracies are finally beginning to discuss whether they can tolerate the more controversial characteristics of certain immigrant cultures.

In France, the debate has centered on whether Muslim kids can wear a scarf in school. In Switzerland, on whether the sets for Heidi and the Sound of Music should be contaminated with minarets. In Holland, on whether cartoonists may caricature religious leaders. In Canada, the province of Québéc has launched a wrenching series of public debates over what constitutes ‘reasonable accommodation’. Nearly every other receiving jurisdiction is at least confused over whether complete face coverings (niqab, burqa) should be tolerated in public.

Concurrently, but seemingly not in response, thoughtful elements of the so-called ‘Muslim world’ are immersed in debate over the Theory of Evolution. They are avoiding, remarkably, the most significant issue facing them this century. Idolatry. The very root of thought itself.

This much deeper question precedes any debate over freedom of expression.

Almost as troubling, the West and the Muslim diaspora within it offer precious little encouragement or alternative. Enthralled with the Greco-Roman hairsplittings of secular and constitutional law, Ayan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch press, Irshad Manji, countless American pundits, Jewish academics, and even the Roman Catholic Church have been fooled into framing the debate as a concern over free speech. The United States refer to it self-referentially as First Amendment rights.

They are all missing the point.

Free speech might indeed appear in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but among Abraham’s children, limits on free speech are not addressed until the second Commandment. The First Commandment deals with an a priori and much more fundamental fallacy: the inherent trap in symbolic thought itself!

Contemporary fundamentalists stand in breach of that First Commandment. They think it forbids drawing cartoons of Muhammad or Jesus. It actually only advises against deifying such images after they have been drawn. The outrageous idolatry at the root of Islamists threatening to assassinate Dutch cartoonists isn’t in their believing the Dutch cartoons insulted the Prophet, it is in allowing that a cartoon, or any other any image, could depict the divine in the first place!

The sin of idolatry is being repeated in the minds of those fundamentalists as surely as among the Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai / Jabal Musa. Moses smashed the tablets in frustration at this truly original sin. Jesus mocked and derided the pretentions of Pharisaic posturing rooted in this same confusion of symbol with what it represents. It is time for Twenty-First Century Muslims to do the same homework.

Until representatives of the three traditions claiming roots in the Middle East renew their common understanding of the First Commandment, they will remain incapable of reasonably accommodating their differing descriptions of the approach to that common, sacred, and primordial presence they respectively call Christ, Allah, or JWH.

Free speech does play a role in this. It's just not the main issue. As one brave managing editor of Al Jazeera put it recently, "how can any community aspire to the democratic principle of free speech so long as we are forbidden to argue with our fathers?"

Meanwhile, personally, despite the most Canadian of reasonable accomodations, there are two aspects of immigrant practices that I can’t bring myself to consider as human, religious, cultural, or civil ... rights.

They are female genital mutilation and the refusal to show one’s face during legal, 21st century civil transactions that inherently require facial display as the appropriate level of biometric authentication of identity.

Soeur Marie-Hélène de l'Assomption CND wore a veil every day of her life and it didn't interfere one iota with her teaching us to conjugate the verb accommoder in the imperfect subjunctive just minutes before we donned our balaclavas to play outdoor hockey at 24 below.

Soeur..

Obama's First Pitch

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American baseball has begun another pampered journey towards its self-styled world series this fall. It will be hard enough doing so against the fanfare of a genuine world event like this summer's 2010 World Cup of Football (soccer), but it must gall honest American sportsmen even more that the real championship of baseball finished in the wee hours a week ago Monday, in Cuba!

In the tenth inning of the seventh game, Havana beat Santa Clara in a nail-biter. It was a terrific series, played against the backdrop of fundamental cowardice in sponsored American media who dared not cover it for fear their fans might learn the truth: that the best Cuban teams would clean the clocks of what American and Canadian fans pay through the nose for: a second class product.

That's the real secret behind the spiteful Helms-Burton embargo. The best teams in Cuba would win North America's so-called 'World Series' hands down. A Cuban second string already thumped the Baltimore Orioles 12 - 6 at Camden Yahds in 1999 and MLB hasn't had the guts to risk another such comeuppance since.

The latest evidence came in a March 31st article on the eve of this year's magnificent Cuban final, when McClatchy-Tribune News reporter Kevin Baxter, drawing on files from the Associated Press (AP), didn't even mention the series! All he could blather about was how many Cuban players 'defect' during international tournaments.

He was quick to vaunt the $30.25 million Cincinnati paid for pitcher Aroldis Chapman this January even though Chapman was no star in Cuba and had posted losing averages in two of his four seasons in the Cuban league. Same thing goes for most of the other so-called defectors.

And therein lies the lie.

North-American sport media only ever mention the defectors. Where is the coverage of the 95% of first string players that remain in Cuba and, more importantly by far, where is the coverage of Cuba's teams, not just a few individuals?

The truth is that stories about individual players leaving Cuba for the US are spun to look like migrations towards a superior brand of baseball. They are not. They are the understandable attempts of a few journeymen players in the Cuban league trying to escape dead end careers and poverty. No mention is made of the fact that superior players remain in Cuba, that the defectors would far prefer to live and play in Cuba themselves given a reasonable economy, and that the only reason for their poverty is the vindictive and hateful spite of Helms-Burton.

President Obama, you have a tough decision to make. Lift the embargo and the elite of Cuban baseball will opt to stay at home, play at home, and repeatedly win any genuine world series in which you dare let them play.
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Ann Coulter's Ass

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Americans tend to view their political leaders as either knights in shining armour, or devils incarnate. In Canada we think of our leaders as ordinary folks for the most part, and for the most part, ordinary folks a little dumber than we are. A healthy, more mature approach.

We are fierce in our commitment to free speech as well, of course, just a little more considerate of other people's feelings than the USA. We relish inveterate, even devastating iconoclastic banter, but we tend to reserve truly brutal wit for trusted friends and syblings.

That is, until a stranger behaves like a pompous ass.

Last week, American commentator Ann Coulter came to Canada.

Nice ass ... but the University of Ottawa cancelled her performance because she said Muslims should be prevented from using commercial airlines and relegated to flying carpets or camels.

Ms Coulter easily succeeded in fanning her notoriety in protocol prissy Ottawa. That would never have happened in Petty Harbour, or St. John's, however. Rather than wringing their honest hands in anxious sweats over political correctness, Newfoundlanders, would have simply changed Coulter's star billing from political commentator, to comédienne. End of story. A bit more Lenny Bruce than Bill Cosby, but a comédienne nonetheless.

Coulter wanted to challenge the idea that profiling always violates civil rights. (Don't you hate having to explain your jokes?) What irony. It was Americans who gave profiling a bad name in the first place a few years ago when Boston's finest targeted some innocent young men for no other reason than that they were black.

But profiling isn't the problem. The problem lies in how we store data.

Currently, your electronic health record probably has your name, address and date of birth stored in the same database, in the same data tables, as your eye-glasses prescription and your risk of sexually transmitted disease. Known in the identity business as 'tombstone information', these personal identifiers could even be mistakenly linked to a faulty credit rating, or an obsolete criminal record.

That is the problem.

Imagine for a moment a new scenario. One where legislation forbids governments and businesses from placing any unique personal identifiers in the same tables as service related data. In the professional data management business, this is known as 'anonymization'.

At first glance, an eye-glasses prescription, a driving record, ethnicity labels, eye colour, body type and religious affiliation might seem meaningless without personal identifiers.

Not quite. Not to legitimate profilers!

Free societies have powerful rules about personal searches. In general, legislators require public security agents, as members of the executive branch of government, to obtain a judicial warrant before they are allowed to search your home for example.

If our databases were 'anonymized', we could allow counter terrorism and epidemiology officials to profile to their hearts content using that anonymous data, until they detect a statistically substantiated pattern of risk. They could then show probable cause, obtain a judicial warrant, and finally re-combine that risky record with its personal identifiers.

With such safeguards in place, we could allow airline passenger manifests to store every reservation's ethnicity, city of origin, destination, dates of travel, and any number of other indicators deemed useful to epidemiologists and security professionals, as long as they kept that data strictly separate from actual passenger identifiers. Only if a pandemic or security alarm were triggered would permission be granted to identify the individual and contain the potential threat until it could be investigated.

Ann Coulter spoke to Canadian Muslims as irreverantly and deprecatingly as we all do when teasing or arguing with a trusted friend or beloved brother or sister. Her sin was to do it in the manner of a stereotypically rude and abrasive American tourist, rather than billing herself properly as the iconoclastic and polemical ironist (comédienne) she is paid to be.

She will milk this 'all the way to the neo-con bank' of course, accusing Canadians along the way of naïvely confusing constraints on free-speech with courtesy. And she'll be wrong. There is nothing naïve or inadvertant in it. It is called freedom of choice. A Canadian choice. A deliberate choice. A little less partisan. A little more considerate.

In that regard, Ottawa U. let us down rather badly. They should have re-booked the event as a debate and sicked John 'Sheila-Baby' Crosby onto her.

pb
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Reflections on Cuba

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Fulcrum of the Americas. Conscience of the Caribbean. Oracle to the mighty. Salve for the downtrodden. Foil for fools. Mote in Helms-Burton’s eye.

Fidel's Cuba.

At the very peak of the Yankee debate over health insurance, I got sick ... in Cuba. Not just any Cuba, mind you, but rural Cuba. Poor Cuba. Reportedly downtrodden, oppressed, repressed, obsessed and Marxist-Leninized Cuba. Cracks in the walls, peeling paint, light bulbs in only every fourth fixture, typical, tropical, third-world hospital Cuba. Right?

Bullshit!

What an unmitigated pack of lies we are being fed about that island.

The North American public square, our commons, our most basic democratic vocabulary has been so hijacked by the purveyors of vested interest and pre-suppositional lies, we no longer accurately perceive ‘other’. Choking on venemous Helms-Burton narratives about Fidel for fifty years, we can no longer taste Cuba herself. Now eighty-four years old, Castro has spent the same fifty years studying us as we have studying him, yet we dare not admit the bugger might have some useful insights to offer.

Was it Marshall McLuhan who defined unilingual English-speaking North America’s approach to ‘other’ as: “Quick! Let me help you before you drown,” said the monkey to the fish, putting him safely up a tree.

What is this primordial soup in which we are so obliviously immersed?

Lies, upon lies ... upon more lies

Twenty-two minutes of every North American broadcast hour is devoted to advertising. Eighty-six percent of that comes from only two corporate alliances: the chemo-pharma-petro-food block (GM-Splenda-Cialis) and the banking-insurance-investment cartel. The remaining thirty-eight minutes of every hour reinforce that brainwashing with an endless recitation of partisan ‘talking points’ scripted with floods of cash from those same two lobbies.

Are you listening English-speaking America? We are being lied to about Cuba!

The embargo has little to do with the USA preventing goods from crossing the Florida straights. That's the Helms-Burton embargo. The Cuban embargo is run by Cubans, designed to shelter their airwaves from most of our seditious vitriol.

How bad is it? When Fareed Zakaria recently asked Paul Volker what worried him most about this era after his long and distinguished life, Volker replied, “Governance.”

Even the usually attentive Zakaria misunderstood at first. “Government?”, he asked. “No,” Volker replied, “Governance.” Our democracy is broken. We are a failing state.

Volker is not alone. Other prominent public figures see it too, but they use polite words like "gridlock” to describe it. None dares speak the truth, bluntly. The lies are corrupting the very essence of democratic choice.

Eisenhower saw it coming in 1950. He called it the military-industrial complex. Today its a Pharma-Financial complex. Our electoral system has been hijacked. Our elections are fixed because we vote based on those lies.

What's the difference between Zimbabwe and us? In Zimbabwe a corrupt tyrant falsifies the results after the vote. In twenty-first century North America disembodied concentrations of obscene wealth manipulate our thinking beforehand.

Obama knew it. And he blew it. He wasted a year droning drearily on about something called "health care reform". What a crock. The ‘public option’ was about health insurance folks. Nothing to do with the health care. It was supposed to be just one more insurance plan option among many. Choose the one you want. Pick freely. The best and the cheapest should have emerged as honest, realistic, with sustainable premiums established in an open market place.

Instead, the USA have been hoodwinked by colluding insurance moghuls in cahoots with the banks and investment lobbies. The same ones that are gouging patients with illegible disclaimers, limits on coverage, and astronomical premiums long divorced from actuarial tables and legitimate risk assessment. They are all liars. We are the pushovers. And the reason we lap it all up is our elected representatives and mass media rebroadcast the lies ad nauseam.

Our partisan politics are the laughing stock of the rest of the world right now. We have settled for half the service at twice the price (and rising), while voting to continue obscene rewards for those who most successfully divert our savings and taxes into immense capital repositories under narrowly held corporate control.

What's the alternative?

I got sick in Cuba. Really sick, off the beaten track in a tiny rural village. Nothing to do with Cuba. A chronic, pre-existing, aging male's plumbing condition flared up. I got myself to the tiny local clinic. One doctor, two nurses. The doctor called the specialist at the nearest regional hospital. Too busy this afternoon. How about 10:00 AM tomorrow. Saturday. My local doctor’s day off.

Someone picked me up anyway, passed by the doctor’s house to pick her up (her day off remember). In to the hospital. Ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal prostate exam, and a comprehensive discussion in plain language using the ultrasound and x-rays as props. I was given a legible copy of the specialist's case notes and handed a targeted prescription. Out the door.

Time spent? One hour and fifty seven minutes.

Cost for the ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal exam, specialist consultation and prescription? $250. The local doctor’s fee? $15 and only because I was a foreigner.

Equivalent cost for a Cuban citizen? They've already paid through income tax deducted at source. Fully covered by the national health care plan. No incidental charges. Typical wait time for a Cuban citizen at this hospital? About an hour more than mine because, as a guest, they insisted I skip to the head of the four or five people in line at each station.

The people in line had one compensatory demand, however. They wanted to see pictures of my wife. Pictures of my kids. Pictures of the low lying mid-winter arctic sun. They wanted to gasp at the incomprehensible –37C temperature the morning I left home. And, forget privacy, they felt reassured in our common humanity by eavesdropping on the details of my ailments and cure as I chatted with the specialist winthin ear-shot. They wrapped it up with a few questions about my impressions of "la doctora Beatrice" and "mi primo Pascal". My doctor and the specialist respectively.

Seems they are all cousins, or nieces, or aunts, and … well, welcome to Cuba. Or is it Nunavut. Places where life and community are still on a human scale.

I had the decency to wait until I got back to the relative seclusion of my lodgings before getting misty-eyed in amazement, gratitude, relief and, admit it, outright affection for these people.

Were my experience and speedy service unusual? Perhaps, but only compared to other tourists. Not to Cubans. Since I speak Spanish well enough to dispense with an interpreter, I was treated like just one more relative. I suspect that with a language barrier, or had I been stuck in metropolitain Havana, that might have added a few hours to the process.

Who pays?

I didn’t bother claiming the travel insurance. Didn’t bill the Nunavut Health Care Plan either. $250 bucks for all that? Prescription included!

How do they do it?

The Helms-Burton version of Cuban economics spews hate and systematic violence at Cuba for having nationalised the plutocratic power base and thereafter resorted to a two-tiered currency.

Foreigners pay for local services directly to Revenue Cuba in new pesos, which are roughly on a par with the dollar.

Cuban employees receive their salaries in old pesos, worth a lot less. The difference goes directly to the national treasury and pays for superb health care and unlimited education. The rest of the planet calls these “source deductions”. They include deductions for federal income tax, provincial or state income tax, unemployment insurance, health care, pension plan, old age security, union dues, all deducted from our pay cheque ‘at source’, i.e. by our employer, and forwarded to our elected representatives. In Canada this also covers municipalities plowing snow off the highways and runways so the fire trucks, ambulance, and garbage trucks can get through.

Helms-Burton calls this socialism, tyranny, communism, confiscation, castroism, big government and lack of market freedom.

In Cuba, Castro calls it ‘revolution’, an enforced period of transition from Batista-Helms enabled plutocratic exploitation and selfishiency to one of fierce national pride in superb shared services, near complete freedom from debilitating disease, near zero polution and crime, and near 100% literacy. All this is capped by a phenomenal generosity overseas towards millions of less fortunate communities despite the crippling economic impact of Helmsian hate mongering and bullying.

Intimidation, Bullying and Executions

The subtext to all this, we are told, is that Fidel Castro is a ruthless, cruel, violent, egomaniacal communist who has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent entrepreneurs and free thinkers for little more than their aspiring to personal wealth or voicing a dissident opinion.

No matter how laudable the outcomes of universal health care and education, the uncompromising means Castro has used to achieve them are never to be forgiven, forgotten, or tolerated. To hear Helms-Burton octogenerians and legions of other Batista legates sitting in Miami tell the story, the Cuban people live in a perpetual state of gnawing anxiety, fear of reprisal, and muzzled resentment. Miami-based expatriate oligarchs drool with unconcealed anticipation, craving a triumphant welcome from their repressed entrepreneurial and consumerist cousins the moment Castro has the decency to rot into his ovedue grave.

Again, what bullshit!

These morons are clinically delusional. Their cliché-infested minds are so clogged with their own incessant incantations, they actually believe modern Cuba is still as mired in 1959 as their automobiles. The Miami diaspora are oblivious to the transformation, pride, and fiercely independent streak that is sweeping Latin America, growing ever more respectful of Cuba's phenomenal accomplishments. The Bolivarian dream of shrugging off nordic and euro-centric views of the globe in favour of a shared pan-american, self-determining alternative is summed up in the new Latin-American mantra heard from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego: "Our North is South!"

Cubans are not just aware of this movement, they well might emerge as one of its foremost exponents once the blockade is lifted. Convenient consumer goods, appliances and communications technology from northern markets will be welcomed, of course, but I think the Helms-Burton crowd are in for a shock when they discover that Fidel is no longer the lone driver, a rogue demagogue keeping Cuba under his thumb. Entire generations have come and gone under the revolution and the Castro legacy includes a far more resilient, capable, thoughtful, competent, independent, and politically sophisticated transition team than the insatiable nordic giant realizes.

Conclusion

I predict that the Castro era will wind down just as the United States of America's governmental gridlock hits a wall of paralysis. The most explosive irritant will be a sudden and catastrophic shortage of electricity and clean drinking water.

Meanwhile, far from rushing towards indiscriminate consumerism with a reckless assault on their own limited resources, Cubans, while benefiting from broader international trade, will largely hold firm to their present course of husbanded resources, organic farming, and more sustainable social consensus that is a bit less selfish, a bit more respectful of small and distributed communities, and, above all, still committed to shared sponsorship of services that look after the weak as well as the strong.

Any observer of 21st century affairs who cannot suspend his or her conditioned aversion to the earlier elements of the Castrist legacy long enough to examine the analysis the contemporary 'Comandante' continues to offer from the perspective of his octogenerian perch, is a damned fool.

I dare anyone to read the available on-line Spanish or English translations of the near weekly "Reflexiones de Fidel". You cannot do that for six months and not be impressed at the pertinence of the man's observations and dialectic.

The Helms-Burton cabal are incapable of such nuance. So is CNN. With the possible exception of Fareed Zakaria and his remarkable access to genuine thinkers in the northern hemisphere, the rest of our mainstream media are systematically poisoning the information infrastructure on which democratic decisions and survival depend.

We haven't much time to turn this around. If we succeed it will be deemed, in retrospect, to have been ... dare I say it ... a revolution!

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