Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2010

Coming to the small screen soon: “Modern Spies”

Filed under: Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:59

It’s a perfect media pitch: modern spies in America! It’s bound to be a mid-season replacement on Fox in 2011!

Charles Stross wonders why this is a surprise:

The only thing I’m startled at is that anyone would find this surprising. Pre-Glasnost, the KGB was heavily into the economic and corporate espionage business — not simply trying to suborn politicians and penetrate rival intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies, but actively trying to gain competitive advantage for the Soviet Union’s big industrial enterprises. From the early 1980s on, it was a huge priority for them — and indeed, Vladimir Putin was allegedly employed by the KGB directorate concerned with economic espionage. And human intelligence operations, even long-term infiltration ones, are comparatively cheap to engage in — given that agents need to work to maintain a cover identity, it takes relatively little money to maintain them in the field and to maintain a management structure at HQ: the cost of a single spy satellite would cover a hundred spies and their controllers for a multi-decade mission.

Looking at this, it’s hard to disagree with Jim Geraghty “I hope some creative casting director is signing Jewel Staite to play the alleged Russian spy Anne Chapman.”

Here’s an example of a home that’s really a castle

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, France, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Chateau de Guedelon is a real 13th century castle, or at least, it will be when they finish building it:

The ­Chateau de Guedelon was started in 1998, after local landowner Michel Guyot wondered whether it would be possible to build a castle from scratch, using only contemporary tools and materials.

Today, the walls are rising gradually from the red Burgundy clay. The great hall is almost finished, with only part of the roof remaining, while the main tower edges past the 15m (50ft) mark.

Builders use sandstone quarried from the very ground from which the castle is emerging.

[. . .]

The Guedelon site was chosen because it contained all the necessary materials: plentiful oak from the forests, as well as clay and water. Stone from the quarry had actually been used in the building of real-life medieval chateaux.

The CCLA weighs in

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Clive sent me an email this morning, with a link to the preliminary report from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, saying:

The fourth paragraph of the Executive summary ends with a cautionary note about the police chasing after 100-150 protester and in the process disregarding the rights of thousands.

My thought was, what do you expect. In Ontario we let the police do this ALL the time. We encourage it. We even applaud it. It is called RIDE.

This is just the next logical step.

The police demonstrated a bipolar attitude to the disturbances, with the “good cop” sitting back on Saturday and letting the nihilists get away with all sorts of property damage (including three police cruisers), while the “bad cop” showed up later on, like the punchline to a Monty Python skit, to arrest the bystanders (“Society is to blame.” “Right, we’ll arrest them instead!”).

Questionable police tactics at the G20 protests

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this video, saying “My support for the police evaporates with [this] video. What the hell were the police thinking?”:

He then suggested that this is a Toronto Police Services training video:

Update: Even better than the ragged charge shown in the first video, now the police are showing off some of the “weapons” they collected during the G20, including LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gear confiscated from a gamer:

Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists.

Only there’s a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren’t demonstrators. And some of them weren’t weapons — the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game

If they’d found a random SCA heavy fighter to take the armour and weapons from, they might have a slightly better case: SCA heavy combat gear would be comparable to (in many cases better than) police riot gear. SCA weapons are solid rattan covered with silver duct tape to make them appear to be metal — LARP weapons are non-functional foam or other light material (similar “weapons” are called “boffers” and are used as safe toys for kids). SCA shields are fully functional as protection — LARPers generally carry lightweight shields that just look like protection but would not do much in a real confrontation.

I liked this comment to the BoingBoing post:

I remember seeing this same police press conference, only it was in Miami in 2004 during the FTAA summit. Among the items they presented as having seized from activists:

– Tire iron
– Gas can
– A map of Miami (see, they could use it to plan out their terrorist strike!)

It took me a minute to realize they had just pulled all this stuff out of the trunk of some unfortunate activists’ car, where you’d totally expect to find it.

This kind of press conference is a standard component in the “new model” of protest suppression. It gives the police the hilarious task of taking a whole bunch of mostly innocuous stuff they seized and making up stories about how it could be used to maim, kill, and generally cause mass destruction.

I mean srsly – an empty water bottle could be used to fill with gasoline and throw at cops?

Bruce Schneier would be proud.

June 29, 2010

QotD: Canada’s ongoing self-esteem binge

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:48

In light of Thursday’s Canada Day celebrations, pointing out that efforts to outlaw hurt feelings is now a regular part of this country’s modus operandi may make me a party-pooper. But waiting for another time won’t make the truth any easier to bear: From human rights commissions to hate crime laws to civil law suits, Canada has made an art of punishing otherwise perfectly legal behaviour simply because it happens to make someone feel bad. We’ve become a nation of petty grievance-hoarders and tip-toers terrified of offending.

The big problem with this state of affairs (besides how generally unbecoming it is)? It’s slowly making us a spiritless, brittle people. The ability to navigate the ups and downs of life — with a particular emphasis on the downs — is what fosters resilience and flexibility.

If you never have to face the consequences of getting cut from a team, or turned down for a job, or insulted by a heartless idiot, you never develop the sense of perspective (or sense of humour) that it takes to be a well-rounded and capable individual who has the confidence to handle defeat. That’s something parents have to teach their kids, and countries have to teach their citizens. Losing hurts, but you can’t expect mom and dad or a human rights commission to shield you from everything but sunshine and roses.

Marni Soupcoff, “Hockey dads need to grow up”, National Post, 2010-06-29

Even though the G20 is over, the atmosphere remains

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:42

Mike Brock discovers that the hostile environment on the street hasn’t dissipated with the end of the formal protests:

I was sitting down on University Avenue, when a group of police officers approached me and said they wanted to talk to me. Stunned, I opened my mouth getting ready to reply to the request, when one of the officers at the top of his lungs yelled: “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK!”

Another officer said they didn’t want to hear about my rights.

They then proceeded to demand I remove the earphones from my ears, forcing me to get off the phone with my colleague. I told them I was on the phone to which another officer responded, “we don’t care.”

Then they said they wanted to search my bag, because I was “wearing a black shirt”. To which I replied, that I did not consent to any searches. I told them that I would not resist them, and that any search they conducted was under protest. They simply said, “we don’t care. We want to make sure you don’t have any bombs to kill us with.”

The protests may be over, but the malady lingers on. If this is the way the police are now treating members of the public, they appear to be letting off steam after the events of the weekend. If they were trying to prove the point of all the overwrought “OMFG!! We’re living in a POLICE STATE!!” posts on various blogs over the weekend, this is a pretty good way of doing it.

Update: StageLeft suspects that a complaint about police behaviour will get the standard boilerplate response:

Our investigation of our behaviour and conduct in case #xxxxx found that the police officers involved acted properly and in accordance with the law and standard police procedure… next case please.

June 28, 2010

Running with the nihilists

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Tony Keller walked with the main union-led protest marchers on Saturday, pointing out that there was no single, unifying principle — it was a “grievance smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat buffet of complaints, and apparently anyone protesting anything — anything — was invited”. What interested him the most, however, were the “hobbits”:

Standing in front of Cafe Lettieri, which was still open and doing a booming business even as protesters were packed so tightly outside that they pressed up against its windows, I heard someone to my right say, “Black Bloc, meet up on Queen!”

I turned to see six hobbits in black hoodies shuffling past me. It was on. Whatever “it” was going to be.

[. . .]

And then the non-peaceful part of our program started. The crowd suddenly began to surge away from the police lines at Spadina and Richmond, and back onto Queen Street. We were now heading east, violently following the route the non-violent march had just taken. A mass of maybe 100 people in black hoodies and balaclavas was moving at almost a run, accompanied by several hundred journalists and riot tourists. Occasionally someone would dart out from the group to smash a window or spray paint a slogan: “Against Police Against Prisons,” “F– the Police,” “F- Corporate Rule.”

[. . .]

The hoodie people weren’t just small in number, they were also small in stature. A lot of skinny white boys. And white women. (Some skinny, some really not). They looked like the kind of people who spend a lot of time playing video games in their parents’ basements. Or the graduating class of an art college. They were not marauding toughs. More like marauding geeks. Geeks marauding in a spontaneous yet carefully choreographed manner.

There’s a point in most peoples’ lives when getting out and protesting seems like such a good idea. And then you graduate and get a job . . .

Monty’s salute to President Obama at the G20 talks

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Monty, in his daily “Financial Briefing” post, has his own G20 protest:

The meeting of the G-20 is the big news, but “big news” in this case means no news, really. The whole point of the conference appears to provide world leaders with an opportunity to frown and look concerned. What other purpose it serves I don’t know. The peaceful hippies seem to be enjoying themselves, though. Toronto cops arrested about 500 yammering idiots, but failed to heed Mayor Daley’s advice to lump them up a little bit before letting them go. (That would be Richard J. Daley, who viewed beating up hippies as vigorous and healthy outdoor exercise, not his pissant kid Richard M. Daley.)

But hey, on the bright side: everyone agreed to “cut debt”! Yay! It’s just that easy, apparently! Monty, a financial-industry gadfly and obscure vulgarian from some trailer park in Jesusland, heckled the gathered august personages by shouting “You incompetent, moronic, cheating, lying, prevaricating, thieving, low-down, whiffle-headed, asshole spendthrift fucksticks!”. He was forcibly removed by security. When reached later for comment from his jail-cell, Monty said that his remarks “[W]ere delivered in the heat of the moment, but do accurately reflect my beliefs.” He also invited President Barack Obama to come to his cell and kiss his ass. President Obama could not be reached for comment.

The arrest count reportedly went over 900, but the most frequent allegations of police brutality were from some of the media people who were arrested. Jesse Rosenfeld, a Guardian reporter, was observed being punched by police while they were handcuffing him. The National Post had two of their photographers arrested, while all the newspapers seemed to have encountered police discouragement to them filming or photographing events after the violence broke out.

The Toronto Star notes that search warrants are for pussies, not real police officers:

John Booth said the officers, who entered through an unlocked door, sidestepped repeated requests to show him a warrant. He said they alternately promised to produce it later, claimed to have showed it to someone else, or simply said no.

“At first I actually said, ‘This isn’t a joke, right?’ Because I honestly couldn’t even understand where this was coming from,” he said. “They understood, as the interaction went on, that it was looking less and less likely that I had anything to do with what they were talking about. They were inadvertently discovering — ‘Oh, okay, thanks for telling us that there’s two apartments,’ like that was so enlightening. Yeah, well, you should’ve known that before you came into my house.”

The Booths say they will not sue. But they have filed a complaint to the province’s police review office in an attempt to hold the planners of the raid accountable; John Booth said he does not blame the junior officers who conducted it.

Marketing secrets revealed

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

An absolutely brilliant post at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs tells you all about the reality of marketing:

It’s a pretty safe assumption that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve seen “The Matrix.” And you may or may not remember the scene where a kid explains to Neo that the trick to bending a spoon with your mind is simply to remember that, “There is no spoon.”

So it is with marketing. One thing I learned very early in life, thanks to intentional overuse of psychedelic drugs, is that there is no reality. As a guy at the commune once put it: “The reality is, there is no reality.”

So some guy says his iPhone 4 is having reception issues. I say there is no reception issue. Now it’s his reality against my reality. Which one of us is living in the real reality?

There’s a two-part answer: 1, there is no real reality, and 2, it doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is which reality our customers will choose to adopt as their own.

[. . .]

What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.

So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.

It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.

H/T to Chris Anderson for the link.

Tackle the debt, reduce regulatory uncertainty to tackle economic woes

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

In a difficult business environment, companies take precautions to avoid getting deeper into debt or engaging in risky new projects. Companies and individuals do this because the penalty for getting too deeply into debt is bankruptcy: at best, you survive financially but in much reduced circumstances. Governments, despite evidence to the contrary, seem to think they’re immune to this problem and pile on additional debt even when there’s no reasonable short-term hope of getting out of debt. They should learn from Margaret Thatcher’s approach:

A group of 346 noted economists had just written a scathing open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, predicting that her tough fiscal policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base, and threaten social stability.” Thatcher wanted to make absolutely certain her unpopular attack on huge deficits and rampant spending, in the face of high unemployment and a weak economy, was the right one.

So Thatcher summoned Meltzer, along with a group of trusted advisors, to explain why the experts were wrong. Even leaders of her own party advised Thatcher to make what they called a ‘U-Turn,’ and enact a big spending program to pull Britain out of recession. “Our job was to explain why lower deficits and spending discipline were the key to recovery,” recalls Meltzer.

Thatcher was regally unamused by arcane jargon. “Being right on the economics wasn’t enough,” intones Meltzer. “She made it clear that our job was to explain it so she could understand it. If we didn’t, she made it clear we were wasting her time. She’d say, ‘You’re not telling me what I need to know.'”

Thatcher stuck with draconian policies, invoking the battle chant “The Lady’s Not for Turning.” She launched Britain on years of balanced budgets, modest spending increases, falling joblessness, and extraordinary economic growth.

The classic Keynesian theory called for governments to run deficits during tough economic times in order to “prime the pump”: using government money to make up for the lack of private spending in the economy for a short period of time, until the private sector recovered. Governments worldwide grabbed on to this theory, but dispensed with the balancing notion that as soon as the economy recovered, the government had to pay off that debt to return to a balanced budget (or even go into surplus).

Politicians, as a class, love spending money. The more money, the better. They also have remarkably short timelines: the life of this parliament, the next election, pension eligibility date1. Anything that happens beyond that short window of time isn’t important. Spending money the government doesn’t have now is a good thing, to a sitting politician. Paying off the debt later can be left to some mythical future politician.

The other problem that individuals and companies have, but governments don’t, is uncertainty due to regulatory change. Governments don’t have that worry because they’re the ones making the rules (and ignoring them when it’s politically convenient). If you want to depress investment in a given area of your economy, a swift way of doing so is to start faffing with the rules governing that sector. Until you stop changing rules, no company in that sector is going to spend any more than they absolutely have to spend, because you’re creating regulatory uncertainty beyond normal operating levels.

Multiply this by the number of separate government branches involved in making (overlapping, and sometimes conflicting) rules and you can get most major companies to stop expansion, reduce sales, slow or even cease hiring staff until the regulatory environment settles out and the “real” new operating conditions become clear.

[1] Interestingly enough, today happens to be the day that 75 members of parliament qualify for their lifetime gold-plated pensions. I didn’t realize that when I posted this item. Thanks for the heads-up, Kevin Gaudet.

June 27, 2010

The stars were aligned for ugliness

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Peter Kuitenbrouwer enumerates the reasons why the violence this weekend was pretty much inevitable:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has something to answer for tonight. It is hard for this writer to escape the feeling that this summit was designed with every possible star aligned for ugliness to occur. The summit is held on a summer weekend, after university and high school exams are over; all the students are out and free and have time on their hands. Summer weather is perfect for a march. The summit takes place in the heart of Toronto: everybody in Canada has a friend in Toronto where they can stay during a protest.

And can we not say that assembling the greatest number of police in one spot in the history of Canada, and spending more on fences and security than Canada has ever spent before, has a provocative effect?

Why didn’t they keep both summits in Huntsville? Or, as several people have pointed out, at a remote Canadian Forces base where air transport and physical security are already in place?

Update: Jonathan Kay thinks the media and the echo chamber of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and instant messaging combine to make a few incidents appear far bigger and more scary than they really are:

This is one of those stories the social media has gotten wrong: a million tweeters all tweeting up the same three burning police cruisers and few dozen wrecked storefronts. The number of protestors wasn’t even that big (even if the media insists on calling the protests “massive.”) The estimate I’ve seen thrown around is about 10,000. To put that figure in perspective, the number of protestors who swarmed Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas in 2001 was approximately 100,000 — tens times as large.

[. . .]

As I approached the intersection of Queen and Spadina, I could see a rowdy crowd of several thousand gathered. There were a few earnest placards in evidence (“Mother earth convenes the G-6billion. Fuck the G20″). But mostly, it was just excited-looking teenagers surrounding the cop car, like hyenas around their kill. In that moment, it looked like things were about to get truly ugly. I began eying the stores lining Queen, trying to predict which one would get trashed first.

But then came the sirens, and the atmosphere changed very quickly. From down Queen Street, headed eastbound, a speeding convoy of unmarked white busses stopped outside the Silver Snail comic store, and out poured police in full riot gear — helmets, batons, body armor. From an accompanying black suburban came a few even more serious-looking fellows, including at least one with a military-style assault rifle. They never said a word, never issued a threat, never fired any of their crowd-control weapons. They just advanced, in a line, several officers deep, toward the heart of Spadina and Queen. There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw. The worst I witnessed was a single protestor who threw a bottle from amidst the anonymity of the crowd, which gained a few oohs and ahs after it fell harmlessly on the concrete.

QotD: Toronto Saturday Night, G20 edition

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

You can walk a block or two from the action and Toronto is seen carrying on as normal. It’s not quite dangerous, but it’s not quite safe. The crowds are a mix of the indignant, the earnest and the opportunistic. Some obviously carry bad intentions. A lot seem simply bored. When the lights went out in 2003 and order unravelled slightly, Toronto turned into a party. Tonight, again, people are out in the streets, but the mood is simply dumb.

Aaron Wherry, “Toronto, tonight”, Macleans, 2010-06-26

June 26, 2010

The smell of burning police cars

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 21:34

Just when you think the anarchists have decided to let the government look like fools, they pull stuff like this, allowing the security forces to justify the billion+ they’ve spent on the G8/G20 summit meetings:

Pic from Eric Squair.

Pic from Pete Forde. The second police car in this photo also gets the warm treatment from the anarchists.

For those not familiar with Toronto, this is approximately here:

Update: Michael Coren has a suggestion to get the police more involved in deterring the rioters:

An idea. Tell the cops that these anarchist criminals are actually confused, gentle Polish visitors trying to find help at an airport. Not only will deadly force ensue but the police will lie about it all after the fact.

Update, the second: Another burning police car, further east at (I assume) Queen King St. and Bay St.

Pic by Marissa Nelson.

Update, the third: In spite of all the images available of burning or burnt-out police vehicles, the three above were the only ones. Rarely have so many twittered so much about so few . . .

The ungentlemanly art of reporting

Filed under: Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Paul Wells looks at the methods employed by now-famous reporter-to-the-generals Michael Hastings:

Hastings is blunt about the fun a reporter on short-term assignment can have when he doesn’t have to worry about the repercussions of what he writes. “My job was basically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story.”

Then there is this paragraph. The sentence with the bad word is the most interesting to me as it will be to you, but the whole paragraph, with its tensions and contradictions, is worth considering:

   The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this fluff piece now; we’ll give you something good later. No, don’t write it this way, write it that way. We’ll give you something good later.

This deserves to stand as one of the great bits of journalistic self-flagellation and revelation, only a notch below Janet Malcolm’s famous confession that “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

H/T to Taylor Empire Airways for the link.

G20 arrests not considered “major enough” to release details

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Siri Agrell notes the inconsistency of Toronto police over the (32 at time of writing) arrests made around the G20 area:

When asked for details of the arrest of a deaf man at Friday night’s demonstration, Burrows [of the Integrated Security Unit] said he had neither a name or the charges.

“Very rarely do we ever release information unless it’s a major arrest, major charges, big investigation or something like that,” he said. “That’s our standard practice. This guy was arrested last night, there’s nothing major about it. we’d never put a release out about that.”

And yet, the police regularly release information about minor incidents, ranging from lost property to suspicious behaviour. Surely, the arrest of Toronto citizens exercising their right to protest during a major international event warrents some transparency?

Yet another example of the police taking advantage of the situation to expand their practical reach?

So teenagers sending sext messages, a lost urn and some guy trying to pick up Toronto women are worthy of police updates, but details of arrests made during the G20, when police have been given huge powers, aren’t worth releasing?

In a nutshell, yes.

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