Byron Sonne, who spent two years fighting trumped up terrorism-related charges after he was arrested before Toronto’s G20 summit, has been found not guilty of all charges. It’s a small breath of sanity in an otherwise insane judicial process. BoingBoing has a good series of posts that cover the story going back to his arrest.
Also worth checking out are Jesse Brown’s Search Engine podcasts on the subject.
I get really steamed when I hear Herr Harper and his cronies spouting the neo-con line about deficit reduction and making government more efficient. If he really wanted to reduce the deficit, he’d kill the F-35 purchase and start slashing MP’s gold-plated pensions. This article from the Daily Kos tells it like it is.
When right wing politicians talk about deficits you can be certain that they’re waging class warfare. When right wing politicians pursue economic austerity you can be certain that they’rewaging class warfare. If right wing politicians truly cared about fiscal responsibility, they would raise taxes on those who can most afford to pay more taxes and they would end corporate handouts, whether they be direct subsidies or the indirect enabling that is having the public foot the bill for environmental and other public harms incurred as part of corporate profit making. If politicians cared about balanced books they would do what’s best to grow the economy and rectify social and economic imbalances. Prosperity does not trickle down. If given the chance, it can blossom up.In the United States, the only honest fiscal solution is to end the Bush tax cuts, end foreign military adventurism, stop pretending that it’s necessary to spend more on military and ostensible national security hardware than the rest of the world combined, and end all forms of corporate subsidies. If a corporation cannot survive on its own it deserves to die. If a corporation’s survival serves some vital social or security need and it cannot survive on its own, then it should be socialized rather than publicly subsidized. After all, public subsidies to privately held corporations already are a form of socialism, it’s just that much of the money goes into private pockets rather than serving the public good.
I really have to try to keep my blood pressure under control when I read articles like this, and it’s going to get harder, because I won’t know what’s in the food that I’m eating after our fearless leader’s government introduces new food labelling policies. Basically, it means you won’t be able to trust anything you read on a food label and you won’t be able to do anything about it.
According to the budget document,
“The government will change how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency monitors and enforces non-health and non-safety food labelling regulations. The CFIA will introduce a web-based label verification tool that encourages consumers to bring validated concerns directly to companies and associations for resolution“
According to veteran Postmedia health and public affairs reporter Sarah Schmidt, “non-health and non-safety” includes, “net quantity” and “size“.
So what does that mean for you?
It means the food industry has just been told that Mom and Dad are going away on vacation and they’ve left the liquor cabinet open and $200 cash on the dining room table to, “use as you kids see fit“.
What do you think is going to happen? Do you think the food industry’s going to ensure it reports calories and sizes accurately?
God help anyone who’s a diabetic. Our government sure as hell won’t.
It looks like the police are rioting again in New York.
“[W]hat’s been pretty seriously under-covered is this past weekend’s amazing outburst of out-of-control NYPD tactics on Occupy Wall Street,” writes Choire Sicha at the Awl, along with a roundup of links and videos illustrating just how out-of-control those NYPD tactics are.
In Canada’s New Copyright Bill: The Good, The Bad, and The Undecided, Leigh Beaton takes a look at Bill C-11, which is entering the final committee stage of review this week. While some of the worst provisions of the original bill have been scaled back after public protests, the Canadian content cartels are trying to get amendments that would add some of the worst provisions of the U.S. SOPA/PIPA acts to the bill. The article includes links to email addresses of the committee members. If you value your privacy and freedom, a quick email to the committee members would be a very good idea.
The bill as written is nowhere near as damaging as SOPA/PIPA or even the DMCA, and it has significant bright spots, such as extending Fair Dealing (our comparatively toothless version of Fair Use) to include parody, satire, education and non-commercial remixes and mash-ups. But it does include one big problem: an anti-circumvention clause that, like the DMCA in America, will make it illegal to break copy protection even for the purposes of legal copying. This makes no more sense under Canadian copyright law than it does anywhere else: if the act of copying is legal, why should the means to do so be illegal? The Canadian Library Association has proposed a common-sense amendmentto the so-called “digital locks” provision, clarifying that circumvention is only infringing if it is “for the purpose of an act that is an infringement of the copyright”. It makes no sense to exclude such a requirement.
The other major concern is the amendments requested by content industry representatives, which if accepted would turn C-11 from a relatively tame bill into a monstrous cousin of SOPA/PIPA. Proposals include notice-and-takedown systems, graduated response from ISPs, website blocking provisions, warrantless access to subscriber information, and many of the other worst parts of SOPA/PIPA and the DMCA. Additionally, the licensing agency Access Copyright is opposing the bill’s expansion of Fair Dealing, and even trying to go in the opposite direction and scale it back.
SF author Charlie Stross was in the United States recently and watched the Republican primaries with a mixture of bemusement and horror. His comments are some of the most trenchant I’ve seen yet.
I understand the basic point of the Republican presidential primary: get the party members out to pick a candidate from the shortlist of folks with a budget to run for president. And I understand that the candidates therefore need to appeal to the base. And I get that Romney is utterly unacceptable to one sub-group (due to not being a Real Christian) and to another sub-group (due to being the policy equivalent of silly putty), and that Gingrich is in there to deliver a big fat Fuck Off to the RNC over his past treatment (not to mention the narcissistic personality disorder). Rick Santorum I’m at a loss to explainunless he turns out to be Sasha Baron Cohen’s greatest ever and longest running parody act: I’m waiting for him to either call for the reintroduction of the ducking stool for witches, or to be caught in an airport toilet cubicle with an underage [male] page and a couple of lines of cocaine.