BHS

Check out this bumper sticker. This will be particularly amusing for those who've been arguing against my position on the NSA programs.

Read this article. Follow the links where appropriate. Growing discontent in the Republican rank and file has exploded Spearker Hassert et als' support for Congressman William Jefferson. It's beginning to look like November could be a very ugly month for incumbent elephants.

Going into real estate?

Apparently, the government of Namibia cares, enough to arrest people to protect Brangelinas' privacy. That's the point I'm making.

- West Virginia parts 2 to 14. Large, rugged and sparcely populated landscapes prized primarily for their natural resources. - Corporate headquarters drain out of Toronto and Montreal. Movie making companies drain out of Toronto and Vancouver. - American Armed Forces pull out of Europe and East Asia to populate new bases in former Canada. - Reliably Democratic voting patterns for the foreseeable future. - Official Bilingualism, Health Canada Act, Kyoto obligations etc. all go out the window. Former Provinces required to maintain current healthcare spending for a preset length of time, after which their obligations to maintain healthcare spending become an matter of state law. - Day to day life of 99% of Canadians unchanged.

Excellent points, August.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com So, Angelina Jolie is a UN Goodwill Ambassador who has used her celebrity as a bully pulpit to make demands on both her fellow celebrities and on the peoples and governments of the world to do more for those humanitarian projects she has deemed worthy. It's time for a little quid pro quo. The government of Namibia is not only looking at making the day her child is born a national holiday, they are arresting reporters and refusing entry to others to protect Brangelinas' privacy. Altruism ceases to be altruism when it's traded in for luxury and privilege. I've never had much of an interest in Brad or Angelina outside of their work, but for me at least this turn of events tarnishes whatever good came before it.

Of course it's discriminatory. Official Bilingualism, as a policy, is designed to benefit the linguistic minority. The majority of Canadians never need to speak a word of French in their daily lives - a bilingual English / French government benefits them not at all. French speakers, on the other hand, are surrounded by English influences. It shouldn't be surprising that a policy making manditory a linguistic regime that is of benefit to only the minority of Canadians is having an effect on other aspects of government, such as hiring policies.

Jews and Palestinian Arabs are both Semitic peoples. Jewish spies are regularly able to infiltrate Arab governments because of the similarity of their appearance. Agreed. Though I posit that Israel's unique circumstances (surrounded, as it is, by enemy states that would like nothing better than to see it wiped off the map) make it ultimately reasonable for Israel to forego certain liberal niceties in it's approach to lawmaking. I know you think it's important that Palestinians be allowed to use legal loopholes to bring potential suicide bombers into the country, but after a few decades that sort of behaviour becomes tiresome and Israel's more recent laws are reflective of a country that refuses to put up with the constant threat of pedestrian detonation. What a shock. The May two-four weekend was a little bit chilly this year too. Bastards.

According to Wiki they held their annual meeting in Toronto in 1996.

Couche Tarde owns huge swaths of convenience retail space in the US. It's second only to 711 in ownership of US stores. International ownership goes both ways. Which, I guess, only increases the integration of our economies.

Vandalism is not terrorism. Causing power outages will only effectively become terrorism when the outages become so common that those who are affected change the way they live to accomodate them and/or put pressure on the authorities to succumb to the protestor's demands. Until then it's just a one-off criminal nuisance. Sorry for your loss.

Perhaps this will shed some light on the situation: RIA article

It's my contention that only the Third World War (or Fourth, for those who count the Cold War as the Third) will provide enough incentive for Canada and the US to combine politically. I believe for a number of reasons that another European conflagration will occur within my lifetime, so I may yet live to see the day where my citizenship is changed to reflect my participation in a pan-North American political entity, for better or for worse.

So, this thread can only amount to providing a place for you to rant hysterically about how one story proves the NP is the worst paper in the history of the universe and it's continued existence is an insufferable humiliation to Canada. Is that what you're saying? I think that an outside comparison to another news story carried by other news media is illuminating in this case, if only to prove that their are worse ways for a paper to screw up than wrongly accusing a tyrannical theocracy of religious persecution (persecution which, it has been pointed out, may yet occur). Which, being contradictory to your goal in this thread, is something you might want to jump on. Which you've now done. Thanks for proving my point.

You mean misquoting Franklin. I'm not stating that information technology is soley responsible for preventing attacks that may or may not have occurred since 9/11, merely that it's a useful tool that shouldn't be abandoned. Were the systems that predate 9/11 illegal and unconstitutional or not? Asked and answered. I have better things to do than reword my previous arguments. That's fair. Bill Clinton used FBI files as dirt sources for his political enemies, so the precedent is there. (To be completely fair, I'll allow that every President in US history has used the powers of his office to dig up dirt to one degree or another. If there were Presidents who didn't they are probably a minority.) Did I say impeach? I'm saying that anyone who feels that they've been wrongly targeted by this program, from Joe Citizen to Howard Dean, can bring a suit to the Supreme Court to attempt to prevent the government from misusing their phone records or tapping their calls. The Democrats are in the best position to get the info needed to press such a suit but they don't. At the very least, they could apply for an injunction. Besides, the Senate Republicans under Clinton proved that impeachment is a losing strategy twice over - it doesn't have much of a practical effect against a President who is unwilling to step down, and it turns off the voters. You say that now, but you'd feel differently in an emergency situtation where you're unable to send or receive vital telephone calls because some rich dude wants his peace and quiet. Alright then. The status quo is likely to remain until November 2006. If the Dems retake Congress they can pressure the lid off of the NSA's programs, if they so desire, to expose it's successes and failures. I say we wait until then.

(Cue Eddy Murphy.)

Machinations: I'm not even sure that we're on the same topic anymore. I'm going to try to reply to your post point by point. That's a lovely platitude, but it doesn't pass the smell test. Gun laws limit liberty in favour of increased security. Are you saying you're in favour of abolishing gun laws? (You could call this a red herring on my part, but you seem to have based your entire argument on this statement and I think it deserves an appropriately severe rebuttal. And you did open the door to external arguments by using such a blanket generalization.) Here you've established that the government has been using technology to monitor communications since before 9/11. This is confusing. These systems don't work, unless you're trying to establish a totalitarian government? And then they work? According to the wiki article you linked to, Russ Feingold introduced legislation to shut down the IAO. Why did he do that? If the IAO's work is unconstitutional and illegal, why not bring suit to have it quashed and set a precedent? The Democrats are happy to accuse the Administration of illegal and unconstitutional activities for the sake of getting on the news, but for some reason they lack the will to follow through and make a court case out of their accusations. My conjecture is twofold: they don't believe they'll win (ie. they don't really believe that the laws that the President is supposedly breaking are themselves Constitutionally valid in the face of the Presidential powers they aim to supercede), and they don't want to permanently eliminate courses of action that a Democratic president may some day wish to persue. As to the technology being unproven: are you concerned that it won't work at all, or that it will backfire and only catch innocent civilians? You've totally lost me with these two sentences. In what way should I be concerned about the terrorists using this technology? I've already answered this point. There's a lot wrong here. First of all, this is a complete red herring. Secondly, signal blocking technology has enormous potential for misuse and chaos creation. Thirdly, your last sentence fragment in paragraphs answers your own question - how do you know what technology the government is employing? You haven't convinced me yet. Maybe we should just leave it at that.

Oh, come on. Rove would have to have known ahead of time how stupidly Dan Rather et al would behave in this case. I have great respect for Rove as a political tactition, but in no way do I believe he's psychic. It's a simple case - a raving anti-Bush looney concocted fake evidence using a methodology he was too stupid to realize was easily identifiable, and the CBS people bought it because it confirmed a "truth" they already believed in. This is entirely consistent with their defence that the memo was "fake but accurate".

For anyone who's interested in what a real media scandal looks like, read this article from National Review Online about Hurricane Katrina coverage, by Jonah Goldberg.

I'm sorry, I don't see the connection. Why would a Liberal party policy in Quebec have negative consequences for the Federal Conservatives? Let's look at the most likely outcome: Charest's policy will have negligable effect on Quebec's environmental conditions but measurable costs to the economy. Increased cost for no measurable increase in benefit is never a winning sales strategy, no matter how big the advertising campaign is. (True, they might try to spin this as a holier-than-thou programme to increase Quebecer self-esteem, but I doubt it will work.) This will not increase support for the Charest Liberals directly. At the very best it won't drag their polling numbers down. So, if Charest impliments an environmental policy that won't benefit his own provincial party, the only way this could negatively impact the fortunes of the federal Conservatives in Quebec would be if their support was tied to the fortunes of the provincial Liberals in a general way, such that if the electorate gives up on the Liberals provincially they automatically give up on the Tories federally. Is that what you're suggesting? The only other way to take your question is as a suggestion that Charest's policy might be successful and make the Conservatives look bad. Perhaps this might be the case in the short term, before the economic impact begins to take effect. If the federal Liberals can't make hay in Quebec during that honeymoon period it won't affect the Conservatives at all.

Hmmm. Fake but accurate. I guess we can put you down for believing the NP story then, regardless of how it might clash with reality. (And, by-the-by, the "facts" alluded to in the Rathergate story about Bush being a "deserter" have been disputed ad nauseum. But if you relied on CBS or Kos or MoveOn for your news you might have missed that.) I'm starting to see a theme here, where you project a lack of education onto people you disagree with. It's happened in a number of your posts. It leads me to believe you have an education you are proud of. Good for you. Educated people tend to have a better grasp of the big picture and the rhetorical tools to express themselves adroitly. Though it might look better if you tried starting a post without resorting to generalized and unwarranted ad hominem attacks in your first sentence. You know, as if you had something more relevant than hysterical gain-saying to add.

My apologies for not specifying that the governments using said tracking technology be non-totalitarian for the purposes of the question I've posed. Assuming that we keep the discussion confined to non-totalitarian Western governments, and assuming that those governments do not degenerate into totalitarianism, I believe the onus is still on you to show, as per my earlier question, why such a database would be harmful. To humour you, though, I'll re-iterate that the most obvious use of multi-level data mining techniques on phone records is to flush out terrorist networks. If a government agency targets an individual for investigation it would be helpful to know that from a data mining of his phone records there appears to be a larger network of co-conspirators that might also be worthy of investigation. If a terrorist cell slips through the cracks and perpetrates an act of terrorism, it would be helpful to be able to quickly root out whatever support networks they had in order to prevent potential connected cells from activating. If data mining techniques used in this way are successful, how can you question whether or not they've kept people safe? There is of course the question of whether the government agencies given these tools will use them for purposes other than the investigation of terrorism. They almost certainly will. The potential for such abuse is enormous. The DEA for instance would have a lot of use for such a tool when tracking drug gangs. So my next question is, which is worse: allowing the government to use such tools in the hope that they will be effective in preventing terrorism (despite the potential for misuse or the targeting of innocent friends and aquaintences of targeted individuals), or preventing the government from using such tools in order to placate the privacy concerns of people who will never be targeted (despite the possibility that data mining will in fact be an effective tool for terrorism prevention)? (For you fans of logical fallacy: please note that this is not a false dichotomy. This is not an either / or scenario, merely a comparison of potentially negative consequences.) I'm sorry that the whole situation has an Orwellian ring to it. We live in a world where technology has enabled invisible government forces to quickly look into many previously private aspects of our lives. This is an unfortunate side effect of modern convenience, the same convenience that allows terrorists to quickly organise themselves and pass information over great distances in real time. The two conditions are made mutually inclusive by the techonolgy involved. Telling the government to piss up a rope and expecting the terrorists will do the same is nothing short of sticking your head in the sand hoping it all just goes away. It won't.

All true. I'm a little disappointed this post didn't take off. Maybe the topic is too obscure.

There are a number of problems with this scheme: - Like our own gun registry, this system only targets law-abiders. Anyone who uses encryption for legitimate purposes will register their encryption key. Terrorists will not. Failure to comply with registration rules is nothing compared to the other stuff they're doing. - If a company decides to change their security system and / or update their encryption key they will have to re-register to be in compliance. What if the registration system goes down? What if you've been hacked and want to make changes today, but it takes a week for the government to get up to speed? If you are checked for compliance during the window between updating your own system and the government updating their records, will you be charged with non-compliance? How much of a hassle will it be to beat the charges? There's plenty of potential for nightmare scenarios there. And, as I mentioned above, these nightmares will only apply to people who have an interest in following the law. If your business is really a terrorist front there's little likelihood you're going to mind shutting down operations and fleeing if you're charged. Only a business with aspirations to permanency has to worry about the consequences.