Monthly Archives: June 2006

On Friday it came out that the US Federal Government has been monitoring financial transactions with the same zeal as they have been monitoring email and phone calls.  The database that the Department of JustUs (Their motto:  “It’s Just Us”) tapped into is called SWIFT or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions.  

SWIFT is the clearinghouse for, as the name states, the electronic moving of money from A to B.  They handle about 11 million messages a day.  Not the actual transfer, but the details about the transaction.  From whom and what account, how much and to whom into what account, in what currency, at what time.  It is essentially the log of the bank transactions. 

The idea, post 9/11 was to track the cash to and from Al Qaeda, identify the various cells and put names to the cement heads involved.  The Department of JustUs didn’t want this to be commonly known.  Part of surveillance is to not let those who are being watched, to know that they are being watched, so you can see who plays with them, supports them and the various goings on.  I can buy into some secrecy on a limited basis.

We know that the US Feds have been spying on domestic citizens’ phone calls, emails and financial records for several years, without warrants, as part of the Patriot Act and a couple of Executive Orders.  This, of course, is contrary to Amendment IV, ratified December 15, 1791, of the US Constitution, which reads thusly:  

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.  

Incidentally, the lads who put this little gem into the US Constitution had just come through a war they eventually won.  The British would routinely intercept mail, bust down doors, terrorize families, cart off the husbands under various ‘charges’, burn down barns, pay informants to eavesdrop and do everything in their power to crush the Rebellion as it was an issue of Colonial Security.  

What the DoJ is doing is data mining.  The data piles into a big database, Rob Scrimger can comment on how to do it.  Next, a clever bit-head writes a stored procedure to ask the following questions:  Find me all the bank transactions from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and Afghanistan to the US, or to an intermediate country that winds up in the US.  

Then, of that group, find me all the transactions that are less than $10,000 in value.  Ten thou is the threshold that all US banks must report, by law, to get around money laundering.  A good financier of cement heads would make sure that the transaction won’t set off the RICO trigger for compulsory reporting. 

Now, find any transaction that is readily divisible by 2, 5 or 10 and throw them out.  This is the Rule of Expense Account Padding.  If you put in for $300 worth of expenses, all the auditor bells go off, but $309.43 must be true, as it is too strange a number to be anything but legit.  Nobody with a brainstem would transfer a round number to a cement head.  But just to be sure, check where the transactions came from.  If the transaction is from an individual, not a bank, flag it for me, even if it is divisible by 2, 5, or 10.  

Last step:  Print out all the transactions left over.  Show me the names, addresses and account information with that transfer:  Turn the list over to the G-Men with simple orders:  Watch these people closely and cross names off the list as we go.   

Invariably you will find the vast majority of transactions are benign:  Tuition payments, bills, lending cash to a relative, charitable donations and such.  Odds are most individuals do this once a month, or only a few times a year.  Banks shoot big numbers back and forth, hourly.   

This is data mining at its simplest.  It is what the DoJ is doing with the SWIFT data.  Add in a list of phone calls to and from known cement heads and email to and from cement heads, all gong to the same address then you have what would be described as a person of interest.  

Was the test of no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized fulfilled? Ummmm.  

Today, Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the nation’s chief law enforcer "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times _ the reporters, the editors and the publisher."

"We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told The Associated Press.  

This is called trying to muzzle the media to get them to stop looking too closely at what the government is doing.  I shouldn’t have to quote the First Amendment, but I will:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  

In 1972 Richard Nixon and the Committee to Re-Elect the President used the IRS and the FBI to put the screws to publishers, activists and enemies with either overt actions, or the threats of actions to muzzle dissent and force the media to not look too closely.  

The Washington Post ignored the pliers to the scrotum approach and brought us Watergate:  A sitting President, Richard Nixon, resigned in disgrace two years after winning the biggest plurality in Presidential election history.  America was appalled beyond belief at what went on.  

So, back to the title:  Uppity Canadian.  Why is an uppity Canadian explaining this stuff to a partially American audience?  I have a hidden agenda I’m going to tell you about.  

In Canada we‘ve elected a Dubya jock-sniffer and Cheney-wannabe called Steven Harper.  Harper is watching what Dubya is getting away with.  He’s going to try to get some of that.  I don’t want a government microphone in my apartment.     

Judging by the media coverage, the American public does not care that their cherished rights as enshrined in their Constitution are being eaten whole by a government and a President who have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted to make photocopies, let alone respect important rights.  

If I can remind you folks south of the 49^th about your constitutional rights, you might do something about it.  If your media grows a set and starts to poke into the really illegal, really stinky things your government is doing, then I can benefit. 

The outrages being done today make the Watergate heinousness look like a five year old pinching a Dubble-Bubble at the supermarket.  This isn’t stain-on-a-dress impeachability.  We’re talking stuff even a grade four student in a US public school can see is truly wrong.  

Our government will see Dubya and his cronies get tossed out on Blue Box day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Then Steven Harper will back down and take his brownshirt bund back to the Tar Sands where they belong.  

See?  I told you I had an agenda.

Some catchup from previous posts.   

The seventeen Canadian terrorist suspects have, or have not, been charged with all kinds of things, or not.  The judge slapped a publication ban on all the proceedings.  This means that the media can’t report on the trial or trials.  Consequently, we can’t tell if it was a righteous bust or not.  

I understand and respect the publication ban on the Young Offenders, as that is how the Young Offenders Act is written:  Zero Coverage allowed.  However, for the other dozen, I’d much prefer to see the goods.  Not that I don’t have all the faith in government and the justice system required by a good citizen, but there are times when good citizens should apply a bit of scrutiny.  This is one of them.  

I haven’t written, except parenthetically, about the Stanley Cup Playoffs, as I am a poor excuse for a Canadian:  I don’t give a suede-covered flying copulative act about ice hockey.  I think the Edmonton Petroleum Workers and the Carolina Atmospheric Disturbances are playing in the last game.  

My understanding is the Carolina Atmospheric Disturbances won.  I missed the game: I had to go out and buy a comb last night. 

The World Cup is taking up the time of several dozen fellow employees in the Mothership cafeteria.  They are glued to the tube.  I appreciate soccer/football, as there is an element of skill to the game and this is their Big Show.  Good for them.   

I also see hundreds of cars driving around the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) with little fan flags flying from their windows.  You’ve seen them, the flag of Togo, or Brazil, or Croatia on a little plastic antenna that you wedge into your rear window.  

There are other, more dedicated, fans who have painted their entire car with the colours of their team.  I can only hope they did it with water-based paint that will scrub off, or there will have to be some explaining to the Significant Other about the state of the automobile. 

Dubya has gone off script again.  Today he’s demanding UN Security Council action on Iran (the one next door to Iraq, that isn’t invaded, yet) and their nuclear weapons insanity.  His henchmen are flogging the possibility that Al Qaeda cementheads were going to poison the New York Subway with cyanide.  

I’ve been in the NYC Subway.  New Yorkers wouldn’t notice that everyone around them was keeling over unless they dropped their Starbucks and some of it splashed on them.  Then, there would be hell to pay:  “You’re payin’ for the dry cleanin, motherfu…gak!”  Thud.   

What is actually happening is the scare-mongers are trying to get you cranked up some more.  It is the usual Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, Box Cutters on City Busses, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and unidentified Black Man with a Gun rap.   

I forgot the last coda of that rap:  Al Gore is a putz and Global Warming is a hoax.  Hillary Clinton wants to force your daughter to have an abortion.  A Mexican Illegal Alien is coming to kick you out of your house.  Someone from India is gong to take your job.  

A frightened populace is a compliant populace. You can make 280 million people demand to be ear tagged, tattooed with a number and cavity-searched daily, if you frighten them often enough.  By my take, the American population is nicely compliant right now. 

Racing with street cars is amazingly exciting.  Look at the film franchise “Fast and the Furious” who glamorize street racing.  Watch “Pinks!” on the Discovery Channel if you want to see street performance.  Or look at the drifting phenomenon to see that young people, horsepower and a certain lack of brains is a thrilling, but potentially dangerous confluence.   

Every year innocent bystanders get killed by street racing.  Street racing crashes are almost always at high speed, usually fatal to at least one person and cause significant damage to the rest.  The Canadian Federal government has brought in legislation that makes street racing a Criminal Code offense, with up to 14 years in prison for killing someone while street racing.  

The Deity knows I love performance cars, hot rods and sports cars.  There is something indefinably beautiful and perfect about the Dodge Daytona in Petty Blue.  Or a ’49 Merc lead sled that has been slammed and shaved with frenched headlights and lake pipes.  For those who just said “Wha??” type those terms into your favourite search engine and see what I mean. 

I’m not coming down on those who peel out, or burn out, or lay a patch at the local Burger Hut parking lot in their muscle car.  Amish kids probably compete to see who can get the horse-drawn buggy out of the meeting house parking lot first.  It is normal.  Dumb, but normal.  Racing is something else. 

The only place to actually race is on a track with a helmet, firesuit, rollcage, competition belts and a full safety, fire and ambulance crew on site, ready to go.  These things are needed when, not if, an amateur driver exceeds their imagined driving talents. 

Some provinces have or are considering banning nitrous oxide injection systems on street cars.  It is essentially the same nitrous oxide your dentist would feed you, except in a car engine, it does amazing things.  

Take a Ford Taurus, Built With Pride in Chicago by Ford.  From the factory it has 155 horsepower.  Apply $1,000 for the nitrous kit, a day and a half of a mechanics’ time and you have a 250 to 400 horsepower Taurus.  If that can’t get you to the IGA in half the time, then you’re not trying.  There are no legitimate technical reasons for nitrous oxide injection on a street car except for street racing. 

I would like to see what I call a “Pinks!” law passed for street racing.  It isn’t Zero Tolerance, but it sets reasonable standards for those who want to own a hot rod or a performance car, which is perfectly legal to own and enjoy. 

A “Pinks!” law works like this.  If the cops stop you for suspected street racing, there are two checks. 

First, is there working nitrous on the car?  This is not hard to spot with two or three hours training.  Cops have rudimentary automotive technical training:  They can seize your plates if your car is judged unsafe.  Running nitrous?  Lose Your Ride. 

Second, how fast were they going?  If the vehicle was more than 49 kilometers per hour over the speed limit you Lose Your Ride.     

I don’t mean lose your ride for a week, or thirty days or three months.  I mean you Lose Your Ride.  On the spot, no negotiations, no tearful appeals, hand over the keys, Insta-Justice.  Show up at the court date and fight the charge.  If you win, you can have it back, otherwise it belongs to the police. 

It would take, oh, maybe three confiscations for the word to get out:  They Ain’t Kidding. 

If you want to drive your high performance street rocket to a race track, I have no problems as long as the vehicle is legal and you obey the usual laws, speed limits and stop signs.   

At the track you can sign the waivers, hook up the nitrous bottle, put on the racing slicks and whip out your badboy attitude.  Race until your brain is fried and your wallet is flattened.  I’ll even come and watch some summer night.  Run what ya brung.  

I do appreciate the run what ya brung ethic, performance cars and street racing. 

In 1972, some people, whom I may or may not know, believed very deeply in run what ya brung.  What they brung was an A/Fuel Altered to Carling Avenue in Ottawa. 

The car was called Bad Science and it ran on a combination of liquid nitromethane and Sunoco 260 gasoline.  It was no where near vaguely legal to be on a city street.  There were no front brakes, limited rear brakes, no lights, no signals, no mirrors and no speedometer.   

It did have a tubular welded steel chassis, one seat, M/H racing slicks and a parachute.  Other options included a 427 cubic inch Chevy big block with a 6-71 Roots supercharger.  From each cylinder, the exhaust pipes were as big around as a coffee can.  There were no mufflers. 

It is rumored that someone I may or may not know, put a mixture of chlorine bleach and gasoline under the rear wheels.  The driver, it is alleged, spun the rear wheels in the fluid, igniting it in a ball of flames and smoke to warm the tires before the start of the run.  This would have purportedly happened in the parking lot of the Fairlawn Plaza, but I wouldn’t know about that. 

I would also suspect that several hundred people in the neighbourhood, trying to sleep, with the bedroom windows open on an August night, sat bolt upright in bed thinking the World Had Ended.  A fuel car in those days would make a noise like 6300 artillery cannons going off in your bedroom every minute, with about the same amount of flame and smoke. 

It was also alleged that Bad Science left two long, smoldering streaks of rubber for 1000 feet along Carling Avenue.  I also have no information about Bad Science being hustled into a covered trailer immediately after the run.  Or the trailer being spirited away before the police showed up. 

Street race?  Never.  We need a “Pinks!” law.

Track race?  If I had the money and the car, I’d be there.  Allegedly.

North Korea is ‘close to testing’ a long range ballistic missile.  So says Dubya’s meat puppet, Tony Snow in a story on the Associated Press today.  If Snow isn’t full of it and Kim Jong-Il is for real, then you and I have a problem. 

Here’s the short geography lesson to get you located:  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is North Korea, the unfriendly one.  It is owned and operated by Kim Jong-Il, the guy with the bad perm, heel lifts and the movie addiction.  It has not been confirmed that North Korea has nuclear weapons, but a lot of the sideband chatter says they either do, or are so close as to make no difference.  North Korea has one side of the 38^th parallel, too many people, not enough food and a standing army that wants to do something other than standing at attention in the morning, then executing political prisoners in the afternoon.

The Republic of Korea, the one we know as South Korea, isn’t terrifically friendly either, if truth be told.  South Korea does understand that countries turned into glowing, radioactive, glass lakes don’t buy enough ships, cars, marine engines, HDTV’s, cell phones, computers, clothing and home appliances to make it profitable for Hyundai, Samsung and LG.  South Korea does not have nukes.  They have a lot of American troops, the other side of the 38^th parallel and some UN folks standing around looking important in their blue hats.

North Korea is kissin’ buddies with China.  South Korea is kissin’ buddies with the United States.  Both those countries have nukes.  China has an international dialing plan for their missiles:  The US can reach out and touch anyone, anytime, anywhere.  North Korea might be able to hit Alaska with a limited payload.

The standoff is the old Cold-War-Mutually-Assured-Destruction-SuperPower-War-By-Proxy game of Don’t Blink. 

Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or NATO and the Warsaw Pact until 1990, we aren’t eyeball to eyeball with reasonably pragmatic, approximately sane, Soviet leaders:  If the technology works, the US will be eyeball to eyeball with Kim Jong-Il and by proxy, whoever is on the big chair in Beijing this week. 

The US cannot preemptively bomb North Korea, even with conventional bombs.  China would be very unhappy with the US doing anything in the backyard.  South Korea can’t do anything about it, as that tweaks China’s nose too.  Japan might have the tools and the moxie, but if Kim Jong-Il’s Taepodong-2 missile can reach the US, then hitting Japan is dial 9 for an outside line easy and puts a damper on Japan hitting first. 

England and France are too far away to care.  India and Pakistan are more concerned about making grumpy noises at each other.  Israel may or may not:  They’re being coy.  Russia has re-aimed the four or five missiles they have left at Beijing, figuring, hell, if we’re going to go, let’s all do the Apocalypso.

All it takes is one jittery, unstable, none-too-bright, warmonger Daddy’s Boy with a grudge, to escalate this beyond all sense.  This narrows our choices down to Kim Jong-Il and George Walker Bush.  We know how one of them responds to ‘foreigners’ and threats, real, imagined or manufactured.

Here’s my prediction:  Within three months expect to see a Presidential “Cuban Missile Crisis” type of briefing on television.  If you think you’re frightened now about terrorist Al Qaeda cells looking to bomb your local Wal-Mart, imagine how North Korean and China will be demonized.  The Terror Alert Pez Dispenser is going to be pinned on Red.

This is a great way to get your Star Wars II program funded for your buddies.  What?  StarWars II?  Originally a bad hashish dream of Ronald Regan who had been taking too many hits off the bong with Nancy, StarWars was shown to be a complete technical hallucination.  Dubya trotted it out in 2004 as a way to defend the US from “rogue nations” like Indonesia, Libya and, drum roll please, North Korea.    

StarWars II, more properly, the Missile Defense Shield, never went away.  The US doesn’t have the cash to shovel into it right now as they have boots on the sand in Iraq.

But an invisible threat by crazy, Godless communist yellow people a half a world away in a country that you can’t actually invade with expensive troops?  This has promise.  They can pull the troops out of Iraq with impunity and bring them home, freeing up some serious money for StarWars II. 

Keep in mind that it won’t be the top 1%, Dubya’s base, who will take a huge tax hit to ‘protect our homes with an umbrella of American technology to defend us from those evildoers of the Axis of Evil with their nukleer missiles who mean to do us harm.”  The top 1% own the companies that are going to make a bundle.  You are going to be frightened into paying for it.

It puts any Democratic Presidential candidate in a box for the next ten years.  The Republicans could exhume Richard Nixon’s remains and win, as long as the press release said he was in favour of StarWarsII  to protect the US of A and be a ‘beacon of freedom to all the freedom loving peoples of the world”

North Korea doesn’t want to attack or invade North America.  They can’t take the ground, they can’t hold the ground if they did invade, and they wouldn’t know what to do with North America if they could take it and hold it.  North Korea needs us as a place to sell things to earn enough money to get by.  They can’t feed their own people, let alone take over another country.

You could cut a deal and get North Korea to sit down and shut the fuck up, with four freighters of Canadian wheat and a tanker of oil.  A quiet negotiation and a simple settlement is not the War President’s way. 

He must have a Legacy.  And his buddies must have more money.   

The 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race just ended.  Twenty-four hours of very fast racing on an eight mile circuit that weaves around the Loire.  On par with the Monaco Grand Prix, Indy 500 and the Paris-Dakar Rally, Le Mans is one of those races that sit at the top of the mountain.  Just about everyone has at least heard about Le Mans. 

The top two winning endurance racers were from Audi:  They build remarkable racing machines and quite wonderful street cars.  Externally, the winners looked sleek, powerful:  Low-slung, fat-tired, voluptuously curved, purpose-built weapons designed to violate the laws of aerodynamics, velocity, gravity and common-sense.  They are racing cars.  Brutes.  These two from Audi were very different under the skin. 

They are powered by Diesel engines.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that pulled close to 300 kilometers per hour on the Mulsanne straight.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that would pull nearly 2 G of lateral force in corners.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that run on oil, not gasoline, or alcohol, or exotic fuels created by mad scientists. 

Audi winning Le Mans overall, with a Diesel, is the moral equivalent of winning the Tour de France on a unicycle, while drunk.   Then, nailing the Triple Crown on three-legged Shetland pony, hoisting the Stanley Cup with a team of eleven-year olds, and winning the Masters playing with an aluminum softball bat, a sod shovel and a snooker cue.

In the rest of the world, the Diesel engine is the engine of choice for family cars.  The reason the rest of the planet likes Diesels is simple:  The fuel costs a lot less and the engines will last, almost forever, with the usual maintenance.  Fuel economy is much better than gasoline and the pulling ability (torque) of the Diesel is huge. 

In North America, we relegate the Diesel to trucks, transports and heavy equipment because of their pulling power and their fuel economy.  There are the occasional eco-oddballs who run their personal diesel car on a mixture of recycled safflower oil, rendered goat grease and cat urine.  Diesels will burn just about anything in a pinch.

The Audi TDI’s proved that you can have a blindingly fast, reliable and proven Diesel engine that will out-perform the world’s best endurance racers.  This is cool.

There are two drawbacks to the Diesel, to North American sensibilities.  One is the odd clopping sound they make.  We’re used to the bang-bang-bang of a gasoline engine.  There is the smoke that Diesels produce.  We’ve imbedded the image of a smoky truck or bus in our brains filling the air with choking clouds of foul-smelling soot. 

The next time you’re on a highway, look at the exhaust stacks of most tractor-trailer trucks.  Modern Diesels very rarely smoke, unless under a big load, like starting to move at the stoplight and then only for a moment.  With engine control computers, particulate traps and turbo-charging, the Diesel is quite clean, compared to a gasoline engine.  Diesels only smoke when there is something wrong with them, meaning someone is not doing the maintenance, or has modified the engine somehow.

Roll down the windows too.  You won’t hear the screaming of a cage of angry bears coming from the truck.  The noise you hear is from the tires or the airflow, not the engine, especially at cruising speeds on the highway.  I was passed by a truck last week on the 401 highway.  He was flogging the truck unmercifully, running more than 130 kms an hour with a full 53-foot load.  The loudest sound I heard through the open window on my car, was the rear set of tires whining on the pavement. 

You can buy a Diesel passenger car from some manufacturers here.  Notably, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen.  The Asian imports, who sell thousands of Diesels overseas, don’t send their full line of engine choices to North America.  Domestic manufacturers only make Diesels available on their truck lines. 

Why?  That is easy enough to answer.  Gas engines are cheaper to make.  Gasoline is dirt cheap here, by world standards.  The oil companies don’t like Diesel.

Modern fuels all start from crude oil feedstock.  Crude, depending on which one, is thick and dark like molasses or heavy brown corn syrup.  To fraction, or break down crude into component fluids, you boil it, under pressure, in a big tower called a cracking tower.  The higher up the tower you drain off the fluid, the different type of fuel you get.  I am truly simplifying here, but that is the process, more or less. 

Look at a cup of gasoline:  Sort of a watery feel and very aromatic, meaning it vaporizes quickly.  Pour out a cup of Diesel oil and it just sits there like tan coloured, thin, corn syrup and doesn’t smell much, meaning it isn’t as volatile as gasoline.

Then, as a comparison, pour out a cup of Coleman stove fuel, which is naptha, or white gas.  It is clear like water, light to the feel and seems to evaporate before your eyes.  Naptha is drained off almost at the top of the cracking tower.

Bunker Oil, which is even darker and nastier than Diesel, is for ship engines and big generators.  It is only about one step removed from the crude oil that comes out of the ground, with the obvious rocks, gravel and small animals filtered out.

Here’s the Rule of Thumb:  The thicker and darker the petroleum product, the less work it takes to refine, which means the less it costs to make, which means the less you can mark it up. This means the less profit you can make on the product. 

We now have two big industries, oil and automotive, who have, shall we call it, a vested interest in keeping North America away from Diesel power for their passenger cars, as long as they can keep dancing.