Category Archives: News and politics

This is the part I’m looking forward to:  Food. 

Humans need to eat food, usually a few times a day.  The food must be healthy, clean, safe and nutritious.  Humans do not live long on a diet of gravel and sawdust, washed down with a cup of kerosene. 

Since we need food and the Earth has a fair amount of it, this is good place to stay.  Now, I’m going to let you in on a secret:  Don’t tell anyone. 

Humans eat other living things, including animals.  Lettuce is a living thing until the farmer yanks it out of the ground and tomatoes are alive until twisted off the vine.  Wheat is a living grass until swathed, husked, ground into flour and baked into bread. 

Take two slices of bread, apply heat from electricity to caramelize the sugars in the bread, then smear on a little congealed milk fat from a pregnant bovine.  At the same time, take two slices of raw, fatty, salted, pig flesh from the side or belly of a pig (You do have to kill the whole pig) apply heat to render out the fat, then solidify and caramelize the remaining proteins. 

Slice the tomatoes, the reproductive organ of the tomato plant, add a leaf of the until-recently alive lettuce, two slices of that cooked pig belly and a bit of dried, ground up fruit from the piper nigrum vine. 

Perhaps you want to add an emulsion of undeveloped chicken fetuses torn from their shells, whisked with spoiled white wine and some fruit from an olive tree that have been pressed until oil squirts out. 

You get a Toasted BLT with Mayo.  Now, I am being silly, but just the same…

The healthier the living things we eat, the healthier we humans are.  Lettuce is something you could grow yourself, so you would know exactly how healthy it is.  Same with tomatoes, corn, or papayas, if you can can grown papayas where you live.  

Most urban North Americans don’t grow their own food.  We go to supermarkets and trust that everyone else involved in making our food did things right.  Most of the time the system works well enough.  It is most often when basic, simple foods are messed with that we get into problems.

Read the side of a box of just about any prepared food.  If you can’t pronounce or recognize the names of the ingredients, then there are too many things in there:  The food is over-processed.  

That isn’t to say that it is bad for you, in fact, vitamin fortified milk is actually good for you, but is Polysorbate 80?  Is Xanthan Gum really necessary?  Does artificial flavor do anything for the essential nutrition of what you are putting in your mouth?

Good food is food that is as natural as feasible.  A chicken raised on untreated grains and allowed to run around without being jammed full of vitamins and antibiotics is a fairly natural product. 

Cows, in a natural state, are ruminants who eat grass or grains and drink a lot of water.  If the grass is clean and free of pesticides and the water is pure, then you get a healthy cow.  Feeding a cow ‘bone meal’ increases the calcium in the milk, which is good for us.  However, bone meal is dead cow parts ground up and dried, which is not good.  

Kreutzfeld-Jacobs disease, or Mad Cow disease was a direct result of agricultural businesses making animals become cannibals.  Very few animals eat others of the same species.  Lobsters come to mind and that’s about it.

The less number of ingredients in your food is good, but then there is the Green side of it. 

Papaya does not grow in Ontario, but I can get papayas, mangoes, star fruit, taro, yucca and all kinds of weird produce at my local store, all year long.  Almost all of it is trucked or flown in, which costs energy to do, as well as the energy to store it before it gets to the supermarket.  Tomatoes from Chile, Bananas from Ecuador, Cucumbers from Costa Rica, Oranges from the US, all takes trucks, trains, ships and planes to get that stuff to us.

There is a concept called the "100 Mile Diet" in which you try to eat or consume things that are grown, harvested, slaughtered, made, woven, or wrought within 100 miles of where you live.  The idea is that you support local farmers, local businesses, local craftspeople and local manufacturing.  It costs less energy to get the stuff to you and the sources being closer, you can see how organic, or sustainable, or Green the producer really is.

It is a good idea.  However, it also means that in February you might be living on salt pork, sauerkraut, onions, storage potatoes, and home-canned fruit.  It is do-able but not rating high on the fun scale without a lot of work.  For me, the various pharmaceuticals I have to take to keep from dying, come from more than 100 miles away.  Some come from Indianapolis, others from Richmond Hill and some from Montreal.

But the concept is sound.  Buy local as much as you can.  The Mississauga Farmer’s Market is about two blocks away from here.  You can walk up to the grower, ask questions about how they grow their food and even taste it before you buy it.  I’d rather give a local farmer my money, directly, than a produce broker in New Jersey who sells it to a distributor, to a middleman, to a store, then on the shelves. 

The less hands and fingers involved with my food, the potentially healthier it will be and the greater potential that there was the least amount of non-renewable energy expended to get me to the point of cleaning up crumbs after eating a BLT with Mayo. 

Which brings us to water. 

Humans are about 90% water.  We need to drink clean, fresh, uncontaminated water to live. For that matter, all the things we eat need clean, fresh, uncontaminated water too.  Bad water applied to things we eat, means we get sick, sometimes quickly, like E. Coli tainted spinach, sometimes slowly, like mercury in tuna, or fire retardant in breast milk.   

Using the Great Lakes as a toilet is Stupid.  Running a dishwasher for three cups, two plates a handful of utensils and a cutting board is also Stupid.  Allowing businesses to dump manufacturing effluent into a body of water is Stupid.  Using water to keep a lawn green is Stupid, especially in a desert.

Potable water, the stuff that comes out of your tap, most often called ‘city’ water is generally clean, pure and healthful to drink.  Rain water, the stuff that falls from the sky, is not, legally, potable water.  However, it works just fine to irrigate crops, water the lawn, wash the car, or to hose down the family dachshund.  I am assuming your roof isn’t covered with diseased carrion or nuclear waste. 

Collecting rainwater is sensible and Green, reducing your use of potable water, but there are improvements that could be made.  By law, all the water that comes into a house must be drinkable by humans.  The water in the tank of your toilet is perfectly safe, potable water.  The water that departs after you flush, is not.  We must be protected from sewage and that makes sense.  But the water from your shower, or from the dishes is, aside from being soapy, or greasy, or tainted with crumbs from a BLT with Mayo, is perfectly fine for the garden.

What we need is a way going forward to keep potable water, greywater and sewage separate.  Sewage we all agree needs thorough treatment.  Greywater, like the shower, the laundry or the dishes needs a little treatment.  Potable water is already clean.  Ideally there would be two sewer pipes coming out of the house.  One for the sewage and one for greywater.

Following on, trying to be even more Green, one would go over to a composting toilet and use composted human waste as fertilizer.  However, it doesn’t quite work in an urban highrise apartment building.  The retrofit costs are too high and the payback is too nebulous for a landlord.  There is also the "ick!" factor of using composted human waste products in a garden that is hard to get over, but is done in a number of countries, quite safely.

Reducing the amount of water you use is easy.  Make sure the dishwasher is full before you run it.  Use biodegradable soap and laundry detergent, as it takes less energy to clean the waste water.  Don’t spend forty-five minutes under the shower, unless there is some very strong, compelling medical reason why.  Use water restricting shower heads and taps.  Put a bucket in the shower and use that water on the petunias or the impatiens.  If you can, get a rain barrel and hook it up to your downspout to water the lawn.  Capturing rain water means you can screw the Water Company out of a few dollars, which always feels good. 

And the last two?  Fix leaky taps.  Hire someone, or learn how to do it yourself. The final one is this ditty:  "If it’s yellow, let it mellow.  If it’s brown, send it down."  

The industrial side of it is a little harder to fix.  Perhaps a law that the CEO of every company that uses water in their processes, must drink a liter of their wastewater every month.  That would ensure that the water leaving a factory would be just as clean as the water going in.

A test. Remember our three core facts from the first post?

1) Oil is a finite resource.  We don’t know how much is left.

2) Food is important.  If you don’t eat, you don’t shit.  If you don’t shit, you die.

3) Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the Universe and I’m not convinced about Hydrogen.

Electricity comes from coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear or hydroelectric generation, with a percentage from solar, geothermal or wind.  All the good rivers for hydroelectric generation are taken, so that leaves mostly oil-based and nuclear-based:  Things burning to make heat.

Making electricity most often means making heat to make steam to turn turbines to generate the electricity.  A nuclear reactor is a way to make heat to make steam.  The downside of nuclear generation is the waste will kill you and we don’t quite have a handle on how to keep the waste safe for five thousand years, despite what the commercials say. 

We can’t uninvent nuclear and we haven’t figured out how to make it go away safely.  Let’s just leave nuclear generation of electricity at the level where it is and not make any more problems for ourselves.  As the nuclear plants age out, shut them down. 

That leaves oil-based generation and the percentage of renewable energy generation.  Coal and natural gas are for our purposes, oil-based.  Wind works well enough but solar has issues, as we have clouds on this planet and solar doesn’t work at night.  Geothermal is not widely available, like in Iceland where almost all their electricity comes from geothermal sources.  Maybe there is an active volcano in Mississauga, but I haven’t found it yet.  I think the city would tell us if there was. 

The issue is only partially how we make electricity.  The underlying issue is the storage of electricity.  You can’t store it, except in batteries (or the energy potential in a dam, but those are all taken) and batteries aren’t enough for cities or businesses. 

Just to make it harder, you have to make electricity near where the users of electricity live, as those pesky electrons don’t like to travel very far.  Lazy buggers those electrons. 

Which leads us to:  Reducing the use of electricity means using less oil-based generation.  How do you reduce your personal use of electricity?

Compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs last longer, generate less heat and provide significant energy saving over the course of a year.  I have exactly two conventional incandescent lights now.  One in the stove and one in the fridge.  The rest are CF or low-voltage halogen.  I’m saving my landlord money, but the concept is the same:  Not using as much electricity as I could.

Living in a highrise apartment, I face north, so I don’t use as much air conditioning as a south facing apartment, however, when I go to work, I close the drapes and reset the thermostat to not cool the apartment, unless the temperature gets over 90 F, or 30 C. 

When I get home, I turn the AC on, if things are too muggy and turn if off at night.  In the winter, the heat might come on five times a day, as a twenty-floor concrete building is a fabulous heat sink.  Every unit around me is heated, so the only thing I technically heat are the windows.  I would, if I could, put all this on an electronic thermostat, to do it automatically for me, in case I forget. 

Yes, the fridge runs all the time.  So does this computer, the router and the cable modem.  There is the usual leakage of what are called vampires.  The cable box, the microwave, or anything that could be blinking 12:00 -12:00 – 12:00 uses some electricity to keep the clock running and the electronics warm. 

For example, your TV never really turns all the way ‘off’, despite what the button on the remote says.  If you hook an ammeter up to a TV, you’ll see it still draws electricity to keep the power supply and the picture tube idling.  When you press ‘on’, the electron guns in the picture tube are ready to show you Dr. Phil in about a second. 

Otherwise it is like the Ye Olde Days Of Television where you would power up the mighty Philco or Electrohome and wait 30 to 60 seconds for the tubes to come up to temperature before you could see the Indian Head Test Pattern on WWNY-TV from Watertown, NY.  Captain Kangaroo is going to be on soon!

Ideally, you should unplug those culprits. However, the geek in me is deeply offended by electronics that blink 12:00 – 12:00 – 12:00, so I don’t.  I offset that by physically turning off the computer monitor at the power switch, which on an LCD display, actually stops power draw.

By the way, if you have an older computer monitor, the big tube-type conventional display, you might think you’re using less power by using a screen saver.  You would be wrong. 

Look at the monitor, running the ‘blank’ screen saver in a dark room.  You’ll see the electron guns in the picture tube are actually painting ‘black’ on the screen, which means they’re using electricity.  Hit the power switch for the display and see what ‘off’ really looks like.  Leave the computer itself running if you want to, but turn the display off with the power button and you have reduced the electricity demand by about 70 percent for that computer.  Or, break down and buy an LCD display that uses significantly less electricity.

Rule of Thumb?  If it is electronic and feels warm, it is probably using electricity.  Don’t unplug hospital equipment please.  There are some things that should be running all the time and Grandpa Hubert’s ventilator is one of them. 

Using less electricity means using less oil, coal, natural gas or other stuff that burns and we can’t replace. 

There are Green electricity sources.  Wind power is one I like, as the technology is very simple and simple is usually very Green.  In my perfect world, there would be a modest, self contained electricity generating wind turbine on the top of any building more than three stories high.  Everyone would generate a bit of wind power and that which the building didn’t use would go back into the grid. 

This would mean that the electrical meter on your house would have to spin in two directions.  One way when you’re using electricity that you aren’t generating yourself and costing you money. The meter would spin the other way when you are generating more electricity than you are using, saving you money, deducting from your bill. 

Theoretically, you could be getting a cheque from the Electrical utility and not paying for any of your energy use, as you are generating enough for your own needs and then some.  Needless to say, the electricity companies are not keen on this, as the centralized, metered and highly regulat
ed generation of electricity is how they make grotesque amounts of money. 

Until a government with a set of big attachments orders a change, all we can realistically do is use less electricity.  We can always yell at the government, but we’ve seen how well that works most of the time.

When it comes to Green electricity, there are some excellent things going on with wind power.  Germany is the leader in using a highly distributed grid of wind turbines to supplement their conventional generation.  You find small clumps of wind turbines all over the countryside in Germany, turning gently, rolling out a few more kilowatts of power.  Multiply that times thousands of individual turbines and you cut back on the amount of stuff that gets burned to power your Nintendo Wii, xBox360 or electronic garlic press.

In the Bruce Peninsula, towards Owen Sound, there are several modest sized wind power farms that add some more electrons to the bucket.  There are people who consider them a blight on the landscape and others who are vitally concerned about the rare species of innocent Pileated Monk Gulls that die horrible deaths flying into the whirling Blades Of Death at a wind farm. 

Both sides are right, but both are also being stupid.  If we don’t reduce our consumption of oil-based electricity, then the Pileated Monk Gull (I made it up, don’t bother searching for Pileated Monk Gull) and the rest of us are going to die because the atmosphere will be unbreathable.  The clouds of pollution will make it impossible to see the landscape anyways.  Objections to wind farms as aesthetic blights or as a Bird Cuisinart are not looking at the larger good, over a longer term. 

There are some nifty technologies.  The Peel Region Algonquin Power program burns material that will not compost to generate heat, to make steam to make electricity.  This also includes the international airline garbage, that must, by law, be incinerated for safety reasons.  The system burns it twice, the second time in a high temperature (+1,000 F) oxygen-rich environment to make sure all the little bits are sterilized. 

The fly ash is captured, the exhaust heat is recirculated to extract as much energy as possible, then scrubbed with water, catalysts and activated carbon to clean it.  The dregs are scanned with a big magnet to collect any ferrous metals that might have melted out, then the final bits are used as part of the daily landfill cover.  Peel has several kilometers of roads paved with a mix of asphalt and bottom ash from the incinerator and so far, it seems to work fine. 

Incineration doesn’t mean we can throw everything into the trash and forget about it.  The Peel Region program however, does show that if you must incinerate stuff, you should suck every last erg of energy out of it using all the technology you can to make it as safe as you can, to make electricity and find a way to use the leftovers too.

Geothermal is a superb idea.  The inside of our planet is very hot, molten rock.  Stick a tube into it and pump the heat up to a boiler to make steam, to make electricity.  Except the hot molten rock is five to ten miles below the surface of the earth and is nearly impossible to get at, unless you live on, or near volcanoes or geothermal hot spots.  In those locations, the hot rock from the interior of our planet are much closer to the surface. 

Iceland is is far along the process of using almost no oil to generate their electricity and Iceland gets dang cold in the winter too.  It is one answer, but is dependent upon having an active geothermal hotspot nearby.  This doesn’t quite work for most major cities.

That leaves us with solar:  Solar power has been around for more than 50 years and works well for cottages and travel trailers.  The two problems with solar are that it doesn’t scale up to feeding a business or town, and it doesn’t work at night.  You get caught in the storage issue of batteries, which works for individual houses, but doesn’t scale to a town of 25,000 people. 

It can also be argued that solar cells contain poisonous heavy metals like Cadmium Telluride, Copper Indium Selenide and Gallium Arsenide.  Solar cells are basically light sensitive transistors and most folks can’t whip up a batch in the bathtub over a weekend, paint it on the roof, hook up some wires and be done with the commercial grid.  Not to say that solar isn’t good, as it is very good, but as a percentage of renewable energy, not the whole answer.

The Whole Answer is a bit of everything.  Some wind, some solar, some super high efficiency burning of waste that would be going to a landfill anyways, with what ever we have left from hydroelectric sources and a declining amount of nuclear.           

The Rule of Thumb?  Burning things to make electricity is not good for the planet, as a general guideline.  If we must burn stuff, then have the sense to extract all the energy out of it and make sure that what is left is safe, benign, and reusable in something else that we need. 

Ideally, all electricity should be produced by falling water, blowing wind, or solar cells, as those are things don’t have a lot of footprint, are self-sustaining and we don’t have to technologize it too much.  

The easiest fix is to use less electricity in the first place.  Conservation.

Conservation is inexpensive to do.  It is easy to do, as long as you know how to screw in a lightbulb.  (I mean ‘screw in a lightbulb’ as in remove the current one and put a new one in, you dirty-minded jokesters)  Turn off lights and appliances you aren’t actively using.  Use less air conditioning or heating.  An electronic setback thermostat is cheap (about $50) and easy to install if you’re the forgetful type. 

Get a modern, high efficiency fridge, stove, washer, dryer or dishwasher the next time you have to replace a major appliance.  For those of us who have landlords, ask the direct question of them:  May I please have a new, Energy-Star certified Fridge and Stove?  It will save you, Mr. Landlord, a bunch of money on the electricity for the building and pay for itself in about five years.

There are some ‘activist’ things you can do, that are very simple.  If you shop at a store that is lit up like Christmas when we’re short of energy, ask the manager, very politely and nicely, if he or she would be so kind as to turn off about half the display lights in the store. 

If they can’t (and some corporations don’t give their store managers that kind of latitude) ask politely if the manager would be so kind as to tell head office that it would be good corporate citizenship for the business to cut back on their electricity use.  Leave it at that. 

You’ll be amazed what happens with anecdotal requests from customers that get passed up the corporate foodchain.  Retail is so cutthroat competitive that you might just be listened to.  Or fill out a customer comment card and ask them to cut back on the lights, please.  

As for the politicians.  Hmmm.  We can’t burn them for heat, as the laws discourage that.  We can’t harness the unmitigated manure that falls out of their mouths as a source of bio-fuel energy. 

About all we can do is remind them that conservation is much cheaper and faster than building new coal or nuclear plants.  Conservation can happen over a few months:  A new power plant takes about 5 years to bring online.  A new nuclear plant takes close to 15 years until it starts spitting out electrons. 

Five years from now might as well be 11,000 years from now to a politician, so bring your timeline down to months and use their unmedicated ADD to your advantage.  Green Now = Votes Now.  Use a colourful handpuppet and a funny voice if you have to. 

If they say they ‘have to study the implications and economic paradigms for transparency and efficacy’ you have a Stepford Candidate and should in all decency run away, taking your vote with you.  Let the colourful handpuppet tell them that, as you get the hell out of the constituency office. 

In the next installment, we’ll talk about Food.

President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, while in deep discussions with Vladimir Putin at the Cradle Of Idiocy in Kennebunkport, Maine, took time out to commute the sentence of Irving Lewis ‘Scooter" Libby just a few minutes ago.

Irving, if you remember, was looking at a couple of years federal time for being a lying sack of waste products, while working for Shotgun Dick Cheney.  Shotgun Dick and Kousin Karl knew that if Irv went to the Crowbar Hotel, the likelihood of him telling the whole truth when he got out, was very high, so they distracted President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy with the shiny side of a DVD and handed him a last-minute press release, commuting Scooter’s sentence.

Meanwhile, over at the Kennebunkport guest house, Vladimir Putin was cooling his heels, doing Sudokus with the Secret Service, waiting for the Jo Jo The Idiot Boy to come back from the meeting. 

Their conversations picked up where they left off, Putin talking about the downside of moving any Patriot Missile installations to Europe, while Dubya was daydreaming out loud about the Spice Girls getting back together and its impact on the Twins.

Putin left a few second later, saying he had an urgent appointment and he’d be back in a while.  Putin’s comment, "возьмите дерьмо" or "зажмите регистрацию" depending on how you interpret it, could mean closer ties in the lumber and building materials sectors, or, Putin was going to "pinch a log".

Meanwhile the conventional media is in a flat spin.  The White House has now officially jumped the shark and the media feel duty-bound to nail someone to the floor for the most flagrant abuse of Presidential Power since Gerald Ford gave a Kiss and a Hug to Richard Nixon after Watergate.

The political subtlety of the act of commuting Irving Libby’s sentence is on par with a Tasering and baton beating of The Constitution.  Which means it is beyond the mental ability of Jo Jo The Idiot Boy and can only be dumped on the desk of Cheney and Rove as the parties responsible.

Vladimir Putin meanwhile, after taking the sports section of Pravda with him on his mission, returned to a darkened meeting room.  Jo Jo had left the building.

The Assembly of First Nations Day of Action has come and gone.  For those who read the post "Shame on Us (Slightly Misleading)" you’ll find that the red nose wasn’t a big part of the action, which is just fine by me, as the likelihood of anyone paying any heed to my suggestions is slim to none.

For those south of the 49th, I’ll translate.  Canadian First Nations (meaning Indians, or Aboriginals) staged a one-day, cross-Canada protest.  There was an element of fear that things would escalate out of control on the Day of Action.  It has happened before.  Search up Ipperwash if you want some more information.   

The overall tone was peaceful, respectful and supportive.  In listening to the various media outlets around Toronto I heard only one of perhaps a dozen ‘person on the street’ clips that wasn’t positive, meaning 11 were understanding and supportive of the cause.

This doesn’t mean the Day of Action was a failure, or too limp-wristed to be of any value in advancing the First Nations’ cause.  Quite the opposite:  It looks like us White Folks are starting to get it.

Since I can only speak for myself, I will.  I’m a fifth or sixth generation, middle-aged, United Empire Loyalist White Canadian Male of British, Irish, Scottish heritage.  The standard Anglo-Saxon Canadian Mutt, who was brought up on Cowboys and Indians in the 60’s in a school system that didn’t know shit from sandwich fixings when it came to First Nations’ history, culture or issues. 

Or, if you want to stereotype me, I would be the second to last person you would expect to be on the side of the First Nations.  The last person would be Mike Harris, former Premier of this province.  Like all stereotypes, there is a grain very broad truth in it, but there are also too many assumptions.  What I do share with another stereotype, of Canadians in general, is an essential sense of fairness.

I didn’t come to this realization overnight.  Around 1977 I was fortunate enough to visit the Golden Lake Reserve and hang out with some folks.  Something didn’t sit right.  I was a 90 minute drive from our nation’s capital city, in a place that I could best describe as the Third World.  I decided to figure out what the hell was going on.  There was reading involved.  There was the asking of dumb questions and some very patient answers from people who took the time to explain things from their perspective.  Then there was some thinking.  Reflection, if you want to use the more formal term. 

Over the years, in watching other First Nations groups, I saw the same things, sometimes in lesser degree and sometimes in greater degree.  It still added up the same.  Canada screwed the First Nations and was acting like a bunch of racist, paternalistic, bureaucrats who moved their mouths, but never their hands to their wallets, or a hand outward in assistance or friendship. 

Consider this:  The only reason any of the explorers of history lived more than a week and half over here, was because the First Nations peoples met the boats and taught effete upper-class twits how to not die in a new land that was nothing like France, England, or Norway.  If you don’t believe me, take a drive up past Maniwaki (less than an hour drive from the Parliament Buildings in the Nation’s Capital) and walk into the bush.  If you get lost, odds are rescuers will not find your body.  Ever.

In exchange for not letting our ancestors die, we took their land, slaughtered several thousand just for giggles, shoved them into reserves, attempted to ‘tame the red man’ and generally trampled all over their existence.  Then we had the bald-faced temerity to set up a system that was designed to systematically rip away any last vestiges of culture, language or history over generations with the Indian Act of 1876.

My voyage to a vague understanding has been long.  Very few Canadians have either taken the time, or had the luck I had to develop a half-informed opinion.  The Day of Action, with all the attendant media coverage of the issues involved is a start.  It helped to put the issues in 20-second sound bites that are digestible by non-First Nations people. 

Which means at the end of the Day of Action, a lot more Canadians are starting to see the beginnings of an understanding of why the First Nations are not happy.  Which also means, a lot more Canadians are potentially willing to stand along side the First Nations because we recognize the vicious unfairness of the whole situation. 

So, fellow pasty-faced non-First Nation Canadians, what are we willing to do about it?

I haven’t written much about President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy lately, so I think it is time to turn over that compost pile and let some more moisture and air into the US Federal Scene.

The investigation of the firing of the US Federal Prosecutors is proceeding apace.  Congress has subpoenaed a raft of documents that have bearing on the process the White House used, via Kousin Karl, Shotgun Dick and some other pod people like Alberto Gonzales to decide who would go and who would stay. 

President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, yesterday, through his attorney Fred Fielding, told Congress to piss up a rope, asserting Executive Privilege.  Fred, as we know, has a long tradition of Executive Privilege, right back to the Nixon White House.  Kousin Karl hasn’t coughed up the required emails, as the email accounts used were not White House email accounts and were ‘inadvertently’ not archived by the Republican National Committee.  Same with Shotgun Dick’s email trail. 

Fielding is offering, instead of the actual documents, to allow Harriet Miers, Jo Jo’s attorney at the time, Kousin Karl, political director Sara Taylor and their various deputies to be interviewed by Congressional Judiciary Committee aides in a closed door session, without transcripts.  Or, to make it simple, no sworn testimony, no record, no public disclosure.  It might as well happen at a coffee shop, over blintzes and two-over-easy with wheat toast.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is also putting out their share of legal documents.  On Wednesday they subpoenaed the White House and Shotgun Dick’s office for documents regarding the broad, uncontrolled, warrant-free wiretapping and surveillance of American citizens at home and abroad.  The predicted reaction from the White House and Shotgun Dick is "Executive Privilege" again. 

Considering the long, soiled, tradition of Executive Privilege, it is hardly surprising.  There are some things that should be kept secret, like the nuclear launch codes, or some of the back room dealing that goes into any international treaty.  I have no argument with that.  What I do have argument with, is those elected to high office who think that they are above the law and can do whatever the hell they want. 

Yes, on occasion the leadership has to do some things that are questionable.  JFK ordered patently illegal overflights of Cuba by recon aircraft during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  JFK also allowed the CIA to form a secret army to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. 

Espionage is, by definition, surreptitious obtainment of information through all kinds of illegal, extra-legal or barely legal means.  Spy satellites that can see the flies on Vladimir Putin’s lunch salad, near the cucumber slices, are funded by the taxpayer and I can live with a little bit of discretion in how much data is disclosed about capabilities.  I don’t want the bad guys to know what we can or can’t do.

Yes, there should be some secrets, if only because other countries don’t play by the rules.  It doesn’t make it right, but I can tolerate it, a bit.  Executive Privilege is something different; we’re not dealing with things that protect the security of all of us.  Executive Privilege as a blanket statement isn’t right. 

Running over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights like it’s a speedbump, isn’t right, not by any stretch.  Using high office to line the pockets of your cronies isn’t right.  Using high office to manipulate policy and budgets to benefit a very select few isn’t right. 

Spying on American Citizens without a warrant isn’t right.  Sending American soldiers to a foreign country to die for no valid reason isn’t right.  Lying to Congress and the Senate isn’t right.  Rewriting the rules any time you want to isn’t right.  Signing statements aren’t laws, they’re marginalia at a press conference.

Hiding behind the dirty skirts of Executive Privilege isn’t right.  Unless you’re President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, Shotgun Dick, Kousin Karl and the rest of that gang.

For this, I put half the blame right on the media.  The US press has gone flaccid.  Mind you, daily chain whippings by Ari Fleisher, Scott McLelland and Tony Snow will tend to do that to the media.  Having Shotgun Dick put the arm on your employer will add to the pressure to ‘play along’.  The White House didn’t have to create an Enemies List, as anyone not on the Pro-Bush list is an Enemy. 

We need another Saul Alinsky with a side of Carl Bernstien and Bob Woordward to truly dig into the seven years of rampant illegality that are the hallmark of President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy’s reign.  We get Michael Moore and Ann Coulter as the high water marks on either end of the spectrum. 

The voters also have to assume some of the blame.  Remember that you elected these people to high office.  They work for you and if you’re willing to swallow Executive Privilege as an excuse, then you’re getting the government you deserve. 

You’ve already got the media you deserve.

Mike Nifong, the District Attorney in Raleigh North Carolina has officially gone under the Duke University Lacrosse Team Bus. 

The Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Trial, as it became known, looked like a slam-dunk.  Out of Control Rich White Boys sexually assault a stripper during a drunken team party:  It sounded completely plausible.  If you are honest, you probably nodded you head and said "Yeah, I can see that" after reading the initial coverage.

Nifong, not above gathering a truckload of national publicity, promised a speedy conviction and did what lawyers do:  He made sure the Duke University Lacrosse Team was convicted in the court of public opinion long before getting near a judge.  Duke University suspended the students, shut down the program and generally helped encourage the climate of charged-tried-convicted-sentenced that prevailed. 

Things were not as they appeared and eventually the wheels fell off the prosecution.  Mike Nifong winds up being tried and disbarred for hiding evidence that supported the defense, some stunning ethics violations and generally being an Asshat in Public.

The part that perplexes many Americans I’ve talked to, as well as most Canadians is this:  An Elected District Attorney?  WTF! 

There are some positions that should not be elected, as it is too easy to game the electoral process.  Any meat puppet who wants to run for sheriff or judge or DA just has to say "Tough On Crime" and they wind up wielding immense amounts of raw power.  That doesn’t mean they know their earlobes from their elbow, or are the kind of folks you want running the show:  It merely means they can get elected. 

Getting elected on either side of the border, is nothing more than a high school popularity contest.  Based on the voter turnout statistics in local elections, like the school board, mayoralty, or city council, less than 50 percent of eligible voters have the time, energy or sense to vote.  Usually it is less than 35 percent. 

As for the voters’ motivating factors?  The TV commercial or lawn sign they saw last seems to be about right.  This means the candidate for local office with the most money for commercials, signs and other media will most often win.  There are notable exceptions:  Steve Forbes, the zillionare, pumped tons of personal cash into media for his Presidential campaign and came away 43rd out of a field of 6, but that was a national show. 

Local politics comes down to money.  The potential candidate wants to win.  To win, the potential candidate must have the backing of groups with very deep pockets to pay for lots of ads and signs and the other media pixie dust that makes up a winning campaign.  

Who has the money?  Real Estate companies and business interests come to mind.  Those with money want ‘their person’, someone who ‘understands the issues’ and is ‘concerned" about the rise of whatever talking point is out there this afternoon. 

Civic groups, like environmental or neighbourhood groups, don’t have enough money to pique the interest of a potential candidate.  Again, there are exceptions, but the exception doesn’t always prove the rule.             

Up here our Crown Prosecutors and Judges are employees of the government.  They are paid well and don’t have to ‘run for office on a Law and Order ticket’ or other such madness. 

There are malicious prosecutions up here, of course there are, but not like the one in Raleigh.  That trashed everyone involved from the police to the DA, to the stripper, to the Duke Lacrosse team, the University itself and most of all, the voters in Raleigh who gave Mike Nifong a mandate.

Yesterday morning the police in Toronto swept across various areas to gather up the members of a gang here called the Crips.  Yes, Toronto is a world-class city, in that we have gang violence as well, so you can have some of that "back home" feeling of a car full of gang-bangers shooting at each other in public.

The operation was successful, in that there were sixty arrests.  The dangerous point, somewhat buried by the media was this:  Six known gang members were working on the ramp at Pearson Airport, the largest airport in Canada.  Ramp workers have access to the baggage holds of aircraft and are in a great position to steal, smuggle or generally cause much mayhem.

Which brings up the lax state of security at airports.  I’ve written about it before, that airport security is a massive game of bullshite theatre designed to look like something is being done, while the facts indicate that nothing has really changed.  Actually, things have changed.  The security lines are long, the passengers are treated like meat and the airlines can claim it is all in the name of "security" while crying poor to government. 

This opens up two questions.  First:  If we’re not actually doing anything constructive about airport security, then where did all the money go?  Second: When will this come back to bite us?

The first answer is easy:  Consultants and Those who Create Management Processes.

To get your Transport Canada airside pass you have to pass a couple of courses and a background check.  The courses are not that challenging:  "Should you put your head in a running jet engine?  Yes or No.  Who has right of way, an 800,000 pound airplane full of gas and passengers, or your 500 pound baggage tug?  Pick one."  The background check, as best I can determine consists of asking the prospective employee if they’re nice.

The airlines and the fixed-base operators don’t want to set the bar too high.  Ramp workers, generally, don’t make a whole lot of money, with some exceptions.  There are unions involved at some carriers, notably Air Canada.  Specialist positions, like fuelers, de-icers and maintenance techs are well paid.

For the vast majority of others, the labour situation is "get a warm body that breathes and will accept $9 an hour to hump bags into the hold of a two-hole 37.  And we have to clean a bunch of 757 lavatories coming back from the Dysentery Convention at 4 PM."

Needless to say employees that are treated like dirt, tend not to be the most motivated.  The first ones to go away in a layoff are the ones at the very bottom.  Offering a ramp rat $500 will get you half-ownership of their earthly soul.  In exchange for the $500 you can have them pick up or place packages for you, no questions asked.  This also explains why theft from aircraft baggage has not decreased since 9/11.  If you could double your weekly salary by stealing cameras, jewelry or other things, like booze and duty-free, why not?

Then we task them to be part of the "Security Solution" and issue a wad of press releases?  The logic is deeply flawed and the procedures are almost hallucinatory.  Which also explains why six of the gang-bangers arrested yesterday, work at the airport.  

As to when this broken system will turn around and bite us in the ass?  It already has and will again, as long as the process of vetting is this obviously pooched.  If the RCMP and CATSA were to do a real review of everyone’s airside credentials, the number of arrests would go through the roof of the old Canadian Airlines hangar, near Terminal 3. 

Theoretically, with strong airside security, there should be zero risk to you or I putting a camera, or jewelry in our checked baggage, if our system is as wonderful as the press releases.  The concluding statement is easy enough.  If someone can steal my camera from my baggage with no fear of being caught, what is stopping them from putting explosives in my baggage?  

Personally, I’d be rubbing unpasteurized cheese and home made salami on all the bags going out of the country, just to give the Agricultural Inspection dogs something to do in Frankfurt and Charlotte.  Those poor doggies sit around all day on hard airport floors sniffing nothing but sweaty tourist arses and unwashed underwear. 

The powers that be are great at thinking like bureaucrats and process heads, but fall miserably thinking like criminals.

Last weekend another high speed police chase in Toronto ended with deaths.  All of the dead were under 18, two in a cab that were hit by the suspect, who also died in the crash. 

Right now the families are grieving and the Toronto Police are under the microscope for the how and why of the chase.  The essential facts are that the chase lasted less than a minute and the cop had barely even turned around to pursue the suspect vehicle.  The suspect saw the cop turning around and nailed the accelerator right into the path of two cabs.  60 miles per hour is 88 feet per second:  There are other calculations, like mass and velocity and so on.  End point?  Three dead, two of which just happened to be in the wrong place, in the wrong cab at the wrong time.

Toronto Police have very strong procedures regarding pursuit.  The officer must obey all commands of the incident commander at HQ.  If things are getting silly and dangerous the pursuit must be broken off.  Helicopters can be used.  Other cruisers can be positioned to intercept the suspect.  The police, as best I can tell from reports in the local media, did exactly what they should have done.  Saw a suspect speeding, turned around, hit the lights and went after the suspect.  The cruiser hadn’t even started getting near the speed limit when the collision happened. 

The suspect didn’t do what he should have: Pull over and take his spanking.  He matted the gas and tried to outrun the cops.  Seconds later the collision ocurred when the suspect’s driving ability was exceeded by his velocity and the inverse of his IQ.  Three dead in a very sudden, violent way. 

There are hundreds of unanswered questions.  Was the suspect driving dirty, meaning carrying substances or devices that would get him jail time?  Was the suspect under the influence of things that would have clouded his decision-making ability?  Was the car stolen?  Was the suspect wanted for other things?  This will eventually come out, but right now, media is focusing on the cops. 

Police forces know that pursuits at high speed invariably end badly, despite what you might see on "America’s Wildest Police Chases Part 5"  It doesn’t work that way in the real world.  Most often it is some innocent passerby who gets killed. 

Police, at least in Canada, take pursuit driving courses and are, as a group of people, very good high-speed drivers.  The command oversight is extensive, the default being break off the pursuit.  Unless the target car is being driven by an armed and crazy known perpetrator who just raped a nun and kidnapped a grade 7 class of special ed kids, while brandishing several guns, a sword and expired sour cream, that kind of criminal, they would and should, chase. 

The rest, the police will most often break off.  Remember, cops have radios and guns, with which they can get more cops with more guns and more radios.  The bad guys also know that the police have helicopters and ways to track the bad guys that don’t require high speed pursuit.

Where things go bad is when the lights and siren go on.  I’ve seen it too many times for it to even be entertaining.  People freeze up and lose their minds.  A street near where I live is a regular route where ambulance and fire equipment come up on traffic, with the emergency equipment on full lights and siren.  Drivers stop dead in their tracks, or turn on their four-way flashers, or stare at their rearview mirror. 

A significant percentage are blissfully unaware that an emergency vehicle needs to get by them and are perplexed by the bright and shiny things they see.  They might consider turning down their tunes or might not talk on their cellphones for a second or two.  You can even see some ask the person on the other end of the cellphone what they should do. 

As a public service for those too dumb to live, here’s what you do when a vehicle with blinking red and or blue lights and some kind of loud siren comes up behind you:  Pull as far to the right as you can safely and stop until the emergency vehicle is past you.  Use your right turn signal, as other drivers might be too stupid to live as well.  The right turn signal is usually near the steering wheel. 

If the emergency vehicle is a fire engine, keep your wits about you, as there is usually more than one coming.  Use your rear view mirror to look behind your car, not as a makeup and grooming aid and you might spot another fire engine or an ambulance wanting to get by you.  You don’t have to call someone to tell them that you were just passed by an ambulance or a fire engine or the police:  This is a normal occurrence in a city.

If you are a bad guy, please stop if the police want to talk with you.  You can’t outrun them and you can’t hide.  They have your ass and it is going to jail.  If you feel duty-bound to shoot it out with the cops so you can be on the news, have the courtesy to stop, as very few cellphone video cameras get good pictures when shaking and bouncing around in a moving car. 

We need a few seconds to get good, clear, saleable video footage of you screaming and yelling threats.  If you must scream and yell while brandishing a gun, do use a clear voice.  If there are obscure references to your Grade 6 shop teacher and/or religious political positions you feel you need to take, ensure that the references are short, concise and will make good captions or headlines. 

A nice final touch before you die in a hail of bullets, is to scream "Rosebud!" or another equally obscure cultural reference.  However, if you decide to extend your demise by taking hostages and engaging in a long stand-off with the police, could you schedule your rantings with a ten minute break each hour please? 

Occasionally the amateur media does need to take a pee, or get another coffee and we don’t want to miss anything.

I haven’t written much about the Conrad Black fraud trial in Chicago, for a good reason.  I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about Lord Tubby of Crossharbour being dragged into court.  The bones of the story are uncomplicated, unlike Conrad Black.  The deal is, stock holders are pissed that Black and his management team led what could be characterized as a lavish lifestyle, on the stockholder’s dime.  There are allegations of very lucrative non-compete payments and other accounting shenanigans that are also on the table. 

So far, Conrad himself has not testified and you shouldn’t read anything into that.  Discretion is sometimes the better part of Valor when it comes to Justice, especially in a US courtroom with a jury of middle-class folks hearing testimony from a learned, one-time, British Peer.  Black is so erudite in his common speech that even smart people have to reach for the dictionary listening to him talk. 

What would this mean to a typical US juror?  Black might as well be speaking Portuguese dockworker slang to them, so it is in the best interests of Conrad Black, for Conrad Black to not talk.

By way of disclosure, I used to work for a company owned by Conrad Black (Standard Broadcasting/CJOH-TV) and I have actually met the man and shaken his paw.  End of Disclosure.

Back in the Day, among the many companies that Argus, or Hollinger-Argus, or any of the other several hundreds of companies that Conrad Black owns, or controls, was a little joint called Dominion Stores.  The US translation would be Safeway, or Kroger’s.  In 1986 Conrad decided that the pension plans at Dominion Stores were making too much money. 

This was also true at Standard Broadcasting.  So, Conrad decided that the excess money, or overfunded liability of the pension plans, were his to do with as he so saw fit.  Through some backchannel knowledge of a couple of the players involved in the running of the Standard Broadcasting Pension Plan, the pension was overfunded to the tune of $22 million. Conrad Black scooped that up right promptly.  His Dominion Stores Pension draining netted significantly more:  $62 million.  The Dominion Stores union sued for return of the money.  After taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, Black was ordered to give it back. 

At one time Conrad Black owned some of the larges newspapers in the world, about 400 of them, and was a full-tilt Baron Black of Crossharbour, having renounced his Canadian citizenship to gather that ermine-cloaked honour.

Fast forward to March 17th of this year and Conrad Black is in court up on a stack of charges, including criminal fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and wire fraud.  To say that Conrad Black is in trouble, is up to the court to decide.

Perhaps the most important part of the whole Conrad Black saga, is that he treated the stockholders like "little people" who were not to intrude upon his grandeur.  I know from his past record he treated employees like "little people" or pond scum, depending on his whims of the moment.  His intellect, such as it is, consists of using a thesaurus and posing as a Great Thinker.  The word that comes most readily to mind is bloviator. 

The other one is no noblesse oblige.  There is a responsibility of those of high birth or positions of power to act with honour, kindliness and generosity.  Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate of the 1920’s, besides being wealthier than the dreams of avarice, also funded several hundred public libraries and foundations to carry on works for the good of all.  That would be an example of noblesse oblige.  The Prince of Wales’ Trust would be another. 

President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy is an equivalent of having all kinds of noblesse, but absolutely no oblige, right up there with Conrad Black. 

A great man being brought low?  That’s up to the jury.  I merely would like to see him sentenced to 15 years working at Wal-Mart as a greeter, having to live on minimum wage in a three-floor walkup in a disreputable part of Hamilton. 

Or, used as a golf target at a driving range.  Either or.  I’m not fussy.