The Unreasonable Man

Over the past weeks, I have been watching the demonisation of Wikileaks and its public face Julian Assange with growing incredulity. Enough even to write this blog post, even though I have barely enough time to breathe.

Wikileaks, the course of leaked documents embarrassing to governments, is a media organization. Like the New York Times. And in free countries like the USA, it is legal to publish leaked documents. It may not be legal to steal them, but it is legal to receive and publish them. That is why we were able to have Watergate. Our media depend on such leaks, every single day. This is one of our fundamental freedoms.

Or it was until now. It seems to me that free speech in the west is a shambles - it is free only as long as it does not threaten the established order in any way. The moment is does, it apparently stops being allowed.

Wikileaks has been treated shamefully. Its servers are down. DOS attacks (which, unlike publishing leaks, ARE illegal) are happening - these are, one may well imagine, probably government-based. But no public outrage there that I see. Paypal has stopped handling its payments. Amazon and many other organisations have kicked Wikileaks off their servers after being “asked” to do so by the government, without any legal process. Just like the East German government used to “ask” people to do things. Entirely Kafkaesque.

And Julian Assange, the public face of Wikileaks, is under attack for being a megalomaniac. Whether or not he is (and I do not see evidence): how many of you refuse to buy Apple products, and how often do governments try to destroy Apple, because Steve Jobs has a big ego?

I fear Julian will probably “disappear” into a secret CIA prison - or worse. Sarah Palin and other leading American figures have called for his assassination. Where is the outrage over this? If anyone else called for someone’s assassination they would quite rightly go to jail.

But all the usual laws and rules seem to have gone overboard here. Calls for assassination. Mysterious attacks on domains and web sites. Government destroying by simply “asking” companies to to its thing. We seem to be suddenly living in a Kafkaesque world of secret police running things, with the law being reduced to apparent irrelevancy.

And let’s see why. Because of embarrassment.

And where is the outrage there?

Wikileaks publishes the evidence, for instance, that Hillary Clinton has been asking American UN diplomats to collect the UN Secretary General’s (and others’) DNA. And instead of outrage at this apparent act of clear illegality, we get outrage at… the whistleblower? Shameful.

Most of the world is outraged not at the illegality, immorality and dishonesty of their governments, but at the people who dare point this out? When I see this, I think the world has turned upside down and there is clear danger we will end up with more holocausts down the road.

And not far down the road, either: when I see how quickly we appear to be ready to abandon all legal process, I am utterly astonished.

I would take a good look at Wikileaks via its mirrors (list on http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html) while you can.

Love this - atheism is coming to Toronto, apparently.

Christ Meets Bigfoot

Can’t wait!

Not much posting here. Apologies. www.speedlighter.ca is taking all my energy with its daily posts.

..and one who is aghast at Ms Jean’s order to investigate cultural links between the iBook store and Canada’s culture, as I read in today’s Post.

So the government of Canada is now also going to dictate what I can and cannot read? It is not enough to tell me what TV channels I may and may not watch? What is next - web sites?

With these types of controls, Canada puts itself in a short list of countries that includes such paragons of virtue as Pakistan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China and Myanmar. Not a list the government of this country should want us to be in, and not one that I would expect a conservative government to keep us on.

But then… they are politicians. And as Aristophanes told us thousands of years ago, “under every stone there lurks a politician. Plus ça chance…

Canada’s Tories seem to have seriously lost their way, judging by the news.

Start with the ill-timed but presumably well-intentioned Census flap. Support the libertarian wing of the Tory heartland in a way so inept that it is guaranteed to do them more harm than good.

Follow this by Stockwell Day’s comical insistence on new prisons for undefined “unreported crime”.

Now add the laughable new “measures” to criminalise anyone who is having any non-Calvinist fun. The keystone cops could not have handled it all less ably.

Adults who engage in sex for pay, people who sell any quantity of marijuana (which of course a large proportion of Canadians have used), people who gamble for money: all these are looking at five-year jail sentences. More, any three or more people engaging in these types of fun can be classified as an “organized crime” group. Three poker buddies are the mob, according to Preacher Stockwell.

These laughable efforts at imposing prairie Calvinism on the rest of us will of course fail. The “War on Drugs” has utterly failed in the USA, and it will of course fail just as miserably here. Adding a War On Sex and a War On Poker will of course not help.

Except in filling our new prisons. Yeah! Let’s put as many Canadians in jail as the Americans do (which is more than any other civilised nation). Great moral values, Tories.

And how do we pay for this all? That’s where the Tories do well, right? The economy?

Oh. Maybe not. The litany continues.

Not only did we have the “stimulus” for select industries (cars; but not photographers. Why reward those who failed?), but now our Tory masters have announced, according to The Post, that in spite of the resulting $54bn deficit, there will be no cuts to the civil service. In addition, says House Leader John Baird, quoted in today’ Post, there will be more money for… “defence, airport security and law and order”.

So now we have ever-increasing and unintelligent nannying by socially backward yahoos, an utter lack of economic sense, and a Bush-style War On Everything. Send in the clowns!

Incredibly, this makes me wish for the Lieberals back. They were corrupt and unprincipled, but at least they were neither unintelligent nor a joke. Canada deserves better than this lot: they are insane.

As of today, Saudi Arabia has banned the Blackberry. The United Arab Emerates are about to do the same. Indonesia, India, Lebanon and Algeria appear to be close behind.

That is because all these dictatorships want to listen in on all conversations, emails and messages sent and received by their citizens.

Evidently, we should stand up to this. But instead, the Canadian government and Hilary Clinton have expressed “understanding”. “We know that there is a legitimate security concern,” according to Ms Clinton.

Why? Because the governments in question have referred to “national security” and “avoiding terrorism”, and so on. Nonsense terms that just mean “you’re not allowed to argue with this”.

The same terms our governments use whenever they want to restrict freedom. That’s why they are not arguing more.

Good for RIM for standing up to this. Let’s see how long the Arabs survive without their Blackberries.

Get good service, tell a few friends; bad service, tell them all. And that is what I am doing here, in an off-topic post.

Executive summary: Avoid Sears Oakville, and in particular their clock and watch department.

I took my Omega watch in to them a few months ago to have the battery, which had recently finally died after several years, replaced. This is a thin watch and is hard to handle. The last battery was installed there too, but by a watchmaker.

The current manager of the clock department, Nancy Kaye, told me she was not a watchmaker.

That became obvious. She broke my watch. I got it back not working, with the dial turned. She tried again: now completely broken, and the dial dented.

“We have no way of knowing it was working when you brought it in”, she and Sears say. Cost: $350 plus tax. My cost, they say.

So beware, when you bring a perfectly functioning watch (and not a cheap one either) into the clock and watch department at Sears, and they break it, you end up paying, and they wash their hands of it. Implicitly accusing you of lying.

This is not acceptable. My letter to the Better Business Bureau has gone out. Facebook is next. Small claims court too, maybe. Thousands of you now also know that having Sears do anything is taking a huge risk. I assume this will cost them much more than owning up would. I hope so: this kind of running roughshod over the customer is not acceptable.

The grey suits in the copyright industry will never get it, will they?

For the first time in years I am about to buy music. Patti Smith, two albums, meaning I am about to spend $20 on MP3s. Amazon sells MP3 music - good decision, because I know it’s standard format and not copyright-addled.

So after I do all the work of choosing etc I get this:

We are sorry… We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

OK, not, then. I guess I’ll just have to go steal it again. Idiots.

Ontario passes a temporary law in secret, without debate. And even worse, a police officer’s word is considered convincing proof under this law. Huh? I am not sure even the Nazis went quite that far. Amazing, what our government will do.

…third world cops who do not know the law, it seems: read my blog post on this here.

I posted a few snaps of that preposterous “security fence” here:

http://blog.michaelwillems.ca/2010/06/11/berlin-wall/