Currents

The consensus amongst a crowd of fireworks watchers from the roof of my building last night is that the USA kicked Canada’s butt in the Vancouver Celebration of Light fireworks competition. This, despite a lack of wind that prevented the Yanks’ fireworks smoke from moving out of the way and made half the show sort of an exploding purple nebula.

What was up with the Canadian theme, anyway? Attack? Godzilla? I don’t get it.

Will the Chinese give us a fireworks show to make the Americans (and us) run for cover? More to come.

A friend also noted that last year during the Vancouver City garbage strike, everyone pitched in after the fireworks to keep the beaches clean. Then, the sanitation workers were hoping the beaches would turn into landfill sites so as to boost their strike power. This year, with the strike a fruit-fly tinged memory, the garbage is piling up for the city crew to deal with. Seems like Vancouverites can’t help sticking it to the city workers.

Either a full 60 per cent of Canadians really do hate brown people, or the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress owes Canada’s Prime Minister an immediate apology (Read Who’s Really Playing Politics With Omar Khadr, Mr. Elmasry?).

An Ipsos Reid poll result released today shows that a video released by supporters of the alleged grenade tossing son of Al Queda, Omar Khadr, has done nothing to change Canadians minds about his detention in Gitmo (National Post). NP stringer James Cowan writes:

The results also demonstrate public support for Stephen Harper’s decision not to intervene in the case. Overall, 60% of people said they believe Mr. Khadr should remain in U. S. custody, while 40% said he should be immediately returned to Canada. “The Prime Minister has echoed the sentiments of the country,” Mr. Wright said. “His position on this is pretty sound and opinion is pretty firm.”

That actually puts me in a minority, since I stated in my last post that Khadr ought to be sent to Canada to face trial. Can’t say I’m all that disappointed in the majority of Canadians who likely made the calculation that Omar Khadr, his family and their supporters may represent a dire security threat to the nation — and that should outweigh any other considerations.

Perhaps the majority is right after all about the downside of repatriating Khadr to Canada. I’m still not convinced. But I’m open to arguments.

Canadian Islamic Congress president Mohamed Elmasry says Prime Minister Stephen Harper couldn’t possibly have any reason to avoid speeding Canada’s Al Queda family’s celebrity son home in time for Ramadan other than pure filthy racism (Canadian Press: Harper ‘playing politics’ with Khadr because he’s brown-skinned: Muslim leader).

From Elmasry’s odd perspective, any other Canadian who agrees with the Prime Minister’s stand is automatically a racist. That Omar Khadr is alleged to have killed an American soldier on a foreign battlefield where Canadian forces could just as easily have been the victims couldn’t possibly be a factor. The fact that Canada may not even have the legal apparatus to deal with Khadr any more effectively than the Americans… also not a factor. That Khadr is the son of a woman who proudly declares, “We are an Al Queda family“… also, not relevant.

Not relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Anyone who disagrees hates brown people. Especially the Prime Minister.

Why Canadian Muslims don’t petition to have this slanderous demagogue removed from his position may in fact say more about Canadian Muslims than it does about Elmasry, sad to say.

Funny thing is, I actually agree with Elmasry on his side objective: bring Khadr home (His main objective being tarring Canadians with the sticky tar of racism so as to prevent them from speaking out against a creeping shift in this country’s values). I’ll let the erudite and Agreeable Lyle Neff take over from here with some solid reasoning on the Pith and Substance blog. Mr. Neff writes from Vancouver:

Ms T., although I grudgingly agree that Awful Omar Khadr should be pulled from Gitmo and put into Ontario clink for some less-hard years (because he was just a kid at the dawn of the war; because he may not have killed; because of his father’s malignancy), Canadian public opinion is quite right to hold the boy and his clan in contempt, as one does traitors.

Hey, remember when Jean Chretien interceded with Pakistan to get Omar’s murderous zealot dad sprung — ‘96, wasn’t it? No apology from the Grits as of yet…

I expect we’ll be waiting for that apology for some time, Neff. And now Paul Martin seems to have found his own 10-foot pole (Globe and Mail).

When even the Europeans think we’ve gone too far, it may be time to rethink Vancouver’s harm reduction approach in the downtown eastside. In this week’s Globe and Mail, in “Europe’s approach to drugs is more enlightened … it’s tougher”:

Advocates of harm-reduction measures, such as needle exchanges, methadone programs and Vancouver’s supervised-injection site, often point to Europe’s more enlightened approach to drugs as proof of how far behind we are in Canada. But parts of Europe are having second thoughts. Socially progressive Sweden had a brief but disastrous fling with prescription heroin back in the 1960s. After that, it embraced the hard-line approach. Today its policy is to make drugs very difficult to get, but treatment very easy - and sometimes compulsory…

Meanwhile, in another part of Europe:

Two months ago, the Scottish government announced a change in direction. From now on its primary focus will be on “recovery,” not just harm reduction. “Harm reduction ideas have failed in Scotland,” says Prof. McKeganey. “They have failed to protect injectors from hepatitis C, failed to reduce the scale of the drug problem, failed to reduce many of the harms inflicted on others.”

Hmmm. Sounds familiar. So much for the ambitious ideals of Project Civil City.

Here’s an organization that just doesn’t seem to be listening to the growing consumer demand for environmental sustainability, much less the economic laws of supply and demand. The Telus White Pages came out in Vancouver this week. Quite predictably, most copies seem to have gone straight to the recycling bin (Metro). Seems there’s this newfangled World Wide Interweb that most folks are using to get the directory information they need (Close to 70 per cent of Canadians were, as of March 2007, anyway — Internet World Stats).

The White Pages are printed on recycled paper, from what I understand. That’s great. But the amount of energy and recycled resources that might have been used to make something that someone would actually want (I don’t know… school textbooks? Consumer magazines? Porn?) seems to qualify this annual event as a bad move from an ecological perspective.

In at least one BC community, these products seem to literally go straight from the publishers to the recycling depot (thanks, James Glave).

As in my previous call to action (The Yellow Pages Must Be Stopped), I’m calling for an opt-in requirement for anyone who still wants these bulky directories brought to their door. Put the onus on the publishers to actually contact the end users (by email or a single-page mail-out) to get people to sign up to receive the books.

Again, that’s opt-in, not opt-out. Most email and print newsletters use this kind of procedure and it seems to work well. Those who don’t want the stuff don’t get it, and the publishers don’t have to waste money, resources and energy producing products that go straight into a blue box.

The lights went out in Vancouver the other day, as Vancouver blogging maven Miss604 has dutifully reported. It wasn’t too bad, since it happened in the daytime. Some of my buddies ended up going home at nooon that day. My new daytime gig at a downtown Vancouver office where giant servers must be backed up by super-powered generators at all times means I’ll be working through the apocalypse.

Power outages will likely be a regular feature of life in the coming years, as “environmentalists” protest the construction of new clean-energy hydro dams and wind-powered turbines due to the effect on their pristine country views — and these protesters do this knowing full well that not building this infrastructure now, we’ll be importing vast quantities of “dirty” energy from the USA and Alberta for decades to come. Ah, well.

Of course, there are ways we can at least delay the onset of the blackout season with some energy saving tips for the home, courtesy of the David Suzuki Foundation:

1. Place refrigerators out of direct sunlight and away from the stove and other heat-producing appliances.
2. Always run your dishwasher with a full load. Most of the energy used by a dishwasher is spent heating water, and since you can’t decrease the amount of water used per cycle, filling your machine is more effective than running half-loads.
3. Wash clothes in cold water – yes, they will still get clean!

For more tips that will help us avoid the democracy-killing effect of power black-out Mondays, check out the David Suzuki Nature Challenge Newsletter.

Has your grocery bill increased over the past year or so? That’s when I first noticed more media reports linking the high price of fuel to higher prices for loafs of bread, produce, soy milk and such. News about food supply problems in other countries are already linked to this phenomenon.

But in Canada, are we insulated against the worst effects of peak-oil inflation by our ultra-efficient supermarkets? My wife and I have started shopping at the Kingsgate mall Buy-Low Foods supermarket and at Kin’s Farm Market. At Kin’s this weekend, I picked up enough produce to keep us full of goodness for the next ten days or so (two full bags of oranges, peaches, plums, mangos, kiwis, strawberries and mushrooms), all for $13.42. The Buy-Low Foods has good deals like 2.99 for a kg bag of fruits and nuts granola, or $2.99 a pound for orange and yellow peppers.

So it seems us Canadians in the big cities at least can stave off part of the inflationary effects by simply being a little bit more choosey about where we shop if possible.

I’m lucky enough to have a huge amount of choice for my produce in the central Vancouver neighborhood of Mount Pleasant. I wonder how many others are also still finding deals in these supposedly difficult inflationary times — and how many really have been hurting from the indirect effect of producers and truckers getting gouged at the pump.

The extraordinary Canadian consumer revolt against the Rogers iPhone is going strong. As I’ve mentioned on Techvibes (Rogers iPhone Consumer Revolt Wins Concession. But It’s Not Nearly Enough), over 62,000 Canadians have signed a petition at RuinediPhone.com protesting the gouging-style monopoly pricing of the 3G plan. But will the protest peter out as the first early adopters can’t help themselves and grab an iPhone on its launch day tomorrow from a Rogers outlet (Apple has refused to sell the phones from its Canadian Apple stores in disgust at Rogers’ apparent greediness). Consumer revolts are pretty well unheard of in Canada. Has new media made these kinds of protests more likely to happen in future?

Frankly, while it is interesting, I don’t really get this odd little consumer revolt, and wonder why people aren’t getting much more furious about human rights abuses in, say, Zimbabwe.

And isn’t this invention really just for corporate executives who won’t actually be paying for the phone (or the monthly plan) out of their own bank account? Is it all just hype?

I’ll be heading out shortly to Vancouver’s monthly social media marketing extravaganza, social change seminar and blogapalooza, Net Tuesday. Some of my favorite technorati types will be heading up the event, like social media evangelist Dave Olson (AKA Uncle Weed) John Bollwitt and Rob Cottingham. It will be a regular geek-fest (That’s a good thing, people).

Taking part in this kind of activity alongside my fellow bloggers and tech-people, immersed in this Web 2.0 world has been a lot of fun. But thanks to my new gig in the field of web security technology, I’ve been learning a lot about the safety of the architecture we’re using to do our thing. It’s been a wake-up call.

The vast majority of websites are pretty much uncontrolled breeding grounds for hackers to steal the information of anyone who uses the websites. Most organizations and companies haven’t taken even the most basic security measures. (Check out the video below to see a kung fu-style dramatization of the process of hardening one’s website against hackers.

And blogs ain’t immune. I just had my company conduct a website security audit on one of the many blogs I’ve authored (and no, I’m not going to mention which one and put out a welcome mat to cyber criminals) to see if Wordpress’ software was vulnerable to hackers.

Turns out, the blog had problems; the test turned up 62 vulnerabilities of varying severity. This is far, far less than a company we recently scanned that is involved with security and privacy issues (the sad, sad website literally had a vulnerability exposed on every single page — we’re talking thousands of openings for hackers to exploit). But it was still pretty alarming.

So here’s the question: at a time when everyone is calling for better protection from corporations and government to protect their information, don’t bloggers also need to be responsible and provide a secure environment for their website visitors? Is it beyond our capabilities (financial, technical), or are we just making excuses that allow cyber criminals to get away with their crimes?

“There was a suicide bombing this morning outside the Indian Embassy and the road to the kite stores was closed.” So much for my friend’s efforts to gather some cultural souvenirs our group’s community outreach efforts before her latest stint as a human rights worker in Afghanistan ends.

I’ve actually lost count of how many times she’s been over there. She’s doing good work to help the country rebuild its civil society after decades of incessant warfare. The Taliban’s horrific attacks don’t make it easy for the locals who are mostly just trying to survive.

I don’t suppose the latest atrocity from the Taliban will change the minds of their boosters on Canada’s west coast (and they know who they are), who against all facts and logic keep labeling the Taliban a resistance movement.

Borrowing a bit from their rhetoric, this is the chant I’d like to see at the next antiwar rally in Vancouver:

Pakistan out of Afghanistan!
Iran out of Afghanistan!
Taliban out now!
International solidarity with the people of Afghanistan!