Geoengineering.

It doesn't take much to feed the conspiracy theorists. (La Responsable. Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

Geoengineering is environmental engineering on a planet-wide scale.

Human beings have been engineering the planet since the first trees were cut down to make room for agriculture, and since the first wells were dug, and since the first canals were used for irrigation.

What’s different in the modern world is of course the scale of such operations.

“Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale manipulation of environmental processes to combat global warming. It involves two types of processes — carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management (SRM). SRM, the more controversial prospect, is a form of climate modification that reduces the amount of sun hitting the earth’s surface. Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering (SAG-SRM) would inject the stratosphere with aerosols and could be done at such a reasonable cost ($8 million per year) that it’s possible one nation could take action for the entire planet. Whether used locally or globally, adopting a SAG policy would have long-term and far-reaching consequences. One nation’s policy decision could immediately and adversely affect another country’s economic well-being as well as affect human health over both the short and long term. Calls for environmental justice and adopting ethical guidelines have been raised.” — Reilly Center, Notre Dame.

Gone are the days when the ‘gentleman virtuoso,’ best exemplified by Newton and Hooke, Halley and Kepler, can make world-shattering discoveries in science by patiently working away over a period of years in their own homes and laboratories.

Science is now a huge collaborative effort. Such collaboration involves debate, conflicting opinions, and conflicting aims.

“The basic idea behind geoengineering (or climate engineering) is that humans can artificially moderate the Earth's climate allowing us to control temperature, thereby avoiding the negative impacts of climate change. There are a number of methods suggested to achieve this scientific wizardry, including placing huge reflectors in space or using aerosols to reduce the amount of carbon in the air.” – Guardian.

Is it really just that simple? Spray a little sulfur-dioxide into the atmosphere, and it blocks out x-amount of sunlight? Of course things are never that simple. The debate over global climate change has raged for over thirty years. What’s interesting is that just prior to the beginning of that debate, questions were being asked in the media if we were poised on the brink of a new ice age!

Last spring and summer, in southern Ontario, it was unusually cold. Spring was chilly, and summer really didn’t start until late June—when according to the calendar, it should start.

Of course climate-change deniers see this as ‘evidence.’ Yet it has been clearly stated, many times in fact, that global climate change will result in disruption of regional climates. Records going back hundreds of years are simply not available. Is Canada warmer than it was five hundred years ago?  No one can really say. 

Anecdotal evidence, my childhood recollections of 'deep snow days,' (I was only two feet tall, remember) or statements to that effect by our parents and grandparents really aren’t evidence at all.

But our natural human expectations is that we can go in shorts, take our shirts off, maybe go swimming by late June. Yet I also remember swimming on or about April 20, back in the early 90s, and that particular year I swam (in Lake Huron and the St. Clair River) up until about September 20.

Let’s say we did have a cold summer of 2012. That sure doesn’t sound like global warming. But of course a gradual warming of the entire planet, is only a statistical average. The problem has only been seriously studied for about thirty years. Data is incomplete, in that the ability to study climate in a systematic, global way is very new. Assuming global warming is real, proving it is another thing. In climate upheaval, some areas will become deserts, some will get hotter and some will get colder. The statistical average will rise globally.

Anecdotal evidence certainly exists. Edward Gibbon, writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire back in the 1770s noted that the grape vine had been introduced by the Romans to France and even southern Germany. He observed that the barbarians had crossed the frozen Danube, and the frozen Rhine, on their incursions into Roman territory, and that the freezing of the great rivers was unheard-of in his own ‘modern times.’ He also pointed out that settlement in Europe had resulted in the clearing of the great Hercynian Forest, and that the sun’s rays now touched the earth in a way they could not before—resulting in a change of climate that could never be proven in modern scientific terms.

Also from the Guardian story:

“It's a hugely controversial theory. One of the main counter-arguments is that promoting a manmade solution to climate change will lead to inertia around other efforts to reduce human impact. But the popularity of geoengineering is on the rise among some scientists and even received a nod from the IPCC in its recent climate change report.”

What they’re saying is simple. If there is a quick fix, and especially a cheap one, then everybody gives a big sigh of relief, and efforts to reduce our human impact, largely the effect of consumer lifestyles, on the planet fall by the wayside.

Wind and solar power development is expensive. The fact that they are so expensive, at least in the development stages, means the electrical power generated is expensive when compared to hydro-electricity, or nuclear power generation. Advocates of clean coal would point out that compared to other fossil fuels such as natural gas and oil, it can be an effective solution for power generation needs. Climate change is best left out of their sales brochures and so that’s what they do! It’s human nature, really, to play up the benefits and play down the side-effects.

The hysteria surrounding wind power and windmills in farm country is another interesting factor, a psychological one. But then, change has often been hard and often unwelcome.

This leads us to the question of interest. In Canada, the shale-oil developments would never have gone ahead if the price of petroleum wasn’t high enough to sustain it profitably.

Alternate power sources may threaten that profitability, and the conservative, knee-jerk reaction is of course nothing new. The conspiracy theory of climate change—that it’s all a big lie, is not exactly unexpected, especially when we realize that someone’s present interests are threatened by a change in the status quo.

***

Conspiracy theories abound in the modern world. They are nothing new. Speculation is rife that ‘mystery contrails’ spewed out by U.S. military aircraft are in fact chemical sprays designed to reduce the impact of global warming. This story dates from 1998. But I’ve seen one recently on Facebook, and the statement was made that commercial jetliners were using some form of fuel additive to produce similar mystery contrails. If so, it would have to be one of the best-kept secrets in history for it not to have been documented already. 

Or maybe it has been documented, or maybe it is being documented even as we speak. A photo on Facebook showing a funny-coloured trail coming out of a jet engine is not exactly the same as evidence or documentation.

“How to De-Bunk Chemtrails” is a website devoted to, as the name says, de-bunking chemtrail theorists.

But it is strictly true that contrails, the long white trails of vapour left behind by not just jet aircraft but piston-engined ones as well, go back a long ways, to the dawn of aviation, and in fact they persist for quite some time. Recently at sunset, on a drive in the country, the western horizon was crisscrossed by dozens, even hundreds of contrails. It all depends on atmospheric conditions at the time. The Battle of Britain, high above southern England, left all kinds of contrails. They show up in photos and even oil paintings of the conflict. 

B-29 Bomber pilots would change altitude even at night to reduce contrails so that enemy fighters could not easily locate and engage them.

Are contrails evidence of the government spraying chemicals on the population? (Examiner.)

From the same article:

“There are three main theories as to what purpose chemtrails serve.” (My apologies for the poor quality material, but it is good for a giggle.)

“Weather modification -Chemtrails could indicated a chemical means to influence weather patterns.  Whether suppressing undesirable weather phenomenon or attempting to create desired outcomes, the chemicals sprayed by planes are intended to alter normal weather patterns.”

“Population control -  Are we running out of space on our planet?  Is the government trying to control population growth by spraying chemicals?  If you believe the chemtrail theorists, then the answer is yes.  Newswithviews.com claims the government sprays flu strains each year in an attempt to control population numbers.”

“Inoculation - In direct contrast to the theory that the government is spraying chemicals to make people sick is the theory that the government is spraying the general population to vaccinate against diseases, and probably diseases like Anthrax that are typically used in bio-warfare.  Chemtrails are used to avoid raising the potential alarm caused simply telling people to go get vaccinated at their local pharmacy.”

It is amazing, and an interesting commentary on the human condition, what hysteria a little water vapour in the sky can do. Like Roswell, there are people making a living by spreading what is essentially nonsense, but what the hell, if it sells books…right? Someone is pleased by all the attention. Feeding conspiracy paranoia is an easy way to get some web traffic to your site.

Other forms of geoengineering.

“A scheme to dump quicklime into the oceans to sequester more carbon in their depths is being revived by a British management consultant with backing from Shell.”

Limestone quarry, Belgium. (Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, Wiki.)

“First proposed back in the ’90s by Exxon engineer Haroon Kheshgi, the idea takes advantage of a series of simple chemical reactions. Limestone, at high temperatures, breaks down into carbon dioxide and quicklime, in a process that produces greenhouse gas. But dump that quicklime in seawater, and it absorbs roughly twice as much CO2 as was released in the first reaction.”

“The heat required to decompose the limestone will probably come from fossil fuel, generating more CO2, but even so, the sum of the process could be a reduction of the CO2 in the atmosphere.” (Wired Science.)

“The quicklime scheme is different. It would go right at the heart of the CO2 buildup problem by removing the gas from the air and sequestering it in the world’s oceans. It also makes the oceans more alkaline, directly combating ocean acidification.”

Niagara Escarpment, Milton, ON. (Basho, Wiki.)

“Of course, the scale of the project would have to be eye-poppingly large. The early calculations, Kruger told Wired.com, indicate that 56 billion cubic feet of limestone would be required to sequester each gigaton of carbon. Humans put out about 5.5 billion tons of carbon annually by burning fossil fuels, so a limestone offset budget could reach 300 billion cubic feet of limestone per year.”

Where is all that limestone going to come from? Efforts to protect the Niagara Escarpment, the source of much limestone in Ontario, involve concerns over environmental impacts. Some of the quarries are huge, if you’ve ever driven up there, and there’s quite a few of them. Finding enough limestone to dump in the ocean would disrupt naturally-occurring habitats that are already under threat.

Marine debris washed up on Hawaiin beach after a storm.

Here’s another interesting one. In the science-fiction story ‘The Hermit,’ author Dusty Miller proposes to use a genetically-modified symbiote, the same one that causes hermit crabs to go from a soft-bodied nymph to an animal with a hard protective shell, and train it to eat or bond with plastic. It’s a nice thought and elegant in its simplicity.

Huge mounds of plastic bottles now circle endlessly in the Pacific and Atlantic gyres, (and probably the Indian Ocean as well.) The theory here is that the bottles become coated with a hard shell and sink to the bottom of the ocean—with unpredictable results, but as the saying goes, ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

And maybe that’s our real problem—looking for the quick fix, and doing almost anything rather than changing our lifestyles and attitudes towards our natural environment. Something like such a symbiote, once released from the lab, would of course affect everything in the ocean. Ships’ bottoms would be coated with it, dock pilings, offshore drilling platforms, coral reefs…such a plan would have to be well thought out and take time to implement. A quick fix would inevitably cause more problems that it would solve, but in a crisis situation, desperate times might call for desperate measures.

The money that would have to be spent on ocean de-acidification might be better spent on retrofitting aging, low-rental apartment buildings with better insulation, doors, windows, putting high-efficiency furnaces in working-class homes, designing smaller or at least lighter cars that are more fuel-efficient. All of that goes directly against someone else’s self-interest, of course I am referring to the traditional energy industries.

So far, they have proven effective lobbyists and are holding back many significant changes that are already available and well within our projected budgets.

A quick fix simply isn’t going to happen when a good percentage of the world is either unaware of the problem or living in a state of denial for reasons which they feel are best kept to themselves.

END 

The real question is not so much are there moral dilemmas facing science. The question is how do we solve those dilemmas? It's a question of the quality of information we have to go by, and also the quality of the questions we ask.

On Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie, DBE. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

I’m the sort of guy who likes to figure things out for myself.

You can’t be writing crime or mystery fiction without ever hearing of Agatha Christie. She wrote seventy-eight mystery novels and five or six Gothic romances under the Mary Westmacott name. She wrote the longest-running play in history, The Mousetrap.

She was made a Dame of the British Empire and has sold something like a billion copies worldwide.

I was about fourteen years old. I was bored, and my mom suggested that I might like to read a book, I guess it was a rainy Saturday or something.

I recall coming out of my room and announcing that I was going to be a mystery writer! So I guess I liked the books just fine back then. In fact, about that age, I decided I was going to be a private detective, the fact that I was reading Erle Stanley Gardner and Brett Halliday, and Rex Stout may have had something to do with it. In some strange way, I got my wish, for having set up a murder in a book, the writer must go on to solve the crime, using those 'little grey cells.'

Nero Wolfe’s leg-man Archie Goodwin could remember a conversation verbatim, and recite it in full to Nero Wolfe later, serving as his eyes and ears because Wolfe hated to leave his house.

That impressed me as a valuable skill, and at a certain age, you sort of resent it when people remember things wrong. Were they just stupid? Or just covering their backsides, or had they lied, and never had any intention of doing what they said they were going to do? I guess I’ll never know, but kids are impatient creatures and I concluded that the average person was a bit stupid if they couldn’t remember what they said last week, last month, or last year. Archie Goodwin influenced me, it’s fair to say. Enough background, but I figure I’m relatively competent to write a book report or a review.

Is Agatha any good?

When my mother kindly brought a box of twenty old Agatha Christie books around, I finished whatever I was reading and they were close to hand.

The first one kind of put me off. Elephants Can Remember was rather passive. It was rather vague, and yet it involves a crime that occurred twelve years previously. Sure, old people have fuzzy memories, and the one character, a young girl, in one scene, when asked where she was when her parents were killed, said she couldn’t quite recall. In a later scene she said she was in school in Switzerland when it happened. Even so, that book has page after page of dialogue.

I would estimate the book at well over ninety percent, more like ninety-five percent dialogue.

So that one didn’t impress me too much.

The next one I read was The Man in the Brown Suit.

That one restored my faith in Agatha Christie, but of course the action didn’t happen twelve years in the past. 

Elephants got a three-star rating on Goodreads and the next one five stars, as I recall.

I’m working on the fifth one now, The Murder of the Blue Train. It’s a good book.

The trouble with Agatha Christie books of course, is that they’ve been in print for a long time.

Publishers bought the license, changed the title, and slapped a new cover on old books. If you bought one brand-new at the bookstore, there was a very good chance that you’d get halfway into the story, sit up and say, “Shit! I’ve read this book before.”

We can only blame the publisher for that.

One thing I noticed, in a Fontana edition, was that they used single quotation marks for dialogue.

When someone quoted from history, a literary figure or an aphorism, within dialogue, the typesetters had little choice but to use double quotation marks. To me, that’s bass-ackwards, although it really doesn’t detract from the overall story.

I’m just reading analytically.

In the first five books, two of them have involved wigs. As soon as I read that, I sat up and said, “Aha!”

I knew that was a clue, right? My suspicions were aroused. In the last book I sort of had it figured out, sort of, but she threw yet another twist in and fooled me. If I was investigating that crime for myself, I probably would have worried away at it and just kept going until I caught the killer, but in a novel, all the reader has to go on is what’s inside the pages of the book. Real life is different.

In fact, murder mysteries are not that common in real life, one only has to watch The First 48 Hours a few times to realize that most homicides are anything but planned, anything but well thought out and anything but clever—they are crimes of impulse, passion, and as often as not people get killed over a fifty-dollar drug debt, some disparaging words, or an argument over a girlfriend.

They are anything but sophisticated. That being said, the mystery genre has its tropes.

Agatha Christie is masterful enough (or Madameful enough?) that she always managed to bring up the important clues and at the same time misdirecting enough that so far I have not really known who did the crime until the author revealed it to the reader.

Speaking of tropes, the wig, the Hollywood makeup, the rubber mask glued on with ‘spirit gum’ are all too familiar. That wouldn’t work for me and it probably wouldn’t work for the average killer. I’m six-foot five inches tall, and the odds of me successfully posing as a woman for any length of time are negligible. I would say that’s true of most males, although a pale, slender, relatively short male might pull it off—as long as he doesn’t have a heavy beard, and a five-o’clock shadow, and remembers to sit down to pee…

How many times have we seen it?

The killer is run to ground and then someone grabs them under the chin and pulls off the tightly-fitting mask and of course it’s always the least suspicious person, diabolically clever, and the detective would have to be some sort of genius to get that far.

But also, when you think of Murder She Wrote or even The Rockford Files, it’s pretty obvious that mystery writers, book, film, TV, are often borrowing from the past. They do it pretty heavily and without shame. I would say there have been perhaps one too many writerly crimes—authors, publishers, agents, all very clever and willing to kill to get what they want. Jessica Fletcher, in Murder She Wrote, runs in those circles. She has no need to go out and solve drug crimes in the least glamorous part of town. In that sense, murder mysteries are still escapist fantasies, using established tropes and full of the usual stereotypes.

Another thing is the preponderance of what Christie calls the ‘mentally-disturbed.’ James Patterson has made a good career of portraying the seriously mentally ill perpetrator, his only variation being the serial nature of the crimes, the ticking clock in the background, (which builds tension and suspense) and the setting in a major city. The books are more thriller than mystery or detective story. His detective Alex Cross, the one with all the kids, still follows the stereotype, in that the detective has to have a ‘tic.’ Hercule Poirot had his green eyes, the egg-shaped head and the luxuriant mustaches. I think Mrs, Ariadne Oliver, another character invented by Christie, also a crime writer, has come to hate her own Finnish detective, God knows if he’s got a peg-leg or an eye-patch, but that is just the way things were done—and they still are, as often as not, in modern detective fiction. It is a formulaic genre and woe betide the author who forgets that the readers have certain expectations.

One of my criticisms of an Agatha Christie novel, and I think it is a valid one, was where a small group of people are at dinner and one dies of poisoning. The number of suspects is so limited that in my opinion no self-respecting murderer would ever take such a chance! And yet she pulled that one off too.

That is one small part of Agatha Christie’s legacy. She influenced more than one generation of writers.

I have no doubt of that at all, and she certainly influenced me.

When I go to write my fourth mystery novel in a few months, I will have a lot to think about.

Hopefully the reader will wish me luck on that one.

But we are following in a great tradition. If you don’t like something as a reader or a writer—and I’m not fond of Patterson for some reason—you have the right to do it any way you like. If you can pull it off, then you may have accomplished something of literary value.

If nothing else, I have a hell of a lot of fun writing them.

END

If the reader is interested, my original crime novella ‘The Handbag’s Tale’ is free from iTunes and a number of online bookstores.

This series was inspired as much by Georges Simenon’s Maigret series as anything else, as I wanted a distinctly French feel, a certain noir kind of literature, but there are distinct parallels with Hercule Poirot; perhaps more so with Maigret, although I've only read a couple of those.

Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery. (iTunes.)

The Art of Murder. (Barnes & Noble.)

Blessed are the Humble. (Amazon.)

Robo-Coppage.

Techno Police 21. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

The future is now.

Robot policing is already here.

“Police are already experimenting with robots, both armed and unarmed, and it’s only a matter of time before robots become standard in the surveillance, analysis and enforcement of crimes. They are never tired, irritable, in need of a break or biased, but neither are they able to take in the context of any given situation. Police know there is future for robotic law enforcement in traffic violations (for example, will a car’s onboard computer simply shut the vehicle down as soon as it starts speeding?), but how far will this extend? At what point is human instinct and judgment necessary in the enforcement of law or prevention of crimes? Is it most efficient to build a supposedly bias-free system of law that is responsible for determining, adjudicating and punishing crime?” Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

I can only imagine how the bourgeoisie would feel if their $90,000 BMW, capable of 140 mph, shut down unexpectedly and when it was towed to a garage, they found out there was nothing wrong with it.

So that part is a bit overblown. Traffic chaos is counterproductive in economic terms, and the economy is the new God.

The most obvious use of robots, one that is already happening in the U.S. and Canada, is the use of drones or UAVs for police surveillance. UAVs are increasingly used for domestic police work in Canada and the United States: a dozen US police forces had applied for UAV permits by March 2013. Texas politician and commentator Jim Hightower has warned about potential privacy abuses from aerial surveillance. In February 2013, Seattle Mayor Michael McGinn responded to protests by scrapping the Seattle Police Department’s plan to deploy UAVs. (Wiki.)

The American Civil Liberties Union blog: Domestic Drones.

***

Driverless Cop Cars

Google’s driverless car might make a pretty good adjunct to more mundane domestic policing.

In this scenario, the driverless car simply sets up on the U-turn provisions that all divided highways have for emergency vehicle turnaround. Since there is no human driver to look out the window, the radar-gun is already deployed in the front windshield and with license-plate recognition software, offending drivers will receive their ticket by mail, and if they wish to dispute the ticket, they can attend court on the day appointed and, in Canada, argue it out with the Crown’s robot prosecutor and the robot-judge, which must sound very attractive to our presently very conservative government. In some jurisdictions people who run red lights are already subject to intersection surveillance cameras and ticketing. That one went through some debate locally and was shot down. They are legal in some places. (Trapster.) See also: Rutherford Institute.

Humanoid Robots sell Movie Tickets

I honestly think that humanoid robots like the sexy Peter Weller Robocop will definitely not be the norm. They do sell movie tickets. Modern film is geared to the mentality of ten year-olds.

Small, tracked or six-wheeled autonomous robots are much more likely because bipedal locomotion will be seen as unnecessary and it takes up a lot of computing power.

The psychological effect of a big red robot Mountie cannot be overlooked, and there will probably be a few of them purchased, to stand out in front of the Parliament buildings—tourists will love getting their pictures taken beside them of course; and in a real emergency, their memory banks will be downloaded looking for terrorist suspects. The metal and high-temperature plastic of their bodies will mean that in a fire or explosion, a human perpetrator taking a hostage, they can intervene quickly while regular (warm-blooded) police are still in transit.

Here’s some video of DARPA’s police robot. A humanoid robot is not completely useless, people may be more inclined to obey orders from something recognizable, as opposed to a box on wheels or tracks.

In the film ‘Fifth Element’ starring Bruce Willis, Mila Vovovich and Gary Oldman, there is a scene where a robotic insect penetrates security, complete with camera and microphone pick-up.

Steve Juvetson. (Wiki.)

The president smashes it with his hand or something. But in surveillance, penetrating people’s homes to eavesdrop, or better yet, clinging to a window and picking up conversations through the vibrations of the glass, seems a pretty likely scenario.

Here’s Mythbusters' Adam Savage with his new spider robot. (Youtube.) This one’s pretty big, but with miniaturization and nanotech, the new police ‘bugs’ would be quite small, and to the human eye, indistinguishable from a real insect.

When you consider just how murky convenience store and gas station security camera pictures usually are, and yet when you consider just how many convictions are obtained with what may be the only piece of evidence in a particular case, one would think that the camera and microphone technology would have to be vastly improved. Yet people are shooting some pretty good pics and videos on their smart-phones, and this is a mass-produced commercial application.

The cop-bugs will be state of the art where essentially cost is no object and the middle-class will no doubt support their use because after all, it’s not their kids doing hard time on evidence that would have been inadmissible a few short years previously. By the time they figure out their mistake, it will of course be too late.

Sooner rather than later, robotic snakes will be crawling through the drain pipes and up into the bathroom, and who knows, maybe right up the old wazoo.

Robot Prison Guards

The Republic of South Korea has already rolled out their first robotic prison guards. At a cost of $879,000 each, they’re not exactly cheap, but with mass production and economies of scale, the price will quickly come down. Here in Canada, a brand-new police officer starts off at about $78,000 a year in salary. They get other benefits as well, bringing the total up to about $100,000 a year in costs per officer. Prison guards don’t get quite that much, but it’s still expensive. It is also easy to see that a robot with a one-time cost of perhaps $300,000 would, over the life of the product, result in some real cost savings.

Robot guards can’t be bribed to bring in guns, drugs or smokes—a pack of smokes is real currency in a jail and I’ve heard some astronomical prices for two or three smokes in a jail setting, i.e., fifteen bucks for three smokes. Inmates tear them apart and roll them up in smaller cigarettes and according to one source, ‘That’s your smoking for the day.’

Robot guards would have no resentment and at least on some theoretical level, would have no reason to mistreat prisoners, would have no bigotry in the sense that they wouldn’t care about your skin colour, the nature of your offence, and all that sort of thing. They would also have no reason to look the other way, (paperwork being the bane of existence in bureaucratic systems) and would simply record everything for future reference.

They are also completely incapable of showing kindness or mercy to an inmate, something often overlooked in the sales brochures.

In a medical or psychological emergency, all the robots could do would be to call for human intervention, and in the prison setting, in the future, warm bodies of an official nature will be in short supply. Standard prison models in Canada, using modern prison design, use a minimal two officers per shift to supervise up to 192 inmates. With robot guards, inmate suicide numbers would probably see an increase in the number of fatalities.

In the movie, ‘Robocop,’ when two thugs grabbed a woman for a little ‘rape-party,’ Robocop intervened and the audience cheered. When he shot one of them in the balls, the audience clapped and applauded.

That’s what the cheerleaders for robotic policing want you to see, and to think about the coming robotic revolution in policing, a revolution that has already seen the first shots fired.

But there is a dark side, and that dark side of law enforcement stems from the current social and political climate, not just in the U.S., and the U.K., where they also have a Conservative government as we do in Canada.

Perhaps Bill Moyers said it best:

"The Unfinished Work of America"

Bill Moyers

“In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.”

“I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy.  Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson.  Nor do I romanticize ‘the people.’ You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites.  I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

“But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud.  That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.”

“Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter.  He said: ‘We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses…Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.’”

“And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to ‘the great task remaining.’  That ‘unfinished work,’ as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.” Naked Capitalism.

The Dark Side of Automated Policing

We are well on the way down that road to the dark side.

Nowhere in the Constitution, in the U.S. or Canada, does it say that you have to have employment to have the rights of a citizen. There is no litmus test in terms of income or property. A lot of people don’t get that, and if they do, they simply don’t care.

What is disturbing, and this is not just in the U.S., is the amount of ignorance, prejudice and bigotry still present in the system.

The loudest mouths, and those with the biggest war-chest for lobbying, will have their way with society.

The future of law-enforcement is very bright. For the citizens, the future will be very dark indeed if that is allowed to go on without some checks and balances in the system.

The right to be left alone is one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Constitution.

You might as well forget it, that one is long dead.

You Won't Need a Warrant for That

"Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.”

"The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ is that its representatives only get to invade people's private space -- their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects’ -- after it convinces a judge that they're up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don't store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.”

Consider email.

“In a series of rulings from the 1970's, the Supreme Court created ‘the third-party doctrine.’ Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.”

Even weirder still: in the future, people who appear to be doing nothing at all will become suspicious.

Surely you have something better to do. It's unnatural to be doing nothing at all.

Surely you must be up to something.

We will no longer have the right to be left alone.

Our world will not be destroyed by terrorism, it will not be destroyed by socialism, or communism, or any of the other ‘isms’ that we all love to talk about as if we actually knew something about it.

“We simply must have order.” This phrase has justified more ignorant laws than any other single thing I can think of.

In Canada, fifteen people can successfully lobby the government for a law that applies to all.

And if one kid is killed by a drunk driver, new calls for ‘tougher laws’ dominate the front pages of our newspapers and the letters to the editor, and they are all nice, well-meaning folks doing all the screaming and the yelling.

Our world will be destroyed by our own lack of perspective, our own intolerance, our own strident calls that ‘something must be done about it.’

The world will be destroyed by our own sanctimony.

And the meek, and their heavily-armoured and highly-paid protectors, shall inherit the Earth.

And when that happens, the safest place to be will be behind bars.

END

Author’s Note. A story like this takes a few hours to compile and write commentary, as well as reading the material, (research) and finding suitable pictures, links, etc.

Regarding the image 'Techno Police 21,' according to Wiki the image is too small and such a low resolution that the income potential of the copyright holder is not infringed by its use.

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Louis Shalako.