On the passing of my friend, Peter Smith (1966-2023)

I was saddened to hear of my friend Peter Smith's sudden passing this week. (his obituary)

Peter was 56.

I moved with my wife and 14-year-old daughter to New Brunswick, Canada in October 2005.  One month later, Peter Smith shared these photos with me.  He was one of the first friends I made in Canada

Peter was a man I knew to love beauty, to love life, to love adventure, and to love his wife, Molly.

I had the utmost respect for him.

Peter took these photos on Sunday, 11 September, 2005, in Sussex, NB

Google knows what you did last summer

 Here's something you may find interesting, even "cute" in a way:

Back in the winter, I returned some equipment to a Bell/Aliant store.  When I approached the building the door wouldn't open.  A guy ran over to the door from inside the store and opened it manually.  "It's because you're wearing a mask," he explained.

"Oh, you have a facial recognition system," I said.

"No, not really," he said, "it just keeps people out whose faces match a profile of bad guys.  We don't collect information on our customers."

"I see, it's a facial recognition system that only detects bad people."  

I would bet money there's an image in a database somewhere of me entering that store, with the exact time and date.  Just like recorded surveillance video footage.  No harm done ... except I bet that image can be used to link me to countless other pieces of data, including every location I've taken my cellphone.

We all have the right to engage in perfectly legal activities that harm neither ourselves or anybody else without continuous scrutiny of our activities and without fear that we'll be mistakenly identified as a "person of interest" or whatever. As I've pointed out before, I'm doing nothing wrong when I use the toilet; yet I still believe I have a right to do that in complete privacy. (trust me, you don't want to watch)

Privacy is a basic human need, and a respect for privacy is basic human decency.  What I say, to whom, and where I say it, simply is not anyone else's business but my own.  I resent being told I'm the one who's doing something ​wrong when I express a desire to protect my privacy.  And I think privacy is worth defending.

I would also like to stress this point: it is not the actions of those who intrude on our privacy that appalls me, it's the passivity of the people who accept one of these two claims:  

1) Heck, who cares?  I've already shared half my life on FB ... nothing's really private anymore, anyway.  

Worse, because it's a passive acceptance of authoritarianism: 

2) I am doing nothing wrong; why should I care if my actions are being recorded?  If you're not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide.

Yeh, if you are an honest law-abiding citizen, then you should not harbor a desire for privacy.  Not in what you do, or where you go, or whom you love; not in your finances, your personal or your business relationships, your communications, or your personal beliefs and practices.  These things don't belong to you.  They belong to society, to the State.  And if you seek to conceal them; quite obviously you are trying to conceal something you've done wrong.  Bad person.  Bad citizen.  

People are really twisted mentally today ... not just those who control the instruments of ubiquitous surveillance, but those who think they're "cute".

Torture is NOT a "legal" issue (it's a moral issue)

Most of the arguments that were made to defend the use of torture techniques by American military and intelligence agency personnel centered around the "legality" of those techniques.

First of all, that was a classic "red herring."  It was a diversionary tactic, intended to divert attention from the fact that the use of torture is, has always been, and always will be a moral issue, not a legal one.  Those who ordered the use of torture against suspected islamists in secret CIA prison camps covered their legal asses very well ... completely, I'm sure.  I'm not interested in their legal arguments at all ... they are not relevant to the issue as it concerns us, the American people.  And the morality of torture is all that should concern us.

I was concerned only with the honor of the American people; and with the American nation.  And that honor was what was violated by the use of torture ... not merely international law or treaty law.

In short and in summary ... Americans shamed themselves by their defense of this practice.

I am proud that I refused to stoop to that moral low place.

The high ground that was given up has not been recovered.  It is unrecoverable.  And it is the loss of that moral high ground that has been most damaging to the US and to the security of the American nation ... not the revelations that Americans are "torturers."  

Again, I'd like to say that when Americans, as a people, defended the torture of helpless prisoners, detentions without legal recourse or any evidence of wrong-doing, and armed attacks on weaker, unarmed and defenseless nations that had done nothing to deserve those attacks, Americans did not violate any law, or even the rights of others.  Americans violated the very most basic American principles of justice. Americans violated their own principles. Those were my principles, and I hope they were yours.  I was brutalized.  So were you.

Americans made an evil choice: to trade something precious (that which makes America what it is) for mere promises of a little bit of extra promised security.

In sanctioning torture, Americans chose badly.

I'm sure, though, that the United States will never provide cluster munitions to anyone they know will use those weapons.

What does propaganda look like?

A few years ago, I worked on a project for the Canadian federal government. In our project space, we were surrounded by propaganda posters .. one morning I was staring at this one from Veteran Affairs Canada, and quipped to my coworkers, "I want to die in a war, Grandpa, just like Daddy!"

Holy crap... my co-workers did not think that was the least bit funny. I argued (unsuccessfully) that it was a propaganda poster. 

But that poster was propaganda ... emotionally evocative. Crafted for political manipulation.

35 years ago: James Hansen delivered his ground-breaking Senate testimony

 Thirty-five years ago, on 23 June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen gave testimony before the US Senate in which he warned that the global climate was changing; due to greenhouse gases in its atmosphere, our planet was warming.  He predicted that the warming would continue.  The New York Times reported that testimony on Page 1, under the headline "Global Warming Has Begun".

Were Hansen's 1988 projections correct?  The overwhelming consensus of scientists around the world:  "Hansen nailed it."

https://youtu.be/UVz67cwmxTM

The data collected over thirty years proved him right:

Hansen also forecasted that the Arctic would warm even faster than the planetary average

What happened since? The Arctic warmed even faster.

Hansen forecasted that the amount of sea ice in the Arctic would decline.

What happened since? The amount of sea ice in the Arctic declined.

So, was this guy some kind of kooky clairvoyant, or was Jim Hansen just a very good scientist?

Jim Hansen, by the way, is now 82 years old.