Nice shot, Steve!
This comes from the announcement that Obama is throwing Harper a bone to extend the Softwood Lumber Agreement. Yes, we don't quite want your oil but we'll take your wood and punish you for owning it as a nation! Actually...why don't we just charge the forestry companies a bit more money and be done with it?
On to the real news.
I remember when I first discovered Boingboing a few years ago, it really resonated. It was a prime example of how the internet can change things. You would watch as a story rolled out and then within a few hours, a boingboinger somewhere would chime in and the story would evolve to encompass this first hand information. I've watched as support has grown for protests and public perception has changed. Today, it looks like the 24 hour Boingboing blackout (amongst others) is
really having an effect on SOPA legislation. It's pretty amazing. A lot has been made of Wikipedia going black, but I don't think this would have been anything without the Boingboings and Reddits getting on board.
Similarly, it's been pretty amazing to hear mainstream TV news pick up on this over the last few days. I guess the average person really doesn't have a clue that this was even out there or what it could mean.
Slate argues that a bit of Piracy is a good thing. Minor piracy. Like when the Pirate is Johnny Depp and there are high jinks involved.
This link
shows the staggering amount of money donated to politicians by media interests to Politicians in support of SOPA/PIPA. Just crazy amounts of money. And some of these same Politicians are
guilty of copyright infringement themselves.
And lastly (hopefully), this article
debunks some of the bogus numbers, both in dollar and job losses, attributed to Piracy. And the final point, that the US Government could end up spending $47 Million to become the Copyright Police for a bunch of private corporations, is a good one.
Oh, another one here. With a great shoplifting anology.
Pipelines don't seem to be very popular right now, whether it's
Keystone or
Northern Gateway. As well, a
Salon article points out the absurdity of the Canadian Government lobbying hard within the US, being a mouthpiece for American Oil Companies, yet making a big stink about "foreign environmental interests" and telling Americans to mind their own business.
The Globe and Mail has an article that claims Stephen Harper has effectively shaped the discussion on health care transfer payments and pipelines. Which seems to be an optimistic take on things, if you're a Conservative. As it suggests that the fight is over already. And...then...
they start doing the dirty work to make sure that the discussion is shaped for Harper, digging in to foreign environmental interests. If only they would work this hard on digging up info on the Conservatives.
Hey!
Let's cut those meat inspectors! Who cares about food safety! I mean, it's been years since a bunch of people have died from improper food inspection. Let's rely on the free market. People will simply refuse to buy meat that kills them, so it will all sort itself out.
I remember when I was young that I thought
MP pensions were a good thing. After all, you're asking people to leave their past lives behind to serve their country. If somebody has to leave a good career, they should be compensated for taking on such a risky job, right? That was before I realized Politics was an exercise in triple dipping: Accepting a bunch of cash from Industries to create self-serving legislation, banking the above mentioned fat pension, and then taking a high paying job from the same people that paid you a bunch of cash to write laws on their behalf. Ya, I no longer thing that MP pensions are such a good thing. I'd imagine Steve-O is kicking himself for railing against them for long. "If only we'd talked more about bureacrat pensions rather than MP pensions!"
Steve-O has a plan to outsource Government communications and advertising. To save money. Because profit driven corporations can always do things cheaper than focused government departments.