So, a few odious provisions of the Orwellian named Patriot Act, particularly section 215 used to illegally justify the bulk collection of the phone records of law-abiding U.S. citizens, was forced to sunset only to be replaced by a slightly less odious, and just as Orwellian named USA Freedom Act.

I expected to find a scathing analysis of the events of the past few weeks on The//Intercept but I had to read through nearly a quarter of the more than 1,276 words in the article before I came to the buried lede.

[W]hile the Freedom Act contains a few other modest reform provisions‚ such as more disclosure and a public advocate for the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, it does absolutely nothing to restrain the vast majority of the intrusive surveillance revealed by [Edward] Snowden. [Emphasis mine, JH]

It leaves untouched formerly secret programs the NSA says are authorized under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and that while ostensibly targeted at foreigners nonetheless collect vast amounts of American communications. It won’t in any way limit the agency’s mass surveillance of non-American communications.

As I wrote after Sunday night’s legislative action, which paved the way for Tuesday’s vote, this marks the end of a vast expansion in surveillance authorities that began almost immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks. Indeed, the Freedom Act represents the single greatest surveillance reform package since the 1970s.

But that’s a low bar.

A very low bar indeed. So, how did certain senators vote? I’m still looking for the roll call, but, not surprisingly, Senator Bernie Sanders, (I-Vermont) voted no.

I left the following comment on the story in reply to Rhodan 1970 who made the repugnant You run from the law, you end up with a good chance of having an entry wound on the back side lame excuse: We do not allow summary executions here and fleeing from the police is not a capital crime in the United States.

Oliver Laughland, writing for The Guardian in ‘Shot from behind’: man’s death reveals hidden horror of Latino police killings begins:

Outside the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco’s Mission district, a newly painted mural glows in the afternoon sun. Two of the men etched on the wall are instantly recognisable: to the right stands Eric Garner, the unarmed black man killed by police in New York City; Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, stands to the left. But framed in the middle is a face hardly anyone from beyond the streets of this historically working class area would have ever noticed.

Amilcar Perez-Lopez was 20 years old when he was shot dead by two plain-clothed San Francisco police officers in February. An undocumented migrant and Guatemalan national, he is pictured at the bottom of the mural, his hands up, clutching a copy of Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide.

He was killed two blocks away from the mural. The gallery’s owners heard the gunshots go off.

If you have a suspect running away from an attempted, or actual homicide, with a weapon in their hand and you fear for the safety of other citizens and you have a clear shot, then police can make the case for opening fire. Short of that, a chase is not an excuse for a hail of bullets, because bullets take bad hops and innocent people can get hurt or be killed.

As of this morning, The Counted include 470 people killed by police, so far, in 2015.

We are 18 months away from our next presidential election in November 2016 and journalists are talking about momentum?

Trip Gabriel and Patrick Healy, writing in Challenging Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Gains Momentum in Iowa for The New York Times write:

A mere 240 people live in the rural northeast Iowa town of Kensett, so when more than 300 crowded into the community center to hear Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, many driving 50 miles, the cellphones of Democratic leaders statewide began to buzz.

Kurt Meyer, the county party chairman who organized the Saturday event, texted Troy Price, the Iowa political director for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Price called back immediately.

“Objects in your rearview mirror are closer than they appear,” Meyer said he had told Price about Sanders. “Mrs. Clinton had better get out here.”

The first evidence that Clinton could face a credible challenge in the Iowa presidential caucuses appeared late last week in the form of overflow crowds at Sanders’s first swing through that state since declaring his candidacy for the Democratic nomination.

He drew 700 people to an event Thursday night in Davenport, for instance — the largest rally in the state for any single candidate this campaign season, and far more than the 50 people who attended a rally there Saturday with former governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland.

People in Iowa take their presidential politics very seriously and there is no more serious candidate than Bernie Sanders.

Tom Wolfe famously nailed the essence of the ’60s in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (page 83) when in 1968 he quoted Ken Keasey’s dictum: There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place—then it won’t make a damn.

Fast forward 40-plus years to Helsinki, Finland and the city’s bus station.

There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. “Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off. Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. “You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.” Penn’s bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform”. Three years later, something similar happens. “This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.” What’s the answer? “It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

A little way farther on, the way Minkkinen tells it, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off on idiosyncratic journeys to very different destinations. That’s when the photographer finds a unique “vision”, or–if you’d rather skip the mystificatory art talk – the satisfying sense that he or she is doing their own thing

Just as Kesey told Wolfe, getting off the bus may be ill advised.

Ma and Pa have already built nest number two and are waiting for this brood to mature.

Exposing corporate hypocrisy surrounding self-reliance and the value of bootstraps while sucking at the pubic teat—like yanking the blanket off of yet another child molester hiding behind Christ or a Republican homophobe trolling for a hookup in an airport bathroom—is shooting the fish in a proverbial barrel. Yet, we need to keep pulling the trigger for our own sanity.

Damian Carrington, writing in Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF for The Guardian, writes:

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, said: “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidies for fossil fuels, which distort markets and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries.”

Lord Stern said that even the IMF’s vast subsidy figure was a significant underestimate: “A more complete estimate of the costs due to climate change would show the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels are much bigger even than this report suggests.”

So, what are we doing about this travesty? Not much.

Barack Obama and the G20 nations called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies in 2009, but little progress had been made until oil prices fell in 2014. In April, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, told the Guardian that it was crazy that governments were still driving the use of coal, oil and gas by providing subsidies. “We need to get rid of fossil fuel subsidies now,” he said.

Reform of the subsidies would increase energy costs but Kim and the IMF both noted that existing fossil fuel subsidies overwhelmingly go to the rich, with the wealthiest 20% of people getting six times as much as the poorest 20% in low and middle-income countries. Gaspar said that with oil and coal prices currently low, there was a “golden opportunity” to phase out subsidies and use the increased tax revenues to reduce poverty through investment and to provide better targeted support.

Subsidy reforms are beginning in dozens of countries including Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand. In India, subsidies for diesel ended in October 2014. “People said it would not be possible to do that,” noted Coady. Coal use has also begun to fall in China for the first time this century.

The problem we face is that ending the subsidies will affect the poorest of us the most in the day-to-day costs of heating our homes and driving to and from work. Rising energy prices will not bother the 1 percent one iota and shifting their investment dollars might be conceivably inconvenient, but not onerously so.

Now if we could shift those subsidies to offset the cost, there would be more hope.

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

*That is 464 killed so far this year, most recently Richard Davis, 50, killed by Taser on Sunday, 31 May and reaching back to New Years day when police ran over Garrett Gagne, 22.

We all know about Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell and…, but what about the rest of the citizens killed by police, what The Guardian calls The Counted who have died at the hands of the police so far in the first five months of 2015?

The Counted is a project by the Guardian—and you—working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists as frequently and as promptly as possible.

this is a living document. Track the death toll yourself. Be enraged.

My current project is a novel set a century ago in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve only been to Charleston once, and that for only a single afternoon more than a dozen years ago. I remember the high bridge driving south into the city. I remember lunch and a bookstore. I remember park and battery at the end of the peninsula. What makes me think I could write a convincing novel about a character in a city I cannot claim to know in a period I haven’t experienced?

Knowledge that I am writing a work of fiction, not a historical biography and confidence that I can do sufficient research with texts and the Internet to weave the telling details and plead my shortcomings for the rest.

David Nicholls, writing in Google v old-fashioned legwork—how to research a novel for The Guardian shares some of his insights on the topic.

While there’s clearly no agreed method for an author to acquire a sense of place, I’ve always wanted to know a location at first hand, and have always been able not only to place a pin in the map but also to specify a date and time, so that the flat on Rankeillor Street in Edinburgh where Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew wake on 15 July 1988 is the same sublet flat that I shared with 15 other students during that summer’s fringe festival. This is not to say that the events are autobiographical – that’s rarely the case – but experience provides a sort of sense-memory, an authenticity that hopefully finds its way on to the page, because if the background is tangible and real, then hopefully events in the foreground will seem more plausible, too. Mapping and timing the journeys also seems important, and while writing One Day I stomped from Rankeillor Street up Arthur’s Seat then down to the New Town and on to the point on Hanover Street where the final conversation takes place. I can’t claim that the re?enactment had a huge effect on the text; the only detail I remember lifting from life was the cock-and-balls graffiti that someone had scrawled in green Sharpie on the trig point on Arthur’s Seat. Did they bring the pen with them with this in mind? I wondered, and had Emma wonder this, too.

My first, unpublished, novel relied heavily on such reality checks. I drove to the places in and around Cleveland where the action took place. I used my own home as a model for the home where my protagonist lived. Only when I went somewhat far afield for the final chapters of the story, did I create a fictitious estate on a semi-fictitious western Lake Erie island.

One of the advantages of walking and driving the places in your story is that you gather the unexpected experience: a chance encounter or discovery of a shop you had never seen before. These are telling details that make a difference. Nicholls continues.

The most obvious inadequacy of such an approach is that if the author doesn’t leave their desk, then nothing happens to the author. Some writers have fun with this mingling of personal and fictional experience, and I enjoyed both Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, books where a blurring of author and narrator invites the reader to think, my God, did this stuff really happen? Even when the work is unequivocally fictional, the author wants to bring something home from the journey, a useful souvenir. Visiting a book fair in Moscow I found myself sharing a table in the hotel’s breakfast room with some noisy and self-confident armament manufacturers and this encounter, heavily fictionalised, found its way into Us, as did the smallest hotel room in Venice, a heavy, salty meal in Munich and the sleepless night that followed, an awkward encounter with the bikers outside a bar in Amsterdam. There’s that familiar feeling: this is an awful experience, maybe I can use it.

One of my favorite writers, and mentor-at-a-distance, Lawrence Block, went to some pains to describe the angst of getting the bus route right or knowing on which side of East 62nd street the pizza shop is located on. Block’s main reason for checking such trivia is that if the writer gets their facts wrong, a few—most likely, very few—readers will spot the mistake and be jolted out of the story by the incongruous factoid.

We strike a balance. I know how easily I can be sucked into research heaven as an excuse for procrastination. Years ago, when I was learning to paint with watercolors, my father told me of his experience as a Fine Arts major. He preferred watercolors because “you can’t fiddle with them.” Oils, on the other hand could be endlessly painted, scraped, repainted and since no artist can ever really be done, there could be no final product. (I am reminded that Leonardo da Vinci carried La Gioconda–The Mona Lisa–with him for more than 20 years, working on and off on the project as he willed.)

Writing, if we allow ourselves the luxury, can be like that. We may never finish, unless and editor (or agent) is there ripping pages from the typewriter before we have a chance to make just one more change.

Behind my grandparents’ home on Front Street in Marietta, Ohio, between the garden and and the Marietta Boat Club on the bank of the Muskingum River, was a concrete boat. Not a boat for hauling concrete, but a boat made from concrete. I’m not sure how the relic from WW II came to be there, but I imagine that the boat had something to do with Marietta Concrete, where my dad worked his way through college drawing plans for grain silos.

Before there was plastic, there was cement, plaster and concrete.

This technology is flat out cool.

When art becomes a death defying act, then there is much more at stake than art. Bravery is doing that which terrifies you because you realize that what you do is more important than your self. Cartoonist Aseem Trivedi fully understands the concept.

In January this year, Trivedi announced he planned to launch a magazine of cartoons in tribute to Charlie Hebdo. His first campaign is in support of Badawi, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years’ imprisonment in September last year. The first 50 lashes were administered in public outside Jeddah’s Al-Jafali Mosque on 9 January. According to his wife Ensaf Haidar, his case had been referred to the Supreme Court, which could sentence him to death for apostasy.

Trivedi is waging his fight for freedom of expression and information in a country where it is highly dangerous to criticise Islam. The subject of religion remains sensitive for journalists and bloggers. Some religious groups come out with threats and aggressive condemnations, which their members then attempt to carry out arbitrarily while the authorities turn a blind eye.

The number of journalists killed has declined considerably, but self-censorship and the prevailing climate of insecurity and impunity are a cause for concern. The launch of Black & White is a breath of hope and a message to all enemies of freedom, which must be passed on.

Blogging is not a crime.

I was in the break room, filling my coffee mug, when one of the Language Arts, what we used to call English, teachers announced her entrance to no one in particular with “god I hate grammar.”

Setting aside the irony of that moment, consider that I, and the other teachers in the room, felt for her. I’m a writer who never properly learned how to diagram a sentence or how to conjugate the really tricky verbs. Every time I sit at the keyboard a part of me thinks of the scoffing snorts a copyeditor will share with the office while reading my prose.

I’m supposed to get this stuff, damn it!

Good communication ought to be about being understood, not adhering to some set of last-century rules. Right?

The good folks at Merriam-Webster agree. Sort of.

If you’re someone who cares about writing and speaking carefully, though, your communication skills will be strengthened by keeping them straight, so here’s the lowdown. Lay’s most common meaning is “to place (something or someone) down in a flat position.” Lie’s corresponding meaning is “to be in a flat position on a surface.” Lay is transitive; it requires that the verb have an object; there has to be a thing or person being placed: Lay it down. Lie, on the other hand, is intransitive. It’s for something or someone moving on their own or something that’s already in position: You can lie down there. You can lie there all day.

That’s tricky enough, but it gets worse when we start using the words beyond the present tense. Here’s lay in context in tenses that show its principle forms: I was told to lay the book down. I laid it down as I have laid other books down. I am laying more books down now.

And here’s lie: I was told to lie down. I lay down. I have lain here since. I’m still lying here.

Did you catch that? For lay, we have lay, laid, have laid, laying; for lie, we have lie, lay, have lain, lying. And then there’s the unrelated verb meaning “to tell an untruth.” That lie goes lie, lied, have lied, lying.

Yes, it’s really that complicated. We apologize. If you want to brush up, focus on the present and past tense—they do most of the work by far—and check the dictionary entries when you’re not sure.

I’m going to go have a lie down.

Whoo wee! There’s goin’ to be some fun in Texas now!

Texas lawmakers approved carrying handguns openly on the streets of the nation’s second most populous state on Friday, sending the bill to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it and reverse a ban dating to the post-civil war era.

Seriously folks. This can only end badly. Innocent people are going to be hurt, possibly killed, either accidentally by stray rounds as fools draw down in public spaces, or deliberately by misinformed zealots. Then there will be all the panics as people see guns in public buildings and private establishments.

The looniest Texans are Clint Eastwood wannabes…

Don’t mess with Texas is about to become the reason to not visit the Lone Star state.

Previously…

Back in 2010, while working on Tim Russo’s campaign to become a member of the Cuyahoga County Council, I had the chance to see Tim’s attic man-cave where one wall was dominated by an oversize reproduction of Shepard Fairey’s iconic Hope poster. Like Tim, I was captivated by the message of Hope (I should have remembered, and been forewarned by, candidate Bill Clinton’s billing as The Man From Hope).

I moved on after President Obama proved just as disappointing as President Clinton. So too has Fairey.

The man on the poster is still president. But the artist behind the poster has moved on.

Shepard Fairey, whose stencil portrait of Barack Obama with the caption “Hope” became the defining image of the 2008 presidential campaign, told Esquire magazine in an interview published on Thursday that the politician had not lived up to the propaganda.

“Not even close,” Fairey said.

“Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected. I mean, drones and domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support].”

The Hope poster represented an unusually explicit foray into politics for the Los Angeles-based artist, who first won renown for an image of Andre the Giant with various captions, including the command “Obey”.

Instead of Hope, perhaps Fairey’s poster should have taken a line from Dante: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

Creativity is hard. Really, really hard. If you’re writing/painting/sculpting/drawing/scoring ideas faster than your fingers can move, here’s a clue: you’re producing drek.

Some writer—just who is a matter of debate—observed that writing was easy, you just opened a view and bled onto the paper.

I think I like Derf’s graphic version better.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the first installment of The Guardian’s Carbon Bombs in the Galilee basin in Queensland, Australia.

Here in Southern North America we’re fighting over building a pipeline through our largest source of food and water to move petroleum from Canada to Texas. A failure anywhere along that pipeline would threaten those resources as well as the health and lives of millions. Far more importantly, however, building the pipeline could be a vital part in arming the detonator for a Carbon Bomb far more devastating than than the mega-tonnage thrown by the 24 Trident ballistic missiles from by our 18 Ohio class submarines.

The Alberta government claims the tar sands are the third biggest proven crude reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, with proven reserves of about 168bn barrels.

It demands huge amounts of energy to extract thick black petroleum from the earth, 3.2 to 4.5 times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil.

But the vast majority of the tar sands, 142,200 sq km, are too deep to mine, forcing the industry to resort to the far more energy intensive steam-assisted gravity drainage to melt the tar sands and flush it up from the depths to the top.

James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist who first sounded the alarm on climate change, warned mining all of Alberta’s tar sands would be “game over for the climate”.

What makes the tar sands an existential threat to humanity?

Five years ago, the International Energy Agency said tar sands production would need to peak at 3.3m barrels a day by 2035 to avoid blowing through the carbon budget—the limit to avoid dangerous climate change. But the Canadian government has already approved production of 5m barrels a day.

This, is not worth this.

Hieronymus Bosch did not conceive of such an actual hell.

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

I have long advocated for the rigorous display of handguns on citizens because such display, especially by people of color, will bring demands to amend our constitution and bring some sanity to the issue of gun ownership in this country. Blessed Texas has opened the door.

Texas lawmakers approved carrying handguns openly on the streets of the nation’s second most populous state on Friday, sending the bill to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it and reverse a ban dating to the post-civil war era.

Gun owners would still have to get a license to carry a handgun in a visible holster.

The state – known for its wild west, cowboy history and some of the nation’s most relaxed gun laws – has allowed concealed handguns for 20 years. Concealed handgun license holders are even allowed to skip the metal detectors at the state Capitol, as state troopers providing security assume they’re armed.

But Texas was one of only six states with an outright ban on so-called open carry, and advocates have fought to be allowed to keep their guns in plain sight. Cast as an important expansion of the second amendment right to bear arms in the US constitution, it became a major issue for the state’s strong Republican majority.

Now, I think every church, social club and neighborhood organization whose members are non-Europeans should flood the State of Texas with requests for licenses and encourage their members to openly carry. When the Black Panthers went down this path in the ’60s, states quickly saw the dangers and imposed curbs on everyone. The time for the national debate is now and we can thank the good loonies of Texas for the opportunity.

I added my name this morning to a petition post by Reporters Without Borders after reading “Raif Badawi’s detention is an insult to intelligence and freedom” this morning on the group’s website. I generally ignore such online pleas, but I signed the petition because I could clearly read the language and fully support the intent of the words.

The disturbing bit is that the petition has been on the Internet—population 2.1 billion and counting—for more than five months and only 46,207 (46,208, counting me) have found the petition and taken the less than a minute required to read and add their name to, the document. That means that less than 0.002 percent of the potential community thought that sentencing a blogger to 10 years and 1,000 lashes for exercising the universal right to free speech was a bad idea.

Perhaps a few of my own tiny audience will add their names.

I hope so.

Please.

Is the soul of nation, the moral authority of more than 35 million people, worth $15,000,000 per lash? That is the question that Nick Taylor-Vaisey explores in What of that $15-billion arms deal with the Saudis? for Macleans.

Think about everything you see as you make your way to work every morning. You definitely see women driving cars, even though they’re not men. If you pass a legislature, you might see protesters doing their thing, even though they’re saying awful things about someone in power. If you’re in the nation’s capital with some time to kill before your shift starts, and you have a hankering for a (sort of) celebrity trial, you can sit in on #duffytrial’s second act, which opens at the downtown Ottawa courthouse on June 1.

All of this is normal, even mundane. But much of it is illegal, or basically impossible, in other places. Let’s play a game called Guess the Country, based on the observations of Human Rights Watch:

[Citizens] are increasingly and openly discussing government affairs on Twitter and Facebook-a ban on women driving, arbitrary detention of peaceful dissidents and terror suspects, and corruption, among others-but the government in 2011 banned public protests, tightened press laws, and arrested scores of peaceful rights advocates and protesters. [This country] struggles with a poorly defined and nontransparent justice system based on religion that metes out draconian sentences. Women and minority Shia citizens face systematic discrimination. Immigration and labor restrictions on migrant workers facilitate widespread abuse.

The country: Saudi Arabia. Admittedly, the game wasn’t all that difficult. The repressive regime that rules in Riyadh is legendary and a constant international hallmark of realpolitik at work: the government may be terrible with human rights, but it’s a stable regime that’s “friendly” to western interests in a part of the world where stable, “friendly” regimes are hard to come by. That explains HRW’s last sentence in its overview of the country’s record: “Western countries remained largely silent about poor rights conditions in the kingdom.”

Canada’s opposition parties have persistently demanded the feds call for the immediate release of Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger who’s serving a 10-year prison sentence accompanied by 1,000 lashes. Badawi’s family fled to Quebec in 2013. Whenever the opposition brings up Badawi, the government’s talking points respond.

“Mr. Speaker, we have repeatedly and publicly expressed Canada’s strong objections to the imprisonment and punishment of Raif Badawi,” said Tory MP Bernard Trottier on May 8, in response to Liberal MP Irwin Cotler’s question. “We will do so again today. Canada considers Mr. Badawi’s sentence to be a violation of human dignity. We will continue to call for clemency in this case. We have made representations to Saudi Arabia’s ambassador here in Ottawa, and Canada’s ambassador in Riyadh has met with senior Saudi representatives a number of times. We have also registered our government’s concerns with the Government of Saudi Arabia. This will continue going forward until clemency is granted.”

Meanwhile, as the government “registered” its “concerns” with the Saudis, a Canadian crown corporation was working on an arms deal with the same country. And this wasn’t a small-time deal. The Canadian Commercial Corporation is brokering a $15-billion deal that would send a bunch of Canadian-made light armoured vehicles for service in Saudi Arabia.

We here in lower North America like to think that Canadians are different. Perhaps we are wrong.