Author: CLARION

AUSTRALIA TO BAN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR KIDS UNDER SIXTEEN

Australia has passed legislation that forbids children under the age of sixteen from having social media accounts.  To be clear, this is not a cellphone ban so far as I currently understand it, but rather something targeted at kids’ ability to sign up for social media accounts in the first place.  I guess the feeling is that, once you take the social media out of the phone, the device just becomes this inert piece of irrelevant technology.

Yeah, right.

In the Australian situation, being monitored breathlessly by provincial governments here in Canada who like to make big noises that have little impact, the gatekeepers, the people responsible for ensuring compliance with the age requirements, are the creators and operators of the social media companies that are being shut out of one of their most lucrative markets.  There’s those damned foxes again, in charge of the gate to the hen house, so to speak.

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COUNCIL BRAKE-CHECKS STAFF INFO-TECH RECOMMENDATION

In a way, it seemed that Wednesday morning’s Town Council meeting, at least the open part of it, was the relative political equivalent of a McDonald’s drive-thru window, in that you got what you were looking for much quicker than had you gone for the regular in-store experience.  At least for me, anyways, since Council then went into closed session, please don’t get me started.

But in that brief period of sunshine, important work was done, and that’s not being sarcastic.

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TOWN COUNCIL AND CLOSED SESSIONS. THE RULE RATHER THAN THE EXCEPTION.

I don’t think I’ve seen Renfrew Town Council at its best.  I don’t know if it has one.

So far as I’ve been able to determine from a first-hand point of view, there is no best to be had, unless they really crank it up behind closed doors, where they kick everyone out of the room so that they can talk about the real stuff, the stuff that people want answers to.  I can only assume they’re talking about important things in there, but how would I know?  As I said, I, and anyone else present, have been shown the door.  Only the so-called primary actors remain, the inner circle, the sanctum, the privileged few.  The ones who matter.

The foxes slamming the door of the henhouse once inside.

After close to three hours of the eyeball-bleeding, public-facing facade of “openness and transparency,” this council will often go into closed session.  Top secret, hush-hush and all that.

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THE RENFREW TAX MAN COMETH. AND HE COMETH WITH A VENGEANCE

In an earlier opinion piece, I threw out the notion that in Ontario, municipalities are not allowed to run operational deficits.

They’re not.  It’s as simple as that.  I didn’t make it up, agree or disagree, I just stated that fact as it currently stands.  Check out the Municipal Act 2001 if you wish.

It’s something that is obviously concerning if you live in Renfrew, pay property tax in Renfrew, and follow Renfrew news — such as it may be, and it ain’t much, unless you enjoy dollops of self-serving platitudes and accept them as “news” — so I can certainly see and understand some degree of anxiousness around someone coming along and telling you that the corporation that you fund — the municipality — isn’t allowed to carry a deficit term over term.  Because you know that, if deficits aren’t allowed, that shortfall will have to be made up somewhere.  And that you, as the primary source of income for that municipality, may — will — be called upon to make up a big chunk of that shortfall.  In other words, through no fault of your own, you’ll be required to pony up to make right the egregious mistakes or lack of rigour that has led to that deficit situation in the first place.

And by deficit, let me be clear.  We’re not talking about slipping into maroon territory here, where you you slide gently from black ink to red ink on the balance sheet.  We’re talking full-on red, dark red, the ugliest colour of ink possible when we’re talking about money, especially if it’s your money. 

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WHEN THE DOGS AND PONIES ARE RUNNING THE SHOW

The circus comes to town every couple of weeks when Town Council has its regularly scheduled dog-and-pony-show exercise that passes itself off as municipal democracy in action.  And despite everyone performing their roles, with varying degrees of success, the production is made up seemingly of a council rubber-stamping whatever the administrative side of things wants it to rubber stamp.  Mind you, a couple of councillors will periodically raise objections to this, but will often get out-voted if they raise their concerns to the level of making a motion

That’s because here in Renfrew, we have what looks to be a chimera of democracy in play.  

Elected councillors are flummoxed by redundant and poorly organized agenda briefing documents, almost always numbering over a hundred pages, two-hundred pages, and often more.  This is how administration does it, firing smoke grenades to obfuscate things enough that councillors routinely pass what’s put in front of them because, as some have said, they trust the department heads to manage their departments with effectiveness and due diligence.

Sort of like the last council did.  

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SYRIAN REBELS ON THE MARCH WHILE REGIME ALLIES CRUMBLE

It’s a bitch of a day to be a dictator, especially one with any fingers in that toxic pie that we also refer to as Syria.

It appears that rebel forces, a term I use loosely to describe the various opposition forces, not necessarily aligned, that have broken out of their positions and attacked and taken Syria’s second-largest city of Aleppo.  No rebel force has had a foot in the ground in that city since 2016, back when the Russians carpet-bombed them out of the place, while at the same time indiscriminately killing thousands of innocent civilians.  You may know already that the Russians have never been accused of being bleeding-hearts when it comes to civilian deaths, or any deaths for that matter.  That said, their murderous tendencies fit hand-in-glove with those of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it was those Russian interventions, along with interventions from Iran and Hezbollah, that kept the slimy sum-bitch in power.  He did, after all, almost lose that power as a result of the more generalized Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, but hung on by the hair of his chinny chin-chin with the help of his benevolent friends.

But things have changed for Assad, and not in the best of ways.

Those three outside interventionists that prop up his regime are all now themselves involved in existential crises of their own making, because all three kept sticking their faces in places where they did’t belong, and are now paying their respective prices for that.

I’ll go Iran first.

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CANADIAN NEWSPAPERS FILE SUIT AGAINST ChatGPT AND OPENAI

It’s come to light that a group of Canadian newspapers have banded together to launch a lawsuit against ChatGPT and OpenAI, two entities that specialize in using artificial intelligence to generate what could be called “creative’ materials.  By creative materials, I speak mostly about text, or writing applications, and artificially-generated images, although the technology will soon expand to include other artistic endeavours, like video, music, and, well, you name it.

These entities are also referred to as large language models, or LLM’s, and get their capabilities from scouring the internet in the most precise detail and “learning” from what they scan, both in terms of content and style, to the point where they can replicate the work of a real person, and do so in seconds.

The implications, and ramifications of this, are huge.  And to a large degree totally unfair to those people and those organizations who generate creative content the old-fashioned way:  through talent, hard work, and much self-sacrifice.

The reason it’s newspapers leading this particular charge is two-fold.

First, it’s been the news media generally that has been stolen from on an egregious scale, victimized by the big tech companies who would allow that original content to be posted and re-posted on their various social media platforms and other platforms.  Given the rise and popularity in social media, it was only a matter of time before the advertising dollars followed suit, the same dollars that newspapers relied on to provide their product and pay their salaries and bills.  After all, when you advertise in a newspaper, your messaging gets thrown in the trash after a day or a week, depending on the type of publication.  When you advertise online, algorithms ensure that your message will remain alive, and pop-up conveniently everywhere a potential consumer may go, since the algorithm has already determined your surfing and interest patterns.  A much better bang for your advertising buck.

The kicker is that the place that created the original content is forced to lay off staff, downsize its operations, or close completely, thereby sniffing out the source of all that creative work.  So there go of all those writers, reporters, graphic artists, editors, and advertising sales people, all victims to voracious American big tech companies who have literally come in and stolen everything from you to fuel their own breath-taking growth.

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CANADA’S F-35’S ARE ON THE WAY

It’s been awhile since I last had anything to say about  Canada’s procurement of F-35 Lightning II jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force, or RCAF.  The combat aircraft, all 88 of them, were purchased as replacements for Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18 Hornets, in service since the 1980’s.

Things were so bad with the Hornets that, although a very capable aircraft and much better than none at all, we had to literally buy additional Hornets from Australia more for the spare parts they represented rather than the flying platforms themselves.  The Australians, as well, have gone the way of the F-35, but were ahead of Canada in the ordering of them, making their F-18’s available to Canada as we struggled to maintain a competent fighter-interceptor presence over Canadian skies while we waited for the new planes.

The Canadian F-35’s have always been the topic of scepticism.  Canada was one of the first countries that signed on to the original consortium of nations that plugged into the program that was to design and build what is officially known as the Joint Strike Fighter, a fifth-generation stealth fighter that would combine the very best of the F-15, F-16, and F-18 fighters into one platform that could also double as a networking attack quarterback capable of managing the entire battle space.

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TRUMP TARIFF THREAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TRADE

The American president has threatened us — Mexico too — with a 25% tariff on all goods and services that has all the political experts at your local landfill going apeshit, with no offence intended to either apes or their periodic need to take a shit.  After all, domestic apes only shit what you feed them.

This is the kind of thing that gives your hero Pierre Poillievre the zoomies, and results in him yipping and yapping as he runs hell-bent along the perimeter of the backyard fence.  As the postal workers are on strike, it’s the only exercise he gets.

I’m not going to get into the thousand or so reasons why this is all political theatre, on all sides, and by that I mean the Americans and their bullhorn-blowing acolytes here north of the border.  But I can point out a couple of things.

First, if the tariffs were to actually be applied, every single American citizen, and probably all the illegal ones too, would lose an estimated $1500.00 a year in economic consequences, and that’s before any possible retaliation by Canada.  That’s because of the intricate integration of the two economies.  In essence, if the Americans were going to carry through with this threat, it wouldn’t be a case of shooting themselves in the foot, but rather a case of them employing a machine gun for the same purpose.

The Americans would never impose a 25% tariff on us, or Mexico.  Full stop.  

What they would do is use such a threat to make us take action in other areas, like defence spending, border security, and a range of other side issues where the Americans are pissed at us.  To be sure, on the trade front, our southern neighbours have always been rankled by government subsidies in the softwood lumber sphere, or the Quebec dairy sphere, and other economic spheres, but those things have all been addressed through the negotiation of free trade deals between the two/three countries, including the last one signed by the incoming American president himself.  You’re not going to suggest that he negotiated a bad deal with Canada, are you?  Because he only negotiates “perfect” deals.  And the last one has his fingerprints all over it.

Just look at the statement the American president-elect put out on his home-made social media platform that announced the tariff attack and threat in the first place.

“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

So, it’s not about trade, per se, it’s about using trade as a cudgel to get what you want in other areas.

As his nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent writes, “Whether it is getting allies to spend more on their own defense, opening foreign markets to U.S. exports, securing co-operation on ending illegal immigration and interdicting fentanyl trafficking, or deterring military aggression, tariffs can play a central role,”

Oh my God, can we please learn about this guy, already?  He’s only been around for forever, yet we continue to react, and/or over-react based upon assumptions that we make that are, oftentimes, flawed assumptions.  I mean how many of us got that last election totally wrong, right?

If anyone thinks that Agent Orange is going to wipe out the economies of many of his own states, or that he’s going to be responsible for Americans at large taking a huge consumer price hit, then you’re thinking and behaving exactly as he intends.

So we’ll spend more on defence.  Tighten up the border.  Put the screws to fentanyl, which is actually more of a China/Mexico thing, although that drug causes untold mayhem here in Canada as well.  I’ll not argue against any of those things, so go Donny as far as I’m concerned.

But to think the guy would go out and knee-cap himself just because he likes to mouth off on social media?

Hardly.

RENFREW TOWN COUNCIL MEETING: SCOUTING REPORT 26/11/2

So what am I supposed to do with that?

I attended the Town Council meeting last night, all pumped and ready to go.  Really juiced the place up in yesterday’s piece with the prospects for high-drama and bet-worthiness.  Got there early to get a good seat — okay, so that’s never a problem — and generally made myself comfortable, certain that there’d be plenty to write about this morning.

I was brought back to Earth in a hurry.  It is, after all, Renfrew Town Council.  Sorta like that cop that waves you by saying “Nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see here.”

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