Mr. Wilkinson Leaps On His Sword...

AllYourPublicDisorders'RUs
MultimillionareVille

...Or Some Such Thing.

Link

The critical passage in the good Mr. Wilkinson's letter to his followers is the following:

"...Go to David Eby's townhall - whether you have a ticket or not..."

Gosh.

Maybe now would be the time to revisit that matter of whose been doing all that lawyerly 'practicing' that Mr. Wilkinson brought up a couple of weeks ago.

For the record, from the British Columbia Law Society's directory (just type in name):

*****

'Nuff said?



________
Tip O' The Toque to A. Reader for pointing us towards the law society's registorial pages...
And, just in case you missed it, former PostMedia BigData guy Chad Skelton has done the (pretty simple) math...
And, right on schedule...Here comes Marky Mark's reverse catapaulting of Mr. Wilkinson's sword...



.

I've Said It Before And I'll Say It Again...

ActivistsCanBe
LawyersTooVille


...They will always try to smear the one they fear most.

Link

______
What's it all about this time Alfie?....Well....This.


.

The Vancouver Model...."$800,000 In Twenties Is Very Heavy."

2009WasALongLongTimeAgo
Where'sIGETNowVille


Well, well, well...

The Globe and (NoLongerEmpire) Mail is floating the idea, in the form of a piece under Adrienne Tanner's byline, that our money laundering problem should be subjected to a public inquiry.

Of course, the usual suspects agree that we should get to the bottom of the matter:

...That view (that we should get to the bottom of things) is shared by two former provincial attorney-generals, Wally Oppal (Liberal) and Ujjal Dosanjh (NDP). Both applaud Mr. Eby’s efforts to get at the truth but say calls for a public inquiry are premature...


Except that, of course, we wouldn't want to really go whole hog because that would be very bad for business or some such undefined thing:

...Public inquiries work best when they are narrowly focused. Both Mr. Oppal and Mr. Dosanjh agree the person best positioned to limit the scope is Peter German, a respected former RCMP officer hired by Mr. Eby to investigate money laundering and its connections to real estate...


Hmmmmm....Not sure I agree.

Still, if you want narrow Mess'rs Oppal and Dosanjh, I'll give you narrow.

Because I am of the opinion that an in-depth inquiry specifically into the whys and wherefores of the following would open up all kinds of legitimate avenues for investigation by, say, stringers from the New York Times:

______
Need background?...It's here.
Quote in header?....Mr. Eby goes to Ottawa.


.

The Dilbit Pipe Chronicles (ctd)...Mr. Scheer Follows Ron Down The Rabbit Hole, Obviously.

Who'sSocialist
NowVille


On Saturday we pointed out that Mr. Mason of the Globe has concluded that Mr. Trudeau would be blamed by Albertans, regardless, even if he does succeed in getting the pipeline built.

What's it all about this time Alfie?

Well...

Noted obviousologist Andrew Scheer, as quoted by Mike de Souza in his excellent NatObserver piece published Sunday, explains (and amplifies) the Ron's thinking for all to behold:

..."I believe conversations around using taxpayers' dollars to backstop the project is a result of the crisis that we're in, that is of the prime minister's own making," Scheer said. "Had he seen the lay of the land politically in British Columbia and quickly referenced any jurisdictional questions to the Supreme Court back in the fall, had he not brought in Bill C-69, which further destabilized the investment community's confidence in these type(s) of project, we very well may not be under the May 31 deadline."...

Gosh.

Is it possible that somebody's very best Western affairs columnist really does have his finger on the pulse of the political zeitgeist....errrrrrrr...the finest of the fine folks whispering sweet nothings in his ear?


.

Ron Hits The Dilbit Pipe Hard, Obviously.

ThereIsNoChichesterCathedral
InBurnabyVille


According to Mr. Mason of the Globe, Justin Trudeau will lose even if he wins.

Because, apparently, every grain of prairie grass will diss him for doing so.

Or some such thing:

...If he (Trudeau) does succeed in pushing the pipeline through, he’ll anger people in Metro Vancouver where most of the opposition to the venture is based. But he would also get little credit in Alberta, or the neighbouring jurisdictions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where there is a common view he made a hash out of this issue unnecessarily...


Meanwhile, heading to a place the authorially obvious one dares not tread, 'Curious George' actually did some actual analyzing of the situation on the Twittmachine:

****

In less obvious news of the deeply buried lede kind, it turns out that the good Mr. Mason would like at least some of his readers to conclude that 57% of British Columbians did not actually elect the members that formed the minority government led by Mr Horgan:

...Mr. Trudeau had to have known this pipeline had the potential to grow into a national nightmare the moment Mr. Horgan’s NDP was allowed to form government in B.C...


Gosh.

Just who was it, exactly, that elected the ol' sportswriter and made him a member of the puffed-up proMedia poli-punditry anyway?




________
You want a real take from a proMedia member who is actually paying attention?....Check out this thread from the GStraight's Travis Lupick.
And, just in case you missed it, Horgan has taken up blogging....Imagine that!


.

So...Why Didn't George Bush Pardon Scooter Libby?

Fitzmas
RevisitedVille


So, why, indeed, did George Bush the younger not pardon Scooter Libby for his part in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame back in the darkest days of yet another venal Republican administration?

Well...

Over the next news cycle or two you will likely hear and read all kinds of variations on the theme that Bush didn't believe Libby 'deserved' it  given the so called 'facts' that had been unearthed by Saint Patrick the Lord of Cross Harbour slayer.

But there is something else very important to consider, especially when you also hear about the 'message' that Mr. Trump is apparently sending to all of his minions, both current and former, who have been hooked by Mr. Mueller.

The world's top Plameologist, Marcy Wheeler, made that point yesterday before the slow moving Saturday Night Massacre, Part Deux, started rolling out, in slow motion, this fine Friday afternoon:

"...Bush commuted but did not pardon Libby, then refused, against PapaDick (Cheney)’s plaints, because (smarter lawyer) his lawyer counseled that’d be obstruction [update, or counseled that Libby could still incriminate Bush]. Trump can’t fully pardon his firewall, for the same reason: bc these witnesses will lose Fifth Amendment privileges against self-incrimination..."


Do you see the problem for the likes of Mess'rs Manafort, Kushner, Gates, Cohen, Flynn and, perhaps, Bannon there?



______
Update: And now, unbeknownest to so many of this in blogworld earlier today, Ms. Wheeler has been given the big stage on the biggest page....This is a good thing.
And what's likely to be the next stop on the slow rolling Trump Train to Massacray?....Ms. Wheeler thinks it just might be the end of Rosenstein at the DOJ (the guy who appointed Mueller after the Sessions recusal and the Comey firing)...Interestingly, this afternoon Rosenstein started to pushback against one of the screamers' shouting points (that is sure to show up on Fox and Friends if it hasn't already).
Meanwhile....Patrick Fitzgerald point out that Mr. Trump is full of obstructionist oompaloompafish offal when it comes to the Judy!Judy!Judy!-backed 'reason' for the pardoning of Scooter Boy.


.

The Winnability Whinermeisterer.

ProjectEverything
KloutKlubVille


This just in...

Link

Don't know about you all but I, for one, sure am wondering who, exactly, the good Mr. Marissen 'always' said this to.

If you get my drift.


______
Link to the MoCo story referred to is here...Based on the numbers and graphs in the actual piece the header is more than a little misleading...And, based on those massive corporate money mounds that the Clarklandians amassed in 2016 and 2017 I can almost forgive the Horganites for accepting the big money globs up to the deadline...Almost...Regardless, Mr. Weaver and friends are the only folks that come out of this one clean which should, in my opinion, be the real story here.
In other, more important, news analysis re-nalyzed news...Norm Farrell takes Colby Cosh's latest apart completely and discovers that it is made entirely of sand buried deep beneath a dilbit pond...Seriously.


.

Kids These Days.

After six weeks spent (literally) tap dancing around Europe, littler e. flew in from Copenhagen via Reykjavik last night.

And, with a few days to go before she goes back to work, this morning she rushed off to the train station to catch the Amtrack to Seattle.

Gosh.

If only kids these days had some get up and go.


.

Relative Affordability.

IsThisTheUDI

OrJustAnotherCountryVille

"...Condominium properties are the last bastion of relative affordability in Vancouver..."

Phil Soper, CEO, Royal LePage

Sure thing Mr. Soper.

Because...

You know.

...The average price for condos hit $723,827 in March, up 22.8 per cent from a year earlier and just shy of the record $751,358 in January...

Brett Jang, Globe and (nolongerEmpire) Mail

April 4, 2018

_______
Subheader put a worm in your ear?....This!

.

Who Knew...

Lotusland's Nat Bailey Stadium has never been known as a slugger's park.

Heckfire, even my favourite Vancouver Canadian of all time had a hard time launching them out of there before he moved on to the real pad in Atlanta, a place where bloopers could win World Series games.

But....

Here's something I did not know until today, courtesy Tom Hawthorn's great Globe obituary of the even greater Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub:

...It was in Vancouver (for an exhibition game) that (Expos) manager Gene Mauch convinced the outfielder to alter his swing to better pull the ball for power, as he had only hit five home runs into the first week of June. "I just bent my knees a little and dropped my hands a bit and started swinging, and it just felt free," Mr. Staub recounted in John Robertson's 1971 biography, Rusty Staub of the Expos. He hit batting-practice homer after batting-practice homer at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium in Vancouver.

"That was the day that I became a home-run hitter again," he later said...


Imagine that!



.

The Keef Report...Coalition Baiting Uber Alles!

ThereIsAClub
GlimmerTwinsVille

Link

Sheesh.


______
Previous editions of the Keef Report can be found....Here.


.

Norm Farrell's Modest Proposal To Deal With BC Hydro's Big Troubles.

It'sDifficultToGetALotuslandianProMediaPunditToUnderstandSomethingWhenHis
CAPPSalaryDependsOnHisNotUnderstandingItVille

For tens of billions of easily demonstrated reasons that local proMedia will never tell you about BC Hydro is in big, big trouble.

Norm Farrell, who has done so much to demonstrate said reasons, has come up with a way out of the jam (scroll down to the comments):

"...Sell BC Hydro’s generating and transmission assets at depreciated market value to a new BC Electric Company financed by a reformed bcIMC and owned by the pension fund and current employees with government continuing to hold shares. Public pension funds would be kept at work in BC instead of being invested abroad, funding the tobacco industry, arms dealers, Chinese state-controlled enterprises and other undesirable investments.

BC Hydro is already a financial basket case. Aging plant, worthless assets (about $7 billion of intangibles and deferred costs), unprofitable markets and a changing energy landscape means it cannot survive long term without huge subsidies from the province. Selling generating and distribution assets and paying off the enormous existing secured debt would leave a company with no ability to continue. It would have to declare its insolvency, unable to pay contractors.

IPPs could do contracts with the new company and ones that serve local needs would find success. Those expecting to sell power profitably to a public utility so that agency can sell it into money losing markets might not fair as well..."


Seems to me that the fine folks who currently hold the decision making power when it comes to such matters just might want to unplug their ears and start paying attention to Norm (once again).

.

Eleven Percent Can Become A Really, Really Big Number.

TheFriendOfMyFriend'sFriend'sCousin'sUncle
HasBeenHarvestedVille


It wasn't just Cambridge Analytica.

From the Guardian's latest under Paul Lewis' byline:

...Academic research from 2010, based on an analysis of 1,800 Facebooks apps, concluded that around 11% of third-party developers requested data belonging to friends of users.

If those figures were extrapolated, tens of thousands of apps, if not more, were likely to have systematically culled “private and personally identifiable” data belonging to hundreds of millions of users, (former Facebook platform operations manager Sandy) Parakilas said...


And, as Mr. Parakilas notes, Facebook, and its very small boss, turned a blind eye to pretty much all of it until 2014.

Why the change, then?

Well...

That is not entirely clear, but there is speculation that some of the data harvests had become so large that the book of faces folks may have come concerned that the biggest harvesters themselves would soon set up their own social networks.


.

Throw Out All Your Algorithms.

TheFeedHasBeen
ForcedVille


Nevermind the never ending NYT stories from Maggie Haberman et al. about the mangled machinations behind the mad king's Twittmachine feed.

Because this, from the Guardian's Carol Cadwalldr, is the thing we ALL need to be paying attention to:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd...

{snip}

...Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”...

{snip}

...Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately...


Fifty.

Million.

So, what did they do with the profiles?

The young Mr. Wylie explains...

______
If you want in-depth  analysis and (mostly, I think) algo-free commentary make sure you read (and bookmark) Marcy Wheeler.
Couldn't happen/hasn't already happened here?....The MoS explains why you might want to think again.
And on that other thing I've been blathering on about recently....If Ontario had prop-rep would the entire country be concerned about the good Mr. Ford's political future at the moment?
Finally, Jody Paterson explains why, for her at least, it is difficult not to wonder about motives and long held beliefs when it comes to the recent change of heart writing of Martyn Brown in the G Straight...It's hard not to conclude that she has a point.


.

Proportional Representation...The Codswallopian Wave Of Status-Quoism Is Coming!

May2017Isn'tTheOnlyTimeThatWeVoted57%ToMakeA
BigChangeVille


The following is the lede of Douglas Todd's (most excellent) piece on the forces of 'No' aligned against Prop-Rep in today's VSun:

This year is certain to include more high-profile nay-saying from the well-funded opponents of proportional representation. They seemed omnipresent during B.C. referendums in 2005 and 2009, when the possibility of electoral reform fell less than three percentage points short of the 60 per cent threshold needed then to change the polarized way we do partisan politics in this province...


How will we ever stand our ground against the wave and all the prop-bombs that are sure to be buried within it?

Well...

We think that is something that Merv Adey would have wanted to help us deal with in a rational, calm, and fact-based manner.

Stay tuned!


.