Contracting Out Is A Crime

Once again the attempt by the Liberals to Reinvent government, the mantra of the neo-con revolution of the nineties, ends up costing Canadians millions. Whether it was the P3 Boondoggle with the Firearms registry, the RCMP pension fund fraud or this case where the Department of National Defense was bilked for millions. It all has to do with contracting out and outsourcing IT functions of the State.

Ex-federal employee guilty of huge fraud

A former defence bureaucrat, who led a jet-set lifestyle, pleaded guilty today to two charges in a phoney contract billing scheme that bilked $146-million out of the federal government before it was stopped.

Paul Champagne, who had been an $80,000-a-year contract manager with the department, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and one count of breach of trust in an Ottawa courtroom.

He was fired from his job in 2003 after billing irregularities were revealed involving a contract with U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard.

After a lengthy RCMP investigation, Champagne, 49, was charged with seven fraud-related crimes. After he pleaded guilty today to two charges, the Crown dropped the remaining five counts.

He will be sentenced in January.

In the late 1990s, the Defence Department issued a series of contracts to Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Inc., eventually paying $159 million for computer maintenance services. The government later discovered it got little or nothing for its money.

The Public Works Department red-flagged the contracts over the four years prior to Champagne's dismissal, but did nothing. A scathing report in 2003 found that managers at the federal government's tendering department failed to appreciate the significance of at least three audits that warned something was terribly wrong with the computer contracts.

After the scandal became public, Hewlett-Packard said it was told by the department to pay a group of subcontractors and their work was deemed secret.

In May 2004, the computer giant repaid $145 million to the federal government, and said its employees did nothing wrong.

Two Ottawa businessmen, Peter Mellon and Ignatius Manso, were also charged, but the Crown said Monday only one case remains to be resolved. A spokesman for the RCMP couldn't say what the status of the cases might be.

Over 10 years, starting in 1993, five contracts worth a total of $250 million were signed with the Compaq Computer Corp., Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard, which eventually bought Compaq.

Audits conducted by Public Works in 1999 and 2000 raised concerns about three of the contracts, but in 2001 a further review found unauthorized billing and "evidence of contractual funding appropriated for other purposes."

After Champagne was fired, National Defence did its own internal review of contracts and discovered problems with two dozen other projects. Today, the Defence Department did not respond to requests for comment about what safeguards have been put in place to prevent a repeat of the fiasco.

At the time of his arrest Champagne was a multimillionaire, who insisted his wealth and homes in exclusive districts of Ottawa, Florida and the Turks and Caicos were the results of shrewd investment in high-tech stocks during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

SEE:

Defense Lobbyist Now Minister

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Dinos and World Systems Theory

In the World Systems Theory of political economy, the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstien claims that capitalism evolved coincidentally with the decline of feudalism, it did not suddenly replace that political economic system but rather evolved out of it. It was not the only political economic system evolving at the time but the one that became dominate.

This can be proven with a simple example, a robber baron newspaper owner who sells his national citizenship in order to buy a lordship from Baronial Britain. Here we have someone who is a capitalist aspiring to the titles and honorifics of the old feudal order.

Now we find the same thing happened with proto-dinosaurs and their later dinosaur relatives. The dinos did not wipe out their earlier relatives but co existed with them. Much like the remnants of feudalism, Lords, Queens and Kings, autarchies, exist today under capitalism.,

UC Berkeley scientists, digging deep into a remote New Mexico hillside, have discovered a trove of fossil bones that they say is evidence that dinosaurs and their early relatives lived side by side for tens of millions of years before the relatives slowly died off and left the dinosaurs to dominate the ancient world.

Until now many scientists had thought that dinosaur "precursors" -- perhaps their ancestors -- disappeared suddenly long before the dinosaurs themselves rose to prominence, but the bones dug up by Berkeley paleontologists show evidence of a different story.

The discovery of a wide variety of creatures all mingled together in layer upon layer of rocks dating from Earth's late Triassic period between 235 million and 200 million years ago, they say, shows that the strange relatives of the dinosaurs remained on the scene while the dinosaurs evolved into truly dominant creatures during the Jurassic period, between 120 million and 200 million years ago.

Until now, many scientists have argued that the early close relatives of dinosaurs must have disappeared abruptly in an early "mass extinction" about 215 million years ago that has never been clearly explained. Others have thought that the true dinosaurs, whether carnivores or plant eaters, simply outcompeted their relatives for dominance in the ancient environment and quickly drove them to extinction.

And after all economists call themselves scientists. Of course like its prehistoric ancestor Capitalism itself is a dinosaur. And those who believe that Capitalism is, was, and will always be eternal are to political economy what creationists are to paleontology.



See:

Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Marx For Beginners

Saving Capitalism From Itself

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Damn Commie Canadians

Quick someone tell the flat earth society and the climate change deniers at the Blogging Tories.

Canadians prove humans are causing climate change

Like Medicare this will prove once again to the Republican and conservative American rightwhing whiners that their northern neighbours are truly evil and a socialist menace.



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Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

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Anarchy and Education

Our theme for our July Carnival is
Anarchism and Education.

A.S. Neill, The Modern School, Ivan Illich, homeschooling in a statist society, homeschooling in the age of neo-conservative anti-public education, pedagogy of the oppressed, Pablo Fiere, Fransisco Fiere, Emma Goldman, the origins of American public education in Nativism and the KKK, classical education, dead white men, deconstruction, academia, autodidactic intellectuals, working class intellectuals, education and class, post secondary proletarians, William Morris, Godwin, Shelly, Byron, Keats, Mary Wollstencroft, Mary Wollsencraft Shelly, the narodniki, Bakunin, Kropotkins Appeal to the Young, the SI, France 1968, read a book.

The carnival will run July 27-August 5th.

'I never let my schooling interfere with my education'.
Mark Twain.

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Sea Serpent

Here is an interesting Sea Serpent that actually has been documented in scientific journals. And it is Canadian.

Cadboro Bay in British Columbia claims Caddy, or Cadborosaurus willsi, a serpent-like creature that to this day remains the only monster ever described in a scientific journal.

The existence of the species has been suggested by the original specimen-based description in a refereed scientific journal in which the type juvenile specimen is represented by 3 different close-up quality photographs (in the B. C. Provincial Archives in Victoria), in which at least three new-born relatively tiny precocial "baby" specimens have been independently held by at least three pairs of human captors during the past 40 years, and by more than 100 documented sightings, photographs, sonar images, and sketches of live animals made independently at predicted times and places, subsequent to the original description in 1995 and continuing to the present

In the Amphipacifica Journal of Systematic Biology Drs. Paul H. LeBlond and Edward L. Bousfield review the large aquatic reptile known as "Caddy" from the Pacific coast of North America. Bousfield and LeBlond believe the historical records about this creature contain sufficient evidence of "specimens in hand" to conclude "the animal is real and merits formal taxonomic description," and propose it be named and diagnosed with vertebrate class Reptilia as Cadborosaurus willsi, new genus, new species.

Many people have spotted a large marine cryptid from coastal areas of the northeast Pacific Ocean and sporadically these sightings have been reported by the news media. Bousfield and LeBlond describe it as "a large serpentine animal (adult body length 15-20 meters), clearly unlike any whale, pinniped, fish, or other existing vertebrate animal that makes only brief appearances at the sea surface, presenting distinctive head, a long neck, and trunk region that often forms into number of vertical humps or loops. Its swimming speed is astonishing to those who try to approach it, invariably unsuccessfully."

And while the article the first link is from;Sea monsters: Not real, but good for business describes many fresh lake sea monster sightings, it basically claims they are all made up. Of course as per usual I believe many of them may be sightings of the rare and endangered ancient dinosaur fish the sturgeon.


See:

Die Vurm

Snakes Alive

Nessies Relative

Nessie?

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Chupacabra In Texas?

So is this strange animal discovered in Texas the mythological Porte Rican Chupacabra, or just a naked coyote? Place your wagers.

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Die Vurm

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Biological Weapons In Iraq

When one thinks of biological weapons one thinks of germs and viruses, and perhaps cattle mutilations and black helicopters,but not man-eating badgers.

Clearly the British army has to do more to win the hearts and minds of folks in Basra.

It's one of the more extraordinary statements issued by those chaps in the British Army.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area," said British military spokesman Major Mike Shearer.

To make it crystal, another spokesman added: "We have not released giant badgers in Basra and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river."

Rumours abound among people in the southern Iraqi city that British troops based in the area since 2003 introduced bear-like beasts, with large fangs and claws and a penchant for human flesh, to sow panic.

But despite the fantastic rumours spreading through Basra about the origins of the animals, they have been identified by local vets as the honey badger.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra's veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and has tried to reassure his fellow citizens that the badgers are not a new post-war arrival in the region.

"These animals appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta," he said. "Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."

The honey badger, or ratel, is known as a brave predator capable of killing a cobra. It weighs up to 14 kilos and is not known to kill humans and drag them away to its lair.

This reminds me of the Frank Zappa album Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

After all the Badger is a member of the same family as the weasel .

And speaking of weasels, Prince Harry who was supposed to go to Basra is currently stationed at one of NATO's leading Biological Chemical Warfare Research stations; Suffield Base in Medicine Hat.

See:

Iraqi Ghost Dance

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Our Living Earth

It's Alive.

Lovelock's Gaia thesis is that the Earth, our home, is alive. Though she may not be interested in the goings on of the surface dwellers. I began this post a week ago, and while posting a nuclear leak occurred in Japan after an earthquake and as these posts show there was wide spread tectonic plate activity this last week and over the last month all across the globe.

More than 5000 tremors have been felt since January in the Patagonia region of Chile, causing residents to fear that a cataclysmic earthquake may surface.

Kenya: Earth Tremors Cause Panic in Nairobi Tremors hit Peshawar, Swat

Two 5.0 magnitude earthquakes jolt Negros Oriental

Uganda: Heavy Rains Causing Tremors, Says Expert

Tremors shake Portsmouth again — second this month

Another quake hits the North People living in the Burmese town of Tachilek and Laos' Bokeo province also felt the tremors.

PESHAWAR: An earthquake of mild intensity was felt in Peshawar and Swat districts on Sunday at 1724 hours. According to Peshawar Meteorological Station, magnitude of the earthquake on the Richter scale was recorded at 4.8. The epicenter of the tremor was about 300 kilometres north of Peshawar in the Hindukush Range, it said.

Then a couple of days later I discovered in the discount bin a book on the social and geological history of the 1906 San Fransisco Quake. Simon Winchesters; A Crack In the Edge of the World.

It outlines not only the geological faults that resulted in the San Fransisco quake, in light of the recent 2004 Tsunami, reviewers were quick to link it to the recent hurricanes; Katrina and Rita that destroyed New Orleans.

Winchester relates that 1906 was record year for massive, 8 and higher on the Richter Scale, earthquakes around the world, the plates all shifted. Which is the BIG picture of life on earth. Get practicing on your skate boards for the global shift.

Ours is an age of disasters: natural, as in hurricanes, tsunamis, famines, earthquakes, fires, and man-made, as in war and terrorism.

It's hardly surprising, then, that such a distinguished writer as Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa, should commemorate the approaching 100th anniversary of the earthquake and fire that began at dawn on April 18, 1906, and nearly destroyed San Francisco.

But Winchester doesn't confine himself to the disaster itself. He provides a virtual guidebook to the world of tremors and earthquakes and the geological conditions that produce them. He also examines the long-range effects of the San Francisco disaster.

With hurricanes Katrina and Rita fresh in our memory, Winchester's words on the far-reaching consequences of natural calamities strike home:

Seldom does an entire and very large urban community fall victim to utter disaster ... The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most obvious. The Great Fire of London in 1666. ... The huge earthquake in 1755 in Lisbon — and then, in 1906, San Francisco. ... The largest of these cities and areas survived [because they] exist for reasons that go far beyond the accumulation of buildings that is their outward manifestation. Their presence ... is invariably due to some combination of geography and of climate, together with some vague and indefinable organic reason that persuades mankind to settle there.

So it was with New Orleans and San Francisco. Otherwise, who would live in a city situated below sea level and adjoining a stormy sea? Who would want to settle in a place where, over the years, numerous earthquakes and fires have occurred?

In New Orleans, the catastrophe came from the sea; in San Francisco, from the earth, specifically the San Andreas Fault, which runs from Northern to Southern California, ending at the Salton Sea near the Mexican border.

Winchester, who trained in geology at Oxford, gives the reader a short course in geological theory, detailing the history of geological ideas. He shows why the 1906 earthquake occurred and why such a catastrophe will almost certainly recur near the same place.

The San Francisco earthquake changed the life of the city. More than 28,000 buildings were laid waste. Estimates of the dead range from about 600 to about 3,000. More than half of the city's population of 400,000 were left homeless.

Before the quake, moreover, San Francisco was the preeminent city of the American West. After the quake, slowly but inexorably, that title passed to Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south. Various things wrought the change, but among them was this: The San Andreas Fault in Southern California has never been as destructive as in the north. Los Angeles has had its quakes, but so far none has come close to devastating the city.

Winchester points out that tectonic plate activity is a source of earthquake activity as much as magma movements are and current research verifies this.

Tremors deep inside the Earth are usually produced by magma flowing beneath volcanoes, but a new study suggests they can also be produced by the shifting and sliding of tectonic plates. "Unlike the sharp jolt of an earthquake, tremors within Earth's crust emerge slowly, rumbling for longer periods of time," explained Kaye Shedlock, the program director for Earthscope at the National Science Foundation.

These are the first recordings of non-volcanic tremors deep inside the Earth. They were recorded in deep boreholes that were drilled down to a depth of about 2 miles.

Instead of volcanoes, the scientists think the subterranean rumblings might be caused by processes similar to those that produce tremors near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, an active fault that runs from mid-Vancouver Island to northern California.

Add to that the fact that some scientists believe the Earth is about to reverse polarity, and well as they say; 'all Hell will break loose'.


So lets go back to the beginning of this post which I began last Monday five days after the initial shocks as a result of our living earths tectonic plate movements, which are slow as molasses in January as my mother would say, resulted in a series of earthquakes and other seismic activities.

Tanzania's 'Mountain of God' erupts

Kenyan panic after more tremors

US geologists say recent earth tremors were due to a seismological process known as seismc swarm

Research on earth tremors necessary, say local geologists

The Japanese earthquake ,Southwestern Japan proving temblor hotspot, resulted in exposing the poor safety and maintenance record of their privatized nuclear industry. Tremors spotlight nuclear plants

But there is always a silver lining.

Many earthquakes in the deep ocean are much smaller in magnitude than expected. Geophysicists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found new evidence that the fragmented structure of seafloor faults, along with previously unrecognized volcanic activity, may be dampening the effects of these quakes.

Examining data from 19 locations in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, researchers led by graduate student Patricia Gregg have found that "transform" faults are not developing or behaving as plate tectonic theory says they should. Rather than stretching as long, continuous fault lines across the seafloor, the faults are often segmented and show signs of recent or ongoing volcanism. Both phenomena appear to prevent earthquakes from spreading across the seafloor, thus reducing their magnitude and impact.

Until you get the big picture. Which is that it is not magma alone that is responsible for earthquakes and volcanic activity, some of it is human, (oil and gas drilling, nuclear blasts), and much of it is now being attributed to tectonic plate activity as well. Because a week later, early this morning another quake hit India.

Moderate quake in India, mild tremors in Delhi

Along with the threat of global warming and asteroids now we have to consider Gaia evolving herself, and we are just along for the ride.


See:

Boreno is Burning

Did Nuke Cause Earth Quake

Our Living Earth

Dialectics of Extinction

(r)Evolutionary Theory

Earth in Upheaval-Updated

1666 The Creation Of The World

Man Made Volcano

Lost Tsunami Lost Atlantis

New Island

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18/7

Steam power is the basis of the industrial revolution and the birth of Capitalism in America. Some of the steam lines in New York City date back to then. And steam is inherently explosive.

Huge Steam Pipe Blast Kills One in NYC

Emergency personnel look over a truck that lies in a hole in the street after a steam explosion in midtown Manhattan, New York, Wednesday, July 18, 2007. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

A transformer exploded in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, creating a roar and a huge plume of smoke and sending pedestrians fleeing from the area in scenes reminiscent of the September 11 attacks.

Police at the scene said 15 to 20 people had been taken to the hospital. CNN said three of the injured had been admitted to the New York Presbyterian Hospital emergency room.

In Washington, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said there was no apparent link to terrorism.

"Right now it is a localized incident," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "At this point, we see no nexus to terrorism."

Officials said a ruptured steam pipe appeared to have caused the transformer to blow.

The explosion erupted during the evening rush hour in one of the busiest sections of New York City, near the transportation hub of Grand Central station.

A loud constant roar rang out through the streets.

Photograph by J.D. Griggs on February 3, 1988

Steam explosions (also called littoral explosions, because they occur at the shoreline, or littoral zone) result when lava meets the sea. In the photograph above, the explosion sprays fragments of lava into the air. The smaller pieces are carried by currents and deposited in bays to form black sand beaches.

SEE:

Nuclear NIMBY

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And Justice For All

Shareholders rights upheld in Lord Blacks trial which has conservatives all in a tizzy. Since they favored the aristocratic pretensions of robber baron Black rather than the rights of the 'little guy and gal'.

For Prince, 58, Black's fate was sealed in a 2002 shareholders' meeting.

As prosecutors played the recording, and she heard angry investors lambasting Black about why he and other high-ranking Hollinger executives were receiving millions in non-compete payments, Prince decided she would do everything she could to convict him of fraud.

In fact, if it were up to her, Black would also be going down on an additional fraud count. Had that happened, she said, it might have shown the pattern of criminal activity jurors needed to convict the fallen media baron of the most serious charge of all – racketeering.

Despite efforts to avoid media during the trial, jurors overheard in an elevator one day that some Canadian media had called them a "blue collar" jury and critiqued their appearance. "When we were deadlocked, one of the jurors, she's a teacher, gave us a pep talk," said Prince. "She said, 'They're calling us country bumpkins. They think we're too stupid to figure out this case.' And it brought us all together. We were going back in there with a unanimous verdict," she said.

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