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I am going to put a stake in the ground here and say that I think tasers should be removed from service.  Not because they are not useful in law enforcement, but because the services that use them abuse them, and cannot be trusted with them. 

Properly used, tasers should be regarded as a non-lethal means of disabling a suspect, and should be used when a gun would otherwise be warranted.  But time and again, tasers are being used inappropriately.  Children, the elderly, suspects already in jail and behind bars, dead suspects and non-threatening suspects have all been wrongfully tased.

The most recent incident of abuse occured at the end of May 09, when a 72 year old woman was tasered by a seemingly helpless big, brawny police officer.  This incident was recorded by the police video.  Its clear from the video that she was being uncooperative, but was she beligerent enough and threatening enough to get tased?  It seems as if taunting the police officer by double-daring him to taser her was enough to put him over the edge.

Here in Canada, in November 2007, a newly landed Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski died after being tased at least 5 times by the RCMP at the airport.  In the course of the government enquiry, it was revealed that he was tased at least two times while he was dead, as one of the arresting officers was convinced Dziekanski was continuing to resist when he stopped moving. 

It became clear in the enquiry that the four RCMP officers decided to taser Dziekanski as a first resort, within 25 seconds of encountering him, and then provided misleading accounts on the internal investigation by the RCMP as to what happened.  A video shot by an eyewitness and shown repeatedly in the enquiry, resulted in the 4 arresting officers needing to recant virtually all of the testimony they had previously sworn to.  The RCMP is now trying to challenge the authority of the enquiry to find the officers guilty of misconduct on the ground that it lacks jurisdiction. 

In addition to misuse, the weapons themselves cannot be trusted.  The RCMP has ordered to remove from service  more than 1,500 older-model M-26 Tasers after initial testing found an 80 per cent failure rate, where the guns did not deliver the correct charge within the manufacturer’s specifications.   This problem is two-fold.  If the taser delivers too low a charge, the suspect is not disabled and the officer is in danger.  If the charge is too high, the suspect can be injured or killed by the shock. 

It is also becoming clear that, despite the manufacturer’s own “evidence”, there is a building body of evidence tasers do result in death.  Its not clear exactly what the circumstances are where death occurs, but it has happened enough so that the victims are not outliers. 

For me, the net is that until the use of tasers is ensured within very strict guidelines, i.e. where you would otherwise use a gun to disable a beligerent and threatening suspect, tasers should be pulled from service.

Capitalism is Eating Itself is the latest song I wrote and recorded.  You can view the video here.  The video helps tell the story.  Here are the lyrics.  And here is the cover art:

The title derives from Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism is doomed to failure because it relies on ever increasing consumption of the endless stream of goods that are being produced ever more efficiently.  His thinking is that eventually, producers (i.e. capitalists) will no longer find markets for all these goods, and the whole system will consume itself and collapse.  That is a brief synopsis of a complicated philosophical argument. 

I wrote the song in response to the financial meltdown that afflicted the world.  However, the meltdown was obviously driven by greed and a massive sense of entitlement, rather than an endless supply of cheap goods being pushed into the marketplace, though that is happening as well. 

The poster child for this whole mess has got to be Bernie Madoff, though he is clearly one of many.  Whether he stole a couple billion dollars or $50 billion, the point is that he and others in the financial services industry took advantage of deregulation and inept government oversight to run multibillion dollar ponzi schemes for more than a decade.  Despite having been investigated at least twice by the SEC. 

I am not against people raking in millions or billions of dollars (some hedge fund managers received more than $1 billion in total compensation in one year), but when governments appear to be benign (to be kind) or complicit by creating a regulatory environment that allows this to occur, and then pumps trillions of taxpayer dollars to bail out failed business models, reckless risktaking and inept management, it is a sign of systemic failure across the financial system.  

We live in a world with a perverse and immoral sense of entitlement.  When people like John Thain of Merrill Lynch believe they are entitled to a $35,000 toilet, something is terribly wrong with a culture that encourages and rewards that kind of thinking.  Consider that greed in a world in which 1 in 6 of the world’s population, more than 1 billion people, are so poor that they cannot sustain themselves (defined by the World Bank as living on less that US$1.25/day).  The system is failing for the vast majority of the world’s population.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this blog is to talk about my music and the meaning behind my songs.  The first one up is “Watching the Watchers”, a song I wrote and recorded for my first CD, Cosmology, but then re-recorded and released as a single in June 09.  You can listen to the updated song here and read the lyrics here.  This is the cover art:

The song is about the surveillance society we are living in.  I was inspired to write it after reading “The Transparent Society” by David Brin (1998).  In essence, our privacy has been eroding for a long time, and through the  decade since the book was published, personal privacy is effectively gone.  In addition to the information that is continuously collected by government and commercial enterprise, we are willing to publish personal information on ourselves on the sundry social networking sites across the web. 

Given the scrutiny and transparency that we live under in our personal lives, Brin makes the argument that there needs to be two-way transparency, such that we are able to see who is collecting our information and what are they doing with it.  In essence, we need to watch the watchers. 

Whether it is credit scores, purchase information, the Google street-view-car, or any of the myriad ways information is being collected, we need to be concerned and diligent about how it is being used. 

A fundamental question is who owns information about you?  Do you own it?  Should you control who has access to it?  If someone is profiting from that information, should you have a right to royalities?

Personal privacy is pretty well gone.  As for reigning in the watchers, I am afraid this is a cause that too few are concerned about and we will be too late to do anything about.

I am just finishing up a new photography project.  A couple of years ago, a replica of the Shroud of Turin was making the rounds.  In case you don’t know about the shroud, it is reputed to be the burial cloth draped over Christ.  The link above is to the Wikipedia article, which is as good a place as any to get some background, if you are so inclined.  

The background I will share here is that, in 1898, the shroud was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer named Secondo Pia.  To his astonishment, the photographic plate revealed the face of a man, in positive, which implies that the image on the shroud is a negative. 

The shroud was photographed for the second time by Giuseppe Enrie, in 1931.  Those images were shot using high contrast film and are quite stunning.

A great mystery of the shroud is how the image was imprinted on the linen.  Again, you can read about this elsewhere, as the discussion is very well documented. 

So, I’d like to share my photograph of the face in the shroud as it appears naturally, along with a couple of images that were inverted and filtered in Photoshop. 

I am certainly not here to argue for or against the authenticity of the shroud.   But you can clearly see the face.

As I said, this was a project which I mounted and framed.  Here is the completed project, with a frame made of flamed birch.