Herr Harper: Master Of The Twitterverse

Given the Prime Minister's penchant for control, I suppose this story should come as no surprise, but does rather conspicuously give lie to his claim of running an open and transparent government, doesn't it?

OTTAWA - Pity the poor government tweet, nearly strangled in its cradle before limping into the Twitterverse.

Newly disclosed documents from Industry Canada show how teams of bureaucrats often work for weeks to sanitize each lowly tweet, in a medium that's supposed to thrive on spontaneity and informality.

Most 140-character tweets issued by the department are planned weeks in advance; edited by dozens of public servants; reviewed and revised by the minister's staff; and sanitized through a 12-step protocol, the documents indicate.

Insiders and experts say the result is about as far from the spirit of Twitter as you can get — and from a department that's supposed to be on the leading edge of new communications technologies.

The documents, obtained through the Access to Information Act, show such a high level of control that arrangements are made days in advance to have other government agencies re-tweet forthcoming Industry Canada tweets, because re-tweets are considered a key measure of success.

In turn, Industry Canada agrees to do the same for tweets from the Business Development Bank of Canada and others.

Formal policy for the department was set into a protocol last October, with a 12-step process that requires numerous approvals for each tweet from Industry Minister James Moore's office or from the office of Greg Rickford, the junior minister.

Public servants vet draft tweets for hashtags, syntax, policy compliance, retweeting, French translation and other factors. Policy generally precludes tweeting on weekends, and the minister's personal Twitter handle must be kept out of departmental tweets, though his name and title are often included.

Climate Change Denial And The Koch Brothers

Since April 2013 the number of Americans who do not believe global warming is happening has increased from 16 to 23 percent. Find out why here and in the following video:

Sound Familiar?

H/t Occupy Canada

"You can't control people by force anymore, but you can get them to focus on nothing but maxing out five credit cards, okay you got them."

H/t Noam Chomsky

A Guest Post From The Mound of Sound

In response to my last post, which dealt with climate change and the persistent drought in California, The Mound of Sound, a.k.a. The Disaffected Lib, offered some incisive commentary that I am featuring as a guest post.

Mound has been doing exemplary work on the climate file, and people looking to educate themselves on a world increasingly imperiled by climate change need look no further than his blog.

We've been warned from the outset, Lorne, of 'tipping points.' We haven't grasped the hard reality of actual points of no return beyond which we have triggered natural feedback mechanisms beyond our control, beyond reversal, that create runaway global warming.

Far more dangerous than outright deniers are those who get the reality of climate change but take a 'just not yet' approach to any effective action. It's this group, ostensibly with us, that can postpone action until the options are foreclosed and we find that we have already crossed tipping points.

Jared Diamond discusses this in "Collapse" as the process of 'rational' short-term decisions that, cumulatively, are lethal, essentially suicidal. As long as we take these decisions and actions individually in a short-term perspective they're perfectly sensible, rational. Today that is the way we prefer our problems served up to us.

And, even as we muscle our way through this climate change argument, it always comes back to the crashing reality that climate change is but one of several, potentially existential challenges that confront mankind.

Virtually every problem we face is, to some considerable extent, a function of our intellect which supports the theory that intelligent life may be self-extinguishing.

When you take the extreme weather events the world has endured over the past five years and extrapolate a somewhat worsening continuation of them over the next two to three decades where do we as a global civilization wind up?

We've experienced major crop failures in the world's breadbasket countries - Australia, Russia, America - but it's sort of like a boxer absorbing a punch. You can generally take one blow and remain on your feet. We haven't experienced a situation where these failures happen concurrently, the equivalent of a flurry of really hard punches. What then? We're not even willing to prepare for a best-possible scenario.

Welcome to Easter Island.

UPDATED: No Longer The Shape Of Things To Come

It's here, and it is very, very bad.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tip of the hat to my friend LeDaro, whose regular use of video clips on his blog has done a great job in graphically depicting the ever-growing crisis we call climate change.

UPDATE: Here is some grim reading to accompany the above grim video.

UPDATED: More On The Minimum Wage

There has been very much a predictable reaction from business to the Wynne government's decision to raise the Ontario minimum wage to $11 per hour as of June 1. Even though this modest increase will do little to lift the working poor out of poverty, the commercial sector is running about shouting that the sky will fall, prognosticating a loss of jobs as they take up a defensive position against something that will, they claim, eat away at their profits.

The following video from City TV offers a smattering of a debate over the issue; unfortunately, I no longer seem able to play video from the CBC, where much more detailed discussion has taken place, so this will have to do. Following the video, I turn to Joe Fiorito's latest observations about working poverty as his column today returns to the story of Doreen, whom I discussed yesterday.

As noted previously, Joe Fiorito has pointed out what a hardscrabble existence Doreen, a personal care worker, leads. Today, he adds to that portrait:

She said, “I broke my glasses last July. I can see, but fine stuff I can’t read.” You guessed right. She has not replaced her glasses. This is the kind of poverty that hurts deep in the bone, dulls the senses, and strangles hope. She has not stopped trying.

Compounding Doreen's problems are the expenses involved in keeping her qualifications current; she recently received a letter from one of the agencies for whom she is on an on-call list:

The letter advised Doreen that, if she wanted to stay active on the agency’s list and be eligible for work in the future, then she had to renew her first aid and CPR certificates.

Trouble is, the course preferred by that agency costs $115 and is only offered on weekends. Doreen works on the weekend for an elderly couple. What this means is that, in order to take the course and renew her certificate, she would have to cough up a day’s pay out of pocket to attend, and she would have to miss two days’ work on top of that.

There are more details about Doreen's travails in Firotio's piece, but I think you get the picture.

As I suggested yesterday, unless and until we are willing to put a human face on the working poor, their plight will never be addressed with any real justice.

UPDATE: Andrew Coyne and business representatives have recently suggested that minimum wage increases are a blunt instrument with which to attack poverty, and that a guaranteed income might be preferable. The cynic in me suggests this could be yet another way that business wants government to subsidize their operations; should they ever express a willingness to give up some of the generous corporate tax cuts that have come their way over the past several years as a show of good faith, perhaps then I will take them seriously.

A Little Something For The Cinephile

Enjoy!