HUMOUR:

FOREIGN AGENTS ABOUND:

CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-OTTAWA:

SPYING IN OTTAWA:

The following item is from the Ontario platformist site Linchpin/Common Cause. It seems that in the run-up to the upcoming G20 meeting in Toronto that the police in Ontario are doing what police always do ie gather intelligence and try to intimidate protesters. that is hardly "news", though the fact that they have been caught in at least one visit is. One more item about the violation of civil liberties in Canada to add to the tremendous list. I may think that what follows is both very true in some aspects and the result of unsupported speculation in other parts as to how the secret police proceed. The general advise, however, is quite sound. Nobody should answer questions from the usual fishing expedition on the part of the police unless 1)they have at least 40 years experience in radical politics, 2)they are at least 25 or 30 years older than the cop(intimidation factor), 3)they've been visited at least once before, 4)they have immediate access to a hidden recording devise, 5)the cops will agree to come by at a reasonable time of day and agree to the presence of witnesses and, perhaps most importantly, you have a plan in place to say nothing while continually questioning the agent.





To say the least all these items rarely (ever ?) come together at once. Therefore the advise to "say nothing" is the best that can be given. Here's the Linchpin item, corrected for English punctuation ( Don't get me started on this item-Molly ).
LPLPLPLPLPLPLPLP
Heads up: Cops visiting Ottawa activists

On Thursday morning, an Ottawa-area activist was visited at their home by two plainclothes police who said they were RCMP from out-of-town.

The previous night, after a public event on diversity of tactics, some activists present suspected the event was under surveillance when men in a white van were seeing watching from outside the venue.

So perhaps more people will be visited in the future? We've seen these kinds of strategies before, most recently in the lead up to the olympics in Vancouver, where activists involved in anti-Olympics organizing were visited, followed, and surveilled.

The visits are surely intended to gather intelligence and to intimidate.

Ottawa activists should be aware that this is going on. learn how to protect yourself, don't let yourself be tricked. guidelines on how to deal with police visits are posted on the anti-G8/G20 mobilization website, attacktheroots.net: http://www.attacktheroots.net/node/38
During such a visit, they may say that they are there to help you and your group/cause, trying to secure real information which they can distribute to others (cops and non) who may be less appreciative or understanding of what you are doing than they, the visitors, are.

They may say they are supportive of your cause, they know you're not out to do anything bad, they believe that the progressive victories in our society are in large part due to the kind of work you and others are doing and have done.

They tell you they're dressed in plainclothes, no official car, so that people won't see you speaking with the police and think that you're stabbing the movement in the back.

They may ask you to go for coffee or meet in some other way.

They may assure you that they do talk with other activists and that there is no unofficial 'activist policy' to not speak to the police.

They may mention pieces of your personal information, just so you know they know more about you than they should.

They may speak to your interests - the importance of unions, the problems of corporate media, whatever moves you/them.

They say they want to help you in what you're trying to do and that good communication and communication channels will benefit all involved.

They may tell you about their personal convictions, their background, how they agree with your values and about instances of their work where they are modeling these values.

They may be gathering intelligence through observation of you, your behaviour, anything you might say - even if you try and keep quiet.

They may be intimidating (but probably not explicity, they're probably trying to come across as friendly and an ally).

They may not even directly mention the upcoming G8/G20 summit/protests.

Again, see the info/advice posted on http://www.attacktheroots.net/node/38

HUMOUR:

QUICK DUDLEY, FOLLOW THAT PHONE NUMBER:

(And you thought you were paranoid)

It was many years ago, and I was picking up the mail at the post office box for the anarchist journal 'Flashpoint' that we ran out of Saskatchewan for some years. What to my wondering eyes should appear but an envelope from the 'Government of Canada'. "Oh, this should be interesting", I say to myself. I open it up, and the enclosed ms says that it is from the 'National Library of Canada', and it demands that we send them 2 copies of each issue of the paper. It went on to describe the legal penalties should we fail to comply. Oh sure.....

"Well finally I get to have some fun". I draft a reply, pass it by for a quick review of the other people involved, and send it on:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your interest in our journal 'Flashpoint'. We would be pleased to send you copies of our journal, as we are sure that it would be a valuable addition to the National Library of Canada. We have to inform you, however, that your institution falls under the 'institutional subscription' category. This means that the cost would be $200 for a 'perpetual subscription'. Please remit said payment by cheque or money order made out to 'Flashpoint', and I assure you that the first two copies of each issue mailed will be directed to the 'National Library of Canada'.

Yours sincerely,

bzzzzzzz

For some inexplicable reason we never heard from them again. Fast forward this video about 30 years.

Now the world is on the internet. I mean it, the whole bloody world, from Burkino Faso to Bhutan. Molly has been churning out this blog for a little over three years, and in that time I have become accustomed to certain "regular visitors". These include various corporations such as the Royal Bank of Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company, Walmart, General Motors, etc., etc., etc..The list would be very long and tedious if I were to include every company that drops by here to check out the nasty things that are being said about their treatment of their workers. Some have been suckered by some sort of present day mutation of "management consultants" into subscribing to some sort of aggregator of "who hates me this week". To say the least this sort of thing delivers far less than a simple occasional google search at 50 times the cost. But who am I to argue with public relations departments and their expenditures.

Some of these visitors have become almost old friends. A similar thing goes for certain government agencies. I am indeed very happy that institutions such as the governments of Ontario, Manitoba, BC and Canada are so thrilled with my literary skills that they feel obliged to return again and again. The same goes for such groups as the Toronto Police Force and the RCMP. Hi guys ! My favourite is actually the Defense Research Establishment in Ottawa. The latter does bring up the fact that a lot of this state attention is actually desk jockeys looking for something like "Julie Couillard's tits" (google this and see how fast you get to Molly's Blog). It's been years since the "scandal" about how the spooks in Ottawa were actually spending a lot of their time "spying on porn". No problem for me. I could think of worse things that you could be doing...like actually working.

Now, it is actually quite useless for these government agencies to come to this little cat's blog. For one thing I never publish anything that isn't already in the public domain. For another thing a lot of what is published here is actually a reprint of what is published on another site (this extended rant excluded). Why don't the spooks go to the river's source ? Perhaps they do, and the fact that they also end up here is one more example of "time serving" as they pretend to work in the course of a day. That is actually quite likely given the work habits of the average government office. Once more who am I to argue.

Then there is the obvious fact that would be apparent to any reader of this blog that "Molly's anarchism" is the furthest thing from conspiratorial politics and militant grandstanding that you could imagine. Anyone coming here here could easily see that this blogger advocates an anarchism that is totally publicly open and is opposed to the illusions of grandeur that all too many pseudo-anarchists harbour. Anarchism will stand or fall by its practical appeal to the average person, and there are no "criminal shortcuts" to convincing the general public of the practicality of its ideas. police forces would find this blog a particularly sterile field to either gather information or incite certain actions for political purposes.

When I lower myself to actually spit fury at some of the things that pass as anarchism, especially in the USA, I have certainly far too often adopted the tone of an elementary school teacher lecturing a class of brain damaged 6 year olds. Well, it happens to be true, and it doesn't matter if the (politically incorrect word warning !!!) tards have a half digested vocabulary of big words that they don't understand. They still have no common sense. One of their idiocies is imagining that they can "out-conspire the state". I have actually seen public discussions of how they can encrypt their emails so that the police can't read them. Cough ! Cough ! Cough ! I really wonder, given the mental level of the average participant in such games, if the idea that the police, if they bother to pay attention at all, wouldn't give the supposedly best suggestion ever crosses their limited minds.

All this is a preliminary to the following. In terms of "general intelligence" I have the unfortunate feeling that the average police officer is superior to the average "fashion anarchist" of the 'abolish civilization/form a black bloc/do vandalism/we are beyond leftism' variety. Maybe the cop lacks the half digested academic rhetoric, but perhaps the cop is the better for it. There are, however, sometimes some things that make me doubt this conclusion, that makes me think that the police are just as stupid as my mad comrades. The following is one of those 8 million stories in the Naked City.

Here was Molly following who has visited her blog. Once more the RCMP from Ottawa showed up. Tick it off. As the intro to this post indicated I am sometimes inclined to "send a bill", and one of my enduring dreams is that, if I ever retire and have enough time to track every visitor to this blog that i would institute a "pay for view" system. This means that all visitors from certain corporations and governments, unless they had a legitimate reason for visiting here such as a view of either the constellation Perseus or Julie Couillard's tits, would be noted, and a monthly bill would be sent. Real people would be exempt.

This visit, however, was particularly strange. The RCMP were looking for the phone number "604-822-0912". What in the name of Jesus is this, and what on Earth does it have to do with me ? I went on the search. I went to search it down myself. The RCMP spent little time on this blog in their search. The phone number is that of the (get this) 'Green College Dining Society' in Vancouver. You won't get in touch with the head chef via this number, but you will, at least, reach the kitchen. The connection to Molly's Blog is that there is a series of lectures at UBC on the Olympics and that there are "optional dinners" offered afterwards. The phone number to register for these dinners was given via a press release by the Olympic Resistance Network. The best spin I can put on this is that the RCMP want to tap the phone of the (ha ! ha!) Green College Dining Society so that they can get the phone numbers of anyone who wants the overpriced dinner after the academic lecture. Get the names of all those lefties with money to waste I guess. What this has to do with "preventing terrorism" ala the Abdul Al Hazrad Brigade, is beyond me. To me it seems like wheel spinning, adding names and phone numbers to files that have no purpose. I've said before on this blog that the attention that the Canadian police pays to the public opposition to the Olympic Games is at the expense of attention to real terrorist threats. This is just one more example.

This, of course, is infinitely stupid, on the level of those who think they can "end civilization" by firebombing SUV sales lots. This, however, is the "intelligence" that is supported by taxpayer dollars, and, as I said, it makes me wonder about my estimates of "relative intelligence" of the state and its pseudo-opponents.

CANADIAN POLITICS:

POLITICAL "INTELLIGENCE" -THE RCMP SPIED ON RITA MACNEIL:

Have a look at the sweet and jolly person to the left. Can you think of anyone less likely to be involved in a "conspiracy against national security". Well, probably not, even though Rita MacNeil has been a long standing holder of left wing view. It was, however, her early feminist views, before she became an established singer, that drew the attention of Canada's spooks. Yup, that's the Rita who wrote such hits as 'Flying on Your Own', 'Born a Woman','Working Man' and 'She's Called Nova Scotia'. Since 1986 Rita has operated a tearoom!!! in her home island of Cape Breton. This is obviously a hotbed of subversion. Here's an item from the Canadian Press, dutifully reproduced at the Autonomy and Solidarity site, and, once more dutifully reproduced here at Molly's Blog. Read the following for its comic effect if nothing else. To see more about Rita, see the lyrics of her songs and download her music see her official site.

.........................

The RCMP Spied on Early Feminist Organizing:
Rita MacNeil, who went on to become a popular singer, was named in an RCMP document on a 1972 feminist gathering, Feminist singer of 'women's lib songs,' among dozens under scrutiny in early '70s.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press, August 5, 2008
OTTAWA–RCMP spies infiltrated the women's movement in the early 1970s, monitoring marches and rallies to keep an eye on feminists including Rita MacNeil, who would become a much-admired Maritime songstress.

An undercover source reporting on a March 1972 gathering of women's liberation groups in Winnipeg compiled biographical sketches of several delegates, noting MacNeil was in attendance from the Toronto Women's Caucus.

"She's the one who composes and sings women's lib songs," says the RCMP memo, portions of which remain secret.

MacNeil, who lent her musical talents to the feminist cause before turning to music full-time, was among dozens of women from across the country who came under Mountie scrutiny, new research reveals.

The entertainer was not immediately available for comment, nor was her manager.

Historians Steve Hewitt, a Canadian lecturer at the University of Birmingham in England, and Christabelle Sethna, of the University of Ottawa, sifted through hundreds of pages of declassified files detailing the RCMP Security Service's interest in women's groups that began flowering in the late 1960s.

Hewitt, a long-time chronicler of RCMP intelligence efforts, and Sethna, who specializes in women's studies, married their respective academic interests in jointly delving into the little-explored subject.

They have collaborated on three papers describing a strange collision of worlds in which the highly regimented and male-dominated RCMP security branch struggled to understand a new generation of women who shunned traditional female roles to agitate for equal pay, sex education in schools and access to abortion.

It has long been known that the now-defunct Security Service spied on a vast array of groups – from trade unionists to student associations – during the Cold War with the aim of gauging the potential threat from left-wing subversives, possibly linked to hostile foreign powers.

The force opened the file "Women's Liberation Groups – Canada" on May 13, 1969.

The Mounties pored over pamphlets, position papers, announcements and meeting minutes. They also relied on informants – females by necessity at closed-door meetings, but either male or female spies at open sessions.

Founded in May 1970, the Toronto Women's Caucus, and its office on Adelaide St. W., was controversial from its inception.

The RCMP amassed thousands of pages worth of surveillance records on groups like the women's caucus, Sethna told the Star's Brett Popplewell yesterday.

"There were three ways they were spying," she said.

"One would be on the ground taking photographs and noting down names, (another) was through informants and the other way was through open sources like the newspapers" that were reporting on the groups' actions.

The Star's archives refer to the Women's Caucus as "a militant women's liberation group," after it became vocal in the media during the 1971 census when it protested that men were registered as the heads of households.

In March 1971, the Star reported two of the caucus's founding members quit the group, alleging "a male-oriented radical socialist movement" of Trotskyites (love that good OLD Trot entrism-Molly)had taken over the women's group.

Sethna said the Toronto Women's Caucus along with other Toronto-based groups like the New Feminists lasted just a short time in the 1970s and then disbanded.

While the Mounties recognized the various feminist groups were out to "stop so-called exploitation of women," as one officer put it, the force was much more concerned about the apparent infiltration of the movement by avowed Communist interests.

"They were more interested in the political angles and whether these were leftists that were involved in these groups," said Hewitt, author of Spying 101, about RCMP surveillance of Canadian university campuses over the decades.

"And meanwhile there's this really dramatic social change going on almost right under the noses of the police."

The memo on the Winnipeg conference describes one session as "consisting of about one hundred sweating uncombed women standing around in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing."

Women's groups emerging from the New Left rejected standard notions of leadership as elitist, turned public protest into playful performances, took issue with capitalism and dismissed conformist ideas of middle-class femininity, the authors note.

The Mounties, used to keeping tabs on organizations run by men, didn't know quite what to make of the long-haired women in scruffy blue jeans.

"They were at a loss to understand their strategies, their goals, their tactics," said Sethna.

..............................

Rita's Songs

Here's a couple of items, lyrics to some of Rita's songs. The first is a tribute to the Cape Breton Island coal miners.

Working Man

Chorus

It’s a working man l am

And I’ve been down under ground

And I swear to God if l ever see the sun

Or for any length of time I can hold it in my mind

I never again will go down under ground

****
At the age of sixteen years

Oh he quarrels with his peers

Who vowed they’d never see another one

In the dark recess of the mines

Where you age before your time

And the coal dust has heavy on your lungs
Chorus
At the age of sixty-four

Oh hell greet you at the door

And hell gently lead you by the arm

Through the dark recess of the mines

Oh hell take you back in time

And hell tell you of the hardships that were had
Chorus(Repeat Chorus)(Repeat Chorus)
God I never again will go down under ground

***************

FLYING ON YOUR OWN:

Here's another one with a bit more of a feminist bent. Take notes CSIS. Go to the Rita MacNeil site mentioned above for all the lyrics of all her songs.

You were never more strong girl

You were never more alone

Once there was two,

now there's Just you

You're flying on your own

You were never more happy girl

You were never oh so blue

Once heartaches begin Nobody wins

You're flying on your own

Chorus:

And when you know the wings you ride

Can keep you in the sky

There isn't anyone holding back you

First you stumble, then you fall

You reach out and you fly

There isn't anything that you can't do

You were never more wise girl

You were never more a fool

Once you break through

It's all up to you

You're flying on your own

You were never more together

You were never more apart

Once pieces of you

were all that You knew

You're flying on your own

Chorus

Repeat Chorus