Temple Jones’ article contains the following sentence. “Derksen took an unpaid internship in Toronto where he was billed out to clients at a regular designer’s rate – anywhere from $75 to $200 per hour.’ [page 26].
Setting aside questions of ethics – important to many of us, and apparently often ignored by many companies which employ (exploit) interns, the foregoing raises the following issue. Evidently the intern Derksen provided valuable services to the employer who, as we see, used these services to generate income. What kind of financial record-keeping does it take to report that your company has sold something which has no book value (ie which cost the company nothing)?
The answer to that question lies in the words of financial executives themselves.
William Lutz’ book “Doublespeak” (Harper and Rowe, 1989) reports the words of
“Leonard Spacek, senior partner and chairman emeritus of Arthur Andersen and Company….
How my profession can tolerate such fiction and look the public in the eye is beyond my understanding…. My profession appear to regard a set of financial statements as a roulette wheel… - it is [the public investor’s] tough luck if he (sic) doesn’t understand the risks that we inject into the accounting reports.”
We are reminded of the now-defunct Arthur Andersen’s involvement in many accounting irregularities (see below).

and

In 1981... OPM Leasing Services …went into bankruptcy….[I]ts founders …were sentenced to long prison terms. From its founding in 1971 to its demise in 1980 O.P.M. was without funds and lost money every year, yet it continued to grow and borrow large amounts of money ($500 million at one time) How was this possible? Having a good accounting firm doing the annual reports really helped:…an accounting firm that would be ‘flexible’, one that would certify financial statements that painted a rosy picture but would not detect the lease frauds in which the company was engaged. He found his accounting firm, one of the twelve largest in the country, which miraculously changed losses and deficits into profits and a positive net worth….
At first, the accounting firm came up with a financial statement that showed large losses and a negative net worth for the company: … the company was losing money and owed more than it was worth…. Mr. Goodman told the accountants to ‘get back to the grindstone and try to figure out a way to show a profit”, and the accountants did. [page 112]
These are not isolated incidents, and have continued to the present (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals) If one were to dismantle many of the current digitally-based accounting programs (something which, of course, software manufacturing makes difficult and copyright law forbids) I suspect that one would discover many algorithms which, even for the would-be honest financial data-entry worker, make truthful and straightforward financial reporting all but impossible.
In Matthew 10.16 we read that Jesus said “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Some of us hope for a Christian response to the foregoing kinds of events – a response which is honest and principled, but which at the same time is canny enough to “fly under the radar” until it becomes too widespread to be stopped.
(the Reverend) Brock Lupton (ret.)

I suggest that Canadian law can apply only when a rule is violated in sports. Otherwise I suppose one could end up (for instance) with a hockey player being charged with carrying an offensive weapon (the hockey stick). While I advocate large scale curbing of violence, the foregoing would seem extreme.

Vision without action is a daydream: action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese proverb

These "hits" are certainly against the rules of hockey. That in turn leaves the way open for what I would like to see. Once the rules have been violated a player leaves himself open to the application of Canadian law, which applies on the hockey rink as it does anywhere else in Canada. Players who make these kinds of hits could be charged with assault. Coaches could be charged with advocating the committing of assault (so for that matter could the executives who hire "enforcers"). It would be a waste of taxpayers' money to send to jail anyone who is found guilty, but some long-term probations with strict conditions and the acquisition of a criminal record seems like a great deterrent. I am not holding my breath for any of this to happen. Hockey violence puts money in executives' pockets, and that will continue to be the highest priority for them.

As a Canadian senior, I am extremely impressed with the courage of a Canadian teen of Libyan background. In an interview broadcast in part yesterday on CBC radio, this young woman insists that she will not leave, but will stay to resist Gadhafi and be part of history. ML Johnstone, you are right on the mark.

Gadhafi is apparently hiring mercenaries now that his own armed forces are apparently refusing to kill their fellow Libyans. I wonder to what extent Blackwater and other western-based mercenary outfits are involved here. For those who have read Jeremy Scahill's book, the enormous profits reaped by Blackwater owners and board members (including friends of the former Bush administration in the US) due to the efforts of their hired thugs would certainly be consistent with this kind of involvement and with its support from the political right (if anything so disgustingly wrong can be called "right") in the US and elsewhere in the west.

It has long seemed possible to me that President Karzai is the president of Afghanistan at least partly because the Bush administration didn't like the alternatives and meddled with Afghan politics to get a more palatable result in 2001. While it is difficult to gain unbiased information, sources like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omar and http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Hamid_Karzai don't at least seem to rule out this position. Romeo Dallaire, in "Shake Hands with the Devil", is convinced that the US and its NATO allies will do anything to weaken the UN. The NATO actions in Afghanistan certainly seem to do this. I think the US and Britain (and Canada's Harper government certainly seems highly complicit) have achieved this purpose. US influence over President Karzai, despite his commendable attempts to resist some of NATO's extreme interventions, would be powerful indeed if the foregoing theory has any merit. I would be interested to hear what experts think about this hypothesis: does it have any foundation in fact?

I have written to two MPs who have spoken out about Richard Fadden's interview. I pointed out the contents of a report regarding a recent US conference on the inherently unethical nature of spying, as well as Canadian laws regarding libel, slander, and defamation. I doubt if one mere citizen can expect to affect the outcome in an issue such as this unless by the very unlikely possibility that I could become an object of CSIS's ethically "flexible" spying practices. (I doubt if I am that important, though I certainly believe that CSIS frequently spies on Canadian citizens without any cause.) However, I hope Mr. Fadden discovers that at least one Canadian - me - takes him very seriously. I hope he discovers this by the gravity of the consequences I think he ought to be facing.