There was a conspiracy. It still came out.

First of all, read about the brewing scandal about how three Guantanamo Bay prisoners who were alleged to have committed suicide were actually killed by their interogators. The murders were covered up and all corroborating evidence discarded. When the bodies were given back to the families, the throat structures were removed to prevent future autopsies from determining cause of death.

From the sounds of this, this is a bona fide conspiracy, one that would make Hollywood proud. But its existence – and, notably, its revelation – proves why other conspiracies simply can’t exist.

This involved people at the highest reaches (this is par for the course). It involved horrendous deeds And it involved the death of three people from a foreign country who were locked in a prison obstensibly (although, still, perhaps unwarranted) because they were bad guys. The people who knew about this were all military and government insiders. And the United States media has been reluctant to cover this.

And yet, it still came out. These other big conspiracy theories you hear about, the “9/11 inside job” being the biggest example, all require hundreds or thousands of people to do horrendous deeds and kill thousands of their countrymen. And they require either complete silence or an entirely complicit media.

Conspiracy theorists are, of course, not huge fans of anyone’s logic other than their own. But if they were, they would have to acknowledge that keeping all those involved silent (particularly as a new administration takes over), is clearly impossible even when those people are members of the normally closed-mouthed military. They would also be forced to confront the fact that the U.S. media is so diverse that no legitimate career-making story will ever go unreported by at least one of the thousands of journalists desperate to make a name for him or herself.

All that said, you still need to inform yourself about what happens when your country practices torture. So read up, even though it ain’t gonna be fun.

Nice, nice, very nice

I know I don’t believe in signs, so we’ll call this a nice coincodence; with an hour left in my PR career the sun has emerged and is shining over the PNE grounds.

It’s a great day to be quitting a job.

(Can you become addicted to quitting bad jobs?) Note: “bad jobs.”

Exclusive interview: Jason Britton on Stealth Rider and future of Super Bikes!

I interviewed Jason Britton, host of Speed TV’s Super Bikes!, yesterday. Here are some highlights relating to his new show, for what it’s worth.

Tyler Olsen: When do you start shooting the next season of Super Bikes?

Jason Britton: We are currently shooting our new show for Speed called Stealth Rider and they’re basically producing a stunt film in the most iconic locations in the U.S. So anywhere from shooting stunt demos in front of the Whitehouse, the Capitol Building to shutting down the Las Vegas Strip and doing stunt shows in San Francisco in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every location in the U.S. that’s an iconic desirable location we’re bringing stunt shows to.

TO: How long does shooting go.

JB: We’re shooting 13 episodes for this show.

TO: So it’s a whole new series.

JB: Yeah.

TO: Some stunt movies are produced on a hairstring budget. This sounds like it has some financial clout behind it.

JB: Yeah, Speed Channel is behind the show 100 per cent so we got the budget and we’re going through the proper channels, shutting everything down as if it was a feature film, which they’re trying to decide at this point if they’re going to show it in select theatres after the 13th episode or they’re going to have a one-hour episode on the network or how they’re going to do it.

TO: Is that part of the Super Bikes! thing or is it branded differently?

JB: It’s going to be in the Super Bikes! time slot and they’re still going to continue to air Super Bikes!, the reruns, until they figure out where they’re going to go from this season.

It’s similar in a way. We’re doing stunt shows, we’re travelling around the country but this is more focused on location, location, location. We’re not going to a stunt show to do our show at an event or an event we created, we are bringing motorcycles to a general population, people that don’t know anything about motorcycles, people who are travelling to these destinations as a tourist attraction. We’re putting motorcycles right in the middle of that.

TO: You are the event, essentially.

JB: Yeah, we’re bringing a new demographic to motorcycling because our viewers are generally people that are enthusiasts and are into motorcycles whether its stunt racing, road racing, drag racing, whatever it may be. Of course there’s going to be some people who are into bikes and have seen the show – we’ve run into that quite frequently – but for the most part, when we were in Vegas we had probably 3,000 people on the strip that were in awe of what was going on and out of those 3,000 people there were maybe 10 per cent that were enthusiasts. The other 90 per cent hadn’t seen anything like that.

TO: As somebody who has championed the sport, how exciting is that to get new people showing interest in it?

JB: Oh, it’s incredible. I mean, we’re pioneering motorcycling period, let alone motorcycle stunts and bringing that appeal to a brand new demographic. We’re putting the interest in people’s lap who never saw motorcycles in this light. They saw the guy on the bike and said, oh that guy’s going to kill himself or that guy’s crazy or whatever. You know, we put it in front of them in a way they’ve never seen it and we’re getting a great response and it’s a great feeling to open people’s eyes and some of the emails I’ve gotten, some people who have come out while we were filming took the time to look into things a little bit and find my website and get my email and email me about what they witnessed and how it drew them to look further into motorcycling and how they could go about getting their first bike and things like that.

Other highlights:

Best place to ride: Hawaii, from which he just came and where it was 80 degrees.

Worst injury: A tie between a broken back and broken neck

Favourite trick: Headstands, because it’s high risk

Workout regiment: Four times a week; rides a road bike 30 miles per day, four days a week.

Check the Province’s Driving section for what he says about Canadian riders. Jason, who seemed like quite a good guy from our interview, will be at the Vancouver Motorcycle Show January 21 to 24 at TRADEX in Abbotsford.

Twitter versus blogs

I read neither Twitter nor blogs, although with my pending new job, I may be able to redirect my surfing habits away from a few much-visited employment sites.

But I have noticed (possibly, I could be wrong) that Twitter seems to have stolen the role of blogs, as far as unprofessional depositories of random opinions go. Newspapers have gone to great lengths in the past couple years to launch blogs. And as more professionals have gotten in on the game, I’d be willing to bet visitors to smaller blogs maintained by owners in their own free time has dwindled, or at least growth has decreased.

If I want opinion or insight into a new political development, I’d rather read Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne or, before he started focusing on Ontario, Adam Radwanski, than the local crazy down the street.

Twitter is getting overrun by corporations, businesses and PR folks but there’s also a fair amount of regular people on there. I think it’s still used chiefly by self-promotional folks and technology geeks and thus is hardly a “global conversation.” That said, as a reporter, I’ll be adding almost every Chilliwack twitterer I run into.

The reason is simple. When users talk about a subject, they use a hashtag that can then be searched for globally (Apparantly, in English-speaking countries outside of North America the number sign, or pound sign, is called a hash). That means that I can search for any topic in which I may be interested quickly. I can also, then, find locals to monitor for any interesting developments. Blogs take more time, and thus are used less. You can also set up a twitter account more quickly.

For a reporter, it seems like an interesting way to connect with sources. We’ll see when I start in Chilliwack.

Freedom of speech won’t feed my children (but it’s still nice to have)

Two months trapped in corporate PR land is enough to make one realize that freedom of speech at work is something few people really have, especially if you’re in any sort of public job.

If you’re speaking for your organization, or about something that affects your organization, you basically have to parrot the party line. You have no right to say what you think. You only have the right to say what your boss’s boss’s boss thinks. Or what your boss thinks your boss thinks your boss thinks.

There are, of course, exceptions. Teachers seem to have a fair amount of leeway, as do professors, whose batshit opinions can make you wonder how they got a PhD. ——>

Perhaps certain academics can seem crazy and singleminded because it takes somebody very driven to get a PhD and, if you want to get one while you still have control over your bladder, you need to be fairly single-minded and passionate.

Reporters also have pretty much unlimited freedom of speech. So woo hoo for that. It’s time to start using twitter to mock people mercilessly and display general cynicism about Vancouver in general. Or something like that.

(Topic for tomorrow: Has twitter forced blogs to become a spot for more in depth musings?)

On the horrors of teamwork

Team sports are great. Team economics are horrifying.

If journalism is the 100-metre sprint (we’ll equate an editor with a coach), public relations is a long-distance relay of a to-be-determined distance and your shoes are newborn babies.

The finish line is in the same place. But in public relations you run in circles with your teammates, not quite knowing if you’re all on the same page until the very end, when you collapse on the other side of the finish line and realize everybody’s watching the high jump.

You work as a team, but if someone drops a baton, you’re fucked. And you don’t quite know how far you have to go. You just run hard, hoping you’re not running too fast, or not fast enough.

And all the while you try to ignore the squishing and the squeals coming from below your feet.

And now for some good news…oh, right

The Globe and Mail squares up to the fact that young people are in big trouble as far as the whole “prosperity” thing goes. Not too much of a surprise really, though I couldn’t have said it better.

I found two comments interesting.

First (reason: self explanatory):

You can bail yourself out all you want now, but when it comes to write the cheques in 15 years or so, me and my cohort will simply bail ourselves out by puting you into homes or icebergs.

Icebergs seem a lot cheaper, although global warming might pose a problem.

Second comment:

…. yes, they will surely demand more of their leaders. Like all youth, when they get really frustrated, about their prospects in life, they don’t go quietly into that good night. Bet on it. They will not lobby and protest in a ‘nice’ way. The street is their forum.

Sounds like either a deluded student government type or someone born in the 60s. Don’t they know it’s much easier to sit at home and watch TV than do anything about it. And more effective. Given voter turnouts and the general gray-hair-to-peach-fuzz ratio, it would take a pretty organized bunch of people to get something done. And we youth aren’t known for our organization.

Sam Roberts/Arkells/Mother Mother concert

Sam Roberts, the Arkells and Mother Mother played Deer Lake Park last Monday. And while the bands were good, the venue was even better. Full review here.

Fatally Injured=Killed

Metro Employee Fatally Injured Near Vienna Station

I suppose that WashingtonPost.com headline is technically accurate. It just seems like there’s a better word for “fatally injured.” Oh, right. There is. Killed.

Chellah yeah

Rabat’s Chellah was virtually deserted when we visited; certainly storks outnumbered humans two- or even three-to-one. They roosted in the trees and, most spectacularly, on top of a long-abandoned minaret.

The Chellah dates back to the third century B.C., although we didn’t know that when we visited. Rather, it looks like a medieval fort beside a busy ring road around the city. Inside, ancient ruins of what was the first settlement in the area vie for space with trees, flowers and the aforementioned storks.

There are archways and the remnants of small buildings and gardens but no real information on the place. In fact, I don’t have any better information to add to the linked Wikipedia site so I won’t even try. But if you’re in Rabat and want a day away from the ruckus of the medina and old city, and maybe want a couple photos of none-too-shy storks, head for the Chellah.