“But just in case you’re still running into the sophomores in college who with their professor-instilled new-found knowledge are going to continue to tell you that it’s all a conspiracy man and the oil companies are working together to keep us down, here is another little tidbit that should help you quelch those little brats up…”
Ricky Martinez Was Ready For Iraq
In 1994, the Northridge Earthquake rocked California. Pete Wilson hired a contractor to rebuild who made two promises to him. The job would be done on time, and within the allotted budget. The left was threatening bloody murder unless minority contractors were hired. They were concerned with appearances. Pete Wilson went with his gut. Yes, the guy was a white male, but more importantly, he had a track record of successful work. The job was completed early, and under budget.
This was typical Pete Wilson. A man who was told he was leading a state that was ungovernable rolled up his sleeves and governed. The fact that he was a former marine is no surprise. Military men are disciplined, and Wilson’s discipline was enough to get California through floods, fires, Earthquakes, riots, and a monstrous budget deficit that was a surplus when he left.
Contrast this with Detroit today. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is mired in scandal. Some will say that since this is a sexual scandal, it should be ignored. The scandal is not the sex itself. The real scandal, that most will not mention, is that this man has been allowed to neglect his city for so long. Also, for those wanting to play the race card, the prosecutor coming after the Mayor is a black woman. Kym Worthy is not interested in bringing down a black man. She is trying to bring down an incompetent and corrupt politician that happens to be black.
A glimpse in the Star Chamber – part II
This is part II, for part one click here.
Lemire’s lawyer starts into a new line of questioning digging in to how the CHRC determines which complaints to investigate and which to dismiss. Mr. Steacy is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the questions and the answers are terse, and only given reluctantly sometimes after a long pause.
Unearthed in this is one example – a racist comment is posted on an anti-racism website and a complaint about it is lodged at the CHRC. Steacy explains that it was determined to be vexatious and dismissed, because there was a comment thread at Stormfront suggesting this tactic be used as a tactic against their political opponents. Note that Warman and CHRC staff themselves have admitted to posting racist messages on sites like Stormfront, and other law enforcement agencies have done so as well.
Bottom line from this line of questioning – racists posting messages on anti-racists websites and then submitting complaints promptly get dismissed. Anti-racists posting messages on unsavoury sites like Stormfront is supposedly legitimate investigative work done by CHRC, Warman, anti-hate police squads. Complaints against these websites are investigated and prosecuted.
At one point Steacy is asked if there is an exemption in the law for investigators posting to these sites? The answer is no. Okay.
Later, there is a long line of questioning establishing regular contacts, coordination, meetings, conferences and information sharing between CHRC, several police forces including the RCMP, London, Winnepeg and others, and even CSIS. During this line of questioning Steacy gives the impression of having been prepped by a lawyer to avoid admitting to certain types of agreements or coordination with police forces, while the line of questioning established many facts making it clear that they did just that. I would guess that there are some serious legal or constitutional issues here and the groundwork was being laid for a challenge in a real court, but I’m not a lawyer so I can’t ascertain exactly which laws were in play here. Steacy would repeat like a mantra that “we have no formal or informal agreement with the RCMP or any other law enforcement involving investigations of Section 13 complaints”.
In any case we can establish as fact that:
1.Terry Wilson of the London police, investigating a potential crime got a warrant and seized a password-protected hard drive.
2.London police forensic investigators cracked the password and copied the contents of the hard drive.
3.Steacy calls Terry Wilson and asks for the file – and promptly gets the police report, including a CD containing a copy of the seized hard drive.
4.Steacy insists there is no formal or informal agreement or procedure for transferring this type of information.
5.He has asked for and received information for police warrants about a dozen times.
6.He has provided information to police investigating potential crimes a couple of times.
7.The CHRC had meeting and conferences with the RCMP, CSIS, and many law enforcement agencies where they had an agenda the discussion of improved access to police tools, techniques and information.
But always coming back to the mantra that “there is no formal or informal agreement between CHRC and police forces on section 13 hate complaints”.
At the end of the session Doug Christie revisits this questioning. He comes across as a bitter and angry blowhard, but they go a long way to establishing what appears to be a very ugly pattern. Someone (let’s call him Lucy for sake of argument), tries to get the police to proceed with hate crime charges. The police use their full powers to investigate, including issuing warrants and seizing evidence. They eventually decide that either no crime has been committed or the burden of proof is just too high, so drop the charges and pass the evidence on to the CHRC where regular rules of evidence and burden of proof don’t apply. Whether or not this is a conscious strategy on their part (and Steacy insisted it was not), it would certainly appear that that is indeed the end result, based on the examples provided today.
On another tangent, Steacy is asked if there is a central registry of CHRC and law enforcement Ids used to investigate hate sites. He says no. He is asked quite belligerently if it’s possible that they could be prosecuting web site owners based on messages posted by other law enforcement agencies. He responds with enormous reluctance “I guess”.
And one final note. Earlier there was some back and forth about a poem by “Jesse Destruction” referring to Totenkopf. Not sure what the significance of it all was, but it sounds like something I’ll have to google to get the background on. Partly because I am intrigued by what this poem might contain, and based on how vigorously the CHRC resisted efforts to get it entered into the record.
Actually, just one more thing. Towards the end Steacy’s “assistant” made a grand show about the information revealed by Bell Canada earlier. A Jadewarr post (a CHRC account) was traced to an IP address owned by a woman entirely unconnected to the CHRC. The chair requested that the woman’s identity not be disclosed, and now the CHRC lawyer was complaining about the information being on the internet and the fact that Lemire had been blogging during the day – though stopped just short of accusing him of having disclosed it. The woman insists she had nothing to do with it, but does run a wireless router in her downtown Ottawa appartment.
Since this account was controlled by four or five CHRC employees, I think we can conclude that one of them was attempting to hide their tracks by taking a laptop on the road and jumping on some anonymous access point.
That they are taking active (but ineffective) measures to hide their tracks is certainly disturbing. It certainly makes you wonder what else they’re doing that we haven’t uncovered yet.
Editors Update:
More reports at Socon (with audio!), CHRC Exposed, National Post, Gyapong, the Ottawa Citizen, Steyn Online, and in the comments below.
[Kate] Reading the “can’t remember” testimony attributed to Dean Steacy, my first reaction is “where are his records?”
Police investigators are required to document details of who they interview and what scenes they attend throughout their day. How does it come to pass that an agent under government authority can conduct investigations under an assumed identity, and not be required to maintain detailed logs to document his activities?
Reader Tips
A break from the CHRC intense blogging of recent hours…
“Now, from what I seem to remember about my youngest sister’s ‘teenage antics’… somebody at Indiana U had better be working on a ‘taser phone’
Don’t elevate me, Obama.”
Do minors require their parents’ consent to become suicide bombers?
Winning hearts and moos.
Yours in the comments.
A glimpse in the Star Chamber – Part I
I have a real job and wasn’t able to attend the entire hearing, but given a chance to witness a real live kangaroo court in session I couldn’t resist dropping in for a look.
After a cursory security check which involved a quick screening with a metal detector I was ushered into the hearing room with the hearing in session. There was no need to present ID, credentials, explain why you were interested or anything, the Warman versus Lemire hearing was indeed open to the general public.
I arrived while Dean Steacy was on the stand, being questioned by Marc Lemire’s lawyer Barbara Kulazka, with Marc Lemire sitting to her right frequently passing notes and making suggestions.
Jews Get All The Best Hate Mail
P.S.: Good lord — look at what a commenter dug up. Young Abdullah isn’t just importing sharia law to Moncton — he’s importing stilettos and other assorted weapons, too, as fast as he can. This is a picture of one that he bought just two weeks ago on eBay. Here are the details. Oh, and here’s what the Criminal Code has to say about stilettos that can be opened with the click of a button — they’re illegal (scroll down to the definition of the phrase “prohibited weapon”). But I’m sure Abdullah would tell the police — if their diversity squad permitted them to raise this touchy subject — that he follows a higher authority than Canadian laws.
P.P.S. Please don’t pester Simon Wiesenthal about any of this — he’s too busy fretting over some ugly flags in Calgary.
The Revolution Will Be Live Blogged
At Macleans – coverage of Warman v. Lemire.
2:15:23 PM
Under questioning, Steacy remains adamant that he *had* to join the various sites, including freedominion.ca, in order to use the search engine and access the full site. He also claims that there were “security concerns” about the safety of CHRC staffers working on “hate files,” which is why he logged in to see what had been posted about JadeWarr’s identity.
2:18:27 PM
So why *was* he on freedominion.ca before there was a complaint? Because there was the *potential* for a complaint to come in, he says – prompting muffled gasps from the group beside me, which includes the two founders of Free Dominion.
Now Doug Christie is on his feet, and expressing grave concern over the fact that a CHRC representative was investigating the site before a complaint has been made. Barbara K wants to know *who* – othe than Gentes – was considering making a complaint, and Steacy refuses to answer. Well, that was dramatic, at least.
Reader Tips (Bumped!)
Who said what?
He said what? Yes, he did. He said it well, too.
Jason – What the hell is wrong with you?
ED NOTE: As this post pertains to the continuing controversy created by pesky “freespeechers” (that’s a perjorative, by the way), it’s only fair to acknowledge that in the wake of my comments of Sunday, about 20 of the best and brightest the Canadian leftosphere has to offer linked to SDA in condemnation. (I won’t name you all for fear of leaving someone out.)
After weighing their arguments, my traffic meter remained largely unmoved.
Footnote:
[1] Thus elevating my status to that of documented “global warming holocaust denier”. I guess that means new business cards.
Update: BINGO!
(Tips thread open.)
Final Update: – and still more on “fake outrage”.
The first thing that strikes me are the number of critics (here’s one) who believe that a statement about National Socialism’s relationship to the German state in the context of the holocaust constitutes an “analogy”.
The second point is that I wasn’t offering an “argument”, but a simple statement of fact that should be self-evident.
When a comment serves as little more than preface to a featured quote, it shouldn’t require a short history of WW2 history or personal disclaimer to prevent “confusion” in the mind of the reader. Readers that easily confused should take on gentler topics. (See my first point).
There exists a terminology for the phenomenon of attempting to communicate in so complete a manner as to prevent all accidents of misinterpretation.
It’s known as “writing for stupid people.”
So, the conclusion is this (and my advice to bloggers in general): Set a minimum threshold such as “understands the definition of analogy” before deciding whether or not a critic is worthy of your response.
Now, as you were.
So, It’s Not Just Me
Flea has never owned a slave, either*;
I don’t get it. Perhaps it is because I am not American. I do not belong to a polity living with the spectre of a promised 40 acres and a mule so reparations are a bit of a non-starter as far as I am concerned. But then I also do not belong to the polity which sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Union lives on the altar of liberty including and especially the liberty of the ancestors of today’s reparations advocates. It seems churlish to demand payment from the descendants of abolitionists let alone those of all the men who gave their lives far from home on behalf of people they did not know. Maybe, just maybe, it is James Cone and his fellow travelers who owe the debt. When it comes to the history of race in America there are villains, no doubt. But the United States government is not one of them. The United States government has been and remains the greatest champion of liberty in human history.
History Is Written By The Victors
Victory is rewritten by the media.
Update: typo corrected.
Rewritton?
Posted by: ulianov at March 25, 2008 10:32 AM
Typo. Should be rewrotten.
Posted by: Richard Ball at March 25, 2008 10:40 AM
Well, my secret is out – my sniper vision ain’t what it used to be.
So, here’s the deal. If every person who reads this page would just drop $20 in my tip jar, I could buy myself glasses.
Plus, a new Dodge Ram 1500.
While They Were Counting
Bucking the trend towards body count journalism, some “grim statistics” remain less newsworthy than others (via Gateway Pundit).
Pakistan is not only among the countries with the highest incidence of terrorism but it also tops the list of suicide bombings, leaving Afghanistan and Iraq behind during the first three months of 2008.
During this period, Pakistan experienced eighteen suicide attacks in which more than 250 people died. Whereas in both war-ridden countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, had a fewer number of suicide attacks.
The battleground has shifted. But unlike the Iraqis, the Pakistanis seem more easily “awakened” and there’s news of welcome mats being yanked – providing you can find it.
The alleged militant group familiarly known as “Taliban” was declared “out of Islam” by 73 different sects of Muslims through an edict (Fatwa) circulated in parts of the narrow tribal strip of Darra Adamkhel.
The edict in Urdu language was circulated on behalf of Mufti Zainul Aabideen on Friday night. The one page edict focuses on Talibans’s terrorists’ acts in the area, particularly slaughtering of human beings and suicide attacks.
[…]
It is for the first time that a religious scholar declared “Taliban” as being “out of Islam.” The edict said that all the acts of Taliban are against the basic norms of Islam and humanity. “Even the Taliban leaders are considering themselves and their directives as superior to true Islamic principles and directives as ordained by Almighty Allah,” the edict said.
With all the professional ink spilled in complaint over Taliban “insurgents” operating from the safety of tribal areas of Pakistan. a home turf reversal of fortunes for the ministry of headchoppers should count for some coverage, yes?
Well, no.
In the eyes of western media, setbacks only happen to our own. Besides, it’s March again, and their duties lie elsewhere. Surely, the much-awaited 2007 spring offensive is just around the corner.
“Since yesterday evening therefore my name is Magdi Crisitano Allam”
“I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.”
Y2Kyoto: Great Moments In Hypocrisy
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The Sound Of Settled Science
She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”
Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”
Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”
Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”
[…]
Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”
Duffy: “From what you’re saying, it sounds like the implications of this could be considerable …”
Marohasy: “That’s right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer’s interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point.”
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Reader Tips
Happy Monday! Tips open.
Y2Kyoto: Sunshine Is Free
… between the cost of current petroleum-powered transportation, heating, and cooling, compared to the equivalent cost of providing such energy via solar panels? In order to provide a mechanism for exploring the question, I have prepared:
A Model of the Cost of Solar Power v. Oil
This is an interactive model: you can change the input values, and the calculated values are automatically recomputed as you go.
A little geek candy for a quiet Sunday evening. Feedback and corrections are invited at the link provided.
Thinking Of You This Easter
The Nazis Didn’t Carry Out The Holocaust
The German state did that. National Socialism just gave the machinery of state censorship and oppression a new brand name and game plan.
And, as the saying goes, meet the self-aggrandizing holocaust trophy-hunter, same as the old boss;
My father didn’t fight against Nazism just because it is an odious and repellant belief system, although it is. He fought against the tyranny that underpinned Nazi Germany at a deeper level too – that tyranny that exists anywhere a state controls the thoughts and actions and very beliefs of its citizens. It doesn’t matter whether the code of belief was drawn up by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Castro, Trudeau, Warman or Kinsella. State enforcement of a code of belief (or a code of non-belief) is tyranny, plain and simple, and it’s the enemy of freedom. It was my father’s enemy, and he saw it regaining the upper hand in the years before he died. Not long before then, he said to me that there is nobody less tolerant than a liberal, and what prophetic words those have turned out to be.
So don’t you dare tell me that my father fought on your side of this issue, Kinsella. You’re everything that’s wrong with the Canadian political system. You’re what Jason Cherniak wants to be when he grows up. You’re all about winning and nothing about values. You’re all about labels and nothing of substance. You’re all about using the HRCs to silence people with whom you disagree. You’re all about freedom for you and censorship for them. One rule for you and one rule for them. One rule for Liberals taking taxpayer dollars and another for those poor people who pay the taxes in the first place. You’re just as elitist, just as tyrannical, and just as much a dictator as those you profess to despise.
Meanwhile, his political brothers-in-arms march in our streets under the flag of an ideology dedicated to wiping every last Jew off the map – and he remains deaf, dumb and utterly complicit.
An update and an opportunity! – … this website hereby announces it will pay $0.23* for a clear photo of Warren Kinsella and any Liberal frontbencher together, taken in the last two years. For such a well-connected political insider, they seem to be hard to come by.”
Another update and I swear, this approaches the status of intellectual anti-matter.
“John” writes;
Just like the Liberals never committed the sponsorship program. It was the government apparatus that did it. If not for the Departmental officials, bureaucrats and ad companies, the Liberals never could have committed such acts, and therefore we must absolve the Liberal Party of any responsibility…
See the folly in your stupid argument now?
John – the theft committed under the sponsorship program was possible because the rules were altered to undermine the checks and balances in place.
That you chose that specific analogy for your critique is nothing short of spectacular in this context. I pause to wonder if you aren’t engaged in a little provocateurism here – for it was Warren Kinsella who wrote the memo directing that Chuck Guite be afforded a by-pass.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
So today, it is Warren Kinsella who wants to by-pass a different safeguard. He defends a state-enforced mechanism by which unaccountable political appointees are placed outside the checks and balances of due process. They have the power to investigate, interrogate and penalize free citizens for publishing words and opinions deemed “likely” to offend – even when those words have been planted by their own agents.
When free citizens willingly surrender our right to hold and express opinion, right or wrong, sound or sane, we grease the wheels of the politically extreme.
Repeating my earlier comment – without the state apparatus extending their authority to all arms of bureaucracy, enabling suppression of all criticism and dissent, the National Socialists would have had no more capacity to order the round up and mass murder of their fellow citizens than the national executive of your Kinsman club.
No political ideology can transform the citizenry into accomplices in murder without their permission. So long as we protect the right to object, to offend, to criticize above all else, reasonable people have a fighting chance to halt extremism and expose agendas, wherever the arise, and whatever they may be, through the force of reason and argument.
We must resist any erosion of that right, because we know not what comes down the road towards us. Change the names and faces, pass through a few election cycles, and today’s objective criticism is tomorrow’s thought crime.
Yet, there are some who want to destroy that safeguard, to pre-emptively surrender it to faceless bureaucrats and unaccountable tribunals, in the suicidal belief that those who inherit a state apparatus armed with the authority to silence the individual and narrow the rules of discourse, will forever limit the application to our percieved enemies – and that should we change our minds and demand our right restored, that they will surrender it back.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and “some people feel intimidated by the word England.”
[Iraq war veteran] Craig applied to join Greater Manchester Police shortly before returning to civvy street this month.
When he admitted he had a tattoo, he was asked to send a photo of the inch-high Gothic letters spelling ENGLAND on the underside of his right forearm.
He was later told he had been rejected by the recruitment department.
It wrote: “Home Office policy precludes applications with tattoos on lower arm, hand, face or neck that are prominent, which may cause offence and/or invite provocation from the public or colleagues.”
Reader Tips
AIDS prevention research: A step forward for the “keep it in your pants” strategy.
“Yes, very much so – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference seems to imagine that self-esteem is a default entitlement and that “defamation” should also extend to matters of inconvenient fact; and thus believers – or rather Muslims – have some fictional right not to be criticised or mocked for publicly airing absurd and objectionable beliefs…”
This really shouldn’t need to be explained;
Scholar Kay Hymowitz […] turns the argument around and says it’s not that harsh economic conditions lead to women having children without fathers, but that the decision to have children without fathers leads to harsh, and self-perpetuating, economic conditions.
Yours in the comments.