statism watch

Kurt Nimmo, PrisonPlanet.com
February 5, 2009

	The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were nullified many years ago, at least since the emergence of the Federalists under Alexander Hamilton.

Back in December, the Wall Street Journal had a good chuckle over Russian academic Igor Panarin’s prediction that the United States would break apart by 2010. Using threadbare Cold War logic, Andrew Osborn wrote that Panarin’s forecast “is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis.” For the WSL scribe, Panarin’s analysis is about the Red Bear “returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.”

In fact, it was not so much “weakness” that destroyed Russia as it was the IMF, the World Bank, and Wall Street, in other words it was another bankster looting and fire sale scheme that brought the former Soviet Union down, not that we should expect the Wall Street Journal to admit as much. Ditto the current “global financial crisis” and instability in the Middle East.

“Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar,” Osborn summarizes. “Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.”

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Mr. Mohamed has said that he only ‘confessed’ after being tortured by the application of razors to, shall we say, sensitive areas of the anatomy.

The Telegraph UK
February 5, 2009

Two senior judges have launched a highly critical attack on the US authorities accusing them of threatening to withdraw cooperation over terrorism intelligence if details of torture evidence was released in public in the UK.

The judges were dealing with a case which centred on a British suspected terrorist and allegations that he was tortured.

The judges decided not to release evidence of the alleged torture because the US had threatened to withdraw cooperation over terrorist intelligence and “the public of the United Kingdom would be put at risk”.

In a joint judgment involving terror suspect Binyam Mohamed, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said: “In the light of the long history of the common law and democracy which we share with the United States it was in our view difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported, as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters.

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If the actual intention here is to make a tool to more readily pressure parents to vaccinate children if they disagree with vaccinations, this journal would oppose that. Will the electronic health records the province is to “move towards”  be in a central database, or under the control of the patient and a practitioner-designate? Eg, will they maintain the privacy of the current paper records? But there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with changing the media of a record from paper to silicon. Strong dual-key encryption protects privacy. And doctor’s charts are notoriously illegible.

CBC News
February 5, 2009

A Toronto public health official says there is a need to keep electronic vaccination records for children to help stop outbreaks of preventable diseases.

Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health, says that sending letters to parents — who in turn have to dig for charts — is not an efficient way of tracking which children have had their shots.

By law children in Ontario must be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and polio. [Ed. Note: That's a lie. See Missed vaccinations lead to suspension threat, which mentions the opt-out process.]

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George Monbiot, The Guardian
February 5, 2009

Did you know … a law passed to protect people from stalkers is being used by the government to prosecute protesters

One of the most heartbreaking articles I have ever read was a response column published recently in the Guardian. Edward Countryman explained that he was writing on behalf of his wife, Evonne Powell-Von Heussen, “who could not bear to face” the unintended consequences of the thing she had created.

For 17 years she was the victim of an aggressive stalker, who attacked her and held her captive. She spent five years running a brave and vigorous campaign for an anti-stalking law, to ensure that nobody else’s life could be ruined as hers was. Now she has seen how that law – the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act – is being used for a completely different purpose. She is so upset by the “perversion of its intentions” that she cannot bring herself to confront it.

Powell-Von Heussen “took great care that the act would protect frightened, endangered individuals from their assailants, and only such persons”. But the first three people to be prosecuted under it were all peaceful protesters. Since then it has been used by the police and courts to criminalise almost all forms of dissent.

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Propaganda. First, statistics merely suggest cause and effect, they do not prove it. And the point isn’t even that this might not be efficacious in the short term – totalitarian societies have always given themselves plaudits for ‘efficiency’ and ‘public safety’. But do you want morality enforced through intimidation, or ingrained into the moral compass of a child through rational persuasion and example? The former destroys the fabric of a society’s liberties by inverting the principle that it is the state that serves the individual – not the other way around. Of course the fascist shift begins with legitimate-sounding reasons: Ohh, it’s for the children that they need to get used to seeing armed figures of authority in every part of their lives. Oh, we should start fingerprinting or face scanning them for access next, just like in England and Scotland. Oh, perhaps we should bring back the idea of random drug dog locker searches. Oh, it’s for your security that you need to take your shoes off, your bottled water taken away, and be subjected to an electronic strip-search at the airport just like a slave. Oh, we should do this on buses too. Oh, nevermind the TAVIS camera initiative, it would be good to hand some surveillance firm a fat contract to put thousands up so you can be imaged hundreds of times a day like in London, despite the fact it doesn’t prevent crime. We used to associate these breaches with totalitarian states. Lie down, remain silent, and these control systems will continue to constrict our lives in Canada, until one day our children will wake up in a culture in which they live by privilege and permission rather than right.

Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail
February 5, 2009

Attendance is up and criminal charges down as officers show their human side to connect with students

For eight tough years Constable Gavin Jansz belonged to the Toronto Police Service’s gun and gang unit, less known for being warm and friendly than for barging through doors unexpectedly, armed to the teeth.

But at the Christmas concert for James Cardinal McGuigan Catholic Secondary School in December, Constable Jansz looked decidedly different.

Along with a clutch of male teachers he had a role in The Nutcracker Suite, clad in a pink tutu. On a cold, snowy night the auditorium was packed and the appreciative crowd howled. [Ed. Note: Oh, it's all okay then. Ha ha.]

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Ah, Richard Florida – man about town, regionalist, lecturer. Advocate, to judge by the article below, of massive expansion of the welfare state. (And he’s affiliated with the Rotman school?) To call for blanket subsidy of wages by the state is to call for incremental nationalization of the knowledge economy. Not cool, Mr. Florida. And, yes, we know that your co-author is a Bilderberg member. Bloody interventionists. But I’ll give them this at least – they’re not baldly suggesting shovelling money at the banks: their ideals are consistent with classical socialism rather than the corporate socialism so popular at the moment.

While we’re talking about Toronto, anyone know why Mayor Miller is in Basel, Switzerland this week on business? That’s the seat of big pharma and a number of international banks – including the International Bank of Settlements. Something’s cooking.

Update (2009/02/20): CBC reports Miller was in Basel to attend the Carbon Finance Development Capacity meeting, ‘hosted by ECOS and the World Bank’. Mr. Miller’s love affair with new taxes continues…

Flashback: Toronto part of ‘transnational mega-region’

Karen Howlett, The Globe and Mail
February 5, 2009

Report on Ontario’s prosperity urges a transition to a new creative economy from the dying industrial age

TORONTO — The once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis should spur governments to look beyond stimulus schemes to save industrial jobs and toward ways to nurture the occupations that can build future prosperity, says urban thinker Richard Florida.

“These kind of crises – 1873, 1929, 2008 – they don’t come around that often, and they force people to think in a new way,” he said in an interview yesterday. “Now, you’ve got to say, ‘what are we going to do?’ ”

In a report to be released today, Dr. Florida and co-author Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, have laid out their blueprint for the future, one in which virtually every worker, from dry cleaners to biomedical engineers, and every nook and cranny of Canada reaps the benefits of a creative economy.

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