statism watch

Flashback: UK: Man refused liver transplant by NHS dies | Useless seniors burdening the state have duty to die: British Baroness

Kate Devlin, The Telegraph
September 2, 2009

Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors have warned.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

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The CIA would never do anything like that, would they? Think again:

Flashback: ‘They were looking for the ideal Manchurian Candidate’ | Government Experiments on U.S. Soldiers: Shocking Claims Come to Light in New Court Case | Psychologists Helped Guide CIA Interrogations | Vets Sue CIA Over Mind Control Tests | Atomic-testing veterans to receive whopping $24,000 each in compensation | Remembering Brainwashing | Chinese Torture Techniques Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo | Canadian MKULTRA project mind control victim to tell of pills, shocks, brainwashing

Ed Pilkington, The Guardian
September 2, 2009

Medical ethics group says physicians monitored ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and studied their effectiveness

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.

PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret “torture programme”.

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Not to be too critical or anything but in future, when it comes to this issue, it might behoove the CBC to make note of the context here. It could have had some bearing on the justice’s deliberations. It should certainly inform your reading of this David and Goliath battle. Successive provincial governments have indicated they’re prepared to force Enhanced Drivers Licenses – the ones with biometric facial images, integral RFID chips, and the rest of it – on populations with no exceptions simply because there’s an international agenda (and international standards, pushed through by the US as part of their ‘VISA waiver’ program and, in our case, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative) to get everyone on this system. Why? So that you can be tracked everywhere you go in the global system. Seriously! People need to stop sucking their thumbs and wake up to this. It will affect you. It’s technology like this that is going to transform our lives as state monitoring of our affairs increases. And the Hutterites won’t be the last group to have their differences steamrolled as a result.

Flashback: Alberta Hutterites need enhanced driver’s licence photos: top court | US: REALID tracking chip ID card resurrected by PASS initiative | India to issue all 1.2 billion citizens with biometric ID cards | UK: Passport details to be kept on ID register despite card U-turn | Moratorium sought on RFID driver’s licenses | RFID passport security defeated in minutes | Saskatchewan adopting US-mandated ID card, to include RFID chip, facial recognition | Drivers licences with chips spark heated debate | Ontario Privacy Czar Worried about High-Tech Licences | North American ID card in the works through SPP

CBC News
September 2, 2009

A Hutterite colony in southern Alberta is continuing its fight against driver’s licence photos, asking the Supreme Court of Canada for a rehearing.

In July, the Supreme Court sided with the Alberta government in a 4-3 decision, saying pictures are required for security purposes.

The case involves the Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, east of Lethbridge, Alta. The group had argued that a 2003 regulation enacted by the province requiring photographs on licences breached their charter right to freedom of religion.

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Woo hoo. The bank of Canada has already announced that the global recession is over. But don’t start the party just yet -contradictory reports appear daily on the economic health of the nation and the globe. Economist Max Keiser seeks to cut through this confusion by offering a viewpoint that he sums up in one word: deleveraging. In his view, the only reason we haven’t seen inflation yet is the fact that banks are still sitting on hundreds of trillions of dollars in toxic debts and derivatives, a money sponge that the bailouts to date can’t hope to cover. The current vogue of creating new money out of thin air through ‘quantitative easing‘ and new bond issues simply monetizes portions of this debt, passing the risk on to taxpayers, socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. So what’s been done is that the problem has merely been deferred by increasing public debt further, compounding the problem that will exist when some factor (business mortgages? consumer debt?) eventually pulls the last leg out from under the tottering financial system.

Flashback: More US Bank Failures and The Coming Deposit Insurance Bailout | Underwhelming GDP growth fails to move stocks, loonie | A Stock Market Rally Engineered by Government | Central bank of Canada stands ready to inflate currency in response to strong loonie | Bank of Canada declares recession over | Cost Of US Bailout Hits A Whopping $24 Trillion Dollars | Second wave of economic crisis coming, international regulation necessary Brown warns | Budget officer ‘can’t tell’ if stimulus plan working | TSX sinks below 10,000 on World Bank outlook | Financial crisis: Worst may be still ahead, says IMF chief | ‘New world order’ needs better economic grounding: Carney | ‘Reduced pace of deterioration’ indicates economy on the mend: Flaherty | Stimulus needed now, Bank of Canada says | Optimistic central bank expects speedy economic rebound

CBC News
September 2, 2009

The global economy is almost out of the economic woods after a brutal recession, according to a new report released Wednesday.

But, this time around, the resuscitation of many national economies will be anything but normal, said the study published by Scotiabank Economics.

“The road to recovery won’t take us back to the world that existed before the sub-prime crisis began…. World activity will be driven increasingly by China, India, Brazil and other emerging powerhouses,” said Warren Jestin, the bank’s senior economist and author of the global economic commentary.

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Flashback: McGuinty had hand in hiring disgraced eHealth CEO | More untendered eHealth spending, Liberal connections emerge | Head of eHealth Ontario is fired amid contracts scandal, gets big package | Personal ties exposed in eHealth’s untendered contracts | Ontario eHealth approved 4.8 million in no-bid contracts | Electronic immunization records needed: Toronto health official

Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star
September 2, 2009

McGuinty instructs 23 arm’s-length agencies to submit claims for provincial review

Stung by two devastating spending scandals, Premier Dalton McGuinty has ordered all expenses at 23 provincial agencies, boards and commissions to be reviewed and approved by the Ontario integrity commissioner beginning this fall.

Under the new rules, employees with unacceptable expense claims such as alcohol for staff functions and personal items must repay the taxpayers.

The 23 organizations, the largest of 600 such entities in the province, range from Hydro One to the embattled Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to GO Transit.

McGuinty’s move follows the revelations employees at OLG expensed items such as $615 worth of replacement luggage, a $30 car wash without a proper receipt, and a $3,713.77 dinner for 38 people that included more than 10 bottles of wine and other alcohol.

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Yet all this infrastructure’s being geared up for massive vaccination programs. It was just announced today that pharmacists will be recruited in NB to give the shots if legislative hurdles can be overcome. It’s been suggested that kiosks be set up in front of bars to make sure people of a certain age group aren’t overlooked as they stumble out. After all the hyperventilation has ended and the great flu scare of 2009 becomes a fading memory, most of these dosages will likely end up being thrown out, just like was done in 1976. But the drug companies will go home happy, and the international law around mandatory vaccinations will all be in place and the military will have trained up on how to lock down neighbourhoods for when the next health scare hits.

Flashback: UK: Half of all pregnant women will refuse swine flu jab, poll reveals | Flu vaccine plan will be too slow: CMAJ | Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease: Leaked letter reveals concern of neurologists over 25 deaths in America | Canada to order 50.4 million H1N1 vaccine doses – with adjuvant additive | Genetically modified Swine Flu hybrid may provide vaccine yield solution | Washington Post: Swine Flu Vaccine Will Contain Mercury | UK Government Swine Flu Advisor On Vaccine Maker Payroll | Fast-tracked swine flu vaccine will be safe, officials insist | Swine flu: How scared should we be? | Top Epidemiologist Slams Swine Flu Fearmongering | Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers | Lessons of 1976: swine flu, fear, mass vaccinations, wasted millions | ‘Accidental’ Contamination Of Vaccine With Live Avian Flu Virus Virtually Impossible | Officials investigate how bird flu contaminated vaccines in Europe

Joanna Smith, Toronto Star
September 2, 2009

Expert doubts it will mix with seasonal flu virus

OTTAWA–It looks like there is little reason to fear swine flu will morph into a superbug.

New U.S. research suggests H1N1 influenza is unlikely to mix with seasonal flu and mutate into a new and more dangerous virus, as some scientists and health officials had originally feared.

“The fear was that this virus might exchange genes with seasonal strains and become more powerful – even more virulent or even more transmissible than what is being seen so far,” Daniel Perez, a virologist who looked at how pandemic swine flu interacts with other viruses, said in an interview yesterday.

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While on one hand, the prospect of being able to search the entire content of existing texts online with the kind of immediacy Google brings to web search is very exciting to scholars, cyber-linguists, and the population at large, the caveat and the worry exists – what happens in the future when we’ve completed this project and centralized control (or stewardship, as Google might frame it) of this resource? Does it present a threat to the diversity of the knowledge ecology? If, under the legislative monopoly this settlement would grant Google, print books begin disappearing from the shelves at some point, does Google risk becoming the Ministry of Truth, a giant memory-hole from which forbidden ideas may be deleted by legislative fiat? If we watch from the sidelines, we have only Google’s motto for comfort: Don’t Be Evil.

BBC News
September 2, 2009

The proposed settlement between Google and US publishers must be resisted, argues Bill Thompson

Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new, and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an agreement between the search engine giant and the US book industry that will allow it to do this without fear of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Authors and publishers will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the improved access to digitised books that Google will provide.

The deal sounds like a good one, but not everyone is happy with it. The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation to see if it is anti-competitive, and last month a number of library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance which argues that it should not go forward.

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