Tuesday, May 26, 2015

26 May - The View

English: Members of Code Pink attend a MoveOn....English: Members of Code Pink attend a MoveOn.org-sponsored rally against the energy corporation BP in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 2010. The protesters were angry at the lack of efforts to control the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and demanded an end to off-shore oil drilling in American territorial waters. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
MoveOn.org
3 hrs · 
Corporations + handouts = bad news in the fight to ‪#‎SaveTheEconomy‬.Robert Reich explains: http://ow.ly/NrCgN
 



Solar-powered Ecocapsule lets you live off-the-grid anywhere in the world
Nice Architects designed the Ecocapsule, an egg-shaped portable micro-shelter that lets you live off-grid.
INHABITAT.COM



The Conspiracy Archives shared NBC Washington's photo.
6 hrs · 
The government wants a nation of idiots who are unable to think or do any type of math.
It's easier to control people if they are easily confused, stupid, and completely illiterate in math and science.
They are using a new program to 'teach' children math, which makes them horribly confused and unable to do simple math in real life.
Adding and subtracting regular integers is turned into a long process where most children fail.
When the majority of the class fails these simple math questions, the teacher can simply give them a grade-curve and give them all A's....This effectively rewards students for being stupid, and glorifies ignorance and stupidity
NBC Washington
It's been called "Satan's handiwork," and if you thought grade-school math was easy -- think again. Thanks to national Common Core standards, simple arithmetic isn't so simple anymore: http://bit.ly/1qFvtqX
 

CHIME IN: Parents, do you agree?

Institute for Responsible Technology
4 hrs · 



Aelbert Aehegma and Jerry Avissato shared Filming Cops's photo.
Filming Cops with Alan Dawson and Shane Michael Morris
City of Criminals or Runaway Police State?
Full Details: http://goo.gl/WMvTER

  • May 12 at 3:44pm · Like · 1
  • Kim Hunter https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10206070842705873&set=a.3170912827511.2152615.1106208090&type=1
    Michael Nabert
    In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the US government has listened to the will of its people to make a move to limit widespread invasion of citizen privacy.

    In a shockingly undemocratic authoritarian fashion, Canada's government has ignored the will of its people to move to virtually obliterate their privacy altogether.
    Canada has already seen how information sharing done poorly can create injustices, like Maher Arar being deported and tortured in a Syrian prison. A commission was created to look into how that particular injustice occurred, and Bill C-51 does the opposite of what that commission recommended, which is to say that in the face of advice about how to make Canadians safer while also helping security apparatus communicate with each other more effectively, the Harper government has gone in the exact opposite direction, aiming for what we might call a 'total information awareness' approach.

    I strongly recommend reading detailed analysis from legal experts Ken Roach and Craig Forcese on this topic. The section on information sharing in C-51 is found here:

    Essentially, the bill doesn't reduce the quality of your privacy, it obliterates it. For example, Revenue Canada could share personal details of your tax return with the RCMP, which can pass them to CSIS, and so on, and this holds true for any kind of information no matter how personal that any governmental body acquires, such as health information or whatever, and any of the vast net of governmental bodies that now have free license to your private data can, in the language of the bill, disclose your personal information "to any person for any purpose." Period.
    This is unconscionable. It runs so completely contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms it's almost unbelievable, and once that door is opened Canadians' private and personal data can never again be put back into the box labelled "personal and private."
    This is just one of the starkest examples of declining privacy around the world as governments around the globe are striking at the very idea of privacy.

    And brings us immensely closer to the place where disagreeing with government becomes outright fearing it.

    And this is far from the only problem with this horrendous bill.
    * * * * * * * * * * *
    In the last Federal election, I was naive enough to think that this was as bad as the Harper impact on Canada could get:

    Boy, was I wrong. Now all I want is opportunity to dedicate myself full time for a couple of months to trying to bring his regime to an end while there's still bits of Canada I find recognizable. Can you spare a buck towards unleashing me on them?

    I also hope to organize a bunch of people to politely reach across the political divide to speak words of reason to supporters of my political opponents. Knowing he won't be at the debates makes this seem even more important. Join me/find out more here:
    I'm also on Twitter: @SustainableSong
    Now that Bill C-51 has passed, continuing the kind of online activism I engage in here may become a lot harder, or impossible. I entreat you all to pick up the torch and do what I do. It's not hard: pick a topic you care about, find a picture that in any way represents it, slap some words on it that encapsulate your concerns, and (here's the most important part) post it with links to back it up. Anyone can lie about politics online to further an agenda, but when you can point to, say, detailed analysis of the impact of a bill by a respected faculty of law professor to back you up, like this:

    it becomes a lot harder to dismiss what you have to say. The current government of Canada despises and suppresses evidence, because the facts do not support their position, so share as many facts as you can.
    “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
    ― H.L. Mencken


  • Kim Hunter retroactive fascism gasp emoticon https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10206078395454687
    Michael Nabert
    Imagine for a moment that it's the year 2005 again. Public perception of the Liberal government is shaken by revelations of inappropriate use of public funds in the Adscam scandal. Opposition leader Stephen Harper is howling for blood, making all sorts of accusations that either the PM knew, and is guilty, or didn't, and is incompetent. Suddenly, rather than calling a public inquiry into the events, the Liberal majority rams through a bill in Parliament, attached to the budget so it cannot be argued on its own merits, that retroactively changes the law to make what just happened legal. History changed, the law foiled, the whole thing is swept under the table with a flood of public tax dollars spent on partisan advertising that crows about how responsible and accountable Paul Martin's government is. Try to imagine what the 2005 Stephen Harper would have had to say about that.
    Of course, that isn't what happened. A full public inquiry was launched, and the Gomery Commission was empowered to pore over all the details of events to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. The Federal Commission on the Adscam Sponsorship Scandal eventually concluded that $2 million was awarded in contracts without a proper bidding process, $250,000 was added to one contract price for no additional work, and $1.5 million was awarded for work that was never done, of which $1 million had to be repaid. It toppled a long standing Liberal government. The decision to call for an inquiry cost the Liberals dearly, but it was the right thing to do.
    The Harper government is never going to be interested in doing the right thing, unless you mean that right thing to mean anything that might increase their chances at maintaining or increasing their power. They will break any rule they like, they will break the same rules repeatedly, and when they get caught, they will rewrite the rules to suit them. We've seen it with Conservatives breaking election funding laws in both the 2006 and 2008 elections, and then the so-called "Fair" Elections Act, in addition to reducing the nation's power to investigate election fraud, disenfranchising voters, and stripping Elections Canada of even the ability to encourage voting, also rewrote election funding law so that they can set the spending limits wherever they want in order to maximize the value they get out of their war chest and financially hamstring the other parties more effectively. Break the law, get caught, change the law to suit you for next time. Problem solved? Maybe for the party, but not for the nation.
    Then we can look at the Senate expense scandal currently ongoing, which includes Mike Duffy's now famous $90,000, which was apparently a criminal act for him to accept but not a criminal act for Nigel Wright to offer. Try to wrap your head around that and other contradictions as the trial continues, but Mr Harper would cite Parliamentary privilege to avoid the witness box, and he'd like you to forget the staggering number of times he's contradicted himself on the subject. Add in Pamela Wallin and others and you've got somewhere just south of a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars wasted, but more importantly you've got corrupt practices leading all the way to the heart of the PM's office, with such a dizzying array of blatant public lying on the PM's part that it is utterly impossible he hasn't been fibbing to us outright because his contradictory statements could not possibly all be true, which ought to be a red flag even to people who aren't aware that a man known for micromanaging obsessively is unlikely to be completely in the dark about what happens in his own office.

    We're also learning things like the fact that the Conservatives feel perfectly comfortable interfering with an independent audit in order to try to avoid a public scandal. That deceptive practice alone ought to be enough to get them ousted from power, but it's only the tip of the iceberg of wrongdoing here, and seems to be going mostly unremarked.

    In terms of dollars, that's small potatoes indeed. Here we've got $2.5 million of public money being used to advertise a program that didn't even exist. That's nearly the size of Adscam all by itself - and all Canadians got out of it was footing the bill to be publicly lied to. Strangely no one who howled in outrage for Liberal blood over Adscam batted an eye over it this time.

    But wait, Harper's government can blow that level of waste right out of the water with $50 million dollars of public money earmarked before Parliament for "border security" spent on Tony Clement's cottage country riding far, far from the border. Documents reveal that Tony got to pick and choose where to misuse our tax dollars himself and civil servants had nothing to do with the decision making process. In the private sector the Conservatives are so fond of referencing, that would get him fired, charged, and imprisoned. Under Stephen Harper, it gets him the Presidency of the Treasury Board. I suppose to Mr Harper your ability to stick to misleading talking points trumps your ability to not fleece the public of fifty million dollars for Gazebos in your own backyard.

    It's when we start looking more closely at things like the "Canada's Action Plan" ads which are more and more blatantly thinly disguised partisan electioneering that things start getting really crazy. As the National Post points out, if the shoe was on the other foot, Conservatives would be apoplectic with fury. But what's a few hundred million dollars of our money used to keep the nation in permanent campaign mode for only one party? It's not like the Conservatives had to raise that money themselves, right?

    But if we're going to talk about being honest with Canadians about our own money, ignoring the lack of even a budget so far this year, you can't quite top the spectacularly dishonest way the Harper government has lied to Canada about the costs of the F35 jets that they want so badly. I've studied this one extensively, and I highly recommend reading the chapter on it in Michael Harris' book Party of One, but lying to Parliament about it and refusing to be transparent about an enormously big ticket item they intended to purchase is part of why we ended up at the polls last time, part of why Harper's is the only government of Canada ever to be found in contempt of Parliament in the nation's history, and this single fact sums it up: before Parliament and the public the Prime Minister insisted that a contract existed to buy those F35s at a cost of $15 Billiion dollars, while they knew categorically that that number was woefully lowballing it. How much is the real cost? Well, estimates vary. The Auditor General's report, remember the AG works directly for the government and builds his estimate based on the government's own internal documents, told us the true cost was closer to $25 Billion. Even that looks like ten billion dollars of fraud committed against the Canadian people with their own money. Even that would be more than 3600 Adscams worth of deception, but the second column of numbers in the government's own books is still ludicrously out of touch with the numbers the US Department of Defence, who are building the darned thing, offer up. One of their internal documents tells us the true cost to Canada could top $70 Billion, which would mean that the Harper government lied to Canadians to the tune of about $55 Billion dollars. That's about the size of all of Canada's postsecondary education sector, for scale. Or about twenty thousand Adscams.

    So I ask you, how is it that three or four million dollars of cronyism and mismanagement on the Liberals' part brought their power in Ottawa tumbling down, and numbers far more staggering than that don't seem able to touch the Conservatives? I can't quite wrap my head around it, but I do have one observation that seems particularly relevant. When Adscam first reared its ugly head, and awareness and anger mounted, the Prime Minister called a commission to look into the matter and get Canadians the truth, even though he knew it would make his party look bad. When Conservative mismanagement or misbehaviour rears its ugly head, and awareness and anger mounts, the Harper government tells its detractors to piss off, digs in its heels, and engages in trench warfare to prevent investigations from being assessed on their merits.
    The "trench warfare" line isn't mine, though, that's the finding of the judge who examined the robocalls case. A Canadian federal court found in no uncertain terms that widespread electoral fraud took place in Canada's last federal election. The judge also declared that the ruling party engaged in "“trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits.” How is that even remotely defensible? If you poisoned someone 'just a little' and it wasn't enough to kill them, would you expect to be acquitted? How about if you poison democracy? Or put another way, when Ben Johnson was found to have cheated in an Olympic 100 meter race, was the argument made that he should keep his medal because no proof existed that steroids made enough of a difference to change the outcome of the race, or was his medal stripped away? If Canadians are to maintain any faith in our electoral system, fraud has to be taken seriously, period.

    Whenever government watchdogs do their job, the Harper government gives them the boot.
    After campaigning on promises of accountability and transparency, no government in Canada's history has gone to nearly the same lengths as Harper has to avoid any kind of scrutiny. When Canada's Information Commissioner tells us information that should be accessible by Canadians is being deleted or lost and unavailable to Canada's Access to Information Act, naturally the Harper Government dismisses those concerns. After all, what could go wrong with trusting every single representative or employee to document everything using a voluntary 'honour system?' "The only reason for ministerial staff or government employees to be using instant messenger instead of email is because they know what they are doing is wrong and they don't want it recorded."

    Facing possible scrutiny over how unbelievably partisan and lopsided the Canada Revenue Agency's approach to charities is, they've respond by destroying a ton of evidence pertinent to the question. So much for transparency. Instead, we get something that feels like a pre-emptive "hide the bodies!" approach to the question of whether one of the nation's more powerful agencies is serving as political attack dog for the party in power.

    And after it has been proven that industry is being permitted to effectively write its own environmental policy, because Mr. Harper is willing to overturn decades of laws whenever the industry demands it,

    we have reached the logical end point of this journey, where in order to avoid being accountable to Canadians about their actions we now have the government meeting with the same fossil fuel interests that were writing policy earlier, but this time with no official records of what took place at all. None. Feel like filing an Access to Information request about it? There's nothing to see, apart from an entire nation being deliberately kept in the dark. This is how the government meets with the oil industry: in secret, without records, without minutes, without notes. So that you can never know what took place.
    "It's not just bad administration, it's a betrayal of public trust."

    Not quite the "new era of accountability" we were promised, eh?

    But nothing takes the cake like recent revelations that the Harper government's latest omnibus "budget" bill also retroactively changes history to prevent prosecution for criminal behaviour, as well as to keep Canadians uninformed. When a government retroactively provides protection to lawbreaking, it has so completely lost its moral authority to govern that it should not be credibly considered a government at all.
    "It's as if in 2005 we would have erased retroactively all of the audits that Sheila Fraser did in the sponsorship scandal" or "if there are allegations of electoral fraud, we would decide to pass a law to retroactively eliminate and erase all investigations.
    ...
    It seeks to rewrite history, to say that lawful access to records that existed before didn’t actually exist after all, and that if you exercised your quasi-constitutional right of access to those records, well too bad, you’re out of luck."

    If there's ever going to be any accountability whatsoever for the Harper government, it will clearly only happen at the polls. Stand up and vote. When your government shows you in no uncertain terms that it's willing to not only lie to you and distort or hide the truth, but to change the law to suit itself whenever it's called out for wrongdoing, even changing history to rewrite the past and avoid any kind of accountability for criminal behaviour, I can't think of any way it could be more plain that they are not working in the public interest, but only ever in their own.
    * * * * * * * * * * *
    In the last Federal election, I was naive enough to think that this was as bad as the Harper impact on Canada could get:

    Boy, was I wrong. Now all I want is opportunity to dedicate myself full time for a couple of months to trying to bring his regime to an end while there's still bits of Canada I find recognizable. Can you spare a buck towards unleashing me on them?

    I also hope to organize a bunch of people to politely reach across the political divide to speak words of reason to supporters of my political opponents. Knowing he won't be at the debates makes this seem even more important. Join me/find out more here:
    I'm also on Twitter: @SustainableSong
    Now that Bill C-51 has passed, continuing the kind of online activism I engage in here may become a lot harder, or impossible. I entreat you all to pick up the torch and do what I do. It's not hard: pick a topic you care about, find a picture that in any way represents it, slap some words on it that encapsulate your concerns, and (here's the most important part) post it with links to back it up. Anyone can lie about politics online to further an agenda, but when you can point to, say, detailed analysis of the impact of a bill by a respected faculty of law professor to back you up, like this:

    it becomes a lot harder to dismiss what you have to say. The current government of Canada despises and suppresses evidence, because the facts do not support their position, so share as many facts as you can.
    “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
    ― H.L. Mencken


 OpenMedia.ca shared a link.


Secret Police Bill C-51 violates Universal Declaration of Human Rights, OSCE finds
The Harper government’s controversial anti-terrorism bill violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and...
THINKPOL.CA


Is Harper funding terrorism? gasp emoticon 
"Canadian Embassy in Jordan aided the trafficking of British born children and at least 17 others into the hands of ISIS,.. CSIS agent Al Rashid reported to Ambassador Saccomani who reported to Stephen Harper. Harpe




9 weirdest things about this RCMP intelligence report on the "anti-petroleum movement" | Press...
The Mounties always get their man. But a newly disclosed intelligence assessment from the RCMP looking at the "anti-Canada petroleum movement"...
PRESSPROGRESS.CA


The People's Voice shared a link.


Russia Warns It’s Citizens Against Travelling To United States
Russia has issued a warning to all of its citizens travelling abroad saying that U.S. law enforcement agencies are “hunting” for Russians around the world. Russia’s...
YOURNEWSWIRE.COM|BY SEAN ADL-TABATABAI




Museum of History to exclude Winnipeg General Strike exhibit | Toronto Star
A room devoted to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike will be excluded from the renovated Canadian Museum of History, but officials promise the labour...
THESTAR.COM


 a link.
23 hrs ·


Angry veterans launch ‘Anybody But Conservative’ campaign to defeat Tories in upcoming election
“We need a government that will look after us veterans,” said Ron Clarke, a 36-year-veteran, in an emotional plea. For Clarke and veterans advocate Mike...
IPOLITICS.CA


Mint Press News



GMO 'Terrorists': Russia seeks criminal punishment for bio-tech companies
Genetically modified food is accused of dangerously toying with nature. Its potential negative health...
YOUTUBE.COM
Like · Comment ·



Global Research (Centre for Research on Globalization)
2 hrs · 
The documents demolish the “official story” of Western governments promoted from the beginning of the Syrian crisis until the present day – that the “rebellion” was organic, grassroots, and made up of moderates and freedom-loving democracy proponents. The document states unequivocally that “The Salafist [sic] the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” It points out that “The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.” Tellingly, the report then states that “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media . . .”

Global Research (Centre for Research on Globalization) shared a link.



US Department of Defense Admits Supporting ISIS, Buffer Zones In Syria
While the Western mainstream media and even independent gatekeepers like Noam Chomsky for...
GLOBALRESEARCH.CA




Jacqueline Keeler Zuckerberg 

Orpheus
On April 8th spring of 1756 Governor Robert Morris of Pennsylvania offered cash bounties for the scalps of Delaware and Shawnee people. In front of a large group of people on the steps of Philadelphia’s courthouse Morris announced huge bounties for any subjects willing to “pursue, take, kill, and destroy the Delaware Indians” in volunteer scalping parties.
He would pay 150 Spanish pieces of eight for men over 12, 130 Spanish pieces of eight for women and children, 130 Spanish pieces of eight for scalps. These scalping parties were "the only way to clear our Frontier of Savages" according to Morris's councilor James Hamilton. As a result, hundreds of innocent Native Americans were killed.
Dozens of Indians sculpted and killed in the winter of 1874 by the Pegans. All were riddled with bullet holes & every one scalped. Most of them had their shirts & every one had a gash in their side. Bodies were shriveled up and skin was rotten.
No less then 800,000 Indians "disappeared into extinction" since 1900.
40,000 to 100,000 died, 1957-68.
The Indian population of Brazil declined from a half million in 1900 to 80 thousand in 1957 to 50 thousand in 1973. Whether the 450,000 missing Indians were assimilated or exterminated is not certain, but a significant number were probably victims of genocide.
Indian population of Brazil declined from 1.0M to 0.2M between 1900 and 1957, a net loss of 800,000 Porter estimates that 100,000 Brazilian Indians were victims of genocide during the 1960s.
87 Indian tribes in Brazil went extinct between 1900 and 1957 (Out of an original 230) This, by the way, is the authoritative study of Brazilian Indian population, which is why every other author discussing the decline of Indian population uses 1957 as a milestone.
The People's Voice shared a link.


Peru To Reopen Inquiry Into Forced Mass Sterilisations
Judicial authorities in Peru have ordered the reopening and expansion of a criminal inquiry into the forced mass sterilizations of around 350,000 women and 25,000 men during the 1990s. Some 2,073 women have given statements to...
YOURNEWSWIRE.COM|BY LOUISE TURNER


Jerry Avissato shared Mint Press News's photo.
19 hrs ·


Canada can't account for $3.1B in anti-terror funding, AG finds
The Canadian government can't account for $3.1 billion allocated for anti-terrorism funding, Auditor General Michael Ferguson says in his spring report released...
CBC.CA


Jerry Avissato shared The Anti-Media's photo.
15 hrs ·

 a link.

8 hrs · 



Sick: 100% of Democrat Senators Vote for Late-Term Abortion Up to Nine Months of Pregnancy
Today's abortion advocates are so extreme that there are no limits to which they'll agree to. Example? Every Democrat in the Senate voted in favor of a bill that would allow abortion up to nine months of pregnancy. Four months before the mid-term...
RIGHTWINGNEWS.COM


 The Toronto Star's photo.
The Toronto Star
"Conservatives attend the federal debate, 2015," editorial cartoon by Greg Perry for May 25. ‪#‎cdnpoli‬
David Walther shared Title Wave's photo.
2 hrs ·

 a link.
12 hrs ·


Tories blasted for handbook on paralyzing Parliament
The Harper government is being accused of a machiavellian plot to wreak parliamentary havoc after a secret Tory handbook on obstructing and manipulating Commons committees was leaked to the press.
CTVNEWS.CA



Kate Avissato shared a photo to Jerry Avissato's Timeline.
6 hrs ·



David Wolfe's photo.
The Stoner's Cookbook 

Ebaumsworld

- Police the Police - (A Community Project) 
The difference between American police & Icelandic police? Almost everything... learn more: http://goo.gl/tesS8h

Blue Dem Warriors
.omment · 
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The People's Voice
Yesterday at 5:20am · 
US To Heavily Bomb Alaska In War Games Exercise – Lasting 5 Years!
US To Heavily Bomb Alaska In War Games Exercise – Lasting 5 Years!
 
The US Navy is planning to conduct wargame exercises in Alaska for the next five years which will involve “heavy bombing”, causing huge disruption to wildlife....
YOURNEWSWIRE.COM|BY SEAN ADL-TABATABAI

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