The Editorial Times.ca: May 2008



The Editorial Times.ca

"The Thorn of Dissent is the Flower of Democracy"©

or, if you'd rather...
"Its my blog and I'll pry if I want to, pry if I want to"
with apologies to Leslie Gore




"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” CS Lewis.


©Chris Muir

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Up Close and Personal with Volcano Chaiten

Take a ride in a twin-engined light plane to get a close-up view of Volcano Chaiten erupting in southern Chile. Risky flight, awesome sight. Chaiten began erupting May 2, 2008, after 9000 years of dormancy. Eruptions gathered strength through May 5. Mass evacuations have been ordered in this remote coastal area of Chile.



Chaiten in quieter times (February, 2000) ... (Earth Observatory, NASA)



The ash plume can be seen in this satellite view May 3, 2008, stretching eastward from Chaiten, across Patagonia in Argentina.



A Youtube and Google search will bring up many more videos and stories about this latest eruption.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

I accuse the Canadian Human Rights Commission of corruption - Ezra Levant

I accuse the Canadian Human Rights Commission of corruption

By Ezra Levant on May 9, 2008

The Canadian Human Rights Commission is a corrupt organization. I've given my factual basis for that bold statement before -- such as their substitution of personal biases for standard procedures; such as Richard Warman's improper interference with investigations; such as the CHRC's own violation of section 13; and such as the stunning revelation that the accountCHRC hacked a private citizen's Internet to cover their tracks as they went online to white supremacist websites.

Today I have more evidence of their corruption.

As I noted in March, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing into the abusive and corrupt investigatory practices of the CHRC was not transcribed by a court reporter -- unlike every single other day in the Warman v. Lemire case. The one day when the CHRC was on the defensive was the one day that the respondent -- and any interested members of the public or reporters -- had to make do with their own notes. The Tribunal made an audio recording of the hearing, which is next to useless in terms of searching for key words, skimming pages, etc.

Imagine my surprise when, today, I received a copy of a beautifully-transcribed court report of the March 25th hearing. I received it -- but Marc Lemire and his lawyer have not.

I got it from a reporter who had received it from the CHRC itself. How did he get it? Did he make an Access to Information request? Did he pull a Jadewarr, and hack into the CHRC's computer and steal it?

No. He got it because a CHRC spin doctor called him up, and tried to spin his newspaper that the CHRC wasn't all that bad. He tried to show how the CHRC really hadn't gone online under a pseudonym to post bigoted comments -- even though the CHRC has admitted to doing so a half dozen times, under oath. The CHRC spin doctor used the transcript as "proof.

[...]

If a real police force or prosecution was caught in the unethical conduct of the CHRC, the cops and lawyers involved would be taken off the file, and Internal Affairs would be brought in to clean things up. But there is no Internal Affairs office at the CHRC.

There is no oversight.

Here is that missing transcript. The fact that I have it before the respondent does, the fact that it is being used to bash the respondent in the media by CHRC spin doctors, is appalling.

Fire. Them. All.


Due to personal pressures in other areas, I've had little blogging time of late, and truth be told, there is so much going on not being reported by the MSM in Canada, that I spend too much of my free time following stories on other people's blogs...:) This story is but a tip of a very deep iceberg wallowing around in Canadian civil, legal and cultural waters. Canada's identity, heritage, future, and democracy are on the line, right now. Not down the road, not a year from now or a decade from now, but right now. The Liberal left and the msm won't tell you what you need to know about what is happening to your Canada. You need to get involved. Now.

Instead of wasting an hour watching Lost, spend an hour googling Mark Steyn and Maclean's, Barbara Hall and the OHRC, Pen Canada, freedom of expression in Canada. Get involved. Your children's future depend on it.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Mark Steyn:

[...]

"When he [Jonathan Brean, National Post] raised his hand again to ask his fourth or fifth question, the lawyer [Faisal Joseph] got testy.

"Why are you asking so many questions?"

Brean deadpanned: "Because it's a, uh, press conference...?"

Mr Joseph doesn't seem to be quite up to speed with the concept. Still, this was an ill-advised attempt at a smackdown:

"Will you let me answer, madam?"

"Why didn't you just answer when I asked you the first time?"

Seems a bit tetchy under all the bling. I thought the most interesting glimpse into King Faisal came in the National Post report:

He also hinted that the rebuttal has already been written, or at least sketched out, and that "one of the remedies in British Columbia may very well be that they [Maclean's] could be ordered by the tribunal to put it in."

I see. So this is how it works, is it? A "human rights" judge orders an ostensibly independent privately-owned magazine to print five pages of Islamist propaganda?"
[...]