America's top exports: Grief, sorrow, and loss
Mickey Z.
"Their lives are bigger than any big idea."
- "Peace on Earth," U2
My mother passed away on January 12, after a long illness. She was nearly 72 and had been very ill since mid-2005. Intellectually, one might think that perhaps I had time to "come to terms" with a sense of inevitably...yet I remain inconsolable. Despite having almost three years to "prepare" for this reality, her death is teaching me previously unimaginable lessons about grief, sorrow, and loss. My heart is broken, shattered in a million pieces.
Amidst my mourning, I can't help but visualize the feelings of grief, sorrow, and loss being experienced in places directly and indirectly impacted by US policies. Imagine if you will, a mother in Iraq. She walks to the market as an American bomb levels her home. Her parents, her husband, her children (none of whom were affiliated with the "insurgency"): all killed. What of "her" grief, sorrow, and loss...as the US continues to spend one million dollars per minute on war?
And it's not just military murders. Every two seconds, somewhere on the planet, a child starves to death. More grief, sorrow, and loss. More anger and frustration, too. Columnist and author Norman Solomon recently shared similar emotions when his mother died. "Our own mourning should help us understand and strive to prevent the unspeakable pain of others," he wrote.
"And whatever love we have for one person, we should try to apply to the world."
There's a line in the song, "Middle of the Road" by the Pretenders: "When you own a big chunk of the bloody Third World...the babies just come with the scenery."
What's that...we don't own anything here or in the Third World? Here's the equation, friends: American tax dollars (and our rhetoric and/or our support and/or our silence) fund and/or enable US domination of institutions like the World Bank. As a result, the developing world spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in aid. That means untold billions are allocated toward paying off debt to powerful Western banks instead of being invested in water systems, infrastructure to rural communities, education, and health care.
A 2004 UNICEF report on the State of the World's Children found:
* One in six of the children on the planet were severely hungry
* One in seven had no access to health care
* One in five had no safe water
* One in three had no toilet or sanitation facilities at home
* 640 million children did not have adequate shelter
* 140 million children, the majority of them girls, had never been to school
More than 10 million child deaths were recorded in 2003, with an estimated 29,158 children under 5 dying from mostly preventable causes every day.
29,158. Under 5. Every day. From preventable causes.
The next time you're at a baseball game or rock concert, glance around and get a feel for what 29,158 looks like. Then try your best to conceive of the feelings of grief, sorrow, and loss inspired by those 29,158...each and every day. These are humans, not statistics. They feel as much as you or I.
If they feel anything like I do right now, they are utterly despondent.
"In mediaspeak and political discourse, the human toll of corporate domination and the warfare state is routinely abstract," wrote Solomon. "But the results-in true human terms-add rage and more grief on top of grief."
These doomed humans cry, they mourn, they miss loved ones, and they ask why when the UN tells them that the basic nutrition and health needs of the world's poorest people would cost only $13 billion a year (that's less than 10% of what the US has spent on the war in Iraq so far).
Remember: every two seconds, somewhere on the planet, a child starves to death. Meanwhile, the US spends one million dollars per minute on war. Do the math: How much of our money was spent on war and how many children starved to death while your read this article?
We often hear the question: "Why do they hate us?"
We give them an excellent reason every 2 seconds and a million more reasons every single minute.
Mickey Z. is the author of the forthcoming novel, 'CPR for Dummies' (Raw Dog Screaming Press).
He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
America on Acid?
LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US
BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
View full article and comments here
http:///News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/
By Linda Solomon
Published: April 23, 2007
TheTyee.ca
Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar."
The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.
Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power, Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz. Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.
The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar's passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.
When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.
Fingerprints for FBI
He was told to sit down on a folding chair and for hours he wondered where this was going. He checked his watch and thought hopelessly of his friend who was about to land at the Seattle airport. Three hours later, the official motioned him into a small, barren room with an American flag. He was sitting on one side and Feldmar was on the other. The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn't interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.
Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.
The border guard then escorted him to his car and made sure he did a U-turn and went back to Canada.
'Curious. Very curious'
Feldmar attended the University of Toronto where he graduated with honours in mathematics, physics and chemistry. He received his M.A. in psychology from the University of Western Ontario. At University of Western Ontario, he was under supervision with Zenon Pylyshyn, who was from Saskatchewan and had participated, along with Abram Hoffer and Duncan Blewett, in the first experiments with LSD-25.
"Zenon told me he had had enough strange experiences, that he had gone about as far with LSD as he wished to go. He still had what was once legal.... Looking back 33 years, I don't quite recall why I decided to accept his tentative offer. I was 27 years old and thought of myself as a rational scientist, and had no experience with delirium, hallucination, or altered mind states. I was curious. Very curious. I thought that, like Faust, I might make a pact with the devil in return for esoteric knowledge."
Zenon gave him 900 micrograms of acid and the surprise of his life, he wrote in the Janus Head article. "Following this initiation, I traveled to many regions many times with the help of many different substances. I took peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, MDMA, DMT, ketamine, nitrous oxide 5-MEO-DMT, but I kept coming back to LSD. Acid seemed my most spacious, most helpful ally. While on it, I explored my past, regressed to the womb, to my conception. I remembered, grieved, and mourned many painful events. I saw how my parents would have liked to love me, and how they didn't because they didn't know how. I learned, on acid, to endure troubling and frightening states of mind. This enabled me, as meditation has done, to identify with being the witness of the workings of my mind, observing whatever was going on, while knowing that I was simply captivated by the forms produced by my own psyche."
After receiving his MA, Feldmar spent a semester in the U.S. at the Johns Hopkins University's Ph.D. program in theoretical statistics. In 1969, he began Ph.D. work with Dr. Charles Osgood in psycholinguistics at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. He did further Ph.D. studies at Simon Fraser University.
Legal options expensive
Feldmar was determined, in the months after the aborted border crossing, to turn things around. He was particularly determined because the idea of not being able to visit his children at their homes was unthinkable.
He contacted the U.S. Consul in Vancouver to protest and was again told to apply for a waiver. When he consulted Seattle attorney Bob Free at MacDonald, Hoague and Bayless about going through this process, he learned that for $3,500 (U.S.) plus incidentals, he'd have a 90 per cent chance to get the waiver, but it would probably be just for a year, and the procedure would have to be initiated again, any time he wished to cross the border. Each time, he would have to produce a statement saying that he had been "rehabilitated."
He looked into filing suit against the U.S. government for wrongdoing but gave up the idea when he learned that a legal battle with U.S. Customs would cost his life's savings and, with the balance of power tipped so extremely in the government's favor, he would almost surely lose.
Again, he appealed to the U.S. Consulate. The consulate wouldn't return his phone calls, but in this e-mail message to Feldmar, the consulate explained its position.
"Both our countries have very similar regulations regarding issuance of visas for citizens who have violated the law. The issue here is not the writing of an article, but the taking of controlled substances. I hear from American citizens all the time who have decades-old DUI convictions who are barred from entry into Canada and who must apply for waivers. Same thing here. Waiver is the only way."
Ensnared by Section IV
"Admitted drug use is admitted drug use," says Mike Milne, spokesman for U.S. border and protection, based in Seattle. Milne said he could not comment specifically on the Feldmar case, due to privacy issues, but he quoted from the U.S. Immigration Law Handbook section which refers to "general classes of aliens ineligible to receive visas and ineligible for admissions" to help shed light on the clauses that may have ensnared the Vancouver psychotherapist.
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are inadmissible," Milne said. And then there is Section IV. "Anyone who is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a violation of controlled substances."
If there's no criminal record, as in Feldmar's case?
Not necessarily the criterion, Milne said. You can still be considered dangerous.
'More diligent and vigilant'
"The level of scrutiny at our nation's borders have definitely gone up since the 9-11 disaster and we are more diligent and vigilant in checking people's identities and criminal histories at our nation's borders."
Milne goes on, "There are three main areas that we have employed since 9-11 to better secure our borders. First is the number of officers we have working at our borders. We've doubled the numbers at the border. We've combined officers from Homeland Security and border protection. We brought in the officers from immigration and naturalization service, the department of agriculture and U.S. border patrol. By combining the expertise of those disparate border agencies into a single agency under a single management with the single purpose of protecting the U.S. against terrorism and other related offences, it created a more effective border agency. It created a more secure border.
"The second thing would be our information systems, our watch list systems are better shared within the U.S. government and between governments, between information sharing agreements, through Interpol, through terrorist watch list sharing internationally, we have better access for our front line officers to query information systems up to and including public based systems, including the Internet. Third, we have better infrastructure at our entries. We have cameras in some of our more remote points of entry, gates, lighting, to make them more secure. We do more checks at the borders. It depends on what level of alert we're at. At certain alert levels we do 100 per cent identity checks."
War on drugs meets war on terror
Eugene Oscapella is an Ottawa lawyer, who lectures on drug policy issues in the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa. He also works as a policy advisor to a range of government agencies and departments, including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Oscapella sees the American security system upgrades and the potential uses alarming.
"This is about the marriage of the war on drugs and the war on terror, and the blind, bureaucratic mindset it encourages. Government surveillance in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terror is in danger of making us all open books to zealous governments. As someone mentioned at a privacy conference I attended in London, U.K., several months ago, all the tools for an authoritarian state are now in place; it's just that we haven't yet adopted authoritarian methods. But in the area of drugs, maybe we have."
'Ominous omen'
Feldmar was in the process of considering whether to apply for a waiver when he sought help from Ethan Nadlemann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York, whose financial backer is another Hungarian, George Soros.
Nadlemann was outraged. "Nobel Peace prize winners, some of the great scientists and writers in the world have experimented with LSD in their time. We know people are being pulled out of lines and racially profiled as part of the war against terrorism. But this is a different kind of travesty, banning someone because they used a substance in another country thirty years ago," he said.
In February he wrote Feldmar, "Not that it helps much, but I just want you to know that I have not forgotten you or your situation. I feel frustrated vis a vis the media, and on other avenues, but I am not forgetting. I really think this situation is absurd, and an ominous omen of things to come."
When Feldmar was barred from entering the U.S., he joined the ranks of other intellectuals and artists. Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights. The tour would have taken her to Vermont, Harvard, Stanford and Washington D.C., but she never got beyond the airport check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
'Ideological exclusion provision'
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.
The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.
In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.
Cut off from friends
Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the situation is too daunting.
This is devastating to his family and friends. "My father was doing nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when he was trying to visit the U.S.," his daughter, Soma, an instructor at a Denver college, says. "In terms of family it really sucks. "
It's hard for his friend, Alphonso Lingis, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. "I'm deeply pained by the prospect of no longer being able to welcome him in the United States," Lingis said. "The notion that he and his work could harm anyone is preposterous. He's a victim of scandalous bureaucratic incompetence by the United States officials involved in this matter."
'Alchemist's dictum'
When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was operating out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last six years, since 9-11. His real mistake was to write about his drug experiences and post this on the web, even in a respected journal like Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had not considered posting on the Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many of his generation share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all. He believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom to share with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before they post anything about their personal lives on the web.
"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.
"Memories of having been the object of the objectifying gaze crowd into my mind. I have been seen and labeled as a Jew, as a Communist, as a D. P. (Displaced Person), as a student, as a patient, a man, a Hungarian, a refugee, an émigré, an immigrant.... Now I am being seen as one of those drug users, perhaps an addict, perhaps a dealer, one can't be sure. In the matter of a second, I became powerless, whatever I said wasn't going to be taken seriously. I was labeled, sorted and disposed of. Dismissed."
Related Tyee stories:
Psychedelics Could Treat Addiction Says Vancouver Official
City's drug policy honcho sees 'profound benefits'. A special report.
Where Carla and Wayne Shoot Up
Inside the world of the Insite safe injection clinic.
Secret Summit on Shared 'Security'
Why was North America's power elite invited to Banff?
Linda Solomon is an award-winning journalist who publishes The Vancouver Observer.
BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
View full article and comments here
http:///News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/
By Linda Solomon
Published: April 23, 2007
TheTyee.ca
Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar."
The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.
Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power, Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz. Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.
The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar's passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.
When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.
Fingerprints for FBI
He was told to sit down on a folding chair and for hours he wondered where this was going. He checked his watch and thought hopelessly of his friend who was about to land at the Seattle airport. Three hours later, the official motioned him into a small, barren room with an American flag. He was sitting on one side and Feldmar was on the other. The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn't interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.
Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.
The border guard then escorted him to his car and made sure he did a U-turn and went back to Canada.
'Curious. Very curious'
Feldmar attended the University of Toronto where he graduated with honours in mathematics, physics and chemistry. He received his M.A. in psychology from the University of Western Ontario. At University of Western Ontario, he was under supervision with Zenon Pylyshyn, who was from Saskatchewan and had participated, along with Abram Hoffer and Duncan Blewett, in the first experiments with LSD-25.
"Zenon told me he had had enough strange experiences, that he had gone about as far with LSD as he wished to go. He still had what was once legal.... Looking back 33 years, I don't quite recall why I decided to accept his tentative offer. I was 27 years old and thought of myself as a rational scientist, and had no experience with delirium, hallucination, or altered mind states. I was curious. Very curious. I thought that, like Faust, I might make a pact with the devil in return for esoteric knowledge."
Zenon gave him 900 micrograms of acid and the surprise of his life, he wrote in the Janus Head article. "Following this initiation, I traveled to many regions many times with the help of many different substances. I took peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, MDMA, DMT, ketamine, nitrous oxide 5-MEO-DMT, but I kept coming back to LSD. Acid seemed my most spacious, most helpful ally. While on it, I explored my past, regressed to the womb, to my conception. I remembered, grieved, and mourned many painful events. I saw how my parents would have liked to love me, and how they didn't because they didn't know how. I learned, on acid, to endure troubling and frightening states of mind. This enabled me, as meditation has done, to identify with being the witness of the workings of my mind, observing whatever was going on, while knowing that I was simply captivated by the forms produced by my own psyche."
After receiving his MA, Feldmar spent a semester in the U.S. at the Johns Hopkins University's Ph.D. program in theoretical statistics. In 1969, he began Ph.D. work with Dr. Charles Osgood in psycholinguistics at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. He did further Ph.D. studies at Simon Fraser University.
Legal options expensive
Feldmar was determined, in the months after the aborted border crossing, to turn things around. He was particularly determined because the idea of not being able to visit his children at their homes was unthinkable.
He contacted the U.S. Consul in Vancouver to protest and was again told to apply for a waiver. When he consulted Seattle attorney Bob Free at MacDonald, Hoague and Bayless about going through this process, he learned that for $3,500 (U.S.) plus incidentals, he'd have a 90 per cent chance to get the waiver, but it would probably be just for a year, and the procedure would have to be initiated again, any time he wished to cross the border. Each time, he would have to produce a statement saying that he had been "rehabilitated."
He looked into filing suit against the U.S. government for wrongdoing but gave up the idea when he learned that a legal battle with U.S. Customs would cost his life's savings and, with the balance of power tipped so extremely in the government's favor, he would almost surely lose.
Again, he appealed to the U.S. Consulate. The consulate wouldn't return his phone calls, but in this e-mail message to Feldmar, the consulate explained its position.
"Both our countries have very similar regulations regarding issuance of visas for citizens who have violated the law. The issue here is not the writing of an article, but the taking of controlled substances. I hear from American citizens all the time who have decades-old DUI convictions who are barred from entry into Canada and who must apply for waivers. Same thing here. Waiver is the only way."
Ensnared by Section IV
"Admitted drug use is admitted drug use," says Mike Milne, spokesman for U.S. border and protection, based in Seattle. Milne said he could not comment specifically on the Feldmar case, due to privacy issues, but he quoted from the U.S. Immigration Law Handbook section which refers to "general classes of aliens ineligible to receive visas and ineligible for admissions" to help shed light on the clauses that may have ensnared the Vancouver psychotherapist.
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are inadmissible," Milne said. And then there is Section IV. "Anyone who is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a violation of controlled substances."
If there's no criminal record, as in Feldmar's case?
Not necessarily the criterion, Milne said. You can still be considered dangerous.
'More diligent and vigilant'
"The level of scrutiny at our nation's borders have definitely gone up since the 9-11 disaster and we are more diligent and vigilant in checking people's identities and criminal histories at our nation's borders."
Milne goes on, "There are three main areas that we have employed since 9-11 to better secure our borders. First is the number of officers we have working at our borders. We've doubled the numbers at the border. We've combined officers from Homeland Security and border protection. We brought in the officers from immigration and naturalization service, the department of agriculture and U.S. border patrol. By combining the expertise of those disparate border agencies into a single agency under a single management with the single purpose of protecting the U.S. against terrorism and other related offences, it created a more effective border agency. It created a more secure border.
"The second thing would be our information systems, our watch list systems are better shared within the U.S. government and between governments, between information sharing agreements, through Interpol, through terrorist watch list sharing internationally, we have better access for our front line officers to query information systems up to and including public based systems, including the Internet. Third, we have better infrastructure at our entries. We have cameras in some of our more remote points of entry, gates, lighting, to make them more secure. We do more checks at the borders. It depends on what level of alert we're at. At certain alert levels we do 100 per cent identity checks."
War on drugs meets war on terror
Eugene Oscapella is an Ottawa lawyer, who lectures on drug policy issues in the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa. He also works as a policy advisor to a range of government agencies and departments, including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Oscapella sees the American security system upgrades and the potential uses alarming.
"This is about the marriage of the war on drugs and the war on terror, and the blind, bureaucratic mindset it encourages. Government surveillance in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terror is in danger of making us all open books to zealous governments. As someone mentioned at a privacy conference I attended in London, U.K., several months ago, all the tools for an authoritarian state are now in place; it's just that we haven't yet adopted authoritarian methods. But in the area of drugs, maybe we have."
'Ominous omen'
Feldmar was in the process of considering whether to apply for a waiver when he sought help from Ethan Nadlemann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York, whose financial backer is another Hungarian, George Soros.
Nadlemann was outraged. "Nobel Peace prize winners, some of the great scientists and writers in the world have experimented with LSD in their time. We know people are being pulled out of lines and racially profiled as part of the war against terrorism. But this is a different kind of travesty, banning someone because they used a substance in another country thirty years ago," he said.
In February he wrote Feldmar, "Not that it helps much, but I just want you to know that I have not forgotten you or your situation. I feel frustrated vis a vis the media, and on other avenues, but I am not forgetting. I really think this situation is absurd, and an ominous omen of things to come."
When Feldmar was barred from entering the U.S., he joined the ranks of other intellectuals and artists. Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights. The tour would have taken her to Vermont, Harvard, Stanford and Washington D.C., but she never got beyond the airport check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
'Ideological exclusion provision'
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.
The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.
In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.
Cut off from friends
Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the situation is too daunting.
This is devastating to his family and friends. "My father was doing nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when he was trying to visit the U.S.," his daughter, Soma, an instructor at a Denver college, says. "In terms of family it really sucks. "
It's hard for his friend, Alphonso Lingis, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. "I'm deeply pained by the prospect of no longer being able to welcome him in the United States," Lingis said. "The notion that he and his work could harm anyone is preposterous. He's a victim of scandalous bureaucratic incompetence by the United States officials involved in this matter."
'Alchemist's dictum'
When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was operating out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last six years, since 9-11. His real mistake was to write about his drug experiences and post this on the web, even in a respected journal like Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had not considered posting on the Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many of his generation share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all. He believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom to share with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before they post anything about their personal lives on the web.
"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.
"Memories of having been the object of the objectifying gaze crowd into my mind. I have been seen and labeled as a Jew, as a Communist, as a D. P. (Displaced Person), as a student, as a patient, a man, a Hungarian, a refugee, an émigré, an immigrant.... Now I am being seen as one of those drug users, perhaps an addict, perhaps a dealer, one can't be sure. In the matter of a second, I became powerless, whatever I said wasn't going to be taken seriously. I was labeled, sorted and disposed of. Dismissed."
Related Tyee stories:
Psychedelics Could Treat Addiction Says Vancouver Official
City's drug policy honcho sees 'profound benefits'. A special report.
Where Carla and Wayne Shoot Up
Inside the world of the Insite safe injection clinic.
Secret Summit on Shared 'Security'
Why was North America's power elite invited to Banff?
Linda Solomon is an award-winning journalist who publishes The Vancouver Observer.
Friday, February 01, 2008
carbon capture and storage plan released
$2B carbon capture and storage plan released
Last Updated: Friday, February 1, 2008 | 11:08 AM MT
CBC News
A $2-billion carbon capture and storage plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions was released Thursday by a task force established by the Alberta and federal governments in March 2007.
Carbon capture and storage means that the CO2 emitted from oil and gas operations, coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities is injected deep into the ground rather than released into the atmosphere.
The report, called Canada's Fossil Energy Future: The Way Forward on Carbon Capture and Storage, examined what needs to be done to move ahead with the technology in Canada.
"The report has specific recommendations that could move us off neutral, where we've been stuck on carbon capture and storage," said task force member David Keith, who is the Canada Research Chair on Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary.
"There's been endless talk and hype about this, but nothing has been done," he said.
The report's main recommendation is for the federal and provincial governments to provide $2 billion in funding to get five new carbon capture and storage facilities operating by 2015.
Critics question use of public money
Taxpayers should not have to pay to reduce the pollution created by industry, said John Bennett, executive director of Ottawa-based environmental group ClimateforChange.ca when asked about the recommendation.
"The crux of the matter here is that for some reason the oil industry feels entitled to both pollute and, when we ask [it] not to pollute, to ask for you and me to pay for it. That's not acceptable," Bennett said.
It would be better to create regulations that force industry to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, he said.
Regulations are also needed, said Keith, but until the necessary changes are made, governments need to put up the money required to get the ball rolling.
Alberta's recently released climate change plan relies heavily on the development of carbon capture and storage technology to achieve reductions of 14 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050.
Although neither the provincial nor federal government has commented on the task force report, Keith said he is optimistic the technology will get the support it requires.
Last Updated: Friday, February 1, 2008 | 11:08 AM MT
CBC News
A $2-billion carbon capture and storage plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions was released Thursday by a task force established by the Alberta and federal governments in March 2007.
Carbon capture and storage means that the CO2 emitted from oil and gas operations, coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities is injected deep into the ground rather than released into the atmosphere.
The report, called Canada's Fossil Energy Future: The Way Forward on Carbon Capture and Storage, examined what needs to be done to move ahead with the technology in Canada.
"The report has specific recommendations that could move us off neutral, where we've been stuck on carbon capture and storage," said task force member David Keith, who is the Canada Research Chair on Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary.
"There's been endless talk and hype about this, but nothing has been done," he said.
The report's main recommendation is for the federal and provincial governments to provide $2 billion in funding to get five new carbon capture and storage facilities operating by 2015.
Critics question use of public money
Taxpayers should not have to pay to reduce the pollution created by industry, said John Bennett, executive director of Ottawa-based environmental group ClimateforChange.ca when asked about the recommendation.
"The crux of the matter here is that for some reason the oil industry feels entitled to both pollute and, when we ask [it] not to pollute, to ask for you and me to pay for it. That's not acceptable," Bennett said.
It would be better to create regulations that force industry to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, he said.
Regulations are also needed, said Keith, but until the necessary changes are made, governments need to put up the money required to get the ball rolling.
Alberta's recently released climate change plan relies heavily on the development of carbon capture and storage technology to achieve reductions of 14 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050.
Although neither the provincial nor federal government has commented on the task force report, Keith said he is optimistic the technology will get the support it requires.
CBC "Defends" Canada's Borders
Defend the Border: The CBC's new show can only help "the bad guys"
by Justin Podur; January 05, 2008
The phrase “defend the border” wasn’t always a metaphor. And it isn’t just a metaphor in many parts of the world, even today: some states do have to worry about overland military invasions.
Canada is not such a state. To the degree that it is, the only conceivable invader is, of course, the United States. Those in Canada who talk about “defending the border” are distinctly unconcerned about such a possibility. They are, instead, making an analogy for a set of power institutions designed to keep “them” out and “us” safe.
Some argue that the threat of terrorism to Canada is so great that it outweighs any mushy, politically correct concerns. The historian J.L. Granatstein, in his book, “Whose War Is It?” makes such claims (1). So, with its new show, does the CBC, a point to which I’ll return below. Stripped down to basics, his argument is that Canada, to be safe, needs to subordinate its foreign policy to the US and join its War on Terror wholeheartedly, instead of half-heartedly. The most incredible aspect of his book, however, is that Granatstein relies on fiction – literally, entirely fictional scenarios about Muslim terrorists releasing poison gas in a Toronto subway at the same time as a natural disaster on the West Coast – to demonstrate how Canada needs to have better military preparedness. Granatstein can’t find real threats to justify his policy suggestions, so he makes them up. The detention of over a dozen young Muslim men in Toronto for over a year, accused of some sort of convoluted terrorist plot and possibly entrapped by the authorities, suggests that perhaps Canada’s police and intelligence agencies are also in the business of making up threats (2).
Besides making up threats, the policy suggestions of this school of thought are designed to bring such threats into existence. If certain kinds of terrorism are correlated with foreign occupation, as for example Robert Pape argued in his systematic study of suicide terrorism (“Dying to Win”), Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, supported by these hawks, is increasing the threat to Canadians. So, too, is Canada’s support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, its bombing of Lebanon, and the US occupation of Iraq.
This two-pronged approach, trying to create public fear and racism by contriving fictional threats on the one hand, and participating in occupations and human rights violations on the other, results in a toxic public conversation and a deadly foreign policy. All the same, it is embraced by historians like Granatstein, right-wing newspapers like the National Post, and, most recently, by the CBC.
The CBC’s new show, “The Border”, provides an expensive fictional apology for this two-pronged approach. Its heroes wrestle with moral dilemmas. According to the show’s publicity, “every week, a crack team of Canadian immigration and customs agents deal not only with the latest border-security crisis, but also with the consequences of their actions. Are they rushing to judgment? Are the bad guys really bad guys, or just victims of racial profiling?”
Wrestling with moral dilemmas of immigration and customs would of course be welcome, and Canadians can certainly use more such wrestling. But if the questions are those of an impoverished moral universe (“are the bad guys really bad guys?”) then the answers aren’t going to yield any riches. If we begin from the premise that there are these “bad guys” who threaten us because they are “bad guys”, and the job of customs agents is to use high-tech surveillance and psychological interrogation methods to ferret the “bad guys” out from the ordinary victims of racial profiling, we have already forfeited our moral and political sense. War and terrorism are political phenomena. They are done by political actors (including the US and Canada, if we are consistent in our definitions of war and of terrorism, as well as groups like al-Qaeda) pursuing political agendas with the means they have available. To stop war or terrorism requires first understanding these agendas and actors and seeking political solutions to the problems. This does not exclude the use of force or intelligence, but there is no way that fear, faked threats, celebrating the shredding of civil liberties, ignorance, or propaganda can help. The propaganda of “bad guys” and “evildoers” is itself a tool of war, and the CBC’s new show is such a tool.
I perused “The Border” website (cbc.ca/theborder), viewed the character profiles, and played the online game. The show does, indeed, look well-produced, well-acted, and well-written, which of course makes it worse. The main character, Mike Kessler, is a former JTF2 “counter-terrorism” officer who helped cover-up a massacre in Bosnia, and is tormented by his past. His goal, according to the website, is “to stop people like Mannering (a CSIS agent) from using fear to subvert democracy and take over the country.” This, too, sounds noble, as does his “struggle to hold a line of decency and integrity in a world gone mad.” But the very premise, Kessler’s fundamental moral dilemma – how do you keep your decency while fighting “evil” – is flawed, and from it one can never reach an understanding of what is really happening in these wars. The real question for such agents in the war on terror is simpler: how do you keep your decency while doing evil. And the answer is clear. You can’t.
Other characters with moral dilemmas include Layla Hourani, the “South Asian woman in a white man’s job, a Muslim agent who locks up Muslim bad guys” and finds herself drawn to her charming, roguish partner Gray Jackson, a “womanizer, gambler, and all-round cowboy, with an athlete’s body and an easy, amiable smile.”
Gray and Layla are the agents you face when you play the Border’s interactive game. They intimidate you and present you with fabricated evidence that you committed a border violation, threatening you with a 48-hour detention, using various psychological techniques like asking you why you are so nervous and telling you they already know you did something. When you pass the interrogation, Kessler comes in and says he admires your ability to keep your cool and would like to recruit you to work for ICS. When you accept, you are on to the next level and the next assignment, trying to locate an “evildoer” named Tariq Haddad. Tariq Haddad is an Afghan national whose languages are Arabic and English. This is itself interesting, since Arabic isn’t one of Afghanistan’s national languages and Haddad is an Arab surname – but perhaps the evildoer is a naturalized Afghan. In any case, your assignment is to locate Haddad using spy technology to find his cellphone, and then crack the code allowing you to read his hard drive. There, you find that Tariq Haddad is probably planning to blow up Toronto’s airport. The trailer for the show has Tariq Haddad in a hostage situation at the airport, with his gun at a woman’s head. Kessler coolly tells him this is nothing but suicide. And it’s hard to imagine how any of it can end well.
Casting immigration agents as action heroes fighting fictional threats covers up what they really do. They aren’t sexy action heroes keeping the country safe. They are bureaucrats who deport people who overstay their visas, pull children out of school to deport them and their parents, hand Canadian citizens off to other countries be tortured for ten months, and raid churches to deport people trying to claim sanctuary. They terrorize a whole class of people who live and work in the West without status, exploited and abused by employers, invisible and unable to participate because if they were to live openly they would be deported. The “good guys” profit from the labor of these people who are unable to claim their rights because they live in fear of immigration agents. The whole thing is all the more sordid because Canada’s international behavior, like other wealthy countries, helps create conditions in which people have to flee their homes and be exploited and live in fear. Once they are on this side of The Border, these people are illegal (or, if they are on some limited special work visa, partially legal), without rights, subject to arbitrary power. A documentary like Min Sook Lee’s “El Contrato” can show something of this reality, as can a feature film like Ken Loach’s “Bread and Roses” or Stephen Frears’s “Dirty Pretty Things” (3). But in such stories, immigration agents aren’t heroes. They are the first line of defense of a rotten system.
For all its seeming moral complexity, “The Border” thinks it knows who the bad guys are and thinks it knows that they aren’t us. But there is no way out of this war that doesn’t reject these very premises. “Bad guys” are those who kill and torture and bomb and starve to achieve their ends, regardless of what passports they carry or where they were born. The more powerful they are, the badder they can be. And on the other hand, the thousands of American victims of 9/11, the million Iraqi victims of the US war on Iraq and the uncounted tens of thousands of Afghan victims of the US/Canada/NATO war on Afghanistan all deserve to be counted, with dignity and proportion. Everything that works against that sense of proportion, the CBC’s new show included, is going to keep us fighting this senseless and yes, evil, war, longer.
1) See Jim Miles’s review of this book for ZNet:
2) Thomas Walkom’s reporting on this case has been the best, though he makes the important point that he and other reporters have been denied access to information needed to make a proper report.
3) For El Contrato, see the description and order it here: http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=51087. For “Bread and Roses”, here:
For “Dirty Pretty Things”, here. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301199/.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He can be reached at justin@killingtrain.com
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Helping Gaza
How To Help Feed and Support Children of The Gaza Strip And West Bank
By Tom Feeley
I have been asked by many ICH readers if I can recommend a way for them to help the children of Palestine. I would like to suggest the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund .
The Palestine Children's Welfare Fund is an enterprise that was established by a group of individuals whose goals are to improve the living standards of the children of Palestine in the refugee camps inside Palestine. The group aims to provide the children of the refugee camps with better educational opportunities, health facilities and a bright future without violence, hatred and discrimination. The organization has branches and volunteers in more than ten countries and is not connected with any militant or political association of any kind.
The group is a non-political, non-religious enterprise whose aspirations are purely humanitarian and for the purpose of emancipating the children of Palestine and the human rights of the people and children of Palestine.
One hundred percent of the donations go to the children in Gaza and other children throughout Palestine. There are no administrative costs due to the fact that all staff is made up of all volunteers who work out of or our homes or businesses.
You can make a one time donation by clicking here, or sponsor a child on a monthly basis by clicking here.
Visit their website http://www.pcwf.org/
By Tom Feeley
I have been asked by many ICH readers if I can recommend a way for them to help the children of Palestine. I would like to suggest the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund .
The Palestine Children's Welfare Fund is an enterprise that was established by a group of individuals whose goals are to improve the living standards of the children of Palestine in the refugee camps inside Palestine. The group aims to provide the children of the refugee camps with better educational opportunities, health facilities and a bright future without violence, hatred and discrimination. The organization has branches and volunteers in more than ten countries and is not connected with any militant or political association of any kind.
The group is a non-political, non-religious enterprise whose aspirations are purely humanitarian and for the purpose of emancipating the children of Palestine and the human rights of the people and children of Palestine.
One hundred percent of the donations go to the children in Gaza and other children throughout Palestine. There are no administrative costs due to the fact that all staff is made up of all volunteers who work out of or our homes or businesses.
You can make a one time donation by clicking here, or sponsor a child on a monthly basis by clicking here.
Visit their website http://www.pcwf.org/
Richard Warman's One Man Inquisition
HEY, 'FREE' CANADA GET OFF YOUR BLOODY KNEES
by David Icke
Hello all ...
You may have noticed the postings on my website this week about a man called Richard Warman. His attacks on free speech - including my own - in league with government agencies and Jewish organisations like B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League (whose job is to defame people) and the Canadian Jewish Congress need urgently to be exposed to the wider world.
This is not just a story about Canada - it is the blueprint for the end of free expression that is unfolding across the planet under the guise of Orwellian terms like 'Political Correctness' and 'Hate Speech'.
I first came across Richard Warman, a 'lawyer' working for the Canadian government, when he campaigned with the above organisations to have my public talks in Canada and elsewhere banned because I was a 'racist'. This is invariably the insult hurled at anyone who gets close to the truth. Even people demanding the truth about 9/11 or those questioning the official version of global warming have been dubbed as akin to 'Holocaust Deniers' and if you question any aspect of the official version of the Nazi concentration camps you can now be jailed by the Thought Police.
Ernst Zundel, an elderly pacifist, was illegally abducted from his home in the United States, thrown in a Canadian jail and eventually extradited to Germany to be jailed again for the maximum five years by a kangaroo court masquerading (barely) as the arbiter of 'justice'.
What was Zundel's 'crime'? Differing from the official history of what happened in the Nazi camps. He was, in other words, jailed for this thoughts, his views.
Even his lawyer, Sylvia Stolz, has now been jailed for three-and-a-half years, and banned from practising law for five years, for having the same thoughts and views as her client.
All this in 'free' Germany.
What happens in fascist states is that the verdict and the sentence are agreed before the trial or the evidence. That is what happened with Zundel and that is what happens in the 'justice' and 'human rights' system in Canada, as we shall see.
What we need to understand before all freedom is extinguished is that you don't have to agree with what someone says to defend their right to say it. Indeed, you are defending your right to say and think what you choose because unless everyone has free speech and free thought then no-one does. You can't be free to think and say what you believe if someone is deciding what you can think and say.
That is not freedom of speech or thought - it is the freedom to agree with what the Big Brother state allows you to think and say.
As Voltaire is claimed to have said: 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'
Why? Because your freedom is my freedom.
So what is happening in Canada and elsewhere is an attack on the freedom of everyone and what is happening is truly, truly, staggering in what is claimed - hilariously - to be a 'free society'.
Richard Warman was a member of the Canadian Green Party when I first came across him in the 1990s and he went on to be an 'investigator' for the Canadian Government's 'Human Rights' Commission (which is like George Orwell calling his propaganda ministry the 'Ministry of Truth').
Warman would find out where I was speaking and then contact the venue to say that I was an 'anti-Semite' who was going to blame Jews for everything in my presentation. Most of the spineless idiots at these venues - with honourable exceptions - would then ban the event without any further investigation.
You can see him at work trying to stop my talk in Vancouver in a British Channel 4 television documentary from 2001. The link is at the end of this article.
It got so ridiculous at one point that Warman, writing from Canada, almost had me banned from speaking at the little local theatre a few miles from my home in England where I had spoken with no problem many times before.
In the end, the local council insisted on having an 'observer' at the event to ensure that I did not break 'racism laws'. What did she find? Nothing, of course not. But truth is irrelevant - so long as the mud sticks it's job done.
This is what Richard Warman really believes about 'human rights' and free expression. He was asked about his attempts to ban my public events by the London Independent on Sunday magazine. This was his reply:
'He has taken all the conspiracy theories that ever existed and melded them together to create an even greater conspiracy of his own. His writings may be the work of a madman, or of a genuine racist. Either way they are very dangerous ...
... 'If he's unstable then so are his followers, who hang on his every word. What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?'
That's right, a self-styled 'human rights' campaigner actually said: 'What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?'
This is the mentality we are dealing with here from a Canadian government lawyer who specialises in targeting people who supposedly breach human rights!! You couldn't make it up.
As a result of the campaign against me by Warman, B'nai B'rith, the Anti Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress, I am stopped, searched and questioned without fail every time I pass through a Canadian airport because I am on a computer 'stop' list. What do they find? Nothing. But what happens the next time I go there? The same.
On one occasion I was held for six hours into the night at Ottawa airport and then again the next morning when all I am saying is that we need to love each other, forget our manufactured differences and unite behind freedom for all, no matter what your colour, creed or religion.
In a speech in Toronto on July 6th 2005, Warman described his modus operandi as a technique of 'Maximum Disruption':
'I've come to the conclusion that I can be most effective by using what I like to describe as a 'maximum disruption' approach. ... If I think that they've violated the Canadian Human Rights Act, then I'll look at all of the potential targets and file complaints against them starting on a 'worst offender' basis, although sometimes if I just find people to be particularly annoying this may move them up the list a bit.'
Warman continues:
'The "maximum disruption" part comes in because wherever I think it will be most helpful, or even if I just feel it will be the most fun, I strongly believe in hitting the neo-nazis on as many of these fronts as possible either at the same time or one after the other. I say this because it keeps them off-balance and forces them to respond to things that focus their energies on defending themselves ...'
(My emphasis. D.I.).
Warman, still an employee of the Canadian government the last I heard, is always strongly supported by B'nai B'rith (Rothschilds), the Anti-Defamation League (Rothschilds) and the Canadian Jewish Congress or 'CJC' (Bronfman family, connected to the Rothschilds).
So much so that the CJC gave him its Saul Hayes Human Rights Award for 'distinguished service to the cause of human rights' (no, that's not a joke) and a report by the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission said that Warman 'has recently written a detailed report on Internet hate in Canada for the national Jewish group B'nai B'rith's Annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents'.
[caption to photo on Icke’s site]: Canadian Jewish Congress: 'Congratulations Richard Warman, you are doing a wonderful job.'
What is the extent of the connection between Warman and B'nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress? Can anyone help?
It gets even more outrageous when you consider that Richard Warman has been using aliases, including one called Mary Dufford, to post racist comments on the very websites that he and the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission then target for being racist.
Senator Cools
One rant posted on a forum called Freedomsite on September 5th 2003 can be seen below. Apologies for the language, but we are adults and this is what was posted about a black Canadian Senator called Anne Cools.
'Not only is Canadian Senator Anne Cools a Negro, she is also an immigrant!
And she is also one helluva preachy c*nt.
She does NOT belong in my Canada. My Anglo-Germanic people were here before
there was a Canada and her kind have jumped in, polluted our race, and forced
their bullshit down our throats.
Time to go back to when the women nigger imports knew their place...
And that place was NOT in public!'
This was posted by a user name called '90sAREover' and it was following this that a Warman 'investigation' began into racist postings on the Freedomsite. So who was the poster of this vicious, stomach-turning racism on a site then targeted by Richard Warman for prosecution by the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission?
Well, well, well.
The owner of the Freedomsite and the target of Warman's subsequent 'investigation' is a man called Marc Lemire, a computer 'nerd' and technical expert who traced the posting to the same computer (IP address = 66.185.84.204) from which was posted another user name called 'Lucy'.
Who was 'Lucy', by his own admission under oath? Richard Warman.
Another computer expert, Bernard Klatt, did his own investigation into the origin of this sick and despicable attack on Anne Cools and this was his verdict in an affidavit submitted as evidence to a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on February 8th 2007:
'Based on the information provided in this affidavit, in my expert opinion, I concluded that the Freedomsite message board user accounts "90sAREover" and "lucy" are those of Richard Warman and that Richard Warman was the poster of the message headed "Cools don't belong in our Senate" posted September 5, 2003.'
Don't bother pinching yourself, I've tried. It was also admitted by the 'Human Rights' Commission that its 'senior human rights investigator', Dean Steacy, posts on the 'White Pride' Stormfront website using the name 'Jadewarr'. The game is simple: get an anonymous account to post racist comments on a website and then charge the website owners with posting racist comments.
Richard Warman is saying of David Icke at this point in the TV documentary: 'I think we can release the hounds now'.
Canadian author and journalist, Mark Steyn, summed it up very well this week when he wrote:
'As I said previously, this isn't entrapment; it's manufacturing the crime. Mr Warman posted these words on a website and then used them as part of his complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That is Scandal #1.
Furthermore, when the defendant then made plain that he wished to subpoena the records of the ISP to uncover the author of the above post, the Canadian Human Rights Commission mysteriously dropped it from the case. This suggests an explicit collusion between the CHRC investigators and their former colleague, Mr Warman. That is Scandal #2.
For posting these words on the website and then taking said website to the Human Rights Commission, Mr Warman has been substantially enriched by the Canadian state. That is Scandal #3.'
What has happened to Richard Warman as a result of these extraordinary revelations in the 'free' country of Canada where 'everyone is treated equally'? Nothing. As Mark Steyn wrote:
'If this is correct, I don't see how it's possible to regard the Canadian Human Rights Commission as anything other than a racket for one of its former employees. Why should Richard Warman collect five-figure sums from suing websites for "crimes" in which he has himself participated?'
So why is Warman Teflon Man? Why does nothing ever stick or prompt further official investigation?
Warman has been awarded tens of thousands of dollars by the 'Human Rights' Commission that he used to work for and invariably his targets are those without the resources to defend themselves nor pay the fine and money to him without extreme hardship.
Warman brings his cases under something called Section 13 of the Canadian 'Human Rights' Act which is simply a vehicle for blatant censorship. It makes it a 'discriminatory practice' for 'a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate ... any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt ...' This includes areas like race, religion, sex and a long list of others. Who decides what is 'likely'? The government agency.
Read that again and you'll see that this could be applied to almost any criticism or contrary opinion. It is a censorship charter and the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission has said that the truth of any statement is no defence. The head Internet investigator for the CHRC, Dean Steacy, the Stormfront poster 'Jadewarr', said: 'Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value'.
For violating Section 13 (or rather when the 'Human Rights' Commission has decreed that you have) you can be subject to a lifetime ban on your opinions registered with the Federal Court, a fine of up to $50,000 and up to five years in jail.
Now ... are you ready for this ...? Journalist Mark Steyn writes:
'In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn't have to demonstrate that he's been deprived of his human rights, only that it's "likely" (i.e. "highly un-") that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime.'
Some more outrageous statistics:
100% of cases have white people as respondents
98% of cases have poor or working class respondents
90.7% of respondents are not represented by lawyers
So far, $93,000 has been awarded in fines and special compensation since 2003.
35 respondents have lifetime speech bans (Cease and Desist) orders and if not followed the victims could face up to 5 years in prison.
72.4% of complaints specifically identify 'Jews' as victims.
As the grip tightens on human freedom this censorship is now targeting even mainstream media outlets like Macleans Magazine and what you are reading here is what is planned for everyone all over the world - that's the 'Totalitarian Tiptoe' with regard to Political Correctness. That's the agenda behind it all. It is not about 'protecting minorities', it is about controlling everyone - including the 'minorities'.
It is actually playing 'minorities' off against each other. If a black person says something a gay person doesn't like he can be prosecuted by the Thought Police. But if the gay person says something the black person doesn't like he can be prosecuted by the Thought Police.
It is classic and blatant divide and rule under the guise of 'protecting minorities'.
Another 'modus' of Richard Warman is to launch libel actions against those who defend themselves from his attacks on their character or give their opinion of him and his agenda. He has had one running against me now for nearly six years on the book, Children of the Matrix, which was published seven years ago.
Among the ludicrous alleged 'libels' is that, sit down and take a breath, I called him a 'censor' and an enemy of free speech.
Children of the Matrix was published in 2001 and Warman was at my event in Montreal, Canada (which he had worked so hard to ban) when that book was on sale for the first time. In other words, he read what I wrote about him in the summer of 2001.
So did he contact me or the publisher to make a complaint and discuss it? Oh no. Without contacting me in any way, he began writing to bookstores and distributors telling them that he was taking a libel action against me and if they did not stop handling the book they would be included.
Most of these sad and spineless people allowed themselves to be intimidated and the book lost massive potential sales, for which I shall be seeking compensation. Given that Warman was in the Canadian Green Party at the time, a British Green Party member called Justin Walker contacted him and offered to arrange a meeting with me at which his problem could be discussed and resolved. Warman just scoffed at the idea and dismissed it.
Instead he waited almost a year after he had first read the book before issuing me with a libel writ - just before his deadline for doing so ran out. When he threatened the biggest British book distributor, W H Smith, with being included in the action they looked at his behaviour and described it to me as 'bizarre'.
Six years later the case is still rolling on and in the meantime he has continued to behave with regard to freedom of expression in precisely the way I describe in my book - I mean, see above.
Still, at least a full blown court hearing will reveal to the public and the worldwide Internet community the extraordinary story of Richard Warman and the true identity of '90sAREover' and the Anne Cools posting that Warman has denied on oath was him even though the 'IP' (computer) address is the same as the one he used for 'Lucy'.
Today eyes are now opening ever-wider in Canada to what has been going on and Mark Steyn wrote an excellent article for Macleans Magazine headed 'Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition?' See the links at the end of this text. In another exposé of Warman's weapon-of-choice, Section 13, Steyn says:
'At this point, the Minister of Justice needs to step in. The administration of Section XIII is a public disgrace. I agree with Pundita that it is, in fact, a criminal act in itself. The Minister should order a judicial inquiry into the systemic corruption of Section XIII. Furthermore, in the interim, Agent Dean Steacy should be removed from all "hate" cases, all current cases suspended, and the judgments in those cases brought by Richard The Anglo-German Warman vacated. The mountain of phoney-baloney "jurisprudence" based on the Warman racket should be tossed in the trash.
In the end, Maclean's and I might prevail over this thug racket. But why should we have to spend significant six-figure sums doing so given the prima facie evidence above? Section XIII is misbegotten in theory and a shakedown racket in practice. It's time to end it.'
I repeat, this is not just about Canada or Macleans Magazine or me. It is about all of us. Different sections of society are being picked off while the rest look the other way because they think it does not affect them. Oh, but it does.
The words of Pastor Martin Niemöller come to mind. He was talking about the emergence of the Nazis in Germany, but it is relevant today across the gathering Orwellian world:
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Unless we say 'enough!' now, we have seen nothing yet. We have a choice: a line in the sand now or a global fascist dictatorship ruled by the Thought Police.
It's our call and we'd better make it quick.
PLEASE NOTE: These newsletters are copyrighted for subscribers only, but the information included here is so important that on this occasion please feel free to circulate this in the coming days and weeks - along with the TV documentary and other links below - to anyone and everyone you think ought to read or see them.
Let us remove the power to suppress provided by lack of public awareness.
Thank-you.
..
Richard Warman: 'Lucy' and '90sAREover'
“No, I don't post on websites that I target.”
Er, oh, you can prove it?
Oh yeah, I remember now, I do.
Here is the interchange between Richard Warman and Barbara Kulaszka, the counsel of one of his targets, Marc Lemire, when he was questioned about the screen names 'Lucy' and '90sAREover' at a Canadian Human Rights' Tribunal on February 1st, 2007.
Read more ...
David Icke and Richard Warman
Here is a documentary on David Icke and featuring Warman in 2001 (not all that is said in the reporter's commentary about David Icke is correct).
Click here to watch ...
Who is Richard Warman?
Click here for more background ...
Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition?
From Macleans Magazine
Read more ...
Richard Warman: 'Human rights' for me but not for thee
By Mark Steyn
Read more ...
by David Icke
Hello all ...
You may have noticed the postings on my website this week about a man called Richard Warman. His attacks on free speech - including my own - in league with government agencies and Jewish organisations like B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League (whose job is to defame people) and the Canadian Jewish Congress need urgently to be exposed to the wider world.
This is not just a story about Canada - it is the blueprint for the end of free expression that is unfolding across the planet under the guise of Orwellian terms like 'Political Correctness' and 'Hate Speech'.
I first came across Richard Warman, a 'lawyer' working for the Canadian government, when he campaigned with the above organisations to have my public talks in Canada and elsewhere banned because I was a 'racist'. This is invariably the insult hurled at anyone who gets close to the truth. Even people demanding the truth about 9/11 or those questioning the official version of global warming have been dubbed as akin to 'Holocaust Deniers' and if you question any aspect of the official version of the Nazi concentration camps you can now be jailed by the Thought Police.
Ernst Zundel, an elderly pacifist, was illegally abducted from his home in the United States, thrown in a Canadian jail and eventually extradited to Germany to be jailed again for the maximum five years by a kangaroo court masquerading (barely) as the arbiter of 'justice'.
What was Zundel's 'crime'? Differing from the official history of what happened in the Nazi camps. He was, in other words, jailed for this thoughts, his views.
Even his lawyer, Sylvia Stolz, has now been jailed for three-and-a-half years, and banned from practising law for five years, for having the same thoughts and views as her client.
All this in 'free' Germany.
What happens in fascist states is that the verdict and the sentence are agreed before the trial or the evidence. That is what happened with Zundel and that is what happens in the 'justice' and 'human rights' system in Canada, as we shall see.
What we need to understand before all freedom is extinguished is that you don't have to agree with what someone says to defend their right to say it. Indeed, you are defending your right to say and think what you choose because unless everyone has free speech and free thought then no-one does. You can't be free to think and say what you believe if someone is deciding what you can think and say.
That is not freedom of speech or thought - it is the freedom to agree with what the Big Brother state allows you to think and say.
As Voltaire is claimed to have said: 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'
Why? Because your freedom is my freedom.
So what is happening in Canada and elsewhere is an attack on the freedom of everyone and what is happening is truly, truly, staggering in what is claimed - hilariously - to be a 'free society'.
Richard Warman was a member of the Canadian Green Party when I first came across him in the 1990s and he went on to be an 'investigator' for the Canadian Government's 'Human Rights' Commission (which is like George Orwell calling his propaganda ministry the 'Ministry of Truth').
Warman would find out where I was speaking and then contact the venue to say that I was an 'anti-Semite' who was going to blame Jews for everything in my presentation. Most of the spineless idiots at these venues - with honourable exceptions - would then ban the event without any further investigation.
You can see him at work trying to stop my talk in Vancouver in a British Channel 4 television documentary from 2001. The link is at the end of this article.
It got so ridiculous at one point that Warman, writing from Canada, almost had me banned from speaking at the little local theatre a few miles from my home in England where I had spoken with no problem many times before.
In the end, the local council insisted on having an 'observer' at the event to ensure that I did not break 'racism laws'. What did she find? Nothing, of course not. But truth is irrelevant - so long as the mud sticks it's job done.
This is what Richard Warman really believes about 'human rights' and free expression. He was asked about his attempts to ban my public events by the London Independent on Sunday magazine. This was his reply:
'He has taken all the conspiracy theories that ever existed and melded them together to create an even greater conspiracy of his own. His writings may be the work of a madman, or of a genuine racist. Either way they are very dangerous ...
... 'If he's unstable then so are his followers, who hang on his every word. What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?'
That's right, a self-styled 'human rights' campaigner actually said: 'What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?'
This is the mentality we are dealing with here from a Canadian government lawyer who specialises in targeting people who supposedly breach human rights!! You couldn't make it up.
As a result of the campaign against me by Warman, B'nai B'rith, the Anti Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress, I am stopped, searched and questioned without fail every time I pass through a Canadian airport because I am on a computer 'stop' list. What do they find? Nothing. But what happens the next time I go there? The same.
On one occasion I was held for six hours into the night at Ottawa airport and then again the next morning when all I am saying is that we need to love each other, forget our manufactured differences and unite behind freedom for all, no matter what your colour, creed or religion.
In a speech in Toronto on July 6th 2005, Warman described his modus operandi as a technique of 'Maximum Disruption':
'I've come to the conclusion that I can be most effective by using what I like to describe as a 'maximum disruption' approach. ... If I think that they've violated the Canadian Human Rights Act, then I'll look at all of the potential targets and file complaints against them starting on a 'worst offender' basis, although sometimes if I just find people to be particularly annoying this may move them up the list a bit.'
Warman continues:
'The "maximum disruption" part comes in because wherever I think it will be most helpful, or even if I just feel it will be the most fun, I strongly believe in hitting the neo-nazis on as many of these fronts as possible either at the same time or one after the other. I say this because it keeps them off-balance and forces them to respond to things that focus their energies on defending themselves ...'
(My emphasis. D.I.).
Warman, still an employee of the Canadian government the last I heard, is always strongly supported by B'nai B'rith (Rothschilds), the Anti-Defamation League (Rothschilds) and the Canadian Jewish Congress or 'CJC' (Bronfman family, connected to the Rothschilds).
So much so that the CJC gave him its Saul Hayes Human Rights Award for 'distinguished service to the cause of human rights' (no, that's not a joke) and a report by the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission said that Warman 'has recently written a detailed report on Internet hate in Canada for the national Jewish group B'nai B'rith's Annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents'.
[caption to photo on Icke’s site]: Canadian Jewish Congress: 'Congratulations Richard Warman, you are doing a wonderful job.'
What is the extent of the connection between Warman and B'nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress? Can anyone help?
It gets even more outrageous when you consider that Richard Warman has been using aliases, including one called Mary Dufford, to post racist comments on the very websites that he and the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission then target for being racist.
Senator Cools
One rant posted on a forum called Freedomsite on September 5th 2003 can be seen below. Apologies for the language, but we are adults and this is what was posted about a black Canadian Senator called Anne Cools.
'Not only is Canadian Senator Anne Cools a Negro, she is also an immigrant!
And she is also one helluva preachy c*nt.
She does NOT belong in my Canada. My Anglo-Germanic people were here before
there was a Canada and her kind have jumped in, polluted our race, and forced
their bullshit down our throats.
Time to go back to when the women nigger imports knew their place...
And that place was NOT in public!'
This was posted by a user name called '90sAREover' and it was following this that a Warman 'investigation' began into racist postings on the Freedomsite. So who was the poster of this vicious, stomach-turning racism on a site then targeted by Richard Warman for prosecution by the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission?
Well, well, well.
The owner of the Freedomsite and the target of Warman's subsequent 'investigation' is a man called Marc Lemire, a computer 'nerd' and technical expert who traced the posting to the same computer (IP address = 66.185.84.204) from which was posted another user name called 'Lucy'.
Who was 'Lucy', by his own admission under oath? Richard Warman.
Another computer expert, Bernard Klatt, did his own investigation into the origin of this sick and despicable attack on Anne Cools and this was his verdict in an affidavit submitted as evidence to a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on February 8th 2007:
'Based on the information provided in this affidavit, in my expert opinion, I concluded that the Freedomsite message board user accounts "90sAREover" and "lucy" are those of Richard Warman and that Richard Warman was the poster of the message headed "Cools don't belong in our Senate" posted September 5, 2003.'
Don't bother pinching yourself, I've tried. It was also admitted by the 'Human Rights' Commission that its 'senior human rights investigator', Dean Steacy, posts on the 'White Pride' Stormfront website using the name 'Jadewarr'. The game is simple: get an anonymous account to post racist comments on a website and then charge the website owners with posting racist comments.
Richard Warman is saying of David Icke at this point in the TV documentary: 'I think we can release the hounds now'.
Canadian author and journalist, Mark Steyn, summed it up very well this week when he wrote:
'As I said previously, this isn't entrapment; it's manufacturing the crime. Mr Warman posted these words on a website and then used them as part of his complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That is Scandal #1.
Furthermore, when the defendant then made plain that he wished to subpoena the records of the ISP to uncover the author of the above post, the Canadian Human Rights Commission mysteriously dropped it from the case. This suggests an explicit collusion between the CHRC investigators and their former colleague, Mr Warman. That is Scandal #2.
For posting these words on the website and then taking said website to the Human Rights Commission, Mr Warman has been substantially enriched by the Canadian state. That is Scandal #3.'
What has happened to Richard Warman as a result of these extraordinary revelations in the 'free' country of Canada where 'everyone is treated equally'? Nothing. As Mark Steyn wrote:
'If this is correct, I don't see how it's possible to regard the Canadian Human Rights Commission as anything other than a racket for one of its former employees. Why should Richard Warman collect five-figure sums from suing websites for "crimes" in which he has himself participated?'
So why is Warman Teflon Man? Why does nothing ever stick or prompt further official investigation?
Warman has been awarded tens of thousands of dollars by the 'Human Rights' Commission that he used to work for and invariably his targets are those without the resources to defend themselves nor pay the fine and money to him without extreme hardship.
Warman brings his cases under something called Section 13 of the Canadian 'Human Rights' Act which is simply a vehicle for blatant censorship. It makes it a 'discriminatory practice' for 'a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate ... any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt ...' This includes areas like race, religion, sex and a long list of others. Who decides what is 'likely'? The government agency.
Read that again and you'll see that this could be applied to almost any criticism or contrary opinion. It is a censorship charter and the Canadian 'Human Rights' Commission has said that the truth of any statement is no defence. The head Internet investigator for the CHRC, Dean Steacy, the Stormfront poster 'Jadewarr', said: 'Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value'.
For violating Section 13 (or rather when the 'Human Rights' Commission has decreed that you have) you can be subject to a lifetime ban on your opinions registered with the Federal Court, a fine of up to $50,000 and up to five years in jail.
Now ... are you ready for this ...? Journalist Mark Steyn writes:
'In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn't have to demonstrate that he's been deprived of his human rights, only that it's "likely" (i.e. "highly un-") that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime.'
Some more outrageous statistics:
100% of cases have white people as respondents
98% of cases have poor or working class respondents
90.7% of respondents are not represented by lawyers
So far, $93,000 has been awarded in fines and special compensation since 2003.
35 respondents have lifetime speech bans (Cease and Desist) orders and if not followed the victims could face up to 5 years in prison.
72.4% of complaints specifically identify 'Jews' as victims.
As the grip tightens on human freedom this censorship is now targeting even mainstream media outlets like Macleans Magazine and what you are reading here is what is planned for everyone all over the world - that's the 'Totalitarian Tiptoe' with regard to Political Correctness. That's the agenda behind it all. It is not about 'protecting minorities', it is about controlling everyone - including the 'minorities'.
It is actually playing 'minorities' off against each other. If a black person says something a gay person doesn't like he can be prosecuted by the Thought Police. But if the gay person says something the black person doesn't like he can be prosecuted by the Thought Police.
It is classic and blatant divide and rule under the guise of 'protecting minorities'.
Another 'modus' of Richard Warman is to launch libel actions against those who defend themselves from his attacks on their character or give their opinion of him and his agenda. He has had one running against me now for nearly six years on the book, Children of the Matrix, which was published seven years ago.
Among the ludicrous alleged 'libels' is that, sit down and take a breath, I called him a 'censor' and an enemy of free speech.
Children of the Matrix was published in 2001 and Warman was at my event in Montreal, Canada (which he had worked so hard to ban) when that book was on sale for the first time. In other words, he read what I wrote about him in the summer of 2001.
So did he contact me or the publisher to make a complaint and discuss it? Oh no. Without contacting me in any way, he began writing to bookstores and distributors telling them that he was taking a libel action against me and if they did not stop handling the book they would be included.
Most of these sad and spineless people allowed themselves to be intimidated and the book lost massive potential sales, for which I shall be seeking compensation. Given that Warman was in the Canadian Green Party at the time, a British Green Party member called Justin Walker contacted him and offered to arrange a meeting with me at which his problem could be discussed and resolved. Warman just scoffed at the idea and dismissed it.
Instead he waited almost a year after he had first read the book before issuing me with a libel writ - just before his deadline for doing so ran out. When he threatened the biggest British book distributor, W H Smith, with being included in the action they looked at his behaviour and described it to me as 'bizarre'.
Six years later the case is still rolling on and in the meantime he has continued to behave with regard to freedom of expression in precisely the way I describe in my book - I mean, see above.
Still, at least a full blown court hearing will reveal to the public and the worldwide Internet community the extraordinary story of Richard Warman and the true identity of '90sAREover' and the Anne Cools posting that Warman has denied on oath was him even though the 'IP' (computer) address is the same as the one he used for 'Lucy'.
Today eyes are now opening ever-wider in Canada to what has been going on and Mark Steyn wrote an excellent article for Macleans Magazine headed 'Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition?' See the links at the end of this text. In another exposé of Warman's weapon-of-choice, Section 13, Steyn says:
'At this point, the Minister of Justice needs to step in. The administration of Section XIII is a public disgrace. I agree with Pundita that it is, in fact, a criminal act in itself. The Minister should order a judicial inquiry into the systemic corruption of Section XIII. Furthermore, in the interim, Agent Dean Steacy should be removed from all "hate" cases, all current cases suspended, and the judgments in those cases brought by Richard The Anglo-German Warman vacated. The mountain of phoney-baloney "jurisprudence" based on the Warman racket should be tossed in the trash.
In the end, Maclean's and I might prevail over this thug racket. But why should we have to spend significant six-figure sums doing so given the prima facie evidence above? Section XIII is misbegotten in theory and a shakedown racket in practice. It's time to end it.'
I repeat, this is not just about Canada or Macleans Magazine or me. It is about all of us. Different sections of society are being picked off while the rest look the other way because they think it does not affect them. Oh, but it does.
The words of Pastor Martin Niemöller come to mind. He was talking about the emergence of the Nazis in Germany, but it is relevant today across the gathering Orwellian world:
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Unless we say 'enough!' now, we have seen nothing yet. We have a choice: a line in the sand now or a global fascist dictatorship ruled by the Thought Police.
It's our call and we'd better make it quick.
PLEASE NOTE: These newsletters are copyrighted for subscribers only, but the information included here is so important that on this occasion please feel free to circulate this in the coming days and weeks - along with the TV documentary and other links below - to anyone and everyone you think ought to read or see them.
Let us remove the power to suppress provided by lack of public awareness.
Thank-you.
..
Richard Warman: 'Lucy' and '90sAREover'
“No, I don't post on websites that I target.”
Er, oh, you can prove it?
Oh yeah, I remember now, I do.
Here is the interchange between Richard Warman and Barbara Kulaszka, the counsel of one of his targets, Marc Lemire, when he was questioned about the screen names 'Lucy' and '90sAREover' at a Canadian Human Rights' Tribunal on February 1st, 2007.
Read more ...
David Icke and Richard Warman
Here is a documentary on David Icke and featuring Warman in 2001 (not all that is said in the reporter's commentary about David Icke is correct).
Click here to watch ...
Who is Richard Warman?
Click here for more background ...
Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition?
From Macleans Magazine
Read more ...
Richard Warman: 'Human rights' for me but not for thee
By Mark Steyn
Read more ...
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Prepare for hard economic times: Harper
Last Updated: Friday, January 25, 2008 | 7:48 PM ET
CBC News
Canadians cannot afford to be complacent about the economy because recent problems in the financial markets won't be disappearing any time soon, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told members of his caucus on Friday.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper waves to supporters, workers and members of the federal Conservative caucus following his speech in Ottawa Friday.
(Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)
Harper, speaking in Ottawa on the second anniversary of his election, said that even though the Canadian economy is still strong, jobs are threatened in traditional industries and Canadian families are coping with budget strains.
"Recent volatility in financial markets, emanating mostly from the U.S., may be with us for some time to come," Harper said.
"We are aware of these challenges. We have acted and we will continue to act for regions and sectors that are in difficulty, like manufacturing, forestry, fishing and tourism. We will also continue to take measures to strengthen agriculture."
Continue Article
Harper, delivering what sounded at times like a campaign speech, hinted that a federal election may be coming, but that he and his party will continue to focus on their jobs as leaders.
As his party members cheered and waved banners bearing his name, Harper listed off the accomplishments he said his party has achieved since the Conservatives ousted the Liberals from power in the Jan. 23, 2006, federal election.
Harper noted that his government has stiffened Canada's crime laws and introduced a child care benefit payment to help families with children under age six.
He said the economy has been strong under his watch — unemployment is at its lowest level over three decades, income tax and the GST have been reduced, billions of dollars of Canada's debt have been paid off and inflation and interest rates remain low, while the average income of households is rising.
Harper suggested that he and his fellow Conservatives are the right people to guide Canada through turbulent economic times.
"In times of economic uncertainty, what Canadians need most is strong, steady, certain leadership that's on their side," he said. "It's what Canada deserves, it's what Canadians demand."
No mention of Afghan detainees
Harper did not address the issue of Afghan detainees, which has been a controversial topic this past week.
At a Federal Court hearing on Thursday, Brig.-Gen. André Deschamps confirmed that Canadian troops stopped handing over detainees to Afghan authorities in November after a prison visit found evidence of torture.
The disclosure prompted accusations of a coverup from opposition parties, but the government has denied the allegations, saying it was up to the Canadian army to disclose matters related to military operations.
Manley report is 'strong, balanced and realistic'
Harper did touch on the Manley report on the mission in Afghanistan in his speech, calling it a "good one, strong, balanced and realistic."
The report, prepared by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, recommended that Canada's military remain in Afghanistan beyond the current February 2009 timeline, provided Canadian forces are backed by an additional contingent of 1,000 NATO soldiers and provided with new, medium-lift helicopters and high-performance unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Harper, who commissioned the report, did not say whether he will adopt its recommendations. He did say he doesn't take any decisions about the Afghan mission and the current troop withdrawal date of February 2009 lightly.
"On a matter of national and global security like this, we will never make a decision based on polls," he said. "We will make a decision based on what is right for this country."
CBC News
Canadians cannot afford to be complacent about the economy because recent problems in the financial markets won't be disappearing any time soon, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told members of his caucus on Friday.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper waves to supporters, workers and members of the federal Conservative caucus following his speech in Ottawa Friday.
(Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)
Harper, speaking in Ottawa on the second anniversary of his election, said that even though the Canadian economy is still strong, jobs are threatened in traditional industries and Canadian families are coping with budget strains.
"Recent volatility in financial markets, emanating mostly from the U.S., may be with us for some time to come," Harper said.
"We are aware of these challenges. We have acted and we will continue to act for regions and sectors that are in difficulty, like manufacturing, forestry, fishing and tourism. We will also continue to take measures to strengthen agriculture."
Continue Article
Harper, delivering what sounded at times like a campaign speech, hinted that a federal election may be coming, but that he and his party will continue to focus on their jobs as leaders.
As his party members cheered and waved banners bearing his name, Harper listed off the accomplishments he said his party has achieved since the Conservatives ousted the Liberals from power in the Jan. 23, 2006, federal election.
Harper noted that his government has stiffened Canada's crime laws and introduced a child care benefit payment to help families with children under age six.
He said the economy has been strong under his watch — unemployment is at its lowest level over three decades, income tax and the GST have been reduced, billions of dollars of Canada's debt have been paid off and inflation and interest rates remain low, while the average income of households is rising.
Harper suggested that he and his fellow Conservatives are the right people to guide Canada through turbulent economic times.
"In times of economic uncertainty, what Canadians need most is strong, steady, certain leadership that's on their side," he said. "It's what Canada deserves, it's what Canadians demand."
No mention of Afghan detainees
Harper did not address the issue of Afghan detainees, which has been a controversial topic this past week.
At a Federal Court hearing on Thursday, Brig.-Gen. André Deschamps confirmed that Canadian troops stopped handing over detainees to Afghan authorities in November after a prison visit found evidence of torture.
The disclosure prompted accusations of a coverup from opposition parties, but the government has denied the allegations, saying it was up to the Canadian army to disclose matters related to military operations.
Manley report is 'strong, balanced and realistic'
Harper did touch on the Manley report on the mission in Afghanistan in his speech, calling it a "good one, strong, balanced and realistic."
The report, prepared by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, recommended that Canada's military remain in Afghanistan beyond the current February 2009 timeline, provided Canadian forces are backed by an additional contingent of 1,000 NATO soldiers and provided with new, medium-lift helicopters and high-performance unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Harper, who commissioned the report, did not say whether he will adopt its recommendations. He did say he doesn't take any decisions about the Afghan mission and the current troop withdrawal date of February 2009 lightly.
"On a matter of national and global security like this, we will never make a decision based on polls," he said. "We will make a decision based on what is right for this country."
Worse Than a Crime
Worse Than a Crime
By Uri Avnery
26/01/08 "ICH" -- - IT LOOKED like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.
It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place.
The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.
That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.
ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended: It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!
Months ago, the two Ehuds - Barak and Olmert - imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it. Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more, so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip. Last week they made the blockade absolute - no food, no medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity - incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.
Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning. Apart from that, the blockade remained total.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.
THE REASON given for the starving and freezing of one and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of 365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town of Sderot and the adjoining villages.
That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise have spoken out against a collective punishment that is, undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.
A clear picture is presented to the world: the Hamas terror regime in Gaza launches missiles at innocent Israeli civilians. No government in the world can tolerate the bombardment of its citizens from across the border. The Israeli military has not found a military answer to the Qassam missiles. Therefore there is no other way than to exert such strong pressure on the Gaza population as to make them rise up against Hamas and compel them to stop the missiles.
The day the Gaza electricity works stopped operating, our military correspondents were overjoyed: only two Qassams were launched from the Strip. So it works! Ehud Barak is a genius!
But the day after, 17 Qassams landed, and the joy evaporated. Politicians and generals were (literally) out of their minds: one politician proposed to "act crazier than them", another proposed to "shell Gaza's urban area indiscriminately for every Qassam launched", a famous professor (who is a little bit deranged) proposed the exercise of "ultimate evil".
The government scenario was a repeat of Lebanon War II (the report about which is due to be published in a few days). Then: Hizbullah captured two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border, now: Hamas fired on towns and villages on the Israeli side of the border. Then: the government decide in haste to start a war, now: the government decided in haste to impose a total blockade. Then: the government ordered the massive bombing of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hizbullah, now: the government decided to cause massive suffering of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hamas.
The results were the same in both cases: the Lebanese population did not rise up against Hizbullah, but on the contrary, people of all religious communities united behind the Shiite organization. Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the entire Arab world. And now: the population unites behind Hamas and accuses Mahmoud Abbas of cooperation with the enemy. A mother who has no food for her children does not curse Ismail Haniyeh, she curses Olmert, Abbas and Mubarak.
SO WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.
What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.
Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.
A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.
Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?
Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.
Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.
In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence.
IT HAS been said before that it is dangerous to write satire in our country - too often the satire becomes reality. Some readers may recall a satirical article I wrote months ago. In it I described the situation in Gaza as a scientific experiment designed to find out how far one can go, in starving a civilian population and turning their lives into hell, before they raise their hands in surrender.
This week, the satire has become official policy. Respected commentators declared explicitly that Ehud Barak and the army chiefs are working on the principle of "trial and error" and change their methods daily according to results. They stop the fuel to Gaza, observe how this works and backtrack when the international reaction is too negative. They stop the delivery of medicines, see how it works, etc. The scientific aim justifies the means.
The man in charge of the experiment is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a man of many ideas and few scruples, a man whose whole turn of mind is basically inhuman. He is now, perhaps, the most dangerous person in Israel, more dangerous than Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu, dangerous to the very existence of Israel in the long run.
The man in charge of execution is the Chief of Staff. This week we had the chance of hearing speeches by two of his predecessors, generals Moshe Ya'alon and Shaul Mofaz, in a forum with inflated intellectual pretensions. Both were discovered to have views that place them somewhere between the extreme Right and the ultra-Right. Both have a frighteningly primitive mind. There is no need to waste a word about the moral and intellectual qualities of their immediate successor, Dan Halutz. If these are the voices of the three last Chiefs of Staff, what about the incumbent, who cannot speak out as openly as they? Has this apple fallen further from the tree?
Until three days ago, the generals could entertain the opinion that the experiment was succeeding. The misery in the Gaza Strip had reached its climax. Hundreds of thousands were threatened by actual hunger. The chief of UNRWA warned of an impending human catastrophe. Only the rich could still drive a car, heat their homes and eat their fill. The world stood by and wagged its collective tongue. The leaders of the Arab states voiced empty phrases of sympathy without raising a finger.
Barak, who has mathematical abilities, could calculate when the population would finally collapse.
AND THEN something happened that none of them foresaw, in spite of the fact that it was the most foreseeable event on earth.
When one puts a million and a half people in a pressure cooker and keeps turning up the heat, it will explode. That is what happened at the Gaza-Egypt border.
At first there was a small explosion. A crowd stormed the gate, Egyptian policemen opened live fire, dozens were wounded. That was a warning.
The next day came the big attack. Palestinian fighters blew up the wall in many places. Hundreds of thousands broke out into Egyptian territory and took a deep breath. The blockade was broken.
Even before that, Mubarak was in an impossible situation. Hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion Muslims, saw how the Israeli army had closed the Gaza strip off on three sides: the North, the East and the sea. The fourth side of the blockade was provided by the Egyptian army.
The Egyptian president, who claims the leadership of the entire Arab world, was seen as a collaborator with an inhuman operation conducted by a cruel enemy in order to gain the favor (and the money) of the Americans. His internal enemies, the Muslim Brothers, exploited the situation to debase him in the eyes of his own people.
It is doubtful if Mubarak could have persisted in this position. But the Palestinian masses relieved him of the need to make a decision. They decided for him. They broke out like a tsunami wave. Now he has to decide whether to succumb to the Israeli demand to re-impose the blockade on his Arab brothers.
And what about Barak's experiment? What's the next step? The options are few:
(a) To re-occupy Gaza. The army does not like the idea. It understands that this would expose thousands of soldiers to a cruel guerilla war, which would be unlike any intifada before.
(b) To tighten the blockade again and exert extreme pressure on Mubarak, including the use of Israeli influence on the US Congess to deprive him of the billions he gets every year for his services.
(c) To turn the curse into a blessing, by handing the Strip over to Mubarak, pretending that this was Barak's hidden aim all along. Egypt would have to safeguard Israel's security, prevent the launching of Qassams and expose its own soldiers to a Palestinian guerilla war - when it thought it was rid of the burden of this poor and barren area, and after the infrastructure there has been destroyed by the Israeli occupation. Probably Mubarak will say: Very kind of you, but no thanks.
The brutal blockade was a war crime. And worse: it was a stupid blunder.
By Uri Avnery
26/01/08 "ICH" -- - IT LOOKED like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.
It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place.
The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.
That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.
ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended: It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!
Months ago, the two Ehuds - Barak and Olmert - imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it. Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more, so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip. Last week they made the blockade absolute - no food, no medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity - incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.
Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning. Apart from that, the blockade remained total.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.
THE REASON given for the starving and freezing of one and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of 365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town of Sderot and the adjoining villages.
That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise have spoken out against a collective punishment that is, undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.
A clear picture is presented to the world: the Hamas terror regime in Gaza launches missiles at innocent Israeli civilians. No government in the world can tolerate the bombardment of its citizens from across the border. The Israeli military has not found a military answer to the Qassam missiles. Therefore there is no other way than to exert such strong pressure on the Gaza population as to make them rise up against Hamas and compel them to stop the missiles.
The day the Gaza electricity works stopped operating, our military correspondents were overjoyed: only two Qassams were launched from the Strip. So it works! Ehud Barak is a genius!
But the day after, 17 Qassams landed, and the joy evaporated. Politicians and generals were (literally) out of their minds: one politician proposed to "act crazier than them", another proposed to "shell Gaza's urban area indiscriminately for every Qassam launched", a famous professor (who is a little bit deranged) proposed the exercise of "ultimate evil".
The government scenario was a repeat of Lebanon War II (the report about which is due to be published in a few days). Then: Hizbullah captured two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border, now: Hamas fired on towns and villages on the Israeli side of the border. Then: the government decide in haste to start a war, now: the government decided in haste to impose a total blockade. Then: the government ordered the massive bombing of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hizbullah, now: the government decided to cause massive suffering of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hamas.
The results were the same in both cases: the Lebanese population did not rise up against Hizbullah, but on the contrary, people of all religious communities united behind the Shiite organization. Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the entire Arab world. And now: the population unites behind Hamas and accuses Mahmoud Abbas of cooperation with the enemy. A mother who has no food for her children does not curse Ismail Haniyeh, she curses Olmert, Abbas and Mubarak.
SO WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.
What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.
Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.
A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.
Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?
Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.
Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.
In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence.
IT HAS been said before that it is dangerous to write satire in our country - too often the satire becomes reality. Some readers may recall a satirical article I wrote months ago. In it I described the situation in Gaza as a scientific experiment designed to find out how far one can go, in starving a civilian population and turning their lives into hell, before they raise their hands in surrender.
This week, the satire has become official policy. Respected commentators declared explicitly that Ehud Barak and the army chiefs are working on the principle of "trial and error" and change their methods daily according to results. They stop the fuel to Gaza, observe how this works and backtrack when the international reaction is too negative. They stop the delivery of medicines, see how it works, etc. The scientific aim justifies the means.
The man in charge of the experiment is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a man of many ideas and few scruples, a man whose whole turn of mind is basically inhuman. He is now, perhaps, the most dangerous person in Israel, more dangerous than Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu, dangerous to the very existence of Israel in the long run.
The man in charge of execution is the Chief of Staff. This week we had the chance of hearing speeches by two of his predecessors, generals Moshe Ya'alon and Shaul Mofaz, in a forum with inflated intellectual pretensions. Both were discovered to have views that place them somewhere between the extreme Right and the ultra-Right. Both have a frighteningly primitive mind. There is no need to waste a word about the moral and intellectual qualities of their immediate successor, Dan Halutz. If these are the voices of the three last Chiefs of Staff, what about the incumbent, who cannot speak out as openly as they? Has this apple fallen further from the tree?
Until three days ago, the generals could entertain the opinion that the experiment was succeeding. The misery in the Gaza Strip had reached its climax. Hundreds of thousands were threatened by actual hunger. The chief of UNRWA warned of an impending human catastrophe. Only the rich could still drive a car, heat their homes and eat their fill. The world stood by and wagged its collective tongue. The leaders of the Arab states voiced empty phrases of sympathy without raising a finger.
Barak, who has mathematical abilities, could calculate when the population would finally collapse.
AND THEN something happened that none of them foresaw, in spite of the fact that it was the most foreseeable event on earth.
When one puts a million and a half people in a pressure cooker and keeps turning up the heat, it will explode. That is what happened at the Gaza-Egypt border.
At first there was a small explosion. A crowd stormed the gate, Egyptian policemen opened live fire, dozens were wounded. That was a warning.
The next day came the big attack. Palestinian fighters blew up the wall in many places. Hundreds of thousands broke out into Egyptian territory and took a deep breath. The blockade was broken.
Even before that, Mubarak was in an impossible situation. Hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion Muslims, saw how the Israeli army had closed the Gaza strip off on three sides: the North, the East and the sea. The fourth side of the blockade was provided by the Egyptian army.
The Egyptian president, who claims the leadership of the entire Arab world, was seen as a collaborator with an inhuman operation conducted by a cruel enemy in order to gain the favor (and the money) of the Americans. His internal enemies, the Muslim Brothers, exploited the situation to debase him in the eyes of his own people.
It is doubtful if Mubarak could have persisted in this position. But the Palestinian masses relieved him of the need to make a decision. They decided for him. They broke out like a tsunami wave. Now he has to decide whether to succumb to the Israeli demand to re-impose the blockade on his Arab brothers.
And what about Barak's experiment? What's the next step? The options are few:
(a) To re-occupy Gaza. The army does not like the idea. It understands that this would expose thousands of soldiers to a cruel guerilla war, which would be unlike any intifada before.
(b) To tighten the blockade again and exert extreme pressure on Mubarak, including the use of Israeli influence on the US Congess to deprive him of the billions he gets every year for his services.
(c) To turn the curse into a blessing, by handing the Strip over to Mubarak, pretending that this was Barak's hidden aim all along. Egypt would have to safeguard Israel's security, prevent the launching of Qassams and expose its own soldiers to a Palestinian guerilla war - when it thought it was rid of the burden of this poor and barren area, and after the infrastructure there has been destroyed by the Israeli occupation. Probably Mubarak will say: Very kind of you, but no thanks.
The brutal blockade was a war crime. And worse: it was a stupid blunder.
9/11 Blacklist
9/11 Blacklist: Using Our Dollars for Change
CasaZaza - 911Blacklist.org
In the six years since the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, the mainstream media in America has largely been a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. All of the major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and others had until recently, been silently complicit in the cover-up of the events of that day, the un-Constitutional wars that would follow, and the steady erosion of our Constitutionally protected rights.
www.PEJ.org
When the “9-11 Truth” community grew to the point that it could no longer be ignored, these same networks that had ignored the issue for so long began to attack individuals and groups of individuals who were seeking answers to the lingering questions which still remain about 9-11. As the success of various truth movements continues to broaden, these attacks have now escalated to include Peace activists, monetary reform activists, and now even supporters of Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Recent attacks have suggested that the 9-11 movement, Peace activists, and Ron Paul supporters are terrorists, and some in the media have implied that we should be silenced.
THEREFORE: We intend to compile a comprehensive Black List of the advertisers who support this anti-American programming and urge concerned parties to boycott these products and services until the product advertisements are pulled.
We take these attacks very seriously and regard them as a frontal assault on our freedom and liberty as Americans. The garbage coming from the talking heads makes a mockery of the First Amendment to the Constitution and MUST NOT go unopposed. We must take a stand against this kind of yellow journalism and we think we have a way to make these networks feel our presence. All network television and radio are driven by advertising dollars. We can get the networks attention by targeting their sponsors, and therefore, have an impact on their advertising revenues. The most effective way of doing this is to boycott the products and services of the advertisers which choose to advertise on these various networks. There is strength in numbers and we need to make ourselves heard by hitting them where it hurts, in the pocket-book. This site is dedicated to beginning that process. 911Blacklist.org
On the grand chessboard of the power elite in this world, we may only represent insignificant entities insofar as we are concerned as individuals. However, when considered as a group, we have the potential for considerable influence. Our strength in numbers only serves our cause to the detriment when we blindly live our lives as an economic engine for the ruling class - it is our ignorance that works against us. Our strength is the realization of millions of independent thinkers who can influence the cause of freedom by affecting change where we ourselves hold the most power - as in boycotts of key industries and products.
There is another philosophical aspect to this direction of thought - there is no point in fighting fear and violence with the same methods used by those set against you - in which case you risk becoming that which you oppose. When we are illuminated with the light of truth and understanding, we can then use that power to influence the course of events and effect change. How long could they last if a majority of the people started to boycott key industries and products the corporations are dependent upon for rising profits?
Too often people feel, can feel helpless against the giant machine of corporatism. 911 Blacklist gives us the opportunity and the mechanism by which we can take back control. I urge everyone to get involved with this project - indeed, the only way it can work is if a sufficient number of people realize the power we hold collectively.
CasaZaza
CasaZaza - 911Blacklist.org
In the six years since the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, the mainstream media in America has largely been a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. All of the major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and others had until recently, been silently complicit in the cover-up of the events of that day, the un-Constitutional wars that would follow, and the steady erosion of our Constitutionally protected rights.
www.PEJ.org
When the “9-11 Truth” community grew to the point that it could no longer be ignored, these same networks that had ignored the issue for so long began to attack individuals and groups of individuals who were seeking answers to the lingering questions which still remain about 9-11. As the success of various truth movements continues to broaden, these attacks have now escalated to include Peace activists, monetary reform activists, and now even supporters of Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Recent attacks have suggested that the 9-11 movement, Peace activists, and Ron Paul supporters are terrorists, and some in the media have implied that we should be silenced.
THEREFORE: We intend to compile a comprehensive Black List of the advertisers who support this anti-American programming and urge concerned parties to boycott these products and services until the product advertisements are pulled.
We take these attacks very seriously and regard them as a frontal assault on our freedom and liberty as Americans. The garbage coming from the talking heads makes a mockery of the First Amendment to the Constitution and MUST NOT go unopposed. We must take a stand against this kind of yellow journalism and we think we have a way to make these networks feel our presence. All network television and radio are driven by advertising dollars. We can get the networks attention by targeting their sponsors, and therefore, have an impact on their advertising revenues. The most effective way of doing this is to boycott the products and services of the advertisers which choose to advertise on these various networks. There is strength in numbers and we need to make ourselves heard by hitting them where it hurts, in the pocket-book. This site is dedicated to beginning that process. 911Blacklist.org
On the grand chessboard of the power elite in this world, we may only represent insignificant entities insofar as we are concerned as individuals. However, when considered as a group, we have the potential for considerable influence. Our strength in numbers only serves our cause to the detriment when we blindly live our lives as an economic engine for the ruling class - it is our ignorance that works against us. Our strength is the realization of millions of independent thinkers who can influence the cause of freedom by affecting change where we ourselves hold the most power - as in boycotts of key industries and products.
There is another philosophical aspect to this direction of thought - there is no point in fighting fear and violence with the same methods used by those set against you - in which case you risk becoming that which you oppose. When we are illuminated with the light of truth and understanding, we can then use that power to influence the course of events and effect change. How long could they last if a majority of the people started to boycott key industries and products the corporations are dependent upon for rising profits?
Too often people feel, can feel helpless against the giant machine of corporatism. 911 Blacklist gives us the opportunity and the mechanism by which we can take back control. I urge everyone to get involved with this project - indeed, the only way it can work is if a sufficient number of people realize the power we hold collectively.
CasaZaza
Shopping Our Way to Destruction
F.Y.I.
Shopping our way to safety. Listening to the conventional wisdom about the need for economic stimulus to avoid recession you never get the big picture:
Gail the Actuary points out that debt gets harder to pay back after the peak
http://www.energybulletin.net/39008.html
Kunstler of course has been predicting the end of the sprawl housing bubble for several years.
And if us NA consumers consume 32 times what the average person consumes in the developing world (Diamond) and we're at peak everything now, where our rate of use, pop X footprint, means increasingly less of everything in our future, how profoundly unethical is it to add $145 billion in debt just to get America spending so that we avoid the bid R for a couple of more quarters - spending on becoming more obese, more addicted to toys, travel and stupid financial scams like rec homes.
What kind of democracy do we have given this appalling lack of vision and leadership - I don't hear Layton or May, Obama or Clinton leading in educating people about the stupidity of this short termism, this myopia, this Church of Business need for spending billions of our kids future to save businesses and business people from their foolishness, from their overreach, from their bubbles.
And all those in forest dependent towns now facing no mill jobs for maybe forever are just the tip of the iceberg for the meltdown that's coming.
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&Itemid=1
Collapse: Walmart and Waiting for the Shoe to Drop
Written by Alice Friedemann
As I screwed in yet another fluorescent light bulb that didn't work, I thought about what else I could do to put my finger in the dike of the "Limits to Growth." I can almost hear ecosystems groan as they nearly burst from the weight of heavy metals, pavement, and drought.
Jared Diamond, in "Collapse," believes ecology plays a major role in the breakdown of civilizations.
But Jonathan Friedman, at Lund University in Sweden (1), counters that Diamond has it backwards. The social logic of civilization makes limits opaque to its citizens, who can't even see there are limits imposed by natural resources, so they don't plan ahead. A good example is not preparing for peak oil thirty years ahead of time, as Robert Hirsch points out ought to be done, in the study he headed for the U.S. Dept. of Energy, "Peaking of World Oil Production." (2)
This blindness is evident in the Presidential campaign as well, where none of the candidates is running on a platform of the need to reform industrial agriculture, drastically reduce our consumption of goods and energy, or slow down development and population growth.
Friedman says this disconnect with reality is most powerfully expressed by Kafka, where the characters are trapped in ways of seeing the world they can't see beyond. At a time when most of the world's problems are due to the depletion and destruction of the ecosystems that keep us alive, politicians and people in general continue to see the world through political and economic filters.
Even those of us awake to the world being one big cockroach about to get smashed by energy limits, are trapped likes ants in the amber of the system.
What's ridiculous is that we, personally, are supposed to save the world, not collective action. We're on our own, without government and corporate help. PG&E, the northern California utility that serves five million customers, is encouraging us to buy long-lasting fluorescent light bulbs. It sounds like a bad joke -- how many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb to prevent The Collapse of Civilization As We Know It?
Andrew Szasz, in his new book "Shopping Our Way to Safety," says that our government and regulatory agencies have been so weakened, we've lost hope in collective action. Szasz finds that chilling -- we can't shop our way out of our problems, no matter how many green goods we buy, and thinking that we can gives us less urgency to fight for meaningful reform.
Buying organic is only possible for people who can afford to pay extra, and doesn't do much to change the way food is grown. Agriculture should be at the top of the reform list, because it does the most damage. The way we grow food destroys topsoil, depletes aquifers and fossil fuels, eutrophies water, and poisons land and water with petrochemicals.
As we all know, shopping is what got us into this fix to begin with. Yet we continue to throw hungry devices that suck ever more electric power into the System, like primitives sacrificing goats to the Gods, unable to stop because the financial structure depends on endless growth. The Beast must not only be fed, but mended as it ages and falls apart, its sagging bridges, pitted roads, rusting fresh water pipelines, and aging dams perpetually patched.
Walmart executives must have realized they had to cut back on energy to make profits, and they're trying to turn this to their advantage by Greening their image, hoping to win back the millions of affluent customers who've been boycotting them for years.
On the one hand, it's great that WalMart has decided to green up their image. We need corporations and governments to take the lead in making a transition, since they're the institutions using most of the energy and natural resources.
But as many have pointed out, how can Walmart even be slightly green? They're the main corporation that turned China into a cesspool of coal fumes, sewage, and chemicals to produce throwaway goods, whipping the gyre of consumption into the global tornado that's devoured the flesh of the earth and poured our trees, fish, clean water, topsoil, oil, and metal into cheap goods. They're at the center of the vortex, keeping it spinning, the essence of the delusion we live in. How on earth can they become Green?
Those helping with the WalMart makeover point out that since Walmart is such a large part of the problem, Greening WalMart will have more impact than changing light bulbs. They want to do something, even if in the end, it doesn't do much to avert collapse.
As I see the giant foot overhead drawing nearer, and knowing that my own feeble attempts to hold it at bay are pointless, I can't disagree. We all do what we can, what we think will help, if only to forget we're cockroaches for a while.
* * * * *
Alice Friedemann, January 20, 2008
Alice has been part of the peak oil community since discussions began on energyresources listserve, and has attended many ASPO conferences. She’s spoken at U. C. Berkeley on biofuels and published at culturechange, energybulletin, energypulse, theoildrum, etc. She was a senior-level systems architect and engineer for 25 years in health care, banking, and transportation. Her website is energyskeptic.com
* * * * *
(1) Robert Costanza, et. al. 2007. "Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth". MIT Press.
(2) Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, Robert L. Hirsch, SAIC:
projectcensored.org
Shopping our way to safety. Listening to the conventional wisdom about the need for economic stimulus to avoid recession you never get the big picture:
Gail the Actuary points out that debt gets harder to pay back after the peak
http://www.energybulletin.net/39008.html
Kunstler of course has been predicting the end of the sprawl housing bubble for several years.
And if us NA consumers consume 32 times what the average person consumes in the developing world (Diamond) and we're at peak everything now, where our rate of use, pop X footprint, means increasingly less of everything in our future, how profoundly unethical is it to add $145 billion in debt just to get America spending so that we avoid the bid R for a couple of more quarters - spending on becoming more obese, more addicted to toys, travel and stupid financial scams like rec homes.
What kind of democracy do we have given this appalling lack of vision and leadership - I don't hear Layton or May, Obama or Clinton leading in educating people about the stupidity of this short termism, this myopia, this Church of Business need for spending billions of our kids future to save businesses and business people from their foolishness, from their overreach, from their bubbles.
And all those in forest dependent towns now facing no mill jobs for maybe forever are just the tip of the iceberg for the meltdown that's coming.
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&Itemid=1
Collapse: Walmart and Waiting for the Shoe to Drop
Written by Alice Friedemann
As I screwed in yet another fluorescent light bulb that didn't work, I thought about what else I could do to put my finger in the dike of the "Limits to Growth." I can almost hear ecosystems groan as they nearly burst from the weight of heavy metals, pavement, and drought.
Jared Diamond, in "Collapse," believes ecology plays a major role in the breakdown of civilizations.
But Jonathan Friedman, at Lund University in Sweden (1), counters that Diamond has it backwards. The social logic of civilization makes limits opaque to its citizens, who can't even see there are limits imposed by natural resources, so they don't plan ahead. A good example is not preparing for peak oil thirty years ahead of time, as Robert Hirsch points out ought to be done, in the study he headed for the U.S. Dept. of Energy, "Peaking of World Oil Production." (2)
This blindness is evident in the Presidential campaign as well, where none of the candidates is running on a platform of the need to reform industrial agriculture, drastically reduce our consumption of goods and energy, or slow down development and population growth.
Friedman says this disconnect with reality is most powerfully expressed by Kafka, where the characters are trapped in ways of seeing the world they can't see beyond. At a time when most of the world's problems are due to the depletion and destruction of the ecosystems that keep us alive, politicians and people in general continue to see the world through political and economic filters.
Even those of us awake to the world being one big cockroach about to get smashed by energy limits, are trapped likes ants in the amber of the system.
What's ridiculous is that we, personally, are supposed to save the world, not collective action. We're on our own, without government and corporate help. PG&E, the northern California utility that serves five million customers, is encouraging us to buy long-lasting fluorescent light bulbs. It sounds like a bad joke -- how many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb to prevent The Collapse of Civilization As We Know It?
Andrew Szasz, in his new book "Shopping Our Way to Safety," says that our government and regulatory agencies have been so weakened, we've lost hope in collective action. Szasz finds that chilling -- we can't shop our way out of our problems, no matter how many green goods we buy, and thinking that we can gives us less urgency to fight for meaningful reform.
Buying organic is only possible for people who can afford to pay extra, and doesn't do much to change the way food is grown. Agriculture should be at the top of the reform list, because it does the most damage. The way we grow food destroys topsoil, depletes aquifers and fossil fuels, eutrophies water, and poisons land and water with petrochemicals.
As we all know, shopping is what got us into this fix to begin with. Yet we continue to throw hungry devices that suck ever more electric power into the System, like primitives sacrificing goats to the Gods, unable to stop because the financial structure depends on endless growth. The Beast must not only be fed, but mended as it ages and falls apart, its sagging bridges, pitted roads, rusting fresh water pipelines, and aging dams perpetually patched.
Walmart executives must have realized they had to cut back on energy to make profits, and they're trying to turn this to their advantage by Greening their image, hoping to win back the millions of affluent customers who've been boycotting them for years.
On the one hand, it's great that WalMart has decided to green up their image. We need corporations and governments to take the lead in making a transition, since they're the institutions using most of the energy and natural resources.
But as many have pointed out, how can Walmart even be slightly green? They're the main corporation that turned China into a cesspool of coal fumes, sewage, and chemicals to produce throwaway goods, whipping the gyre of consumption into the global tornado that's devoured the flesh of the earth and poured our trees, fish, clean water, topsoil, oil, and metal into cheap goods. They're at the center of the vortex, keeping it spinning, the essence of the delusion we live in. How on earth can they become Green?
Those helping with the WalMart makeover point out that since Walmart is such a large part of the problem, Greening WalMart will have more impact than changing light bulbs. They want to do something, even if in the end, it doesn't do much to avert collapse.
As I see the giant foot overhead drawing nearer, and knowing that my own feeble attempts to hold it at bay are pointless, I can't disagree. We all do what we can, what we think will help, if only to forget we're cockroaches for a while.
* * * * *
Alice Friedemann, January 20, 2008
Alice has been part of the peak oil community since discussions began on energyresources listserve, and has attended many ASPO conferences. She’s spoken at U. C. Berkeley on biofuels and published at culturechange, energybulletin, energypulse, theoildrum, etc. She was a senior-level systems architect and engineer for 25 years in health care, banking, and transportation. Her website is energyskeptic.com
* * * * *
(1) Robert Costanza, et. al. 2007. "Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth". MIT Press.
(2) Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, Robert L. Hirsch, SAIC:
projectcensored.org
For-Profit Health Care: More than one way to scan a CAT
by Mickey Z.
Since just about every refrigerator automatically comes with a meat drawer, butter shelf, and egg rack, it should come as no surprise that most homes are predictably equipped with a medicine chest. Taking such inevitability further along its natural progression, those in the health care…I mean, disease care field fully expect to be regularly treating patients with a fair amount of body fat.
Case in point: About six years ago, my wife Michele began experiencing severe abdominal discomfort—in the lower right quadrant. Ever cautious about subjecting herself to the demoralizing disease care labyrinth, she was in no hurry to visit our local emergency room. However, when the pain became too much to ignore, the emergency room is precisely where we ended up…at nearly midnight.
A male complaining of pain in the lower right abdomen would’ve garnered an almost immediate diagnosis of appendicitis. For women, it requires further testing. This reality became particularly germane when we realized that the Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan technician was not on duty so late at night and the attending physician could not prescribe a painkiller until a diagnosis was made (which, of course, required the CAT Scan technician). Not exactly Grey’s Anatomy or ER, huh?
Roughly twelve agonizing hours later, a scan was finally performed…but shortly afterwards, a doctor came to speak with me. It seems the test results were, shall we say, inconclusive.
“Your wife is too thin,” the man in the white coat told me. “Her body fat is so low that we can’t get the contrast we need on the scan.” Just perfect, I thought to myself. It’s absolutely ideal that a defective system like this is designed to deal specifically with those who have bought into the standard American diet/lifestyle.
Michele’s family had arrived by then and thought it was amusing to remark that the body fat/contrast conundrum proved that she needed to change her vegan eating habits. After what turned out to be seventeen hours of waiting in misery until finally being scheduled for an appendectomy, Michele was clearly in no mood to laugh.
I’ll tell you what else isn’t comical about the disease care cartels: nutrition training at America’s medical schools. An April 2006 study, published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that “the amount of nutrition education in medical schools remains inadequate” and 60 percent of medical schools in the United States are not meeting minimum recommendations for their students’ nutrition education. Only 32 of the 106 schools surveyed (30% percent) even required a separate nutrition course. Thus, even the most well-meaning and diligent physician is often ill equipped to offer legitimate help within the structure he or she was trained in.
“Doctors typically aren't given much training in nutrition and some so-called nutrition experts are not well qualified in that field,” says Neal Pinckney, M.D., author of The Healthy Heart Handbook. “A large sample of physicians was asked how much training they got in nutrition in medical school. The average was less than three hours, with many having only one hour or less. That's out of nearly 3,500 hours of medical training. The truth is that doctors may get their nutrition information from the same newspapers and TV programs we do, and unless they have taken extra training in nutrition, they may not know much more about nutrition than the rest of us.”
No wonder hospital food is so, uh, frightening. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reviewed hospital menus in 2005 and found that “on many days at some hospitals, patients and visitors cannot find a low-fat, cholesterol-free entree in the main cafeteria or restaurant. Fewer than one-third of hospitals surveyed offered either a daily salad bar or a daily low-fat vegetarian entree” (17 percent of the responding hospitals had a fast-food establishment on the premises). When asked for their “healthiest entree” recipe, 62 percent of these offerings derived more than 30 percent of calories from fat, and a few derived more than 50 percent of calories from fat.
Hey, I guess they’re just making sure those expensive CAT Scans can find contrast.
Mickey Z. is the author of the forthcoming novel, CPR for Dummies (Raw Dog Screaming Press. He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net
Since just about every refrigerator automatically comes with a meat drawer, butter shelf, and egg rack, it should come as no surprise that most homes are predictably equipped with a medicine chest. Taking such inevitability further along its natural progression, those in the health care…I mean, disease care field fully expect to be regularly treating patients with a fair amount of body fat.
Case in point: About six years ago, my wife Michele began experiencing severe abdominal discomfort—in the lower right quadrant. Ever cautious about subjecting herself to the demoralizing disease care labyrinth, she was in no hurry to visit our local emergency room. However, when the pain became too much to ignore, the emergency room is precisely where we ended up…at nearly midnight.
A male complaining of pain in the lower right abdomen would’ve garnered an almost immediate diagnosis of appendicitis. For women, it requires further testing. This reality became particularly germane when we realized that the Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan technician was not on duty so late at night and the attending physician could not prescribe a painkiller until a diagnosis was made (which, of course, required the CAT Scan technician). Not exactly Grey’s Anatomy or ER, huh?
Roughly twelve agonizing hours later, a scan was finally performed…but shortly afterwards, a doctor came to speak with me. It seems the test results were, shall we say, inconclusive.
“Your wife is too thin,” the man in the white coat told me. “Her body fat is so low that we can’t get the contrast we need on the scan.” Just perfect, I thought to myself. It’s absolutely ideal that a defective system like this is designed to deal specifically with those who have bought into the standard American diet/lifestyle.
Michele’s family had arrived by then and thought it was amusing to remark that the body fat/contrast conundrum proved that she needed to change her vegan eating habits. After what turned out to be seventeen hours of waiting in misery until finally being scheduled for an appendectomy, Michele was clearly in no mood to laugh.
I’ll tell you what else isn’t comical about the disease care cartels: nutrition training at America’s medical schools. An April 2006 study, published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that “the amount of nutrition education in medical schools remains inadequate” and 60 percent of medical schools in the United States are not meeting minimum recommendations for their students’ nutrition education. Only 32 of the 106 schools surveyed (30% percent) even required a separate nutrition course. Thus, even the most well-meaning and diligent physician is often ill equipped to offer legitimate help within the structure he or she was trained in.
“Doctors typically aren't given much training in nutrition and some so-called nutrition experts are not well qualified in that field,” says Neal Pinckney, M.D., author of The Healthy Heart Handbook. “A large sample of physicians was asked how much training they got in nutrition in medical school. The average was less than three hours, with many having only one hour or less. That's out of nearly 3,500 hours of medical training. The truth is that doctors may get their nutrition information from the same newspapers and TV programs we do, and unless they have taken extra training in nutrition, they may not know much more about nutrition than the rest of us.”
No wonder hospital food is so, uh, frightening. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reviewed hospital menus in 2005 and found that “on many days at some hospitals, patients and visitors cannot find a low-fat, cholesterol-free entree in the main cafeteria or restaurant. Fewer than one-third of hospitals surveyed offered either a daily salad bar or a daily low-fat vegetarian entree” (17 percent of the responding hospitals had a fast-food establishment on the premises). When asked for their “healthiest entree” recipe, 62 percent of these offerings derived more than 30 percent of calories from fat, and a few derived more than 50 percent of calories from fat.
Hey, I guess they’re just making sure those expensive CAT Scans can find contrast.
Mickey Z. is the author of the forthcoming novel, CPR for Dummies (Raw Dog Screaming Press. He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net
Thursday, January 24, 2008
UN: Canada Alone Votes Down Gaza Relief Resolution
UNHRC slams Israel's actions in Gaza
By TOVAH LAZAROFF
The United Nations Human Rights Council condemned Israel for the 15th time in less than two years on Thursday. Only one other nation, Myanmar (ex-Burma), has been condemned by the council in that time.
Palestinians return with groceries from Egypt to the Gaza Strip at Rafah border crossing.
Photo: AP
"We have witnessed another round of the circus," Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Yitzhak Levanon told The Jerusalem Post by telephone following the vote held during a special session on Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "I think that this is a farce," Levanon said.
Both Israel and the United States boycotted the proceedings, which ended with a call for Israel to lift its siege of Gaza but made no mention of the Palestinian rocket attacks on communities in the western Negev.
With the support of 30 out of 47 countries, the council released a statement calling on Israel to stop its military operations in Gaza and to open the Strip's borders to allow the entry of food, fuel and medicine.
RELATED
Rockets not mentioned in UNSC draft
Israeli human rights groups back campaign calling to end Gaza siege
It asked the international community to insure that Israel stop its actions in Gaza, which it referred to as "collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians that leads to disastrous humanitarian and environmental consequences."
Canada was the only country to vote against the resolution put forward by Syria and Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Fifteen countries, including seven from the EU, abstained. Gabon's representatives absented themselves from the vote.
Canada's representative, Terry Cormier, said his country was concerned by both the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza and the attacks against Israelis.
"Unfortunately, neither this resolution nor the current session addressed the role of both parties. It was regretful that the current draft resolution did not condemn the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians," Cormier said.
The EU ambassadors said they abstained because they, too, were concerned by the one-sided nature of the resolution.
"We believe that this council should deplore the fact that innocent civilians on both sides are suffering," Slovenian Ambassador Andrej Logar said on behalf of the seven EU states on the council.
Still, Muriel Berset Kohen, who represents the non-EU-member Switzerland, which also abstained, told the council that Israeli actions "went against international law."
Syria's representative, Faysal Khabbaz Hamoui, said he had called the session to stop the "brutal aggression" of the Israeli people. The IDF, he said, had killed 90 civilians and the border closures had turned Gaza into a "huge prison of 1.4 million people."
The Palestinian representative in Geneva said the resolution was intended to highlight abuses committed by Israel.
"We recognize Israel, but we are against what Israel is practicing against our people," Muhammad Abu Koash told journalists after the meeting.
Earlier, he told the council that "if Jewish cities were exposed to such... annihilation it would have prompted immediate international" action.
Levanon told the Post he was proud that Israel had for the first time boycotted the council session. He said he had made it clear he was absent in protest against the council's mistreatment of Israel.
If the council continues in this way, he warned, "it will suffer the same fate" as the UN Human Rights Commission, which was replaced by the council in June 2006.
The commission was also criticized for singling out Israel.
Speaking at the IDC's Herzliya Conference in Israel earlier this week, Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen harshly criticized the actions of the Human Rights Council actions against Israel.
"At the United Nations, censuring Israel has become something of a habit, while Hamas's terror is referred to in coded language or not at all. The Netherlands believes the record should be set straight, both in New York and at the Human Rights Council in Geneva," Verhagen said.
At a press conference in Geneva on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also rebuked the council when asked about its special session on Gaza.
"I appreciate that the council is looking in depth into this particular situation. And it is rightly doing so. I would also appreciate it if the council will be looking with the same level of attention and urgency at all other matters around the world. There are still many areas where human rights are abused and not properly protected," he said.
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, said the only other country to be condemned by the council was Myanmar, and that happened only once.
The latest vote against Israel by the council "is business as usual," Neuer told the Post.
AP contributed to this report.
By TOVAH LAZAROFF
The United Nations Human Rights Council condemned Israel for the 15th time in less than two years on Thursday. Only one other nation, Myanmar (ex-Burma), has been condemned by the council in that time.
Palestinians return with groceries from Egypt to the Gaza Strip at Rafah border crossing.
Photo: AP
"We have witnessed another round of the circus," Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Yitzhak Levanon told The Jerusalem Post by telephone following the vote held during a special session on Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "I think that this is a farce," Levanon said.
Both Israel and the United States boycotted the proceedings, which ended with a call for Israel to lift its siege of Gaza but made no mention of the Palestinian rocket attacks on communities in the western Negev.
With the support of 30 out of 47 countries, the council released a statement calling on Israel to stop its military operations in Gaza and to open the Strip's borders to allow the entry of food, fuel and medicine.
RELATED
Rockets not mentioned in UNSC draft
Israeli human rights groups back campaign calling to end Gaza siege
It asked the international community to insure that Israel stop its actions in Gaza, which it referred to as "collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians that leads to disastrous humanitarian and environmental consequences."
Canada was the only country to vote against the resolution put forward by Syria and Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Fifteen countries, including seven from the EU, abstained. Gabon's representatives absented themselves from the vote.
Canada's representative, Terry Cormier, said his country was concerned by both the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza and the attacks against Israelis.
"Unfortunately, neither this resolution nor the current session addressed the role of both parties. It was regretful that the current draft resolution did not condemn the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians," Cormier said.
The EU ambassadors said they abstained because they, too, were concerned by the one-sided nature of the resolution.
"We believe that this council should deplore the fact that innocent civilians on both sides are suffering," Slovenian Ambassador Andrej Logar said on behalf of the seven EU states on the council.
Still, Muriel Berset Kohen, who represents the non-EU-member Switzerland, which also abstained, told the council that Israeli actions "went against international law."
Syria's representative, Faysal Khabbaz Hamoui, said he had called the session to stop the "brutal aggression" of the Israeli people. The IDF, he said, had killed 90 civilians and the border closures had turned Gaza into a "huge prison of 1.4 million people."
The Palestinian representative in Geneva said the resolution was intended to highlight abuses committed by Israel.
"We recognize Israel, but we are against what Israel is practicing against our people," Muhammad Abu Koash told journalists after the meeting.
Earlier, he told the council that "if Jewish cities were exposed to such... annihilation it would have prompted immediate international" action.
Levanon told the Post he was proud that Israel had for the first time boycotted the council session. He said he had made it clear he was absent in protest against the council's mistreatment of Israel.
If the council continues in this way, he warned, "it will suffer the same fate" as the UN Human Rights Commission, which was replaced by the council in June 2006.
The commission was also criticized for singling out Israel.
Speaking at the IDC's Herzliya Conference in Israel earlier this week, Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen harshly criticized the actions of the Human Rights Council actions against Israel.
"At the United Nations, censuring Israel has become something of a habit, while Hamas's terror is referred to in coded language or not at all. The Netherlands believes the record should be set straight, both in New York and at the Human Rights Council in Geneva," Verhagen said.
At a press conference in Geneva on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also rebuked the council when asked about its special session on Gaza.
"I appreciate that the council is looking in depth into this particular situation. And it is rightly doing so. I would also appreciate it if the council will be looking with the same level of attention and urgency at all other matters around the world. There are still many areas where human rights are abused and not properly protected," he said.
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, said the only other country to be condemned by the council was Myanmar, and that happened only once.
The latest vote against Israel by the council "is business as usual," Neuer told the Post.
AP contributed to this report.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Ardoch Algonquin First Nation Vow to Block Proposed Uranium Mine
First Nations vow to occupy eastern Ont. site to block uranium mining
Keith Leslie, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Friday January 11th, 2008
TORONTO - Aboriginals in eastern Ontario warned Friday that they would ignore a court order and illegally occupy the site of a proposed uranium mine north of Kingston later this month unless the province calls a halt to the project.
The Ardoch Algonquin First Nation said it usually permits mining activities on its lands, but will not tolerate uranium exploration because of its impact on the environment and potential to adversely affect people's health.
"The destruction of the land, the consequence of a uranium mine being built, and the health effects will be devastating on our community," former Ardoch chief Robert Lovelace told a news conference at the legislature.
"We have taken a stand that there will be no uranium mine in that area."
The Ardoch First Nation is fighting Frontenac Ventures Corp., which has staked approximately 400 mineral claims covering more than 8,000 hectares of land, and successfully won a court injunction last October to prevent aboriginals from occupying the site.
Lovelace said he doesn't expect any agreement between the two sides before a court-ordered consultation process ends Jan. 28, so First Nations protesters will attempt to return to the site on that date to prevent any further activities by the mining company.
"We feel that our backs are against the wall," he said. "We do have legal rights, and a legal obligation under our own lands to protect our land and to protect our neighbours."
But the Ardoch First Nation opted out of a larger negotiating process involving other Ontario Algonquins and has no standing to object to the uranium exploration, Frontenac Ventures president and CEO George White said in an interview.
"This renegade group of Ardoch Indians, they want to take things into their own hands," White said. "If in fact Mr. Lovelace plans to reoccupy the property, that would be in direct contravention of a contempt of court order issued previously."
White said the Ardoch First Nation was trying to use public pressure on the government to try and halt the project instead of negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the company.
"By provocation and pressing and pressing and pressing the government, they think this issue may be resolved," he said. "The only way to resolve it is through the courts."
Lovelace released an open letter Friday to Premier Dalton McGuinty which warns the controversy could escalate into another tragedy similar to the fatal 1995 shooting of aboriginal protester Dudley George at Ipperwash Provincial Park.
"It is my hope and my prayer that no individual is harmed in finding a resolution to this situation."
He also accused the Liberals of ignoring the recommendations of the Ipperwash inquiry, saying the government has adopted a position of "civil indifference" towards First Nations despite its promise to use the report to forge a new, better relationship with aboriginal Ontarians.
"It's important for the premier of this province to recognize that the recommendations that were set down by Justice (Sydney) Linden to avoid these very same situations as happened at Ipperwash . . . need to be taken seriously," said Lovelace.
"The government of Ontario has simply decided on a strategy of civil indifference: simply stand back and hope that things don't take place and it's business as usual. Certainly, in our case, it has been business as usual (as it was before) the Ipperwash inquiry."
The Ipperwash inquiry report concluded judicial processes such as injunctions were not appropriate or desirable when dealing with aboriginal rights and should be used only as a last resort, he added.
Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle said the government wants to take a look at the Ardoch First Nation's proposal for a moratorium on exploration in the disputed area, but is still hoping for a negotiated resolution.
"We take very seriously our obligation to consult with aboriginal communities in relation to mining activities," Gravelle said.
"We are still optimistic that we can work our way through this. It's definitely a challenge, I won't argue that."
From Canada East online http://www.canadaeast.com/news/article/180442
Keith Leslie, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Friday January 11th, 2008
TORONTO - Aboriginals in eastern Ontario warned Friday that they would ignore a court order and illegally occupy the site of a proposed uranium mine north of Kingston later this month unless the province calls a halt to the project.
The Ardoch Algonquin First Nation said it usually permits mining activities on its lands, but will not tolerate uranium exploration because of its impact on the environment and potential to adversely affect people's health.
"The destruction of the land, the consequence of a uranium mine being built, and the health effects will be devastating on our community," former Ardoch chief Robert Lovelace told a news conference at the legislature.
"We have taken a stand that there will be no uranium mine in that area."
The Ardoch First Nation is fighting Frontenac Ventures Corp., which has staked approximately 400 mineral claims covering more than 8,000 hectares of land, and successfully won a court injunction last October to prevent aboriginals from occupying the site.
Lovelace said he doesn't expect any agreement between the two sides before a court-ordered consultation process ends Jan. 28, so First Nations protesters will attempt to return to the site on that date to prevent any further activities by the mining company.
"We feel that our backs are against the wall," he said. "We do have legal rights, and a legal obligation under our own lands to protect our land and to protect our neighbours."
But the Ardoch First Nation opted out of a larger negotiating process involving other Ontario Algonquins and has no standing to object to the uranium exploration, Frontenac Ventures president and CEO George White said in an interview.
"This renegade group of Ardoch Indians, they want to take things into their own hands," White said. "If in fact Mr. Lovelace plans to reoccupy the property, that would be in direct contravention of a contempt of court order issued previously."
White said the Ardoch First Nation was trying to use public pressure on the government to try and halt the project instead of negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the company.
"By provocation and pressing and pressing and pressing the government, they think this issue may be resolved," he said. "The only way to resolve it is through the courts."
Lovelace released an open letter Friday to Premier Dalton McGuinty which warns the controversy could escalate into another tragedy similar to the fatal 1995 shooting of aboriginal protester Dudley George at Ipperwash Provincial Park.
"It is my hope and my prayer that no individual is harmed in finding a resolution to this situation."
He also accused the Liberals of ignoring the recommendations of the Ipperwash inquiry, saying the government has adopted a position of "civil indifference" towards First Nations despite its promise to use the report to forge a new, better relationship with aboriginal Ontarians.
"It's important for the premier of this province to recognize that the recommendations that were set down by Justice (Sydney) Linden to avoid these very same situations as happened at Ipperwash . . . need to be taken seriously," said Lovelace.
"The government of Ontario has simply decided on a strategy of civil indifference: simply stand back and hope that things don't take place and it's business as usual. Certainly, in our case, it has been business as usual (as it was before) the Ipperwash inquiry."
The Ipperwash inquiry report concluded judicial processes such as injunctions were not appropriate or desirable when dealing with aboriginal rights and should be used only as a last resort, he added.
Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle said the government wants to take a look at the Ardoch First Nation's proposal for a moratorium on exploration in the disputed area, but is still hoping for a negotiated resolution.
"We take very seriously our obligation to consult with aboriginal communities in relation to mining activities," Gravelle said.
"We are still optimistic that we can work our way through this. It's definitely a challenge, I won't argue that."
From Canada East online http://www.canadaeast.com/news/article/180442
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