Bits and Pieces

Note:

There will be little posted for a bit. I have spent a good part of the day picking red currants and gooseberries, and being pricked by gooseberry bush thorns. There is little time or energy for much else since this is the time of year when the wildlife and I compete; they eat it or I make jam, jelly and wine. I am fascinated by watching all the wildlife, the smaller the better, even a toad basking in the shade near water. Tomorrow, there is work to do as I compete with chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons and birds out there feasting, but there is plenty for all of us. It is time to pick and freeze raspberries, make dill pickles, chow, salsa and a few other goodies to horde for the winter ahead. Isn't it a wonderful time of year? NJC




U.K. arrest key break in attacks John Steele and Fiona Govan; with files from MikeBlanchfield, July 28, 05, Daily Telegraph; with files from CanWest

[. . . . ] Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, was linked to an attempt to bomb the Victoria Line at the Warren Street Underground station last week after an image of him fleeing the station was captured on closed-circuit television.

[. . . . ] Neighbours described Omar, who arrived in Britain as an 11-year-old child refugee from Somalia in 1992, as a brooding, angry young man who spoke fondly of jihad, praised Osama bin Laden, and railed against the sale of alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam.

Perhaps a little little wine for thy stomach's sake? Isn't it interesting how women and alcohol are sources of sin . . . but killing is sanctioned? How barbaric is that?

After the raids, Birmingham's senior Islamic cleric claimed Muslims were being unjustly blamed in the war on terrorism and the eight suspects in the two bombing attacks on London "could have been innocent passengers."

Mohammad Naseem, chairman of the city's central mosque, called Mr. Blair a "liar" and an "unreliable witness" and questioned whether the closed-circuit television footage issued of the suspected bombers was of the perpetrators.
He said Muslims "all over the world have never heard of an organization called al-Qaeda." [. . . . ]

Where was Naseem educated? It is a pity these men didn't have fewer prohibitions about a drink and women and more prohibitions against murder.



Hands off Hans Island CanadaFreePress.ca , Alexander Rubin, Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The import to Canada has to do with our borders, what is encompassed if Hans Island is included as part of Canada's land mass with the territorial waters which extend beyond that; think underwater resources -- oil, minerals.

I don't recall any similar reaction when the US sent a ship through the northern waters not that many years ago, so perhaps there is new information we should be searching out.




Killer brain illness in T.O. -- Could be mad cow variant -- Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease

C-JD has an incubation period of 10 to 15 years and in rare cases can, for unknown reasons, occur naturally.

There is no known cure. [. . . . ]

Congratulations to Kate of Small Dead Animals

Canadian bloggers keep mainstream media in check Arthur Weinreb, Associate Editor, Thursday, July 28, 2005



Canada is bleeding John Lawrence, Thursday, July 28, 2005

As Ottawa and central Canada continue to impose their social agenda and political will on the rest of the country without giving them equal or fair representation, this will only get worse, and the fracturing will increase.

CAIR Founded by "Islamic Terrorists"? Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, FrontPageMagazine.com, July 28, 2005 -- Remove "?" for the answer.

[. . . . ] CAIR's filing an amended motion has two apparent implications: that CAIR has tacitly acknowledges the truth of Whitehead's deleted assertions; and those assertions can now be repeated with legal impunity.

We list here the key statements that CAIR no longer deems legally improper, followed by some speculations as to why it might have decided not to contest them in court.

[CAIR is an] organization founded by Hamas supporters….
CAIR was started by Hamas members….
CAIR … was founded by Islamic terrorists.
CAIR's leadership must have stretched its collective memory back to 1994 and recalled (along with counterterrorism expert Matthew Epstein) that Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, former officials of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), founded the organization, while IAP's president, Rafeeq Jabar, was (according to Steve Emerson) one of CAIR's founding directors,. [. . . . ]

Check the connections between CAIR (US) and Mohammed Elmasry's CIC.




Related: In Reply to: Re: Is Paul Martin meeting with terrorists? posted by Al Gordon Posted by Joan O'C on 08:49:56 2005/07/28

Paul Martin is making a HUGE error in lending any more legitimacy to CAIR and their Canadian kissing cousins (and make no mistake about it - in spite of their claims to the contrary, the two organizations are strongly linked) CAIR-CAN.

According to Dr. Bruce Tefft, decurity advisor to the New York City Police Department, and former CIA operative (one of the founders of the CIA's counterterrorism unit), CAIR (and CAIR-CAN) are nothing more than fronts for terrorist organizations

Why do I get the feeling someone is pulling PM's chain. There must be money to be made by keeping PM in power -- courting voting blocs at the expense of the long term good of Canada.




U.S. Tech Firms Help Governments Censor Internet -- Kelley Beaucar Blahos, FoxNews, July 19, 2005

WASHINGTON — Free speech advocates are frustrated with a host of American companies they say have been collaborating with oppressive regimes in countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to help them filter and monitor the Internet activity of their citizens.

Big technology names like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco Systems. . . .

"These companies' lack of ethics is extremely worrisome," said Lucie Morillon, the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group for journalists that monitors government repression of the Internet worldwide, documenting dissidents charged with breaking their country's Internet laws. For instance, the organization reports that an estimated 60 "cyber-dissidents" are in Chinese jails today.

[. . . . ] Representatives from Nortel and Cisco said they do not specifically design their technology for regimes like China to repress Internet access. They say they cannot control the use of the technology once it is enabled. For instance, the firewall that Cisco designed to combat viruses can also be used to block political content that the government does not like. [. . . . ]

China's Internet: Let a Thousand Filters Bloom -- Aided by US technology companies, Beijing tightens its control of information flow Rebecca MacKinnon, 28 June 2005, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

More insidious than the open restriction on the blogging site is the invisible but fine mesh of censorship that China has installed, thanks to the assistance from leading Western firms. China is now engaged in an even larger investment in technology that would help control what its citizens can read on the web and what they can express. This system of censorship has undermined earlier optimism about the internet ushering an era of free expression in China.

How effective is this system? Not 100 percent, by any means, because tech-savvy users can always find ways around internet blocks. But experts who have studied China's system conclude that, as far as the Chinese Communist Party is concerned, it is effective enough to be worth the money and effort. A recent study by the Open Net Initiative (ONI), in conjunction with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, reveals an increasingly sophisticated set of mechanisms through which Chinese internet users are prevented from accessing material deemed off-limits by the Chinese government. See: http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china.

Though government statements emphasize anti-pornography crackdowns, ONI found the primary focus of China's filtering system to be on political content. [. . . . ]

Related links on that site at the end of the above article:
Internet Fans Flames of Chinese Nationalism
The Internet: China's Window to the World
China's "Peaceful Ascendancy"
Bloggers Cut Through Fog of War




Why is Nortel helping China jail Internet users? Jun 17, 2004

Businessman Cai Lujun, 35, will be in jail for the next two years because he posted essays discussing problems affecting Chinese farmers on the internet.

Zhao Chunying, 57, from Heilongjiang was found beaten to death in a Chinese jail after being arrested for writing an account of how she was tortured during a previous detention. [. . . . ]

"What this company is doing is basically telling China that we at Nortel can help you track down activists and free speech advocates," said Ansley, a former professor of Chinese studies and Chinese law in Canada, who was the first foreign lawyer to open a law office in Shanghai.

[. . . . ] "Instead of implementing laws to control the export of such technology that results in scores being rounded up, jailed and even killed, the Liberal government has been handing out tax dollars to companies like Nortel.

"This is indicative of the close links the Liberals have with China's trade and corporate community and human rights is not part of the deal. [. . . . ]

Search: Golden Shield project , Canadian researcher Greg Walton , Sun Microsystems and Cisco Sytems



Canada: Nortel Helps Build China's Surveillance Technology The Register, October 22nd, 2001

Human rights activists have launched an attack on Nortel Networks, accusing it of contributing to human rights violations in China by helping the country overhaul its ageing surveillance technologies.

The "Great Firewall of China", . . . . "Old style censorship is being replaced with a massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance: the Golden Shield."

[. . . . ] Nortel's joint research with Tsinghua University on speech recognition technology, for the purpose of automated surveillance of telephone conversations.

The Canadian firm's support for FBI plans to develop a common standard to intercept telephone communications, known as CALEA, in conjunction with technology transfer through its joint venture, Guangdong Nortel (GDNT).

The promotion of JungleMUX which allows video surveillance data to be transported from remote cameras back to a centralized surveillance point at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

The deployment of Nortel's "Personal Internet" suite in Shanghai, "greatly enhancing the ability of Internet service providers to track the communications of individual users." [. . . . ]

The film Beijing doesn't want you to see -- "no major studio will touch the explosive film, which reveals the true extent of the Tiananmen atrocities that Beijing has successfully hidden from the world" Kevin Steel, 8 August 2005

Still, one pair of filmmakers thinks the story of what really happened at Tiananmen needs to be told. . . . . the book Chaos Under Heaven, about what he witnessed. . . . . On June 20, Conservative MP Rob Anders held a press conference announcing the fundraising effort for the movie, which will feature footage smuggled out of China. [. . . . ]

TiananmenTheMovie.com




The moral destruction of Canada: a survey -- "Contraception separated pleasure from procreation, and it was not long until the ideal of self-sacrifice was replaced by the desire for self-fulfillment at any cost. If children could be delayed (or avoided) because they were deemed to be unwanted, surely spouses could be left for the same reason." Paul Tuns

This article, an overview of the moral crisis that Canada finds itself in now, appears in the August issue of The Interim.
The Destruction of Canada: A Survey
By Paul Tuns
The Interm

"Once human life is devalued at its core, a chain of devaluation begins that travels outward from the source and cheapens all life. This chain is not visible in any single person's decision. From legalized abortion to child abuse and infanticide, to convenience killing of the disabled, to passive euthanasia, to active euthanasia, to state funding and promotion of all of these - there is no moral stopping point."
- William Gairdner, The War Against the Family

For about 40 years, Canada has been the laboratory for an awful social experiment. Beginning with contraception (1967) and divorce (1968), Canadian society has become a culture, coarsened by narcisicm and nihilism; these, in turn, have led us to abortion (1969) and euthanasia (2005?). Canada has become a culture, corrputed by death. But in order to reverse these deleterious social trends, one must first understand them. [. . . . ]

Paul Tuns: Zimbabwe-Red China connection Western Standard, July 28, 05

Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe went to Beijing where he was showered with aid, trade and a co-operation agreement. China, which had earlier this year sold military equipment to African nation, also promised Mugabe eight military training jets as gifts. [. . . . ]

I am always struck by the decency and intelligence of those who write for the Western Standard and Shotgun

There is no point in excerpts. It is good. Just read it.




UK Press Shoots Straight on Islamist Parasites -- photos Al Gordon, CCD




Irshad Manji: When Denial Can Kill -- We Muslims must admit that our religion might be motivating the bombers




MEMRI: Fighting Terror via Newsbeat1-- Newsbeat1 -- several links and commentary

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