May 11, 2006: #1

More foreign spy muscle needed: Public Safety Minister Day Jim Bronskill, May 10, 06

Stockwell Day told a conference on national security Wednesday the government would either create a new spy agency or expand the mandate of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

[....] Day suggested the money needed to launch a new service - expected to be tens of millions of dollars - would not be a barrier.

"We're putting safety and security first, recognizing that there will be an investment required," he said after the meeting. [....]

Search: "foreign intelligence"



Another perspective on grow-ops

Help drug police waste time -- Stop the Grow Tippers before they stop You! by Rafeala Palmieri (18 Jul, 2005)

[....] Well, I guess I don't have to wonder anymore, and I am unproud to say that "nark on your neighbor programs" long active in the USA have moved north to my beloved country of Canada.

I just saw a press conference given by what the lapdog mainstream journalists call Vancouver's "anti-grow-op granny," 67-year-old Chris Taulu, who loves to go around snooping on people and then calling the police to get them busted for weed. [....]

"Here these [pot grower] idiots are, living with a baby whose lungs and body are supposed to be developing," says Taulu, a 33-year resident of the Collingwood section of Vancouver, who lives with her proud husband Ian. "It's terrible what people are exposing their kids to. The problem is huge. I had a grow-op behind me, a grow op up my street, and a grow op down my street. The police took the one down behind me, and then teased me that I didn't find it first."

The grandlady seeks to become a media star with her pogrom [yes, pogrom] against us pot growers. She's releasing a new video, a real tear-jerker, called "Growing up in a Grow Operation," that shows the suffering of little kids growing up with parents who like indoor gardening.

Taulu is almost a police officer herself. She directs the Collingwood Community Policing Center. If you read about the rise of Hitler's internal secret police forces, you will see many parallels between the neighborhood centers Hitler convened to try to ferret out hidden Jews and their hiders, and this woman and her Center. Substitute pot plants and/or pot grower for Jewish person or Jewish collaborator, and Taulu for the civilian Germans who assisted the SS and Gestapo to identify people hiding in their homes, and the parallels are anything but abstract. [....]

Women ... becoming empowered ... an idea whose time has come ... perhaps even women who don't care whether they are seen as "nice"? My word!

Search: Growbusters police program

Remember, this article is written from a pro-pot perspective {cannabis culture}.

As for the parallel he suggests with neighbours identifying Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours whom they simply wanted to eliminate, that worked for France; it's still taken seriously over 65 years after WW2, despite their collaboration with the Germans. Most French pretend that the collaboration didn't happen. ... The official line after the war? Collective denial that it happened. How often have you heard that there were only a handful of collaborators vs a multitude of Maquis, resistance fighters? Not so. The opposite is the case. As was revealed in a six-hour documentary by a French journalist, the level of collaboration was vast and it didn't just extend to the Jews. They collaborated to turn each other in ... to the point where the Gestapo had to tell residents that if they falsely accused a neighbour of being Jewish or hiding Jews, then they would be sent to the concentration camps. The usual reason for doing that was to seize the neighbour's land or to eliminate him as an economic competitor, so I've learned.



Organized Crime in Canada:
A Quarterly Summary
October to December, 2005 Nathanson Centre for the study of organized crime, Jim Bronskill

Organized Crime Activities

* Drugs
* * Cocaine
* * Ecstasy
* * Ketamine
* * Marijuana

* Fraud - Credit Card
* Human Smuggling and Trafficking
* Money Laundering
* Smuggling
* Tobacco Production and Trafficking

Organized Crime Genres
* Cyber-Gangs
* Indo-Canadian
* Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs
* Street Gangs

Enforcement

This makes the cynic in me question .....

Kyoto gets some surprising support from Canadian industry Mike De Souza, CanWest, Saturday, May 06, 2006

The Liberals had many years to perfect leaving behind appointees, potentially lucrative situations / contracts and people who would be unhappy with Conservative changes. (Fill in your own favourites from court appointees and high level positions in the civil service, foundations and agencies, deals promised but only to be delivered after a Liberal election win, "friendship" and business associations (think hard on that one), Olympic plans in BC and maybe elsewhere, African aid sinecures, UNESCO perquisites related to protocol(s) signed .... and more.) Is this one more of them?

OTTAWA -- The Kyoto Protocol is getting some surprising endorsements from Canadian industry leaders who are growing impatient with the uncertainty surrounding the new Conservative government's approach to climate change.

Shell Canada President and CEO Clive Mather, [....]

Canadian Netherlands Business and Professional Association in Toronto. [....]

Environmentalists [....]

The Liberals had proposed to open the market in Canada with a promise to cap the cost of credits at $15 per tonne with a fund to compensate companies that spend more.

Is that the crux of it? That companies would get taxpayer money?

Aluminum producer Alcan, .... Daniel Gagnier, Alcan's senior vice-president of corporate and external affairs. [....]

Gagnier was also skeptical about suggestions the Conservative government is looking at joining the six countries in the Asia-Pacific Partnership agreement on climate change to replace its Kyoto commitments.

"Even the Chinese have said you need both," [....]

And the Chinese would be paid with Canadian taxpayer money for pollution credits ... a good reason to support.....

Let's see now, if I googled a few of the companies and principals speaking out, would I find $$$ contributors to the Liberal Party, recipients of taxpayer money--or hoping to be recipients, friends of previous Liberal government(s), members of councils like the China-Canada Business ... Asia-Pacific Business ... and more who have many ties to the previous governments? The trojan horses ready and willing to speak with the mainstream media to hint at displeasure?

(Metaphoric slap on my hand .... much too cynical on my part.)



New Information: re WWF -- from a comment May 10, 06

(Note: I had typed in error WWW, above -- corrected May 16.)

May 5. 2006: #1 -- See comments on WWF and nuclear power from Grant

Grant has left a new comment on your post "May 5. 2006: #1 [Scroll down for "WWF accepts nuclear reality Herald Sun, Australia, 04 May 06" and check the comments posted at the end.]

He includes several links to more information on the WWF and nuclear power in Australia.

Thanks, Grant, for writing to set the record straight on WWF in Australia.

Revenge of the nerds
Three computer geeks at the U of T are renowned developers of anti-censorship software, including a program out this month that could allow people to outwit the world's most repressive regimes Andrew Chung, May 7, 2006, via newsbeat1

They are self-confessed computer "geeks." They don't go to the gym much, or see much sunlight. They talk about "routers" and "nodes" and "secure socket layers" like they were saying, "Hello," or "How are you?"

But the computer smarts of Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and Michael Hull, combined with their passion for politics and free expression, have led them to develop a highly anticipated software program that allows Internet users inside China and other countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Burma, to get around repressive censorship and not get caught.

Their innovation is called Psiphon, and it's being launched at the end of this month.

"It's enormous," says Deibert, 41, a nerd-meets-aging-punker kind of guy who directs the Citizen Lab at the U of T's Munk Centre for International Studies, where the trio work. "If it works the way we hope it does and is distributed worldwide, it will have a huge impact on freedom of speech."

[....] But there are possible problems for Psiphon, [U of Ottawa's Michael] Geist and others warn.

One is that many people in a place like China are not even aware they're being censored, says Geist.

[....] the "trusted networks" philosophy on which Psiphon is based could be problematic, since trust was a concept shattered during the Cultural Revolution, when even family members were convinced to turn each other in. [. . . . ]

Suffer Little Children ....
Thanks G.

1. Dear God,
Please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter.
There is nothing good in there now.
Amanda

2. Dear God,
Thank you for the baby brother but what I asked for was a puppy.
I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.
Joyce

3. Dear Mr. God,
I wish you would not make it so easy for people to come apart.
I had to have 3 stitches and a shot.
Janet

4. Dear God,
is it true my father won't get in Heaven if
he uses his golf words in the house?
Anita

5. Dear God,
I bet it's very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world.
There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it.
Nancy

6. Dear God,
I like the story about Noah the best of all of them.
You really made up some good ones.
I like walking on water, too.
Glenn

7. Dear God,
My Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy.
How far back do you go?
Love, Dennis

8. Dear God,
Do you draw the lines around the countries?
If you don't, who does?
Nathan

9. Dear God,
Did you mean for giraffes to look like that or was it an accident?
Norma

10. Dear God,
How come you did all those miracles in the old days
and don't do any now?
Billy

11. Dear God,
Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much
if they each had their own rooms.
It works out OK with me and my brother.
Larry

12. Dear God,
I keep waiting for spring, but it never did come yet.
What's up? Don't forget.
Mark

13. Dear God,
My brother told me about how you are born
but it just doesn't sound right.
What do you say?
Marsha

14. Dear God,
Is Reverend Coe a friend of yours,
or do you just know him through the business?
Donny

15. Dear God,
It is great the way you always get the stars in the right place.
Why can't you do that with the moon?
Jeff

16. Dear God,
I didn't think orange went with purple
until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday night.
That was really cool.
Thomas