From: owner-cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca (Cdn-Firearms Digest) To: cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Subject: Cdn-Firearms Digest V15 #127 Reply-To: cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Sender: owner-cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Errors-To: owner-cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Precedence: normal Cdn-Firearms Digest Friday, June 8 2012 Volume 15 : Number 127 In this issue: Big Brother's all-seeing eye Good riddance to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act re:" ... the only solution ..." - Jim Szpajcher Obama Double-Crossed Kennedy Family *NFR* Re:"Guns don't kill people--Bad Policing Does"-Peter Worthington- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 08:33:53 -0600 From: "Joe Gingrich" Subject: Big Brother's all-seeing eye NAPOLITANO: Big Brother's all-seeing eye Use of military surveillance drones overhead would be un-American By Andrew P. Napolitano Thursday, June 7, 2012 For the past few weeks, I have been writing in this column about the government's use of drones and challenging their constitutionality on Fox News Channel, where I work. I once asked on air what Thomas Jefferson would have done if - had they existed at the time - King George III had sent drones to peer inside the bedroom windows of Monticello. I suspect Jefferson and his household would have trained their muskets on the drones and taken them down. I offer this historical anachronism as a hypothetical only, not as someone who is urging the use of violence against the government. Nevertheless, what Jeffersonians are among us today? When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. Folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government. Don't believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the "recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function" in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel insidetheUnitedStates and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them "to collect information about U.S. persons." It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or "military commander" for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. Any "incidentally acquired information" can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What's next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the United States? The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama's secretary of the Air Force on April 23. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as "balancing . obtaining intelligence information . and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution." Note the primacy of intelligence-gathering over protection of freedom, and note the peculiar use of the word "balancing." When liberty and safety clash, do we really expect the government to balance those values? Of course not. The government cannot be trusted to restrain itself in the face of individual choices to pursue happiness. That's why we have a Constitution and a life-tenured judiciary: to protect the minority from the liberty-stealing impulses of the majority. And that's why the Air Force memo has its priorities reversed - intelligence-gathering first, protecting freedom second - and the mechanism of reconciling the two - balancing them - constitutionally incorrect. Everyone who works for the government swears to uphold the Constitution. It was written to define and restrain the government. According to the Declaration of Independence, the government's powers come from the consent of the governed. The government in America was not created by a powerful king reluctantly granting liberty to his subjects. It was created by free people willingly granting limited power to their government - and retaining that which they did not delegate. The Declaration also defines our liberties as coming from our Creator, as integral to our humanity and inseparable from us, unless we give them up by violating someone else's liberties. Hence, the Jeffersonian and constitutional beef with the word "balancing" when it comes to government power versus individual liberty. The Judeo-Christian and constitutionally mandated relationship between government power and individual liberty is not balance. It is bias - a bias in favor of liberty. All presumptions should favor the natural rights of individuals, not the delegated and seized powers of the government. Individual liberty, not government power, is the default position because persons are immortal and created in God's image, and governments are temporary and based on force. Hence my outrage at the coming use of drones - some as small as golf balls - to watch us, listen to us and record us. Did you consent to the government having that power? Did you consent to the American military spying on Americans in America? I don't know a single person who has, but I know only a few who are complaining. If we remain silent when our popularly elected government violates the laws it has sworn to uphold and steals the freedoms we elected it to protect, we will have only ourselves to blame when Big Brother is everywhere. Somehow, I doubt my father's generation fought the Nazis in World War II only to permit a totalitarian government to flourish here. Is President Obama prepared to defend this? Is Mitt Romney prepared to challenge it? Are you prepared for its consequences? Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. He is author of "It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom" (Thomas Nelson, 2011). ------------------------------ Date: Fri, June 8, 2012 8:52 am From: "Dennis R. Young" Subject: Good riddance to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act NATIONAL POST - FULL COMMENT - JUNE 7, 2012 - 1:03 PM ET Good riddance to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act by Jonathan Kay http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/06/07/jonathan-kay-good-riddance-to-section-13-of-the-canadian-human-rights-act/ Five years ago, during testimony in the case of Warman v. Lemire, Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigator Dean Steacy was asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?" His response: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." Those words produced outrage. But there was a grain of truth to what Mr. Steacy said: For decades, Canadians had meekly submitted to a system of administrative law that potentially made de facto criminals out of anyone with politically incorrect views about women, gays, or racial and religious minority groups. All that was required was a complainant (often someone with professional ties to the CHRC itself) willing to sign his name to a piece of paper, claim he was offended, and then collect his cash winnings at the end of the process. The system was bogus and corrupt. But very few Canadians wanted to be seen as posturing against policies that were branded under the aegis of "human rights." That was then. Now, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the enabling legislation that permits federal human-rights complaints regarding "the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet," is doomed. On Wednesday, the federal Conservatives voted to repeal it on a largely party-line vote - by a margin of 153 to 136 - through a private member's bill introduced by Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth. Following royal assent, and a one-year phase-in period, Section 13 will be history. While Mr. Storseth and the MPs who voted for the bill (including Liberal MP Scott Simms) are to be applauded, the fact is that government action on this file is a trailing indicator of popular opinion, which has shifted against human-rights-justified censorship over the last five years for two main reasons. The first reason: the legacy of 9/11, and the associated realization that speech codes have been actively hampering our ability to respond to the threat from militant Islam. In 2006, most notably, many Canadians were shocked when Maclean's magazine was dragged before Canada's human-rights apparatus, and forced to justify its decision to publish an allegedly Islamophobic excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. Till that point in time, it was casually assumed that anyone caught up in human-rights quasi-litigation was a fringe commentator scribbling out unfashionable, retrograde views on race-mixing, or the Jewish "bacillus," or some such. But Mr. Steyn was an internationally acclaimed commentator writing on a real, modern threat that, in its most virulent form, had destroyed a large chunk of Manhattan, and which our troops were fighting against in Afghanistan. The second factor that turned the tide against the human-rights industry was the blogosphere. Till the middle part of the last decade, the Canadian punditariat was dominated by professional columnists who were socially, ideologically, and sometimes professionally, beholden to the academics, politicians, and old-school activists (from Jewish groups, in particular) who'd championed the human-rights industry since its inception in the 1960s. But in the latter years of Liberal governance, a vigorous network of right-wing bloggers, led by Ezra Levant, began publicizing the worst abuses of human-rights mandarins, including the aforementioned Dean Steacy. In absolute numbers, the readership of their blogs was small at first. But their existence had the critical function of building up a sense of civil society among anti-speech-code activists, who gradually pulled the mainstream media along with them. In this sense, Mr. Levant deserves to be recognized as one of the most influential activists in modern Canadian history. The battle against human-rights speech codes is far from won: The worst cases of censorship, such as the muzzling of Christians who proselytize texts that contain anti-gay themes, occur at the provincial level. Yet the tide clearly has turned: The Canadian Human Rights Commission received only three hate speech complaints since 2009, two of which were dismissed. And at the provincial level, bureaucrats know that any censorious verdict they deliver instantly will be pounced upon by Mr. Levant and his blogging allies (including some at this newspaper), and thereby become a lightning rod for legislative reform. The pattern extends to other areas of human-rights law, too: Just this year, an Ottawa woman became a (well-deserved) object of mockery when she went to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to speed up her demand for a parking pad in front of her house, on the basis that navigating the driveway to the back of her house was too tricky. Canada's human-rights law is a product of the 1960s, when much of our society truly was shot through with bigotry and prejudice. Those days are gone, thankfully, and laws such as the Canadian Human Rights Act now comprise a greater threat to our liberty than the harms they were meant to address. The repeal of Section 13 of the CHRA represents a good, albeit belated, first step at reform. Let us hope it provides suitable inspiration for Mr. Storseth's principled counterparts in provincial legislatures across the country. National Post jkay@nationalpost.com - - Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. - ------------------------------ CALGARY HERALD - JUNE 8, 2012 Editorial: Safeguarding free speech http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/Editorial+Safeguarding+free+speech/6747 633/story.html Good for the federal Conservative government for supporting a private member's bill scrapping Section 13 of the human rights code, which this paper has long argued fails to protect the cornerstone of all democracies, free speech. The bill, being advanced by Alberta MP Brian Storseth, would repeal the contentious section prohibiting people from making statements that are "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt," along with Section 54, which deals with associated penalties. Make no mistake, we don't support the right to disseminate hate messages, the original target of Section 13. History has shown though, that the section is often misused for frivolous complaints brought forward over a perceived offence. Section 3, the provincial counterpart in the Alberta Human Rights Act, is no better. These federal and provincial sections can be so broadly interpreted, they are often referred to as the "hurt feelings clauses." Real hate crimes are covered under the Criminal Code, and are better dealt with by police investigations and through criminal charges. True hatred, which promotes violence and harm to an individual or an organization, is already illegal. Comments that are offensive and vile should be denounced as such, in the strongest possible terms, but they are not illegal. Premier Alison Redford, during her party leadership race, promised: "Freedom of expression must be shielded and Section 3 of the Alberta Human Rights Act should be repealed." She should follow through on her promise. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:26:41 -0700 From: Todd Birch Subject: re:" ... the only solution ..." - Jim Szpajcher "The only solution, that I can see, is to have as little to do as possible with police, politicians and criminals." Amen, brother! But pray tell - just how does one avoid such contact in a society where the political presence is omniscient, the power of police ever increasing along with criminal activity. Every aspect of our lives is controlled and/or under observation to some degree - surveillance cameras, computer spying, cell phone GPS, pilot-less drones, satellite technology. Name an activity or area of your life that doesn't have a measure of control over what you can do; how you can do it and under what terms, licencing and permits, etc., etc. I live beyond municipal jurisdiction, subject to the whim of a regional district board of elected and appointed bureaucrats. I am beyond building code standards unless I'm operating a business. When I bought this property, one b'crat drove from Williams Lake (two hour drive) just to check it out. I asked why and was told that lake frontage property didn't sell often and they hadn't had any applications to sub-divide any holdings. They wanted to be sure I hadn't pre-empted Crown land. The "lake police" patrol the riparian zone, video-taping it to ensure that we aren't removing the willows that the beavers and moose eat. Some properties are 'grandfathered' but new owners would be disallowed some of the 'improvements' and road access done back in the '70s. Violations are dealt with swiftly. A family built a beautiful chapel on a viewpoint in memory of a family member, complete with bell, stained glass, etc. Boat access only. The public was invited to sign a book and ring the bell in memory of someone you knew. But - it was just off their property and they were ordered to remove it with 30 days or it would be destroyed. The freest people are the criminals, the scofflaws that thumb their noses at any and all laws; all the while laughing at those that live their lives within the system, subject to all manner of intrusion into their daily affairs. When they run afoul of the law, free legal counsel is provided, sentences for double manslaughter cases get reduced by two times for time already served, etc. If you were a career criminal, what other country in the world would you want to be in in? Only in Canada, you say ..... ? Pity. "It has nothing to do with power - it's all about control." ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 14:08:20 -0600 From: "Joe Gingrich" Subject: Obama Double-Crossed Kennedy Family *NFR* Breaking from Newsmax.com Obama Double-Crossed Kennedy Family Newsmax.com 1501 Northpoint Parkway, Suite 104 West Palm Beach, FL 33407 USA Friday, June 08, 2012 Ed Klein's blockbuster new best-seller about President Barack Obama chronicles Obama's insulting snubs of staunch supporter Caroline Kennedy, the sole surviving child of President John F. Kennedy. Caroline even became so disgusted by Obama she called him a "liar and worse." Klein's just-released book "Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House" skyrocketed to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list in its first week in publication and has remained there for the third week in a row. Klein offers surprising behind-the-scenes details about Obama and first lady Michelle Obama's relationship with Caroline and other members of the Kennedy clan. Like Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy is among the high-profile Democrats who have been "largely frozen out of the White House," in part due to protective senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Klein discloses. During the 2008 primary campaign, Caroline enthusiastically supported Obama, comparing him to her father JFK. She and her uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, broke long-standing ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton to strongly back Obama in the contested 2008 Democratic primary. Caroline even described Obama as the heir to her father's political legacy, writing, "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president - not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." And Caroline and Sen. Kennedy's support even caused a rupture in the Kennedy clan, known for its tight family bond. Bobby complained to his uncle Ted Kennedy about the "outrageous way" the Obama camp tried to hang the charge of racism on Bill Clinton. Bobby grew angry listening to Caroline praise Obama at a family luncheon and squeezed his glass so hard that it shattered in his hand, "shocking everyone and causing a sudden silence," Klein reports. Ethel Kennedy was so gung-ho for Obama during the 2008 campaign that she even stopped talking to her son Bobby, an Obama critic. After Obama won the election, Ethel invited him to visit her home but her request was met with silence. "Ethel was so angry that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture." Seeking a position as an adviser on education policy, Caroline sent the White House a long memo detailing her suggestions for reform and asking for a meeting with the president. She never got a response. Caroline again sought a meeting with Obama while he was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 2011, staying at a house close to Caroline's. The president spurned her overture, and "a presidential snub had turned into an insult," Klein observes. Caroline heard back from White House sources that the president and first lady made catty remarks about how badly the Kennedy women dressed and how their homes were shabby. Caroline felt that Michelle didn't want the Kennedys to be part of the administration because she feared they would have too much influence over the president. At a White House reception, Caroline said shaking hands with the first lady was "like shaking hands with a cold fish." Caroline was annoyed by what she called "odious" comparisons in the media between her mother Jackie and Michelle. Caroline ultimately became so disillusioned about Obama that she said: "I can't stand to hear his voice anymore. He's a liar and worse." Please keep reading below for more details. Newsmax.com - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Has anyone seen Bo lately, the dog given to the Obama's by Teddy Kennedy? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 19:13:07 -0600 From: Larry James Fillo Subject: Re:"Guns don't kill people--Bad Policing Does"-Peter Worthington- Digest V15 #121 References: <20120606124022.3DB2E284080@scorpion.bogend.ca> In-Reply-To: <20120606124022.3DB2E284080@scorpion.bogend.ca> Sender: owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca Precedence: normal Reply-To: cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca Peter Worthington is worth re-reading a few times. Crime, especially violent crime often occurs in clusters within ethnic communities. The reasons are not racial but cultural, there is a social support system for that behaviour. In a normal healthy society, once identified there would be strong social measures exerted for that behaviour to be curbed. The legal system would be alerted and choose to make an example of those caught and convicted. Community leaders would emerge vowing change and shaming those who deviated into criminal behaviour for bringing dishonour upon the community. That process has been subverted by "multi-culturalism, claiming foreign cultures to be as as good or better than ours no matter how outrageous the misbehaviour accepted therein. It reminds me of an old proverb, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue". On 6-Jun-12, at 6:40 AM, Cdn-Firearms Digest wrote: > Date: Tue, June 5, 2012 4:48 pm > From: "Dennis R. Young" > Subject: Guns Don't Kill People -- Bad Policing Does By Peter > Worthington > > THE HUFFINGTON POST - JUNE 5, 2012 > Guns Don't Kill People -- Bad Policing Does > By Peter Worthington, Co-founder of the Toronto Sun > http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/peter-worthington/eaton-centre- > shooting_b_1571324.html > > Depending on who you listen to, last weekend's shooting spree at > Toronto's > Eaton Centre was a sign of gun violence getting out of control, or an > isolated "incident" in North America's safest large city. Take your > pick. > Certainly shootings are up, even if the murder rate is down -- or > in the > statistically "normal" range over the past years. Some worry that what > police are the shooting calling a personal dispute rather than a gang > related shooting -- killing one and wounding six -- signals a > repeat of the > Jane Creba killing at the same Eaton Centre. The Creba killing was > in 2006 > - -- nearly six years ago. She was an innocent victim caught in the > crossfire > of a gang feud. This most recent outrage is quite different. Or so > we are > told. > > What's strange, even ominous, is that the alleged shooter was under > house > arrest and qualifies as a low-life, while the dead victim had a > record and > was no boy scout. It's hardly reassuring when police say this > shooting isn't > gang-related, just personal. There are a bunch of people with > bullet wounds, > including a 13 year old from Port Hope, who will have difficulty > distinguishing the difference. On CFRB yesterday, Christie > Blatchford tended > to support the police view that gun violence is not out of control in > Toronto, "the safest big city in North America." She disputed the > findings > of the Sun's Joe Warmington that shooting occurrences this year are > some > 40.5 per cent higher than this time last year, with 134 shot, > according to > police statistics. Christie scathingly dismisses her friend Joe as > "Detective Warmington." > > A city where gun violence is under control or out of control is > academic to > someone who is shot while minding his own business. And it should > concern > all of us. A soldier who is shot in an ambush in a brush war is > just as > dead, or injured, as a soldier shot during a famous battle in a big > war. > When murders (as opposed to random shootings) in Toronto run at a > ratio from > 1 to 1.5 a week, it indicates a city more secure and safe than > most. But who > are the main victims of shootings in Toronto? We aren't supposed to > know. > Police are not supposed to profile those who commit shooting > crimes. A few > years ago a respected detective was demoted for speaking out about > Vietnamese crime in Toronto. > > Every year, newspapers run photographs of shooting victims. Every > year a > high proportion seem to be from minorities in, arguably, one of the > most > ethnically and racially mixed cities in the world. A problem is, > that if we > cannot diagnose where the problem is, how can we affect a cure? In > this > case, determining which group (if any) is doing the shooting and > which group > (if any) is mostly being shot at. We do know that much of the > shootings are > gang and drug related. But the victims of shootings are often > reluctant to > cooperate with the police, whose job becomes increasingly > frustrating and > difficult. This is hardly a new problem. > > Back in 1964 I covered the trial of Jack Ruby, accused of shooting Lee > Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of president Kennedy. The trial was > held in > Dallas, that year dubbed murder capital of America. In an attempt > to show > the differences between Dallas and Toronto, I wanted to compare murder > statistics of the cities. In those days Toronto had roughly one > murder a > week. I interviewed assistant district attorney Bill (The Burner) > Alexander > about murders in Dallas and he said there were something like 60 a > year. I > forget the number, but it was so close to Toronto's rate that I > felt my > comparison story falling apart. As I was about to leave, I asked > how many of > those murders were white and how many were black. He looked > puzzled, and > said they only counted white killings, but if I wanted the number of > African-Americans killed (he didn't use that term) the numbers shot > into the > hundreds. I took out my pen again; the story was revived. > > In Toronto there are a disproportionate number of Jamaicans > murdered or shot > every year, and a disproportionate number of the shooters are > Jamaican. They > profile one another, and only when big mistakes are made, does the > city get > uneasy. Until we openly acknowledge the origins of gun violence, > and try to > protect victims by curbing the violators, gun statistics are going > to keep > rising, until the penalty for even carrying a gun becomes too risky > for even > Jamaicans. ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V15 #127 *********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca Moderator's email: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca FAQ list: http://www.canfirearms/Skeeter/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://www.canfirearms.ca CFDigest Archives: http://www.canfirearms.ca/archives To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next four lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".)