Amazing!!!

So we must bomb a country pre-emptively based on the chance that they may get a bomb and may use it on Israel. That is of course similar to the faith required of us in the run up to the Iraq war. “They have a bomb and they are willing to use it.” It was just too bad that Saddam had gotten rid of most of the weapons the US sold to him. I mean does this pre-emptive eye for an eye mentality make sense to anyone else. Given the threats that have been coming from Israel, wouldn’t you want to ensure the safety of your country with mutually assured destruction, the deterrent that helped take nukes off the table during the cold war? I mean doesn’t Israel have like 200+ nukes themselves, who they are kidding that they need our help to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. I mean we hear the misquote of Ahmadinejad all the time, that he called for Israel to be wiped off the map, when what he really said was that the Zionist regime in control of Israel will not last the test of time. Probably because Israel keeps picking fights with Middle East Nations.

So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:

“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”

The full quote translated directly to English:

“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

On an interesting side note Netanyahu actually did say something similar during their attack on Lebanon:

“Congratulations Mr. Netanyahu, my first question is that does the beginning of the large train line’s construction confirm the announcement of the dissident Syrian Intelligence Office that you will strike Lebanon?”

In reply, Netanyahu stated:

“Yes, and it is not a secret that it will happen with U.S.-Gulf support and that is why they have been warned, but before you ask, you have a look at the new map of the world and see that there is no nation with this name.”

Source: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/01-03-2012/120646-No_Lebanon_will_be_on_map-0/

Think about it this way, would you shoot an unarmed man dead based on the perceived threat that if he got hold of a gun he might shoot you?? Israel would, and given Harper’s need to please these people, he will likely support this idea because, as he has said many times, Israel has a right to exist which leaves Iran with the right to be bombed apparently.

Well here is a message to Harper, I would much rather go to jail for draft dodging than help you in your military strike on Iran (ala Libya). Are we going to call this a humanitarian mission as well? So if you institute a draft that is exactly what you will get, productive members of Canadian society in jail because we don’t want to go to war to die so Israel can feel safer sitting atop their large pile of nuclear weapons.

My message to Israel, if a strike on Iran is such a good idea, go ahead and do your worst, but don’t expect me and my American Brothers to act like a human shield protecting you from the wrath of Iran, which, based on the fact you fired the first shot, you disserve IMO.

Another thing to keep in mind, only one country has ever used nuclear weapons against another country and even they aren’t rushing to push the trigger.

So the article talks about how CSIS, Canada’s CIA basically, is allowed to use information extracted from suspects through torture which goes against earlier claims that they never use such information.

I have to say, unfortunately, this is a tough one, it seems cut and dry at first but it is very easy to talk yourself into accepting this practice under the guise that it may make us more secure. (Which in my experience tends not to be true, no security is gained through torture only the mirage of security)

First off, Canada should NOT torture under any circumstances, in my opinion this is not up for debate, this is the easy part. There is no credible excuse for such behaviour and since most information gained out of such techniques tends to be unreliable, there is little value added with such interrogation techniques and both our countries integrity and the safety of our armed forces to loose. Canadian soldiers will be in great danger of themselves being tortured abroad if Canada adopts torture. Period.

That being said, the issue here is of the use of information received from regimes around the world where torture is an excepted practice. I think first of all, I would assume it can be tough to get foreign countries to admit that torture was used to get the information, so in the case where CSIS is unaware that information was gained through torture, we will give them a proverbial pass on this although I think it would be in their best interest to discern if this is the case or not due only to its relation to the reliability of the information.

I’ve been over this a few times in my head, and I keep going back and forth. So maybe a quick thought experiment will help.

Okay so CSIS receives information from a foreign country, and after some consideration determines that the information was obtained through torture, oh wait enhanced interrogation techniques, there more PC right. Anyway, so we have information, we know was gained through torture, should CSIS be using that information? Some would say if they use the info they are only encouraging countries to torture and as the article puts it:

this directive is sending the wrong message to dictatorial regimes; you torture and we will return the favour by accepting and using your information.

-source

Personally I think that information gained through torture requires a grain of salt (maybe two). I don’t think we can afford not to at least entertain the possibility that the information is true, but we have to treat any action taken as a result of such information is likely to be a dead end and a waste of resources. Publicly, we must refuse to use information such as this, due mostly to the fact Canadians consider ourselves civilized (whether we are or not remains to be seen) and no person deserves to be tortured by their government. Think about it the other way for a second. Canada decides you may have information seen as valuable to another country, for this example I will use the US. If they arrest you and torture you based solely on the charges against you from the US, I see this as equal to the US encouraging torture by proxy. However, if Canada arrests me for local crimes and through their locally approved interrogation, however much it resembles torture and they uncover a plot that has effects in the US, I think the US should be free to use that info as they see fit, although treating it as possibly suspect.

Letting it be known to the world that we accept information gained through torture we are not only embracing such techniques we are giving our approval of such techniques.Canada should take a public stand, saying we will not accept information gained through torture, but I think they will still need to at least hear the allegations raised by such information if for no other reason to be able to say its BS.

Although, I also want to say, after all that, I am amazed that I am able to convince myself that there are any cases where torture is accepted. A big part of me keeps saying “torture is not okay, no matter what” but then there is this other side that says, if some country says, hey this guy committed a crime in your country but he only told us when we tortured him, this would still require an investigation as torture wont hold up in court, which it shouldn’t but if  you say that they can’t use the info at all, they would have to ignore the accusations of a foreign nation that it has evidence of a crime in Canada. I just can’t imagine a group, tasked with enforcing the rule of law would just ignore allegations just because they came through torture. Its like the idiot in the corner with fingers in his ears going “LA LA Can’t hear you!!” But that being said, if the country is uilty of crimes in Canada as a result of the torture, they should not be immune to indictments just because they gave us the info obtained.

So in the end, here is my stance:

“Torture is NOT okay, and there is never a reasonable justification for such actions. However, allegations from foreign nations, weather gained through torture or not, deserve an investigation to try to determine if we can confirm or deny those allegations. Military action should never be the result of information gained through torture alone, but can be justified by an independent confirmation of the allegations.

Clear as mud?? Thought so.

I would be interested to hear your views? Should we be accepting information gained from torture? is it a slippery slope? or should Canada grow a pair and start these ‘enhanced techniques’ at home?

“seizures, strokes, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, headaches, stomach pains, vomiting, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, auto-immune problems, chest pains, hair loss, appetite loss, personality changes, insomnia, hand/leg tremors, arm/leg weakness, shortness of breath, heart problems, paralysis, itching, rashes, swelling, aching muscles, pelvic pain, nerve pain, menstrual cycle changes, fainting, swollen lymph nodes, night sweats, nausea, temporary vision/hearing loss just to name some of them!”

http://truthaboutgardasil.org/

There have been over 100 deaths related to Gardisil and over 25,000 serious complications like those listed above. I know I heard one story about a girl who developed severe narcolepsy in the days after her vaccination. She was a straight A student, now she is only awake a little over an hour a day and requires 24 hour care. (http://www.patientsville.com/vaccines/hpv4/narcolepsy-hpv-gardasil-2010.htm)

So as I was doing a bit of research, as I tend to do when I see stories like this and I came across the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Website on Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Prevention and HPV Vaccines: Questions and Answers page and was greeted with information that blows this whole charade out of the water in my opinion. (http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/std-mts/hpv-vph/hpv-vph-vaccine-eng.php#a3)

When I click on the question, “Who should get the vaccine?” after trying to sell me on the same old HPV cervical cancer BS I found this:

“Gardasil® is also recommended in males between 9 and 26 years of age, and in men ? 9 years of age who have sex with men.”

So let me get this straight (pun anyone?), you are trying to sell the story that boys need to be vaccinated against HPV because they might pass it on to girls, as it has allegedly been shown to increase the risk of cervical cancer, but then you say gay males would benefit?? I guess one thing we may need to point out to the drug companies, is that one requires a cervix to get cervical cancer. So unless gay men everywhere have started spontaneously sprouting a cervix (if so lets patent it and get transsexuals in on this). Vaccinating a man who will likely never sleep with a woman seems at best to be a waste of taxpayer money (because Health Canada will offer to pay, for the good of the people I’m sure) and at worst, clarification that the true intent of these vaccines is to pump this shit into anyone stupid enough (or young enough not to have a choice) to sit through the process. What ever happened to the idea of informed consent?? One may wrongly conclude that requires people to be adequately informed.

I read a story yesterday and couldn’t get it out of my head because it seems to me to be a hint at how far our society has come since I was a kid, and not in a good way. I admit, chances are I had a naively romantic view of society but when I was younger it seemed that people in power making decisions tended to ask themselves “Is this the right thing to do?” Some call this morality, and of course Catholics and Christians tend to feel they have dibs on morality. Yet you see people that are devout or in some cases evangelical yet don’t seem to have the values I thought were taught by such religions, such as morality and acceptance. It amazes me when people say, you can’t be a moral person if you aren’t religious, yet you find those that are extremely religious who don’t seem to have a moral bone in their body, but I digress.

The story I am talking about is one of the first instances I have heard of Death panels in the US. According to Wikipedia, this was ‘proven’ a myth after Sarah Palin mentioned it in a 2009 debate referring to her daughter with Downs Syndrome possibly being denied healthcare. However, as little as I like this woman as a world leader, she was right. Especially with the newly passed ObamaCare bill which forces citizens to buy private health insurance, or face consequences. But I guess the one thing they don’t mention is that even if you do buy insurance as your government now requires, you may require medical attention that some panel decides is either too expensive, or wont have an effect on your quality of life so the procedure is denied.

This story is about a 3 year old girl named Amelia. She was denied a kidney transplant (at 3?? It’s not like she has her whole life ahead of her or anything) because she is considered to be “mentally retarded”. Her doctor used the fact that he felt that Amelia wouldn’t have a good enough “quality of life” after surgery to justify the cost of the procedure in order to deny it.

There are so many things wrong with this. First being that a Dr. who is supposed to take an oath to practice medicine ethically feels it best to just let this girl slowly die of renal failure.

The second issue comes from the fact that Medicare is slowly putting American Doctors out of work. What happens is that since most Dr’s do whatever necessary to help patients, but Medicare doesn’t tend to fully cover costs, the doctors are taking losses on treating patients, which is not a good business model. Therefore doctors are forced to choose between Medicare patients, or going out of business. If you think ObamaCare will be different, you haven’t been paying attention, if there is one thing governments know how to do it’s mismanage federal programs until they break the system. (Social security anyone??)

So what may be happening is that the doctor can’t afford to loose money on the kidney transplant so he tried to justify no doing the surgery by calling the girl retarded (sorry) so that he can sleep at night.

There is also rumour I heard from a Neurosurgeon the other day which has not yet been made public that ObamaCare will introduce panels of bureaucrats not doctors, to decide what procedures are justified for patients because a federal system like this can’t provide everything for everyone. Think about that for a moment, you aren’t feeling well, you go to a doctor, he finds out you require an expensive procedure which he has to get approved before he can do it. Now your health is in the hands of bureaucrats who want nothing more than to reduce the costs to healthcare.

Instead of putting a limit on profits from essential medications cutting into the big drug companies profits (which considering how much they spend on lobbying wont happen, maybe if Dr. Paul becomes president but I doubt that will be allowed to happen either) or trying to cut costs in other more innovative ways, it is cheaper (and easier) to just let people die. And they wonder why they have such a bad healthcare system (I just found something where they are 37th worldwide, which for a country like the US is not only unacceptable, its borderline criminal IMO, although Canada is 30th)

What we are seeing here is called Eugenics. It is an old philosophy that advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. It was started (in California I believe) in the early 1900s by (to name a few) Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son), Winston Churchill, and Alexander Graham Bell. The problem is that the views of Eugenics seems to have been used to justify atrocities ever since. Hitler and his ideas of the purification of the Arian Race he borrowed directly from eugenics. One of the first challenges to eugenics was a study which found a family of fruit flies, all with red eyes for many generations can still have offspring with white eyes, considered a mild genetic mutation that occurs outside of the inherited traits of the parents. What this showed was that even the most “pure” of parents can still have offspring with traits seen as detrimental, weather something like a predisposition to a heart condition, or even something like reduced mental capacity. Meaning the idea that you can bread the negative traits out of humans is a bit of a fallacy. Especially in an age where Mothers are bombarded with chemicals which studies have found actually concentrates in breast milk.

On an interesting side note, since I am an Albertan I found this interesting. In 1928 Alberta enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act focusing the movement of eugenics on the sterilization of the mentally deficient as determined by the Alberta Eugenics Board. Individuals were assessed using IQ tests which of course caused a big problem for new immigrants arriving in Canada. So many of those sterilized by the government were immigrants unfairly categorized as having impaired intellectual functions. BC apparently enacted its own version of the law in 1933 around the start of the great depression.

I think it is worth mentioning that the great depression played a big role in the acceptance of eugenics in Canada as it was widely seen as a way of relieving society of the financial burdens imposed by defective individuals. These laws were finally repealed in 1972, amazing right. But since some are predicting another depression, the question of weather eugenics will see another upswing in popularity remains to be seen.

And of course, as Alicia Points out, “the harper government” has made the same decision, likely for the same reasons.

Can you imagine if the USA negotiated with King George I regarding their own independence.  On a somewhat related note, look for Israel to invade Iran before the US withdraw from Iraq January 1st, as they cannot finish a scermish with Iran but they sure as hell can start one.

So can there be good Government?

I get the sense that local governments, on the order of state or even municipal governments can be good, as long as they stick to issues they have the ability to actually control and not try to throw their weight around.  It has only been in the last few decades that governments have tried to take on other issues that it need not be involved. If it doesn’t involve crossing the federal border (ie. Immigration, trade, etc.) it should be of little business to a federal government. Most issues that affect us, like healthcare, education, local infrastructure, etc, are in essence state/provincial, even municipal issues and should be regulated as such. Even the legal system itself is built around this idea, in that the federal government makes the laws, and local law enforcement chooses how best to enforce those laws, and in some cases, as we see with drug laws in some areas, choose not to enforce certain laws, usually due to the cost of enforcement. The idea that a federal government has a say in who you are allowed to marry, what medical procedures (ie. abortion) should be available to citizens, or how we choose to pay for medical care (ie Obamacare), is laughable and oppressive. They are forcing the entire country to follow laws and regulations that likely do nothing to protect the citizen/consumer, and do everything for the big businesses that can afford to lobby for/against these laws. And if there is one thing government regulatory bodies such as the CDC, FDA, WHO, WTO, and CPS to name a few, have done well is to destroy any confidence citizens may have in these bodies. I mean just because there isn’t an FDA recall on that meat you are eating does not mean that it is safe, just that it hasn’t been found to cause a problem yet, or that the manufacturer sees punitive damages from a lawsuit as cheaper than the cost of a recall, not the fact their product can harm the people who buy it. And then you have something like the WHO changing its definition of a pandemic, not based on any science, but seemingly for the sole purpose of causing panic, so governments buy millions of (virtually untested) vaccines that most of its citizens wont risk getting. And, how does it look when Child protective services gives it’s employees bonuses for children it forces out of their rightful home into that of a foster family. (On an aside the woman speaking in the afore-lined video, Senator Nancy Schaefer, was ‘suicided’, with her husband likely for bringing these issues to light). I have also always found it strange the level of federal government involvement in dictating school curriculum. It is always scary when you realize how much brainwashing and indoctrination occurs with most government controlled education. The idea that government bodies are in place to protect use is a view that we are given during public-education/indoctrination. The idea that our government is ‘for the people’ and that foreign governments are dangerous are unproven and likely untrue. It seems that most Americans are at greater risk of being tortured, imprisoned or murdered by their own government than the government of a foreign country. This is best outlined by the current tea-party movement, in a time when support for the tea-parties and the libertarian ideals the movement is based, are growing, a campaign to paint tea-partiers at best as racist, and at worst as terrorists (whatever that word even means anymore), is in full force in the mainstream media. Luckily, most people have given up listening to the drivel served up by these private companies each with their own agenda that is woven into every story they produce. Most people are aware that the US government, and more specifically it’s foreign policy, which allows for the killing and imprisonment of innocent civilians worldwide, are the real terrorists. But only time will tell how history treats this dark moment for the ‘land of the free,’ and weather or not societies continue to allow their ever growing governments to engage in behaviour befitting a fascist, tyrannical regime. It may already be too late.