August 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written in the month of August 2005.
These are pictures of the raid on Marc Emery’s seed operation in Vancouver. So here’s the question: are those Vancouver undercover cops trying to protect their identies (ugly, but fairly standard operating proceedure) or are they DEA guys operating in Canada??
It is impossible to tell; but a CPC on the ball and the NDP for sure should be asking the Minister of Justice who these masked men were and they should demand proof that these were not DEA agents operating in Canada.
Written by jay on August 22nd, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Canada US Relations and Canadian Politics and Pot.
The bill would allow police to demand that Internet service providers hand over a wide range of information on the surfing habits of individuals, including on-line pseudonyms and whether someone possesses a mischief-making computer virus, according to a draft outline of the bill provided to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
After a speech to a police association in Ottawa, Mr. Cotler confirmed that his government will soon bring “lawful access” legislation to cabinet for final approval before it is introduced in the House of Commons.
The minister said the law is needed to replace outdated surveillance laws that were written before the arrival of cellphones and e-mail.
globe and mail
Ya know, were I a terrorist or a criminal I rather doubt I would be sending my emails in the clear.
Once again this is the appearence of legal concern without any actual substance or reality. The really bad guys have already figured out the the internet is a great communications technology but has to be used with a degree of caution. The shrubs who will be caught here are kids dumb enough to put up websites full of Warez and MP3’s.
Dumb.
Written by jay on August 19th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Uncategorized and law.
Mr. Radler, the former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, has decided to co-operate and will plead guilty to the charges against him, the prosecutors said at a Chicago press conference yesterday.
This indicates, observers say, that Department of Justice officials may still be trying to build their case against Lord Black in order to file later charges against him personally.
globe and mail
This is awful news for Lord Black simply because if anyone knows where the bodies are buried it is Radler. And the only reason why he would plead guilty is on a plea bargain which will require full disclosure of those bodies.
Biggest mistake Black ever made was taking his companies public in the US. Had he maintained his Canadian and English presence and relied on those markets for funding the issues which are moving him rather closer to bankruptcy and potential jail time would not have arisen. But the US securities regime can be rather more sceptical of the excesses of “proprietors” than the Canadian or British regulators and prosecutors.
Written by jay on August 19th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and law.
I wish I was as smart or funny as Tim Worstall. Over at TechCentralStation Worstall gives a purely practical set of reasons to become a libertarian. You have to go read the whole thing; but the summary is that a) government is not very good at what it does, from (a) it follows that government should do as little as possible as it will almost certainly cock that up.
Written by jay on August 19th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and blogging.
Instapundit points to Gateway Pundit which features pictures of kilometer long gas lineups in Guangdong. The police are standing by.
One commentor ironically observes
I just don’t get it. China has a centrally-orchestrated energy policy, lots of bicycles and other efficient transportation, not too many SUV’s that I know of, no robber-baron oil companies to contend with, and isn’t the White Devil of the Muslim world. How could this be happening?
In fact, as many of the Gateway pundits observe, there are two major reasons. Gas is priced poltitically rather than by the market. Second, China uses energy 1/7th as efficiently as the US in its productive processes. A good deal of the Chinese economic miracle has been fueled by artificially low energy prices which, in turn, have meant there has been minimal incentive to use energy efficiently.
For a certain sort of declinist lefty China is the scary monster which will swallow the US whole. After all, the Chinese have so much US currency and are the largest buyers of US bonds. And the Chinese make things. Lots of things which the US no longer makes like televisions and dollar store merchandise.
In fact, China is a miracle of financial engineering hiding a hornet’s nest of unresolved problems. Making a lot of plasitic stuff with artificially low energy and feedstock input costs is possible; but it is not yet a full on market driven economy. Using politics rather than markets to set energy pricing is just one potentially disasterous Chinese policy.
Equally worrying is the fact China is almost out of water. Or that there is the potential for mass unemployment if the yuan rises more than the piddly .3 percent it was allowed to a month ago.
There are monsters under the bed no doubt - but China looks more and more like a paper tiger.
Written by jay on August 19th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
Small cars driving through a safari park in Merseyside have been chased by confused lions who think they are prey.
Staff at Knowsley Safari Park are monitoring smaller vehicles, including Smart cars and Mini Coopers, after the lions started paying special interest.
bbc via ann althouse
Never happen in a Navigator!
Written by jay on August 17th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on culture.
Have my politics changed? No, not really. They have solidified. They have become more encompassing and less grounded in the status quo.
The frustration I feel right now is not so much a disenchantment with society and mainstream politics, but an internal struggle; an inability for me to reconcile certain aspects of my ideologies with what are, quite possibly, gut feelings and instincts.
Some or all of these feelings and instincts are socially conditioned. Others may be a result of some higher-level reasoning. Or maybe not …
A major internal conflict is the struggle between trying to hold a personal set of philosophies and morals in absolute while having the “gut feeling” and “instinct” that holding philosophies and morals in absolute is wrong. It leads to dangerous, horrible things.
mike brock
One of the problems which face intelligent people is the fact they can reason their way through to the less attractive implications of their most basic beliefs. Mike Brock is having a hard time with his conservatism. I suspect because he is not, in fact, a conservative in the Canadian sense of that term.
Instead he is a radical well outside the politics as usual CPC mainstream whose only real principle is that it would be better to have a Conservative government than a Liberal one. That is what conservative has come to mean in Canada and it is really rather pathetic. Because to beat the Liberals, as Brian Mulroney proved, you have to become the Liberals unless you are willing to cease playing the old style Canadian poltical game.
My sense is that Mike Brock is a radical in the sense that Margaret Thatcher was a radical. Thatcher’s great insight was that the Conservative Party would get no where being a “me too” version of the right wing of the Labour Party. So she wasn’t. Instead she initiated a revolution which put England on the road to becoming one of the most efficient economies in Europe.
Radicals in Canada have tended to be on the Left. It is difficult to think of a right wing radical in Canadian history - and George Grant does not count, he was essentially statist in outlook. Dief was a populist and he scared the bejesus out of Bay Street; but he was philosophically more an old Tory, for King and Country, man than an out and out radical.
Which is, of course, exactly what is wrong with the Me Too Tories. They have not had a radical thought since Preston Manning left the building.
For the Mike Brocks of the world, cheerleading as the CPC runs on SSM/Adscam/Me Too and is beaten handily by a Liberal Party which will still not form a majority government in unsupportable politically. But, worse, the complete abandonment of principle in pursuit of the electoral Holy Grail is painful for any one with an ounce of political integrity to watch.
Welcome to the libertarian world Mike. Lonely, but able to sleep at night, that’s us.
Written by jay on August 16th, 2005 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and blogging.
We’re just finishing off what we hope will be our final move. Posting will continue light but The Canadian Bullet and the American Bullet and Scattergun will all update without human intervention.
See you in a day or two….assuming I can find a little hard drive.
Written by jay on August 15th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on blogging.
You see, the rumour that I’m moving to the USA is true. Contingent upon the INS’ approval over the next couple of months, I’ll be moving across the great divide and joining my fiance near Santa Cruz, California. Somewhere down the crazy river, I’m going to become an American. That’s my home.
the winds of change
Joe Katzman pretty much invented the idea of a group blog. And he managed to herd a group of fact driven cats in the general direction of sound policy analysis, a sense of humour and a lightness of touch.
I was always astonished that the Globe and Mail or the Post did not chase Katzman down to write a weekly column on foreign affiars - something which he writes about rather better than any of the current foreign affairs folks at those two papers.
A lot of people in the blogosphere really had no idea Joe was Canadian and, in a little while, he won’t be. Which is, as with so many other talented Canadian who emigrate to the opportunities America offers, our loss and America’s great gain. Joe will be joining the great Canadian diaspora to California where an estimated one million of us have chosen to live.
Best of luck Joe. We’ll be missing you.
Written by jay on August 14th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canada US Relations and blogging and media.
“Somebody yelled something was falling,” firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled. “We didn’t know if it was desks coming out. It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other.”
“I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament,” she said. “They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been.”
ap
Out 90 stories up at the World Trade Center.
Written by jay on August 13th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Terror.
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