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As good a summary as could be had for what happened to cause Ezra LEVANT to write "Shakedown" - a CBC News Broadcast dated Feb 14, 2008 - Syed Soharwardy has dropped his suit, Levant want to file for "abuse of process" lawsuit.

Religious Persecution?

"The only valid censorship of ideas is not to listen - Tommy SMOTHERS"

Having read "Shakedown" by Ezra LEVANT, I was made aware of the legal farce faced by Rev. Stephen BOISSION who was pursued by the AHRC in 2008 with an outrageous ruling - basically a "show trial" worthy of North Korea or Iran. I now have found Rev. BOISSION has his own website and shows he is unrepentant - which I think is a good sign as he hasn't given up - and is planning an appeal to a "real" court. He filed his claim last week (2009JUL15) and it is very interesting reading as it highlights AHRC's abuse of our constitutional rights.

Read it.

How many words for snow....

I think it maybe myth that Eskimo's have 20 different words (or ways inn Inuktitut) to describe snow, but I think not. In ant even it was reassuring to read that the Scot's have as many ways to describe "rain" - and here they are:

Twenty Scottish descriptions, and their translations, for rain and the act of raining arranged in order from lightest to most severe:

drowie (misty, drizzling, damp);
haar (a mist from the sea);
dreich (merely overcast to distinctly damp);
oorlich (damp, chilly, bleak) simmer-bob (a period of frequent, slight rain);
smirr (a fine drizzle);
Liddesdale drow (a thick, wetting drizzle);
blaw bye (a passing slower);
growin' shoorie (a welcome shower);
peuch, peuchle (to rain in fits);
plowtery (messy, dirty wet, showery);
sump (a great fall of rain);
scudder (a driving shower of rain);
blashy (rainy, wet, gusty);
plump (a sudden, heavy fall of rain);
pish-oot (a downpour);
feechie (foul, dirty, rainy, puddly);
drouk (to soak);
blatter (violent rain);
black weet (a deluge).

There's a sonnet in there somewhere.

Confidence & Hubris

I have just read this article by Malcolm GLADWELL, a Canadian and popular author of a number of hit titles recent (Tipping Point, BLINK). This is an interesting profile that explores the psychological profile of Wall Street Investment Bankers and Overconfidence. Here are some prime quotes;

Most people are inclined to use moral terms to describe overconfidence—terms like “arrogance” or “hubris.” But psychologists tend to regard overconfidence as a state as much as a trait.

Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”

The problem was that when, in early 2008, Cayne and his colleagues stood up and said that Bear was a great place to be, the rest of Wall Street no longer believed them. Clients withdrew their money. As the run on Bear Stearns worsened, J. P. Morgan and the Fed threw the bank a lifeline—a multibillion-dollar line of credit. But confidence matters so much on Wall Street that the lifeline had the opposite of its intended effect. As Bill Bamber, a former Bear senior managing director, writes in “Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008” writes:

"This line-of-credit, the stop-gap measure that was supposed to solve the problem that hadn’t really existed in the first place had done nothing but worsen it. When we started the week, we had no liquidity issues. But because people had said that we did have problems with our capital, it became true... So when we finally got more capital to replace the capital we’d lost, people took that as a bad sign and pointed to the fact that we’d had no capital and had to get a loan to cover it, even when we did have the capital they said we didn’t have."

“When I left,” Cayne told Cohan, speaking of his final day at Bear Stearns, “I had three different meetings. The first was with the president’s advisory group, which was about eighty people. There wasn’t a dry eye. Standing ovation. I was crying.” Until the very end, he evidently saw the world that he wanted to see. “The second meeting was with the retail sales force on the Web,” he goes on. “Standing ovation. And the third was a partners’ meeting that night for me to tell them that I was stepping down. Standing ovation, of the whole auditorium.”

That pretty much seems to sum them up.

Russian Activist Found Dead

First Anna POLITKOVSKAYA and now another shocking political execution in Russia - Natalya ESTEMIROVA - who was found kidnapped and dead, hours after denouncing Vladimir PUTIN over atrocities in Chechnya.

She had been critical of the Chechan regime and Russia's installed puppet ruler Ramzan KADYROV. Just before her kidnapping and execution, Ms. ESTIMIROVA had called for PUTIN to be prosecuted before an International Criminal Court. ESTEMIROVA was a key author of a report prepared by Russian Human Rights organization, Memorial that accused members of the KADYROV administration of revenge killings.

A few weeks ago I was heartened by news that Russia's Supreme Court had over-turned a "Not-Guilty" verdict of three men accused in Anna POLITKOVSKAYA murder and ordered a new trial, despite not expecting a better result. But this atrocity must be openly condemned by PUTIN as it is his admirers/supporters who openly conduct such murders. For Russia to move closer to anything that resembles a democracy that does not terrorize it's own citizens, it must put these totalitarian methods behind it once and for all.

Our Foreign Affairs Minster and Liberal Leader IGNATIEFF must denounce these outrageous violations of basic democratic freedoms.

Here are some addresses to register disapproval:

Mr. Mamedov Georgiy Enverovich
Ambassador of the Russian Federation in Canada
Russian Embassy
285 Charlotte St
Ottawa ON K1N 8L5
T (613) 235-4341
F (613) 236-6342
E rusemb@rogers.com

Mr.Lawrence CANNON, MP - Minister for External Affairs
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada
125 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, ON K1A 0G2
T 800-267-8376
F 613-996-9709
E Cannol1@parl.gc.ca

Mr. Michael IGNATIEFF - Official Leader of the Opposition
656 The Queensway
Etobicoke (ON) M8Y 1K7
T (416) 251-5510
F (416) 251-2845
E Ignatieff.M@parl.gc.ca

Mr. Oleg ORLOV - Executive Director, Memorial Russia
M. Karetniy pereulok 12
103051, Moscow, Russia
T 011 (095) 200-6506
F 011 (095) 209-5779
E memhrc@memo.ru

The Year the Media Died

This is long but entertaining.

What is Canada's Idenity

This piece by Andrew COHEN in the Edmonton JOURNAL was passed on to me yesterday, and I couldn't agree more with it's main thesis.

But [must] learn how to leverage ideas and experience, such as our history of liberal internationalism. We can embrace--and sell--an idea of ourselves as the good-governance nation, for example. That would mean, among other roles, keeping the peace, building federalism, writing codes of conduct, monitoring elections and encouraging mediation.

Let's drop the Tim Horton idea.

Lord of the Flies

Last week President OBAMA dispatched some lazy pests hanging around the Whitehouse.

How much rope does Jennifer LYNCH need?

In what I believe is a total "bureaucratic suicide mission", the "Commissar" of the CHRC - Jennifer LYNCH has unleashed a full scale attack on Ezra LEVANT, Mark STEYN and many of its critics in the media over its outrageous justifications and unmitigated arrogance in how they are running the CHRC.

I believe this is unprecedented and is sure to provoke a response by the Federal Government - somehow. Of course they have been castigated before for "furloughing" recalcitrant civil servants but the CHRC is somewhat better insulated from direct intervention. Still, she is being given lost of rope.

Here is Ezra's blog post on her "attack speech" and here is an editorial in the National Post.

Ezra LEVANT has U.S interview with Bernard CHAPIN

Ezra is becoming pretty sharp on his interview techniques. I found this one to be partcularly terse and to-the-point. Here are my [edited] points.

Q1) What exactly is a Canadian human rights commission (HRC)?

A1) HRCs are government agencies. There are fourteen of them in the country — one for every province and territory, and one national HRC. They’re “quasi-judicial tribunals” — that means they’re sort of like courts. They have the power to hold hearings and issue rulings — including fines and other punishments, such as forced apologies. Their rulings are filed at real courts and take on the force of law. To ignore a human rights commission order is to be in contempt of court — for which the punishment can include prison.

However they resemble kangaroo courts as they are generally not staffed by lawyers, do not follow traditional legal protocols (rules of evidence, presumption of innocence) nor due the provide true "due process" (they are investigators, crown prosecutors and judge/jury all rolled into one).

But it’s not just their procedures that are un-Canadian (and un-American). It’s their substance: they prosecute “human rights” cases that aren’t real human rights at all — like the counterfeit “right not to be offended.” I was prosecuted for 900 days under that one.

Q2) Are the HRCs an example of a good idea gone mad?

A2) I think it’s a good idea for us to get along, regardless of race or sex, etc. But most of life’s little grievances and setbacks are too trivial to be arbitrated by the government. We shouldn’t criminalize mere rudeness or offensiveness. And we shouldn’t dress up a political action committee as a neutral arbiter of justice.

Q3) You suggest in your book "Shakedown: How Government is eroding our Democratic Freedoms" that one tactic in fighting back was to "Denormalize the commissions". What do you mean by that?

A3) Most debates [Ed: with the left] are won or lost before they’ve even begun because one side manages to define the terms of the debate and even the vocabulary. It is almost like George Orwell's newspeak in his book "1984" about totalitarianism. Take the very name “human rights commission.” How could you possibly argue against something so saintly? And me? I was accused of “hate speech.” Who could possibly support me?

[So I decided to "rebrand" myself as a] defender of human rights — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, property rights. The HRCs were violating my rights. [and I wasn’t publishing "hate speech", I was legitimately publishing the news! Both TRUE]

Q4) You labeled the commissions “kangaroo courts” and your enemies tried to have you disbarred for using such an accurate phrase.

A4) For the left - the ends justify the means - and it has been ever so since Communism was founded. [or longer] As I document in my book, the CHRC staff publishes hundreds (perhaps thousands) of bigoted comments about Jews, blacks, gays, etc., all in the name of smoking out the “real” haters. I know that sounds nuts, but they’ve justified their own bizarre, racist behavior as being a necessary evil.

When I refused to go quietly, as most HRC victims do — and when I actually started to win, at least in the court of public opinion — the HRC industry decided to personally destroy me. They piled on with a total of three HRC complaints, four defamation suits, and close to 20 law society complaints. They’re all baseless — I’ve won the first six and should win them all — but the hassle and cost of their nuisance suits are clearly designed to take up my time and money and demoralize me. I have named it "lawfare" or "legal warfare".

Q5) Is there any hope that the government will end this HRC reign of terror and error?

A5) I am very hopeful that there will be reforms. Remember, there are 14 of these HRCs in Canada and any province or territory can make reforms. The Conservative Party of Ontario is having a leadership race right now and the HRC is a central issue in the campaign.