#1
Wall street is about to do to life insurance what they did to housing and the oil market. Here we go again and where is the SEC on all this? Probably investing...
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/06/2009 13:36 Comments ||
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#2
Just another sign of too much money chasing too few real investments (i.e. positive sum games).
#3
on Ray Lucia's radio show this PM they remarked that with the current 0.3% return, it would take 190 years to double your money , not including the detriment of the O's letting the Bush tax cuts lapse. Hope life expectancy increases just as exponentially?
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/06/2009 22:09 Comments ||
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#1
Sounds like the Dane HAs are crafty enough to give themselves plausible deniability, yet recruit a small army to "bash back". Oh my. Berserker bikers with broadaxes.
#3
Little known chapter in history is that Normans [ie Norsemen] ended Muslim control over Sicily. It was sorta of the southern Norman branch office about the time they set up the more famous northern branch around London.
#4
So it's ok in Europe for muzzies to throw rocks, burn cars, and tear up communities, but behold a nasty biker with an az handle doing what the PC police wont. Oh the hate!
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/06/2009 20:26 Comments ||
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By David Warren
It is hard to say whether the decision announced Wednesday by Athanasios Hadjis, the quasi-judge of the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal, is a victory for free speech in Canada. He ruled that Marc Lemire, webmaster of Freedomsite.org, should not be punished for exercising his right to free speech, nor for allowing others who contributed unmoderated comments for exercising theirs.
He found only one act of Lemire's sufficiently bitter to constitute "hate speech" -- namely his posting of an article entitled "AIDS Secrets" by an American neo-Nazi, that went on rather tendentiously about blacks and homosexuals. But he let that pass, too, on the interesting argument that Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act is in conflict with our Charter of Rights, which unambiguously guarantees free speech. Either that, or his argument was that the CHRT has no right to punish anybody for anything: I have even more difficulty than other reviewers in making out the reasoning in this 107-page document.
Hadjis is only a quasi-judge, and his decision can be appealed to a proper court. He had no authority to strike down Section 13(1), as he seems to realize, but by deciding the case as if he had this authority, he was being true to the traditions of the "human rights" bureaucracies, which live in a kind of statutory alternative universe, where logic no more exists than due process, and the law is what the bureaucrats say it is from day to day.
But since the net effect was to release Lemire from six years of Kafkaesque investigation and persecution by the CHRC -- and by Richard Warman, the lawyer who acted as complainant -- I suppose I'm in favour of it. Moreover, it is the first Section 13 censorship case in the history of the tribunal in which the quasi-defendant has been quasi-let-off; as well as the first procedural setback for Warman, who has personally brought most of the previous cases and personally benefited from several of the judgements.
I wrote "Kafkaesque" advisedly, for one of the things to which this case drew attention was the wild methods used by the CHRC and its outriders in their "investigations." These included, in the Lemire case, hacking into an uninvolved private citizen's e-mail account, then using it to post their own incredibly offensive, bigoted remarks at Freedomsite.org, in the naïve belief that this would not be exposed once a Bell technician was called in.
Defenders of free speech have highlighted this affair, from transcripts of previous CHRC proceedings. It revealed levels of bizarre and malicious stupidity beyond the usual bureaucratic reaches, and it is to our shame as a country that a full investigation of the CHRC's methods has yet to be launched.
The decision of quasi-judge Hadjis cannot be read as a remedy for such things. The commission has felt in no way bound by past tribunal decisions, and is under no new legal compulsion to abandon fishing expeditions for "hate speech." Indeed, as Hadjis is himself very much part of the system -- a veteran of multicultural lobbying from Montreal -- his decision can more easily be read as a tactical feint on the part of "human rights" operators, to free themselves from another high-profile case so they can get back to prosecuting all the little people, whose cases will never command national attention, in dark and comfortable obscurity.
The charges brought against Mark Steyn through the B.C. "human rights" bureaucracy, and against Ezra Levant through Alberta's, had already exposed "human rights" commissions to much light, of exactly the sort they least wanted. They have already achieved their chilling effect, by warning every journalist in Canada who fails to toe a politically-correct line that he, too, could be dragged through their machinery for years, at huge and unrecoverable cost to himself, even if the case is later casually dismissed. This having been achieved, they needed to cut their losses.
A more charitable interpretation, offered by Levant on his website Thursday, is that Hadjis has himself become disgusted with that "human rights" industry, and alarmed by its threat to Canadian freedom.
While a better remedy may be available in a legitimate court of law, it is up to the cowards in our Parliament to do something about Section 13 itself, which, as we now know with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight, opened a huge can of worms.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/06/2009 00:00 ||
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If for a moment you thought the Obama administration was going to sit there placidly while some on talk radio were so bold as to criticize its actions, think again, because here comes Mark Lloyd, the new diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission and a man with a mission.
It's not a pretty mission, not if you value free speech, but it is a mission made clear by Mr. Lloyd's own words.
There he was in 2008, participating in a conference on "media reform," telling us what a wonderful leader Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was and wincing at an unpleasantness the dictator had to deal with, the uppity owners of media, people who had some objections in mind.
He spoke of Mr. Chavez's "incredible revolution, a democratic revolution," and of the "property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela" who "rebelled" and who "worked to oust him." Still, said Mr. Lloyd, Mr. Chavez "came back with another revolution, and then ... began to take very seriously the media in his country."
Dang those property owners. Aren't they a pain? Mr. Lloyd seems to think they are a pain in this country, too, at least those who own radio stations. As much becomes clear when you read a report he and some others produced for a left-wing think tank that said conservatives dominate talk radio, not because they are more popular than liberals, as the evidence clearly shows, but because most station owners are white men who apparently heed their monolithic ideology more than the marketplace and their pocketbooks.
The solution to this supposed problem? The report advised limiting how many stations can be owned, which means you would take property away from some people. You would get a lot tougher on renewing licenses of those who don't play the game according to profit-eroding, make-local-groups-happy rules, and you would assess enormous fees to give money to public radio if there was insufficient saluting of all this. It adds up to go broke or go broke.
Do you maybe begin to see that Mr. Lloyd is not as distant as you might like from Mr. Chavez, who has been happily revoking radio licenses of the politically non-compliant in his country? To Mr. Lloyd, as he wrote in a 2006 book quoted in an Internet article, the whole free speech thing is at any rate a bit of a fraud meant to serve global corporations and obstruct policies of the kind our society needs.
Maybe you think all this is OK because the airwaves are publicly owned and talk radio is pretty one-sided, but the fact of limited airwaves should never have been allowed to override the First Amendment's guarantees in the first place, and we are now in an age of endless voices on radio, on the Internet, on cable TV, on satellite radio, in magazines, newspapers and more.
As for the one-sidedness, free means free. It means you can say what you want. And, at any rate, talk radio is little more than one of a few conservative lifeboats in a sea of media and academic leftism.
John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher, explained quite a while back one reason why free speech is important -- that it is always possible that some further insight, some new understanding, some crucial information, some illuminating piece of wisdom will be kept from us if we shut people up. And as the American journalist Walter Lippmann once said, a free press is the only system that gives truth a chance to emerge.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/06/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Perhaps Van Jones will hold the door for Lloyd.
#4
Too late, DMFD. Van was run over by a bus just after midnight.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
09/06/2009 7:46 Comments ||
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#5
Well Van Jones is gone and with some hard work may be this guy is next. See, the Che flag hanging on the wall of Obama's campaign HQ did mean something.
#12
Obama's tactical mistake was he should have gone after free speech on the internet first. Silencing the internet would have spared Van dumbass and the res of his Commi Czars.
Again I hae to say that our Vice Prez Biden was right. He did say there would be crisis in America within the first six months, and here we are, full blown assault on our constitution from all sides...
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/06/2009 20:11 Comments ||
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#13
yeah, we just assumed it would be external. Won't make that mistake again.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/06/2009 20:16 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
