Wednesday, November 29, 2017

What makes us stupid?

At talk I gave at the University of Ottawa last week, one audience member vigorously asked the very serious question: "What makes us stupid?"

It was a talk about freedom of speech.

The presumption is that we (middle and professional-class Canadians and Americans) are far more stupid than we should be. I accept the presumption.

My answer was:

"Well... I don't think it's the fluorine in the water or chemtrails, and many folks will be quite angry that I said that."

(I also don't think it's vaccines but I do think that uncritical acceptance of corporate propaganda about vaccines, and about establishment medicine in general, is part of the said stupidity.)

I continued as follows:

"I think it's the always-increasing and progressive infringements of the institutions that run our lives, which remove more and more independence from us and regulate our every thought and attitude... the schools, the government, corporate employers, the medical establishment... everything to make us more and more dependent, controlled, predictable, and, well, stupid."

The context of my answer is the social theory of dominance hierarchy, its maintenance and growth... along the lines of this recent article, and references therein: "Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights".



Thursday, September 7, 2017

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

Published at Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/


SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.


The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is pushback from individuals and groups -- engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence -- which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential pushback is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations -- in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes -- has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties [1].

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state -- controlled by an elite class -- effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence -- otherwise known as “democracy” -- must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government [2][3], freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions [4].

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law [5]. They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:
•    being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
•    being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
•    being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
•    being induced to commit suicide
•    being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
•    being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail [5].

These anti-speech laws of course are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation” [6].

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.


Endnotes
[1] “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html

[2] “Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013).

[3] “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

[4] “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/towards-a-rational-legal-philosophy-of-individual-rights/

[5] “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. http://ocla.ca/our-work/reports/canadian-defamation-law-is-noncompliant-with-international-law/ (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2)

[6] “Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06. http://www.libelandprivacy.com/areasofpractice_injuriousfalsehood.html

Friday, August 25, 2017

"Anti-racism" is powerful propaganda to condone state violence

"Anti-racism" is the best cover up for the extreme direct and covert military violence of the Obama-Clinton administrations, and the best propaganda that Democrat and Trump provisions of war and domestic injustice are discernible.

And we lap it up. The merchants of outrage are having a field day.

<< 'No Trump, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.': Hundreds show for anti-racist rally in Ottawa >>


The Mike Duffy lawsuit is good for civil rights advocacy

<< Senator Mike Duffy is suing the federal government for nearly $8-million, saying the Senate and the RCMP unjustly made him a scapegoat ... (link) >>


Irrespective of public opinion about Duffy's behaviour, it is clear on its face that the PMO was shielded by the police and legal establishment.

This lawsuit is push-back against an intrinsically and highly biased police and court system in Canada.

It has little chance of success against that deplorable intrinsic bias but the effort is a service to society.

Hopefully the media will contribute non-superficial perspectives.

The law and rules of ethics must apply equally to all, including the PMO, and police and justice institutions must ensure that it does.

The shielding was actuated by throwing Duffy under the bus, whereas they all deserved to be punished for shady dealings. Good that the chosen target is fighting back.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

The Things That Disturb Me Most

By Denis Rancourt, PhD


The things that disturb me most, in order of concern.

When government institutions and corporations attack me and my family to suppress my democratic participation and to gag me and deprive me of my societal position.

When my own society is occupied and degraded by foreign and special interest plutocrats, constantly engineering public institutions towards stupidity and manipulated fabricated conflicts.

The vicious occupation and dispossession that Israel practices in Palestine, because it is immoral and because an unduly influential Israel lobby in my own country manipulates Canada into co-criminality with Israel and intimidates and attacks public-intellectual opponents of Israel's criminality.

The vicious proxy, economic and military occupations and covert interferences of the USA against Latin America, Africa, the Middle East... because my own country has been made a subservient "partner" in this empire of exploitation.

The violence of the Western educational system in gutting individuals of independent thought and self-worth, and its successes in doing so.

The rampant self-interested use of sophistry by the Western professional classes, and the ease with which the sophistry is adopted at large.

The undue and harmful influence of establishment medicine in defining "health" and our fundamental personal values.

The ease with which the global-warming farce was made the paradigm of mass manipulation that it continues to threaten to be.

Etc.

Perceived threats from societal grievances are best addressed with respectful dialogue made in good faith

A potential Nazi-ideology threat in USA-Canada is best addressed by freedom of speech and insisting on civil rights [see Endnote].

White nationalism is a diverse social movement made of people whose fundamental rights in the democracy must be respected.

Otherwise, the suppression will amplify their alienation. Instead we must respect everyone as human beings and protect their rights to express their views, to freely associate, to attempt to influence society... The answer is to engage in good faith, in respect of human rights.

Suppression and alienation can only produce a heightened risk of physical violence and organized terrorism, or destroyed humanity if taken to the limit of genocide, as is occurring in our on-going "past" (aboriginal, black...). Let's not go there. Let's stop spiraling into outrage. There is no need to make Canada into a Ukraine or a Saudi Arabia or, dare I say, an occupying Israel. Let us stop Canada's on-going suppressions before we create more suppressions.

Open dialogue and toning down knee-jerk outrage is the way to go. Follow the advice of Malcolm X and accept to sit at the same table, in the light of day, with all those who have societal grievances. "Nazis" are a hell of a lot easier to cure then the plutocrats that constantly undermine democracy for their continued gain, and manipulate folks to fight each other.

I know a lot of raving idiots (who are otherwise fine and decent people) will assert that I am hereby "supporting Nazis" but those folks are wrong and are part of the problem.

-- Denis Rancourt, PhD


Endnote:

OCLA Calls on the Government and Media to Exercise Calm, Reason and Objectivity

August 20, 2017

The Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA) calls on the government and media to exercise calm, reason and objectivity in civil rights matters.

Civil rights are unjustly abated by reacting governments and opportunist media corporations in times when terrorist events have a potential to cause widespread outrage.

The breadth and intensity of public outrage are often disproportionate to actual danger, have a biological origin in the collective fright and flight response of social animals, and are exploited and amplified by media using narrow and selective coverage.

Frenzies can result, which lead to witch hunts, free rein of enforcers of social norms, and hastily drafted unwise legislation. In addition, society-wide artificially induced outrage and fear can alter an insecure or vulnerable individual’s view of society, in a direction opposite to trust and community.

Several cases of such “cooperative outrage” are listed below, which are presently playing out in Ontario, in which civil rights are threatened and violated.

In all cases, unpopular individuals and groups are supressed by the state. Dominant popular positions are not suppressed and do not require special interventions of civil-rights protection.

  • Professor Jordan Peterson (University of Toronto) organized political resistance against laws that enforce socially correct language and the government cut funding to his internationally recognized scientific research.
  • Editor James Sears (Your Ward News) publishes a satirical political magazine that offended influential individuals and the government barred him from using the public postal service.
  • Social-media pundit Kevin Johnston organized against Muslim accommodation in public institutions and was charged pursuant to section 319(2) of the Criminal Code, a “hate speech” provision that violates the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) ratified by Canada. Johnston was also sued by a wealthy government supporter, pursuant to civil defamation law, a common law that is also non-compliant with the ICCPR [1].
  • A memorial was organized to be held at a Toronto public library following the death of civil rights lawyer Barbara Kulaszka and the Toronto mayor asked the library to cancel the event, trustees motioned a school board to bar its venues from memorial organizers, while the media presented one-sided characterizations of Kulaszka’s “holocaust-denying” former client [2].
  • Toronto-based journalist Faith Goldy (The Rebel News) reported on relative reactions of the state to anti-fa (and Black Lives Matter) and alt-right (and white nationalist) demonstrators and was summarily fired following media-reported high-profile expressions of outrage. The particular pretext given by her employer was not anything she said but rather an asserted unacceptability of the social-media venue in which she said it.
  • Long-time Canadian resident Issam Al-Yamani made a political comment at a Palestinian rights rally in Toronto and the government actuated a deportation procedure that would separate him from his home and family [3].

These Ontario events occur in a background where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is under attack for defending the civil rights of white nationalists, and where Manitoba politician Steve Ashton has recently called for a bill to criminalize “racist and homophobic slurs”, thus bringing us full-circle back into the Middle Ages when governments and powerful individuals could prosecute insults.

The OCLA calls on the government and corporate media not to act so as to degrade civil rights, and instead to recognize that strong civil rights are a necessary condition for democratic social contracting.

The OCLA calls on public intellectuals to resist an emerging pseudoscience of “a scientific basis for hate”, as a eugenics-like artifice in the service of state oppression and disastrous social engineering.


[1] “Release: OCLA Asks Attorneys General to Make Canadian Defamation Law Compliant with International Law”, 2016-02-05, http://ocla.ca/release-ocla-asks-attorneys-general-to-make-canadian-defamation-law-compliant-with-international-law/

[2] The media was silent on relevant international civil rights law: “Laws that penalize the expression of opinions about historical facts are incompatible with the obligations that the Covenant imposes on States parties in relation to the respect for freedom of opinion and expression. (116) The Covenant does not permit general prohibition of expressions of an erroneous opinion or an incorrect interpretation of past events. Restrictions on the right of freedom of opinion should never be imposed and, with regard to freedom of expression, they should not go beyond what is permitted in paragraph 3 or required under article 20.” – General comment No. 34, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Human Rights Committee, 102nd session, CCPR/C/GC/34, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/gc34.pdf , para. 49

[3] “Letter: Canada’s record regarding the civil rights of Mr. Issam Al-Yamani”, 2017-07-04, http://ocla.ca/letter-canadas-record-regarding-the-civil-rights-of-mr-issam-al-yamani/

Monday, August 7, 2017

The X-PHOBIA CATASTROPHE must be reversed

Opinion  /  Denis Rancourt


Beyond a simple political-correctness meltdown, North American society is in the midst of an X-phobia catastrophe.


North America is following a RECIPE FOR SOCIETAL DISASTER: Let governments, institutions, and special-interest lobbies make the definitions of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, X-phobia... as broad as possible and then prosecute everyone for expressed-opinion and inferred-belief violations and sentence them to economic and social exclusion in as many areas of activity as possible.


SOLUTION: Actual freedom of expression with strong protections against the punishing governments, institutions, and special-interest lobbies.

Racism of personal opinion is not a crime. Inferred individual character inadequacies must not be punished by governments and their enabled institutions and corporations.

Instead, concentrate on the physical racism-etc of governments and their enabled institutions and corporations, such as war, genocide, economic apartheid, class-based persecution... Work for more actual democracy, not more societal exclusion and apartheids.

ISRAEL: The whole "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" circus is a textbook example of how a powerful, stratified, funded, organized special-interest lobby (Israel lobby, promoting Israel as the main Middle East foreign-policy enforcer of the USA-allied system) generates propriety crimes to be used against political organizers (BDS) and opinion leaders.

Here in Canada, Ryerson University... [1]


Endnote

[1] "Ryerson University Defines Anti-Semitism", By Ali Rosenblatt, The Louis D. Brandeis Centre, 2017-08-02, http://brandeiscenter.com/blog/ryerson-university-defines-anti-semitism/

SEPARATION BETWEEN WORK AND PERSON

Opinion  /  Denis Rancourt


The rule regarding employer information-mining of social media should be strict. None of it should be allowed.

Tenure or no tenure, full-time or part-time, boss or shop-floor... no one in any employment should ever lose his/her job for any views expressed as a person (as opposed to spokesperson).

The employer should have an onus to satisfy a high threshold that the employee failed in his/her work duties and has refused or was unable to correct the deficiency, without the employer being allowed any reliance on ideological or character inference from social-media communications. Period.

Otherwise, we live in a totalitarian state that can remove livelihood on the basis of political or personal thoughts and expressed views.

This is not complicated. There are no subtleties.

Corporate, government and private-company employers do not own the employees. Rather, they rent some services for specific tasks, whether physical or ideological tasks, and they are allowed to do so pursuant to government-enacted statutes. These statutes give the non-natural-person employer: legal rights, entity privileges, and responsibilities towards society. Their employees must be entitled to protection against use of personality-related information.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Whether Trump or Obama: AIPAC houses (Congress, Senate) must be reined in

Opinion  /  Denis Rancourt



In the face of the reality of emerging Eurasia, seen on every front including the Middle East, the USA has two nonexclusive options:
  1. Act in a reasonable and responsible manner to avoid the next conflicts that could accelerate its downfall, or 
  2. Push ambitious civil-unrest and military campaigns for perceived regional gains or to satisfy rogue allies such as Israel. 

Nice to see option-1 showing the top of its bald head every once in a while [1].

This had to happen: war with Iran would be a gamble that could end USA dominance in the Middle East.

The big boys of the real deep state needed to show themselves and clear out some of the Israel ideologues and war mongers.

The AIPAC houses (Congress, Senate) need to be reined in or the whole hegemony thing could seriously go to hell.


Endnote

[1] "McMaster solidifies power at NSC — and supports Iran deal, sees Israel as occupier", By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, 2017-08-05, http://mondoweiss.net/2017/08/mcmaster-solidifies-supports/
 

When does "antifa" become pro-totalitarian?

Opinion / Denis Rancourt

I noticed some angry "antifa" activists advocating in favour of the recent "hate speech" criminal charges against social-media pundit Kevin Johnston. (See OCLA petition for background.)

Their stance does not strike me as a sterling example of logical consistency.

I'm against Fascism if this means opposing the evident and fast-pace government-corporate march towards totalitarian control over individuals and free associations of individuals, not if it means mobbing and attacking individuals that express views and sentiments.

I feel this way irrespective of the particular expression, irrespective of form and content.

Working with the state to suppress individuals for their ideas and organizing is not anti-Fascism. It is an actuation of totalitarianism.

Words are not bullets and arguments are not anything like (blood letting, bone-breaking) physical aggression. Otherwise, things become irrational very quickly and the resulting chaos serves powerful elites that love us to fight.

Imagine if, instead, we all wanted actual democratic control of the government and institutions. Antifa, Right, Left, whatever... unite.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

The worst enemy of a true civil rights movement

The worst enemy of a true civil rights movement is special interests override.

Too few people can clearly see the essential necessity of defending civil rights and liberties for ALL opinions and for ALL political stances, which is foundational to a stable and healthy democratic society.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Rainbows can be toxic

 "Goodness", "green thought" and rainbows can be toxic. Knee-jerk "progressiveness" is irresponsible and harmful.

  • Pinkwashing includes when Israel's on-going brutal war crimes (a la Geneva Conventions) are covered up by Israel's alleged queer friendliness.

  • Greenwashing includes when devastating exploitation by global finance structures is covered up by promotion of CO2 policy managed by the said structures.

  • Humanrightswashing includes when alleging to protect human rights is cover and the pretext for nation-annihilating war, from the repulsive "Responsability to Protect (R2P)" UN doctrine, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya...


A message to Naomi Klein

A message to Naomi Klein about her recent garbage for the progressive mind "No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need."

  1. Casting the mass criminal actions of the USA Industrial-military-security-finance-congressional-lobby-media complex as exacerbated by Trump serves the said complex.

  2. "Putting forward a credible alternate plan" is a (self-serving) recipe for ineffective civil engagement that neutralizes politicized individuals and serves the said complex.

  3. Your promoter Democracy Now has been exposed as the foundation-funded instrument of the said complex that it is, and so have you Naomi. Whether you want to know it or not, Naomi, you work for the man.



See articles about Naomi Klein in Wrong Kind of Green.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Intl. Quds Day marks a global awakening leading to Palestine's liberation

This article is reprinted from its original publication at khamenei.ir.



Palestine

Intl. Quds Day marks a global awakening leading to Palestine's liberation

Palestine is holding strong, and the world is changing. This year’s International Quds Day has a new global context. The people of the world are peace-loving in their great majority, and the people of the world are seeing more clearly, than ever before, the true face of the USA.

By Denis Rancourt* 

The steadfast perseverance of Palestinians (their legendary “Sumud”) is an inspiration and a grounding force for all people of the world who fight for their homes, their lands, their dignities, and for self-determination.

Unless one is disconnected from reality, it is impossible to image a more honourable and effective viable resistance. This resistance is against the brutal and ideological occupying regime of Israel, and Israel is given virtually unlimited resources by the ruthless global occupier that is the USA.

The USA thinks nothing of mass murders of entire nations (the list is a long one), of empowering local monsters on many continents (another long list), and of covert proxy wars where UN approval for “no fly” carpet bombing cannot be stomached.

Likewise, Israel thinks nothing of military campaigns against Gaza, of indefinite and inhumane occupation, of mass detentions, of killing civilians at will, of condoning extreme settler terrorism, of depriving the Gaza population of basic needs, and of sustained “cleansing” against villages, neighborhoods, and Jerusalem itself.

I hope that the Palestinian diaspora is not being entirely sucked into the illusions of the Western regimes, and into the dulling superficiality that is offered to the Western middle class. I hope that Israel can never coerce all the occupied Palestinians to be collaborators.

On the contrary, the recent hunger strike of prisoners driven to the brink of destruction is a testament that the Palestinian will is strong enough to achieve liberation despite the increasing stranglehold that Israel is applying.

Palestine is holding strong, and the world is changing. This year’s International Quds Day has a new global context. The people of the world are peace-loving in their great majority, and the people of the world are seeing more clearly, than ever before, the true face of the USA.

The world is finally seeing what the American aboriginals have seen, what all the victims of USA state terror have seen, and what Yemenis, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans, Iraqis, Latin Americans, Filipinos… are presently seeing. Many Europeans and citizens of allied countries are seeing that the USA has led their states towards a policy of global terror.

More and more people correctly perceive that the USA wants continuous instability and violence because global stability and respect for national sovereignty (the very basis of the UN Charter) imply the natural development and independence of Eurasia, Latin America, Africa... and the natural loss of USA hegemony.

Likewise, as its victims know well, Israel wants continuous war and conflict in the Middle East to assert its military and enforcement hegemony, which is otherwise naturally eroded by regional development.

In contrast, Russia and China want diplomacy and collaboration to avoid USA mayhem and economic predation. The more the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia bully nations with sanctions and military campaigns and support terrorist proxies, the more emerging nations collaborate and respond.

The USA military regime enforces and thrives from global economic predation. However, the power of the USA dollar, printed at will by the hegemon, is being eroded and will soon collapse. In the new era, stable development will be based on fair trading of national human and natural resources. This model of development is being applied by the competing blocks. Only USA and Israeli blockades, sanctions and elite coercion stand in the way.

The present period is a dangerous period because the failing USA system is frantic and disorganised. The USA economy is a military and predatory economy. The USA regime will continue to inflict damage to slow the inevitable, and for short-term and domestic “gains”. This will accelerate its crisis of international legitimacy. As the storm passes, both the USA and Israel (and their clients) will need to face the new reality of emerging sovereign nations having mutual interests in stability and respect.

This transformation is occurring because regionally powerful nations are refusing to accept the USA nightmare and insist on sovereignty: Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran … because of the dedication and self-preservation of committed home combatants in Palestine, Syria, South Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen … and because of both designed and circumstantial increasing collaboration between independent nations against USA hegemony.

It is the global reality that is causing popular awakening. The USA no longer can intimidate as effectively and no longer controls the narrative. In such a world: war, murder, and genocide carry the consequences of loss of legitimacy and isolation. Does the USA really want to become closed onto itself, with only Canada to exploit? Do client states really only want the privileges of buying overpriced USA weapons and of being paid in soon-to-be-worthless USA dollars for everything they have? Do USA “allies” really want to adopt Hollywood-made pseudo-culture and values?

The answers are no, no, and no. The world is freeing itself at a fast pace. The USA cannot nuke everyone like it did against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are not enough bombs to destroy the emerging world.

This International Quds Day marks these profound changes and sits on the cusp of a global transformation that will include the liberation of Palestine, to the degree that occupied Palestinians will themselves mostly determine. All of this will make both Israel and the USA more humanistic, which is not difficult to imagine.

Occupied Palestinians constantly make brave contributions to humanity, literally with their lives. We celebrate their invaluable gifts to us and we reciprocate when we fight to secure our own self-respect and dignity.



*Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications in physics education research. Rancourt has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israeli lobby at that institution, which fired him under false pretext in 2009.


The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Culture revolution for aboriginal apartheid in Canada

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD


Authentic culture trickles up not down...

Left progressives correctly reject the economic trickle down fantasy.

Why then do they accept the justice and equity trickle down model, in which state-increased access and advantages for collaborating professional class individuals ("role models") would solve the aboriginal apartheid by some unknown magic contrary to historical evidence?

The new campaigns of state-funded education of aboriginal culture and science will be a disaster, by design. 

Real economic independence or bust. 

Without economic empowerment as a basis, top-down provision of ancillary "knowledge" will only deepen the crisis: they don't have economic power, then let them eat state-provided restored "culture".

Multicultural Canada knows how to assimilate with "bilingualism" and neuter with "education". 

The new model of residential schools is to form an aboriginal cadre to feed the students approved culture that is an eminent part of the national multicultural curriculum. 

That is the real "cultural appropriation", irrespective of who is hired. It does not matter that the dancing Indians are actual Indians.

Brilliant.


Other comments and articles by the author are HERE.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Geopolitical Trajectories

As I see it...

The USA wants continuous instability and violence because global stability and respect for national sovereignty (the very basis of the UN Charter) imply the natural development and independence of Eurasia, Latin America, Africa... and the natural loss of USA hegemony.

Likewise, Israel wants continuous war and conflict in the Middle East to assert its military and enforcement hegemony, which is otherwise naturally eroded by regional development.

Russia and China want diplomacy and collaboration to avoid USA mayhem and economic predation.

The more the USA and Israel support violence and bully nations with sanctions and military campaigns and support for terrorist proxies, the more emerging nations must collaborate and respond. Next the USA dollar will continue to be displaced.

The USA is losing its global bully status. The only question is how brutal it will be in its downfall. (Current examples: Syria, Philippines...) It may also find dignity, but historic examples of authentic USA dignity are rare. There is little choice other than firmly resisting USA madness.


A few relevant recent links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iu1ksEQHnA
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/06/08/path-hell-daesh-philippines-us-project.html

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

UN legalistic final sanitization plan for the post-genocide phase of the global aboriginal problem

The real face of "cultural appropriation"


By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD

(Originally a status post on the Facebook page of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association.)

The latest United Nations (UN) Western-world-led globalist scam plan is upon us: Criminalization of "cultural appropriation":

<< Cultural appropriation: Make it illegal worldwide, Indigenous advocates say - Delegates in Geneva from 189 countries are looking at the issue, and some want UN to speed it up - CBC News, June 13, 2017. >>


My take on this travesty:

When the damn lawyers decide to make work for themselves and further exploit aboriginal peoples!

Intellectual Property is a euphemism for corporate and investor theft not unlike protection money and landlord exploitation.

You don't lose your culture when others use and transform or adopt it into their own.

Culture is not a limited resource that is consumed. It is constantly created or destroyed at every location, where it is rooted in economic and human activity. Its transfer is an influence, not a loss.
You lose it when they control, rob, imprison and kill you and your community and family members.

You lose your culture when you are suppressed to the point of not being independent and viable, and you can't muster the will to fight back. The said suppression involves invasion by the predatory system and its culture, and forceful dismantling of the local culture tied to the local original economy.

The occupying system is doing everything it can to separate culture from actual persons, economics and self-determination, so it can be "studied", "taught", "preserved" and "protected". Don't let them make you into a museum and an education curriculum.

The planned legalistic criminalization of "cultural appropriation" is not the way to make reparation or justice. The way to make reparation and justice is to make reparation and justice. Occupying-system laws and their managers, enforcers and collaborators are the opposite of justice. This legal apparatus will be part of the occupation and exploitation.

Another insane "goodness trap" that will benefit the occupying-system managers and collaborators and will lock-in the apartheid.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Can't leave scientists alone with science

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD


(This article was first published on my climate blog.)


If the generalized global warming fever and "climate change" hysteria has taught societal observers anything it is that you cannot leave scientists alone with science.

The scientific enterprise is embedded, and scientists are manufactured service intellectuals.

Two outcomes are possible.

In the first extreme scenario, those scientists that are mainly responsible to recruit young minds and to fabricate the illusion of research freedom are given freedom within the framework of professional advancement based solely on peer-reviewed publication output. The result is irrelevant gibberish, as any institutional analyst would predict.

In the other end-point scenario, research funding is tied to professional advancement and is determined by government agencies and corporate interests. The outcome is again precisely as would be predicted: the research output exactly satisfies the contractual conditions.

This is true whether one is patenting a genetically modified organism, or approving a new "non-addictive" pain medication, or developing a next-generation delivery system for nuclear warheads.

The on-going episode of global warming "science" has illustrated a structural flaw in this otherwise functioning state-science system: If scientists are given career-enhancing supra-national political instruments to create exaggerated relevance of their work in driving a globalist agenda, then they will take the opportunity and run.

Such runaway irrelevance is already known to occur on its own within a career-centered science network (the so-called Gold Effect). [1]. With the climate scare example, we see that the phenomenon is highly amplified when there is a strong corporate or institutional and propaganda-supported driver.

Usually, societal observers and ordinary citizens would not notice. In this case however, the shrill alarmism that has been generated, propagated by the mainstream media, and condoned by the science establishment, is stratospheric. The independent-thinking blogger can detect the tenuous nature of the claims of everything from imminent human species extinction to continental flooding to engulfing forest fires to unprecedented mega-storms to war-causing droughts, and so on. [2].

You can't leave scientists alone with science. Thankfully, in this case, the propaganda runaway has caused the insanity to be palpable, influential domestic forces are not buying in, and a large segment of the middle-class is not swallowing it; species extinction or no species extinction, bumblebee migration or no bumblebee migration.

The heroes in this story -- in this unique and historic example where a large segment of society has correctly perceived a widespread profiteering construct -- are the bloggers and vloggers, the domestic industrial interests that resist finance globalization, the USA political networks that reject global governance, and, of course, the exceptional scientists that refused to compromise intellectual integrity and publicly said so.

All of this, in circumstances where the relevant planetary physics is straightforward, if anybody cared. [3].


Endnotes

[1] See the description of the Gold Effect in:  Rancourt, D.G., Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis, Research Gate (December 2015), 25 pages. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129

[2] My critical review of the global-warming "science" of forest fires may be one of the best illustrations of how bad the science is, as I document the "runaway" recorded in the scientific literature: Rancourt, D.G., Anatomy of the false link between forest fires and anthropogenic CO2, Research Gate (May 2016), 18 pages. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2059.6087

[3] Rancourt, D.G., Radiation physics constraints on global warming: CO2 increase has little effect, my climate blog (June 2011), http://climateguy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/radiation-physics-constraints-on-global.html

Denis Rancourt's articles and interviews on climate are listed HERE.
Links to all my articles are HERE.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Want to be oppressed fairly

Here is how I would put it:
Most of us want to be oppressed fairly more than we want freedom, and that explains a lot.

Monday, May 22, 2017

WAR WITH IRAN - TRUMP INSANITY



Trump is turning out to be a dangerous clown, one that has been a gift for climate and political-correctness critics, but a dangerous clown nonetheless.

The USA is truly frightening, no matter which clown it puts in the window. But the shift towards a more loving USA embrace of Saudi and Israel may well be a preparation for war against Iran, under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, ISIS is a USA creation funded by Saudi, aided by Israel, fought by Iran!

Israel wants a coalition war against Iran more than anything, and Clinton had promised it. Trump was elected to make American great at home... Now he may go along with the most murderous plan of all?

The prospect of war with Iran under Trump, is not just more clowning. It is the most horrific "next step" imaginable. Trump can't show that box of candy and then simply put it away on a high shelf without a real political fight. There is no evidence that Trump could mount or win such a political fight against the deep state and Israeli influence.

A war with Iran would be Trump's legacy of maniacal criminality. If he is using that prospect to leverage the creation of a Palestinian pseudo-state, then he is truly a nutcase. God help us.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Does Israel teach a culture of love for murder?

There is some evidence that Israel may at times be teaching, not hate, but a culture of celebratory love for murder, as per the four quotes below.

<< On Thursday this week (18 May 2017, an Israeli settler distributed chocolates to “celebrate” the killing of a Palestinian youth, Muataz Shamsa (23). The Israeli settler can be seen, in a video posted online, saying: “We killed a Palestinian vandal today...I am distributing candy to celebrate the killing. I want to congratulate the Israeli people for the vandal’s death.” >>
-- BDS South Africa

<< Little kids throw mock grenades and pretend to shoot big guns; a boy crawls militant-style as gun-wielding adults cheer him on; a girl wearing a pink dress carries a rocket launcher twice her size. >>
-- Michael Kaplan

<< Peled-Elhanan examines 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography and civic studies. Her conclusions are an indictment of the Israeli system of indoctrination and its cultivation of anti-Arab racism from an early age: “The books studied here harness the past to the benefit of the … Israeli policy of expansion, whether they were published during leftist or right-wing [education] ministries”. >> 
-- Book review of "Palestine in Israeli School Books"

<< But religious fundamentalist, fanatic and violent indoctrination is not the only brainwashing going on in Israel. There is also the purely military violence.

Two days ago, the Israeli police did a demonstration in Ramat Hasharon for hundreds of 5th-graders, in how they ‘verify a kill’ of a suspected ‘terrorist’.

The mock-operation using blanks, featured policemen coming on motorcycles and riddling a terrorist with countless rounds, continuing to shoot at him long after he has fallen and is motionless – to ‘confirm the kill’.

This is a mock-theatre of an extra-judicial execution, with outrageously excessive violence. And we are not speaking about security forces ‘in the heat of battle’, as it were. They are performing a carefully tailored, and staged, operation. One must thus be in the conviction that they are demonstrating HOW IT IS DONE.

Some parents were upset with this demonstration of violence, whilst the police spokeswoman could not understand the issue: “The children clapped, they were happy”, she said.

Yet the upset Mayor of Ramat Hasharon Avi Gruber said something really worth noting. He told Haaretz that

“in light of the Elor Azaria incident, it can’t be that the Israel Police itself would show a situation in which a man is lying on the floor and is being shot this way.”

Bingo. Azarya was no aberration – he just got caught on film. And now the Israeli police also spilled the beans, in front of cameras and hundreds of children. >>
-- Jonathan Ofir on May 10, 2017, MONDOWEISS

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Distributed-Justice Solution for the Crisis in the Canadian Legal System



By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD

First published on Dissident Voice:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/05/distributed-justice-solution-for-the-crisis-in-the-canadian-legal-system/



SUMMARY: The Canadian legal system is in crisis. I describe the circumstances of the crisis, its features, and its large-scale causes. I propose a radical and complete solution in the form of a “distributed justice” model. The model is a wiki approach for judicial decisions, using small teams of decision makers chosen from a large pool of non-legally-trained jury-like contract employees. Prerequisites of the model are: dissolutions of the lawyer and judge monopolies; and complete transparency and public access to recordings at every stage.


Canadian courts have gone to hell. The Chief Justice goes on and on about a crisis in “access to justice”, without expressing any concrete solutions whatsoever. The family courts are an obscene nightmare, shredding families faster than we can make them. Lawyer fees are through the ceiling and lawyers cling to their monopoly like flies to shit. No justice, justice delayed and justice way-over-priced are now the norm.

Beyond the economic and resources issues, the courts themselves are exceedingly class-status biased, where trial-court judges systematically give deference to the most highly-paid liars from the most “prestigious” law firms, while showing contempt for ground-floor lawyers, and outright hatred for self-represented litigants.

I’m not exaggerating. I’m stating reality as it is. That is why my words may sound excessive. Reality is far beyond what most of us would like to believe.

I have been intensely observing the courts and administrative tribunals, from the inside, now for more than a decade, up to all levels of courts in the country, mostly as a litigant (both represented and not represented) and recently as a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca).  Here is a report I made in 2014 [1].

Why do lawyers lie? First, because they are trained to lie. They are trained to present and defend a plausible “version” of the “truth” that best advantages the client. This is called “advocacy” or “trial advocacy”, and their work in doing so is concealed behind a wall of secrecy called “solicitor-client privilege”. Crown attorneys (state criminal lawyers) have a broader responsibility but they are nonetheless notorious hacks looking for convictions. Second, because they are handsomely rewarded for good lying. It’s that simple.

The judges never interfere with the lawyer lies. They guard themselves from vigorously testing these lies, or even from spelling them out clearly. That is called the “adversary system”, in which each side tells its best lies, which may or may not to be related to the truth. If the judges were to seek the truth, then they could be challenged as showing “bias” and as misbehaving. In fact, their real and systemic bias requires them to stay clear away from the truth.

Why are judges biased? First, because they were trained and practiced as lawyers. Second, they were named because of subservience to political and systemic interests, beyond any other criterion. Third, their first concern is their own social status, especially within the legal profession. Fourth, there are punishments for rulings that offend hierarchical dominance, and rewards for rulings that support society’s dominance structure. The punishments include everything from vigorous viable appeals to gala-event gossip. The rewards include conference keynote talks, favourable academic reviews of decisions, and political promotions to higher courts and to high positions within a court.

Naturally, the higher the court, the more political are its decisions, often reversing the rare fundamentally correct and well-reasoned lower court rulings that “err” towards decency for the individual (I’m making a list).

In addition to all this, and as supported by all this, these boys (judges working with lawyers) continuously act to degrade the constitutional protections of the individual, by contributing a constant jurisprudential creep towards less and less individual rights, not to mention their central role actually drafting laws and advising in the creation of new laws.

Dwelling on the latter institutional damage to the fabric of society would take us beyond the scope of the present article, but there are many Canadian examples of judicial creativity in concocting “tests” for increasing numbers of newly carved-out classes of circumstances… (Another list.)

The said jurisprudential creep away from allowing individual autonomy and influence was brilliantly exposed, for example, in the seminal critical works of Alexander Aleinikoff in the USA, who coined the phrase “familiarity breeds consent”. This known tendency has now been joined by runaway legal-system degradation that accompanies the on-going assault against the working and middle classes in Western countries, in favour of globalized interests.

The economic assault is accompanied by more and more totalitarian control over the individual. Thanks to independent sources such as Wikileaks and a thriving alternative media (social media) network, and no thanks to academics and foundation-funded NGOs, the increasing socio-political totalitarianism is correctly perceived as the multi-tentacular work of the recognizable military-industrial-finance-propaganda complex that Eisenhower described before the propaganda component was fully integrated [2]. The current rapid increases in totalitarianism are driven at the highest level by loss of USA hegemony and the emergence of Eurasia and competing trade structures such as BRICS.

The crisis in the legal system is a predictable consequence of this sudden global shift, since our constitutional legal system was designed to stabilize a domestic society having significant post-depression and post-war individual freedoms (in the absence of present levels of paramilitary policing, surveillance, and enforcement), and is thus maladapted to the new dystopic reality. However, if individual rights are not defended and preserved, then there will be a true melt-down of Western society. So far, the legal system has refused to play its originally intended safeguard role, and has essentially accompanied the new impositions at breakneck speed. There are only a few valiant resistors (“activist judges”?) who are exceptions that prove the rule [3][4].

The features of the crisis are unmistakable, and include: a myriad of statutes that attack hard-earned classic civil rights and liberties (speech, privacy, autonomy), that directly attack constitutional rights without being refuted by the judiciary, huge prison populations, overtly aggressive in-court judicial behaviour (Canada refuses to have in-court video cameras), unmanageable numbers of litigants, unprecedented trial delays, aggressive bail-judge practice, and increasing judicial bias (substituting for principled judicial discretion).

It is not an accident that the Chief Justice has made it a speaking-point fetish. The crisis is also causing cultural backlash that includes the “freemen on the land” phenomenon, a growing and visceral men’s rights movement led by influential men’s rights activists (MRAs) [5], and a growing number of incisive legal reform associations. The Lighthouse Project is emblematic and worthy of note [6].

Well, I have a practical domestic solution. In three words: Dissolve the monopolies.

In this day and age, there are more educated persons in Canada than ever before, and they are all computer and research savvy. There are more and more self-trained litigants who do outstanding work.

The only reason that judges do not allow self-represented litigants to call on whatever help they choose is because that would put a burden on the judge to actually think about the law, rather than simply gauge party-status, based on known quantities that are the certified lawyers with their canned arguments.

Everyone now has access to the powerful legal search engine “CanLII”, which is not behind a prohibitive pay wall. Everyone knows how to do a Google search. Everyone knows how to read, and can learn things on which their welfares depend.

There is no physical or technical reason that justice cannot now be distributed.

There are two monopolies that need to be broken.

The first anti-justice monopoly that needs to be removed is the lawyer monopoly. A litigant must bear the responsibility of his/her free choice of help or representation. Period. Then it is up to the judge to impartially impose standards of evidence, and to correctly rule on the evidence.

This means that a judge might not have both sides spoon feeding him/her the formulaic law, and it implies that a judge would need to know and research the law, in order to make a correct ruling that does not selectively ignore relevant law. What a concept heh?

That is more work for the judge, which brings me to the second anti-justice monopoly that needs to be abolished: judges. All judges could be replaced by a network, and the network individuals do not need to be highly (over) paid tenured servants. “Judge” network individuals could be drawn from the general public (as with juries) and let loose, to a large extent.

This follows the original Wikipedia model of how editors create Wikipedia articles and make editorial decisions, except that in the presently overrun Wikipedia there are large numbers of secretly paid editors and the organization has steadfastly refused to enact policy against paid editorship [7][8].

My idea is that “pool judges” would be impartially and transparently selected and transparently paid at a fair market price for the work. These pool judges would be selected at random from among general-population applicants, allowed to refuse to serve, and screened solely for overarching conflict of interest (such as financial or benefit “encouragement” from enthusiastic employers or special interest entities). As a result there would be retired and otherwise underemployed individuals, which is a good thing. Proportional rather than disproportionate social-status representation would thus be self-managed.

Working groups of small numbers of pool judges would make the decisions in individual cases. Their post-trial deliberations would be protected by privilege and made entirely public and accessible (we have the technology). The post-trial decision-conference would be recorded for the public and would have the judge team present the evidence and hash out their reasoning, all done transparently. Their draft written reasons and decisions would be allowed to be openly critiqued by all parties in the case and by interested observers prior to being finalized. Again, the entire process would be transparent and public.

The law is too important to leave it hijacked by career monopolies, but the prospects for change are dim. The reactionary legal establishment cares only about itself and vigorously opposes any movement towards a working and responsive model. This is clear even from the smallest efforts. For example, the lawyers vigorously fight against paralegals [9], and the judges will never voluntarily accept needed video cameras in the courtrooms [10].

The fact that we have the dinosaur that we have, where actual justice is entirely possible in our present technological society, proves that the systemic imperative is dominance imposition.

The legal system’s crass compliance with this imperative is causing it to come dangerously close to self-destruction. Will this proximity be enough? The history of the professional classes suggests not. The intelligentsia always goes along with even suicidal projects such as wars of global conquest.


Endnotes

[1] “Rogue Courts in Canada Trample Self-Represented Litigants”, by Denis Rancourt, September 29th, 2014, Dissident Voice.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/09/rogue-courts-in-canada-trample-self-represented-litigants/

[2] Dwight D. Eisenhower national television address of January 17, 1961.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY

[3] “Ottawa bail court a 'disgrace', justice of the peace alleges”, March 15th, 2016, Ottawa Citizen.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-bail-court-a-disgrace-justice-of-the-peace-alleges

[4] “In challenge to Ottawa, judge refuses to impose mandatory sentence”, February 13th, 2012, The Globe and Mail.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/in-challenge-to-ottawa-judge-refuses-to-impose-mandatory-sentence/article549725/

[5] “The Red Pill: A Feminist’s Journey into the Men’s Rights Movement”, USA documentary film by Cassie Jaye, 2016, Jaye Bird Productions.
http://theredpillmovie.com/

[6] “Feminism LOL”, YouTube channel of Diana Davison.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRQqUgDRBevsDGOeE1DL3A

[7] “Wikipedia: Paid editing (essay)”, accessed on May 16th, 2017, Wikipedia, and links therein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Paid_editing_(essay)

[8] “The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay”, August 11th, 2015, The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/

[9] “NSRLP Petition in support of the Bonkalo Report”, by Margarita Dvorkina, accessed on May 16th, 2017, Paralegal Society of Canada.
http://pscanada.ca/nsrlp-petition-support-bonkalo-report/

[10] “OCLA Petition ‘Allow Cameras in Ontario’s Courts’”, by Ontario Civil Liberties Association, April 11th, 2016, ocla.ca.
http://ocla.ca/ocla-petition-allow-cameras-in-ontarios-courts/

Monday, May 15, 2017

Eurasia is coming

The regime-change empire has only one plan: To bully and exploit. It is headed for turbulence.

Meanwhile there is the steady and unstoppable emergence of Eurasia.

USA needs to find far better disruption tactics soon. It needs ISIS, murder and destruction to stay on top and to feed its operatives. Soon it will either come to the good side or be isolated and dry up.

Can't wait for the change. The militarily-enforced global exploitation model is over.

<< Putin: Russia Will Build New 'Silk Road' Together With China >>

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Beware White or Green Helmets

Too much spontaneous self-sacrifice in the service of war mongers

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2017/05/10/white-helmets-in-venezuela/

A powerful new propaganda model has emerged.

A Western globalist NGO scheme on steroids, with Hollywood Academy and humanitarian awards glitter... has been deployed in the latest covert regime-change operations, on two continents.

The new model is funded and embedded "white / green helmets" that masquerade as pure spontaneous expression of humanitarian goodness in a covert war of aggression, while operating solely on the USA-supported side of the aggression, such as in Syria (link) and now in Venezuela (link).

Fabricated domestic civil society heroism is the latest social-media-age propaganda instrument in the fake-news arsenal of USA maintenance operations.

You have been alerted. Get your fix from YouTube puppies and kittens but don't fall for the selfless helmets.

Same-day UPDATE: Just learned. White Helmet model going viral. They are now also in Indonesia: "White Helmets Indonesia" (link to their propaganda site). A model that works. You won't see them at aboriginal-rights protests or police-violence incidents in the USA.




Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Manufactured ignorance is a primary function of public education (or, how the world economy really works)

And it works.

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD


A main function of the public education enterprise, beyond destruction of the personality and individual thought and agency, is to ingrain a camouflaged ignorance that becomes a permanent fixture in the host brain.

One of the best examples of such manufactured ignorance is the widespread ingrained notion that the dominant global military-industrial-propaganda complex does or could allow a large measure of "free enterprise capitalism".

This false notion is one where individual motivation to maximize individual wealth accumulation is the first mechanistic organizational principle at work, which "explains" USA economic hegemony.

This myth of "the invisible hand" as being compatible with reality is so pervasive that it has even penetrated the reinforced stronghold of independent thought that is the Libertarian mind.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

USA economic dominance is imposed and enforced by projected military power, which ensures physical control of both energy resources and trade routes, and which imposes global extortion via control of the world currency and financial transactions (the US dollar printed at will by the boss, and direct control of global investment and transaction conditions).

Projected military power also installs direct corporate exploitation on territories, thus preventing any national emergence. Corporations themselves are not so much for directly making money, but more for directly controlling human and natural resources to prevent local emergence.

Projected military power is visible in military bases in every region, and in a fleet of aircraft carriers, each more powerful than the militaries of most nations.

Macroeconomic hegemony is visible in the existence and operation of global finance instruments (World Bank, International Monetary Found) and in the regular USA use of devastating "sanctions" and associated physical blockades.

That the organizing principle is military-CIA-etc-mediated dominance and exploitation rather than benign self-organization from individual motivation for individual benefit is true at all scales: from "health and safety" regulations that create controlled markets further occupying the mind, to the regulated industry of death, to urban building-zone battles for more isolating and sanitized cubicles, and so on.

The Libertarians detect and denounce personal-scale and nuclear-family-scale oppression but largely accept the myth that a mega-corporation is simply an expression of free will. Many find it impossible to distinguish a small private business from an entangled "public" mega-corporation.

Think of the efficiency of the public education enterprise when even the minds of Libertarians are contaminated to this degree.

Surprisingly, fragments of the actual societal organizing principles at work nonetheless occasionally emerge, even in the academic literature: "Preferences for group dominance track and mediate the effects of macro-level social inequality and violence across societies, by JR Kunst et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.1616572114, PNAS, May 8, 2017."

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

"Intersectionality"?

"Intersectionality"?

I'm sorry, but that is bullshit. The first, dominant, and overpowering oppression is violent class dominance, class segregation and class discrimination. Race and gender are side shows that correlate: They are not the driver.

"Intersectionality" is a pseudo-academic service-intellectual cover for professional-class managers who benefit from race and gender-rights posturing, while supporting class-dominance violence.

Bullshit.

[Taking some heat on social media for this one. Like I glared at a sacred cow or something.]
 

On-going mass crime against Yemen

The Saudi war against Yemen is a grotesque violation of the lives and dignity of innocent women, children, and civilians who seek nothing more than peaceful lives under democratic rule of their own choice.

This vile Saudi mass-crime, and the associated inhuman blockade, condoned and supported by the USA, Canada, and the silent Western world, is presently the worst on-going genocidal attack on the planet.

By such behaviour, the West and Saudi show themselves to be hypocritical, vicious, and murderous. I cannot condemn my own government (Canada) enough, which sells arms for profit to the Saudi thugs.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Africa and USA global dominance

AFRICA ::: The US-global elite is losing Africa to China and BRICS. The increasing backlash will include more propaganda pressure to commit more US-led efforts to bring more "democracy" and "human rights" to the continent, including saving women, preventing environmental destruction, fighting terrorism, and managing against global warming... all the usual propaganda scams to justify massive CIA, NGO, and military presence -- for local regime control to the benefit of globalist finance and corporate (extraction) interests.

(See an example of the said propaganda here: “U.S. cutbacks undermine efforts to keep Africa’s population in check”, Globe and Mail, April 17, 2017. Too easy to be critical of this one as solely racist, rather than as tentative propaganda in the service of USA globalism, IMO.)

Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Real Red Pill

I recently watched the 2-hour documentary film by feminist film-maker Cassie Jaye entitled "The Red Pill - A Feminist's Journey Into the Men's Rights Movement".

At the end of her documentary, after her 1-year journey making the film, she states: "I don't know where I am headed but I know what I am leaving behind. I no longer call myself a feminist."

My main thought throughout -- which is not mentioned once in the film -- is how the gender war has totally served the dominance hierarchy; how the grievances on both sides are really predominantly about class; and how an industry of professionals benefits from and manages the gender war.

The real "N-word" is the word you can't even think of saying, the "C-word".

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

The USA does not tolerate chemical weapons?

The USA used nuclear bombs against two civilian cities in Japan, firebombed surrendered German soldiers after the war was over, uses depleted uranium on country-wide murdering fields, used chemical weapons in Vietnam on the scale of the whole country, supports chemical-weapon attacks against guerilla resister-supporting populations in Latin America, allows Israel to use white phosphorous against the Gazan population, ... and used economic sanctions (blockade) to kill a million civilians in Iraq. 

These are just the incidents that come immediately to mind.

And now, the USA has such a high intolerance of chemical weapons that is does not even need evidence of their use before it bombs and sanctions a nation to death. 

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Not George Orwell

Actually...

During times of universal deceit... telling the truth has no effect whatsoever. Unless it is defamatory of powerful interests of course.

Saturday, April 15, 2017

On Syria - Peggy Mason is a dog of war dressed as a human rights defender

Canadian dogs of war dressed as human rights defenders, from Trudeau to NGOs. A very tired trick that must be exposed. Thank you Ken Stone.

AND SEE 2017-04-15 UPDATE BELOW.

2017-04-12:
<< Ken Stone challenges Peggy Mason to a public debate.

Based on her attribution of the recent chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun on the government of Bashar-Al-Assad, I wish to challenge Peggy Mason to a public debate. She is not fit to lead a peace organization in Canada.

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 6:06 AM, Peggy Mason <margaretpeggy.mason@gmail.com> wrote on the "peace-listserve":

"Dear Folks,

We should be calling for an independent UN investigation, with full access, so we have the evidence needed to hold Assad to account, whenever that might be. Because he cannot be prosecuted now, does not in any way mean that it can never be prosecuted. There is no immunity for war crimes.
But the starting point is independent, credible evidence. BTW Putin has said he will agree to an independent investigation. Tillerson should nail this down.

Peggy"

Peggy Mason is president of the Rideau Institute and a leader of Ceasefire, the Institute’s main public outreach and advocacy arm.

I am available to debate Ms. Mason publicly at a time and place which can be negotiated between the two of us.

Ken Stone
Treasurer, Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War >>


2017-04-15 UPDATE:
PEGGY MASON HIDES FROM DEBATE, AND KEN'S RESPONSE TO HER EVASION:

<< Dear Peggy,

Thank you for your prompt reply and your admission that you were wrong to to conclude, before an investigation took place, that President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the April 4th gas attack at Khan Sheikhoun, Syria.

It’s unfortunate that you don’t wish to debate the widely different attitudes within the peace movement towards the US missile strike on the Shayat Airbase in Syria. Nonetheless, the Canadian peace movement still has to consider the issues you don’t want to debate.

In your reply, you touched on the key issue of investigation and judgment before any consequential action should take place. However, in your original e-mail message to the “peace listserver”, you wrote that “Putin has said he will agree to an independent investigation. Tillerson should nail this down.”

I think you have got things backwards. US Secretary of State Tillerson did not wait for (or even call for) an independent investigation of the April 4 incident. Rather, on his watch, his country rushed to engage in an act of war on the sovereign country of Syria which killed several civilians and pushed us towards a wider war in the Middle East, while Putin (as you noted) did call for an independent investigation.

So, here is where we have a difference. In my opinion and that of our Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, the peace movement in Canada needs to be clear and consistent about international law. No country is above that law. The USA and its coalition partners, including Canada, are violating international law by overflying and stationing military forces in the sovereign country of Syria without the permission of the Syrian government. They are also violating international law by inserting, funding, and arming proxy armies of terrorist mercenaries to achieve regime change in Syria. They have levelled onerous economic sanctions upon Syria, causing great distress to the Syrian people, without the approval of the UN Security Council. The US-led coalition used military force against the Syrian government in its attack on Sharyat Airbase on April 7, 2017.

Where we have another difference with the Rideau Institute and Ceasefire is that you have decided to put pressure on the wrong parties. You seem to want to hold the Russian government to account when it appears that it had no hand in the incident and although its military forces are legally stationed in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. Moreover, you seem to be deeply invested in the campaign to delegitimize the Syrian government and to demonize its elected president.

Neither of your approaches is helpful. And these are very important matters which should be aired in public.

Another important point: what have you, the Rideau Institute, and Ceasefire said about the performance of Prime Minister Trudeau in the context of Khan Sheikhoun? Trudeau initially called for an investigation into the claims of a gas attack. Then, less than 24 hours later, he endorsed the USA cruise missile strike on Syria's Sharyat airbase. Now, his Minister of Global Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, imposes new unilateral sanctions on Syria, which are illegal under international law, because they lack the approval of the United Nations Security Council. Your comments would be appreciated by our Coalition members.

Finally my parting comment on your parting comment that (you) are “paying your dues every day” in the peace movement. As far as I know, you are paid a salary. Am I wrong?

Ken Stone
Treasurer,
Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War

From: Peggy Mason
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2017 8:44 AM
To: ernie yacub
Cc: Robin Collins ; Ken Stone ; peace list
Subject: Re: [Peace-l] CW and cruise missiles - I wish to challenge Peggy Mason to a public debate

Sorry to disappoint but I have no intention whatsoever of wasting my time on such a ridiculous debate.


On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 8:34 PM, <ernieyacub@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Robin Collins <robin.w.collins@gmail.com> wrote:

Ken S,
If you read closer you will see that Peggy refers to war crimes committed by Assad, and those may include his alleged use of chemical weapons on April 4.

if you read much closer, you will see the bias in her statement...
"We should be calling for an independent UN investigation, with full access, so we have the evidence needed to hold Assad to account, whenever that might be."

i would very much like to see a debate between pm and ks - what do you say peggy?
ey >>