Membership has it's privileges

I enjoyed this article - about the Liberal "War on Women".

Blueprint for Communism

I just read this book "And Not a Shot is Fired" by Jan Kozak (available free as PDF).

And Not A Shot Is Fired only accidentally made it into the public domain. Written between 1950 and 1955 (and revised somewhat after that) as an internal Czechoslovak Communist Party strategy paper, the two chapters which comprise this document were discussed briefly by Communist Czechoslovak delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in London in the fall of 1957. Kozak was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee, briefly a member of the government secretariat, and later, official historian for the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

Kozak's document is a blueprint of how a "representative government can be made authoritarian, legally, piece by piece. The form remains, an empty shell.... And not a shot is fired."

Most of what Kozak describes had been theorized a generation earlier by Italian Communist Party chief Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci had plenty of time for contemplating the reasons why his Communist Party had lost Italy to Benito Mussolini, since he spent the last years of his life in Mussolini's jails. Gramsci concluded that in order to capture the power in a state, one must first capture the culture. By culture, Gramsci meant the powerful non-governmental institutions of great influence throughout the nation, specifically: churches, unions, mass media, political parties, universities and educational centers, business organizations, foundations, etc.

In the West, Gramsci explained, family loyalties, faith in God, and lawful limits on governmental power were thoroughly represented in the cultural institutions.  Belief in God, family, and limited government in the developed nations of the West constitutes a cultural system of "fortresses and earthworks" against revolution, according to Gramsci. A coup d'etat, without having first subverted these "fortresses and earthworks" through the acquisition of political/cultural hegemony, would only be temporary and result in a quick and successful counter revolution.

The strategy for transforming a parliamentary system of government into a totalitarian
dictatorship involved a giant  kind of "pincer" movement  where "pressure from above" combined with "pressure from below" to effect revolutionary change.   In essence, under this plan, the Communist minority in parliament (in coalition with socialist parties) serves the revolution by initiating policies and legislation which strengthen the hand of grassroots revolutionaries.  The "pressure from below" by the small number of revolutionaries and their larger number of dupes is then used to "justify" the centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch of the state.

In Czechoslovakia, Communist cadres "from below" infiltrated and co-opted the conservative leadership of the agricultural interests, giving the misleading impression that farmers were divided on the revolution — or perhaps even supportive of it. Meanwhile, "parliamentary socialism" — the "pressure from above" — used the power of the state, under the pretext of yielding to pressure from "farmers" (represented by these Communist infiltrators) to break up the economic base and strength of the independent farmers.

As the state passed draconian gun control laws throughout Eastern European countries in the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party armed itself and — together with its control of the police organs of government — obtained a monopoly on force in these nations. 

It is quite short (48 pages) and I highly recommend to everyone.

Mapping Toronto Demographics

Interesting post on using public data in maps.

Why has RCMP Watch website disappeared?

From the beginning of the Robert Dziekanski "death by RCMP Taser" incident I discovered the news aggregation blog - RCMPWatch - that was dedicated to reports about RCMP actions - good and bad -  but mostly bad.

http://personalqwest.blogspot.ca/2009/10/should-rcmp-be-regionalized.html
http://personalqwest.blogspot.ca/2010/06/special-prosecutor-consider-charges.html

It revealed the extent of questionable RCMP activities right across the country - in almost every province - and from almost every credible news source.  It became one of my regular RSS feeds on Google Reader (itself disbanded at about the same time).

Then in June 2013 - it just disappeared. No announcement or warning - nothing. It's domain name just stopped working and has not been reinstated.     This is odd.  On conducting some Google Searches I discovered the secretive nature of its role.  No-one was ever clearly identified with the site.  Some speculated that it was actually an RCMP "Honeypot" operation - but to my knowledge that was never proven.  Regardless it did provide a useful site to review most of the crazy activity of the RCMP - with comments adding insight and observation.

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Outing Climate Change Fraud

Left - Mark Steyn;    Right - Micheal Mann

Well know right-wing commentator, Mark Steyn is being sued in America by a thin-skinned American Climate Change Radical - Dr. Micheal Mann - mostly over the way he was mocked by Steyn in a couple of articles critical of the whole idea of Anthrogenic Climate Change.

This event truly marks a sad day in America as it shows how pathetic the American left has become in their ability to debate in public.

But I think Steyn is actually pleased with the opportunity to skewer this important fiasco of public policy.

Luckily - another Canadian journalist - Donna Laframboise - has also been toiling away (much less visibly) on her own blog about many of the intellectual deceptions of the so-called scientists who comprise the Climate Change vanguard.  (Here is DesmogBlog's "book" on her.)

Two years ago she wrote a book (The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert) that examined the shocking lack of academic principals as practiced by the UN IPCC in their long standing run to promote a global action to combat so-called Climate Change.   Most of the Radical Environmentalists were not amused.

By coincidence she has just finished another book (Into the Dustbin: Rajendra Pachauri, the Climate Report & the Nobel Peace Prize) that explores one of the main actors in this deception - UN IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachuri.

Dr. Micheal Mann plays by the same "fast and loose" rules.

Today Ms. Laframboise has expanded this exercise to identify ALL of the fraudulent IPCC recipients who claim part of the  2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded former to Vice-President Al Gore and the UN IPCC Committee with a website called - fakenobellaureates.com.

It will be a pleasure to see Mark Steyn dispense with his case.

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Books of banalities by Malcolm Gladwell

I have suspected this for some time but I did not bother to check of Malcolm Gladwell was a scientist (although it seemed unlikely) - but someone decided to "call him on it".    I am glad.

Book Review: 'David and Goliath' by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell too often presents as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior.

I also think comparison with a "true" behavioural scientist Dr. Stephen Pinker is fair - even if I am a bit proud of both of them as Canadians.

The westernization of Iran

This article shows that Iran is decaying from within at the fastest rate rate for an economy ever.

Over the last two decades, the country has experienced the fastest drop in fertility ever recorded in human history. [From 3.9% in 1986 to 1.2% in 2012.]

Enemies vs. Adversaries

Micheal Ignatieff explains politics to America in NYT article.

He recently published his memoirs of his failed attempt to "Save Canada" as Liberal Leader.

Wag the dog

What?

How Pentagon FAKED repatriation of fallen soldiers for years with phony ceremonies, decommissioned planes and bodies that had spent months in labs

h/t FFF

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Nigel Farage addresses UKIP National Conference

ART TURNS ACTIVIST ON CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY

Interesting.

Entitled Terracotta Daughters, the exhibit is currently showing in Shanghai’s Gallery Magda Danysz, and uses as its template, the famous Terracotta Warriors, a collection of sculptures representing the armies of the first Emperor of China. Instead of a brigade of soldiers, however, Nourry has generated an army of schoolgirls, symbolizing China’s millions of missing women.

Because of its one-child policy, China has the most skewed sex ratio in the world, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls. 

Since the Chinese culture traditionally favors males, many female babies have been abandoned, murdered, and aborted. In 2000, for example, 90 percent of aborted babies were reportedly female.

By the end of this decade, China is expected to have a surplus of 24 million unmarried males, a factor that has led to concerns that the nation will experience an increase in kidnapping and trafficking of women as brides and, for lonely, single men with no hope of marriage and a family, a hike in gambling, depression, and alcohol abuse.

Anti-Hoarding Task Force?

Ok, this caught my eye - Vancouver has an "Anti-Hoarding Task Force" that goes about attempting to deal with households who have accumulated enough garbage to be a risk to themselves and neighborhoods?

A Vancouver woman refused help from the city’s hoarding task force just a few weeks before her house burned down, says a city councillor.

Members of the city’s Hoarding Action Response Team conducted the first property inspection early this year after a neighbour launched a complaint with the city about the clutter and rats in the backyard.

The city’s Hoarding Action Response Team, the first of its kind in North America, was created in 2011 with Vancouver Coastal Health as part of the city’s Healthy Cities initiative. It was meant to be an 18-month pilot project to deal with a backlog of complaints about hoarders in Vancouver.

He said of the estimated 80 hoarding cases that the team took on when it was set up, about 50 per cent have been successfully resolved without forcing the person to clean up. He added that in most of those cases the person has sought therapy for the mental health disorder.

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Adobe Customer data hacked - serious risks exist

It was finally disclosed by Adobe that 2.9 million customer records were compromised - along with other suspected software codes.    Of course there are laws in place that are supposed to prompt these disclosures ASAP - but they are routinuely ignored.

"Many companies believe that it is worth the risk of not reporting since reporting could mean a loss of consumer confidence in the brand," 

Of particular concern is the pervasive influence that Adobe plays in HTML code - and that it's very popular products could now provide a new attack vector to deliver exploits and viruses.  Of course customer identities have been compromised as well - but that seems the least of anyone's concerns.