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Lee Kwan Yew 1923-2015

Lee Kwan Yew-1955

 

The founder of the independent city-state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, who has just died at 91, was undoubtedly the most intelligent and capable world leader of the past half-century.

So says Theodore Dalrymple, and I concur.

How many people in history manage to found a state? Since the days of Greek heroes of near mythology few men could rightfully say, “I founded a state”. Theseus and Athens? Oliver Cromwell tried, but was too early, and could not solve the succession problem. George Washington succeeded, with the assistance of an brilliant cadre of fellow founders. MacDonald in Canada? There are not many men of this illustrious calibre.

Let me tell my little story about Lee Kwan Yew. He had retired as Prime Minister of Singapore ten years before; it was the year 2000, though in the Chinese way he was retained as “Senior Minister”. I was reading the Singapore Straits Times in the lounge at Bangkok Airport, about 2 a.m., one of the best newspapers in the world.

On the inside front page was a report of a speech by Lee Kwan Yew to a Singapore business club. In it, Kwan Yew was basically saying that every major economic development policy he had imposed on Singapore was wrong, and needed to be changed. Singapore had made it through a nimble fingers approach to working up the production chain to ever higher value-added goods, with a significant measure of cultural repression.

Lee Kwan Yew had just then returned from California, and he had seen the future, and it worked. It involved making an economy work on brains, and it therefore involved policies that would attract talent. These policies would be tolerant and welcoming to a multi-ethnic citizenry.

I am not concerned with whether Singapore has managed such an about-face; I like to think it has. My point is that for Lee Kwan Yew to say this, he would have had to take stock fundamentally of where the world was going and had both the wit and the courage to see where his beloved and successful policies were no longer sufficient. Then he declared them to be insufficient, and called for new approaches to wealth development in Singapore.

Imagine if Harper or Chretien had said, at any time, that policies to which they had been personally committed were no longer sufficient? Not Harper criticizing Chretien, or the converse, but Harper or Chretien criticizing in public his own decisions: official bilingualism, multiculturalism, free trade.

We Canadians need to see the way the world is working out, and if we had leadership like Lee Kwan Yew’s, there would be little to stop us. Then again, maybe we do have leadership like Lee Kwan Yew’s in the current PM: unlovable, but possibly great.

Dalrymple again:

Lee Kwan Yew had no problems with elitism, provided it brought about an elite of intelligence and ability (not always quite the same thing); the fashionable theories of liberal educationists had no attraction for him. No politician has ever defended more fiercely than Lee Kwan Yew the importance for a society of fostering high intelligence….

He was educated in London and Cambridge, and he recalled admiringly the way evening newspapers were piled in the street in London and people paid for them by leaving their money without any compulsion to do so and without ever stealing what others had left. This, he thought, was a well-ordered and disciplined society, and he resolved to bring such good order and discipline to his own society.

 

I saw a mother with three young daughters out walking around the snow-covered park near me the other day. One was in a pram, the other children were about three and five years old. Mum had a plastic bag hanging from the pram, and one of her children was spotting waste paper left in the park, which they were encouraged to pick up and take home, as a matter of civic duty and pride. I felt that Canada had a great future if such values were being inculcated in young children. Just a little bit of Singapore and Japan, please. We do not want to live in mental strait-jackets, but we can always manage with high levels of civic engagement, trust, and public cleanliness.

 

lee kwan yew-2015

 

 

 

You are allowed to teach Christianity as if it might be true

A very welcome decision of the Supreme Court this morning in the Loyola High School  case: you are allowed to teach Catholicism in a Catholic school as if it might be true.
The case concerned the rights of a Catholic private school in Montreal, Quebec to teach a religion and ethics course without being forced to teach the view that all religions, being worthy of respect, were actually equally true.

If anything, the Minister’s decision – which was the basis of Loyola’s decision to appeal – shows that the Government of Quebec has established secular humanism as its official state religion, and that it is prepared to enforce the idea that all religions, being somehow worthy of respect, are in a sense equally unworthy of belief.

A religion need have nothing to do with a God, gods, or the metaphysical, and still be a religion. National Socialism (Naziism) and Communism were state religions, though both were anti-Christian and atheistic.  The Government of Quebec has merely transferred its state religion from an ultramontane version of Roman Catholicism to secular humanism, but it retains is collectivist and authoritarian impulses.

From the judgment:

Held: The Minister’s decision requiring that all aspects of Loyola’s proposed program be taught from a neutral perspective, including the teaching of Catholicism, limited freedom of religion more than was necessary given the statutory objectives. As a result, it did not reflect a proportionate balancing and should be set aside. The appeal is allowed and the matter remitted to the Minister for reconsideration.

 

The majority decision was written by Judge Rosalie Abella (who knew?) and for once I agree with her.

 

Freedom of religion means that no one can be forced to adhere to or refrain from a particular set of religious beliefs. This includes both the individual and collective aspects of religious belief. Religious freedom under the Charter  must therefore account for the socially embedded nature of religious belief, and the deep linkages between this belief and its manifestation through communal institutions and traditions.

The context in this case is state regulation of religious schools. This raises the question of how to balance robust protection for the values underlying religious freedom with the values of a secular state. The state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that students in all schools are capable, as adults, of conducting themselves with openness and respect as they confront cultural and religious differences. A vibrant, multicultural democracy depends on the capacity of its citizens to engage in thoughtful and inclusive forms of deliberation. But a secular state does not — and cannot — interfere with the beliefs or practices of a religious group unless they conflict with or harm overriding public interests. Nor can a secular state support or prefer the practices of one group over another. The pursuit of secular values means respecting the right to hold and manifest different religious beliefs. A secular state respects religious differences, it does not seek to extinguish them.

                    Loyola is a private Catholic institution. The collective aspects of religious freedom — in this case, the collective manifestation and transmission of Catholic beliefs — are a crucial part of its claim. The Minister’s decision requires Loyola to teach Catholicism, the very faith that animates its character, from a neutral perspective. Although the state’s purpose is secular, this amounts to requiring a Catholic institution to speak about its own religion in terms defined by the state rather than by its own understanding. This demonstrably interferes with the manner in which the members of an institution formed for the purpose of transmitting Catholicism can teach and learn about the Catholic faith. It also undermines the liberty of the members of the community who have chosen to give effect to the collective dimension of their religious beliefs by participating in a denominational school.

Snippets:

In a multicultural society, it is not a breach of anyone’s freedom of religion to be required to learn (or teach) about the doctrines and ethics of other world religions in a neutral and respectful way…..

Preventing a school like Loyola from teaching and discussing Catholicism, the core of its identity, in any part of the program from its own perspective, does little to further the ERC Program’s objectives while at the same time seriously interfering with the values underlying religious freedom. The Minister’s decision is, as a result, unreasonable.

Unfortunately, Madame Justice Abella sent the case back to the Minister of Education for reconsideration, rather than granting the relief sought immediately.

Per McLachlan,C.J., Moldaver and Rothstein:

The communal character of religion means that protecting the religious freedom of individuals requires protecting the religious freedom of religious organizations, including religious educational bodies such as Loyola….

The freedom of religion protected by s. 2 (a) of the Charter  is not limited to religious belief, worship and the practice of religious customs. Rather, it extends to conduct more readily characterized as the propagation of, rather than the practice of, religion.

Indeed, presenting fundamentally incompatible religious doctrines as equally legitimate and equally credible could imply that they are both equally false.  Surely this cannot be a perspective that a religious school can be compelled to adopt.

The minority differed principally in seeking to grant Loyola the relief it sought immediately, rather than sending the decision back to the Quebec Minister of Education for reconsideration

The nauseating moral swamp of black and liberal reaction to Ferguson

No one over sixteen has failed to have had a negative interaction with police.

Here are instances from my life:

Your bicycle has just been stolen and you flag down a cop car. You cross the street to approach the car and the idiot chides you for crossing the street against a traffic light, or something. Then they tell you your stolen bike is their business, and don’t go looking for it. They do nothing but give you a number where you can reach a kindly old retired cop who handles stolen bicycle complaints. They do nothing effective.

You are a teenager on your way to your friend’s house. The cop stops you, you get into the cop car at his command and he proceeds to intimidate you for daring to be in that part of town at night. The entire proceeding is just a cop being a thug.

Your house has been thoroughly robbed. On the cop’s second look through your house, the improperly stored firearm -according to our draconian firearms control law –  is discovered in its hiding place. They take the rifle and never give it back. You have to hire lawyers to defend yourself. You make it clear to the prosecutor that there will be plenty of newspaper coverage of the fact that your door was broken down, your house robbed, and the homeowner is in more trouble than the thief who stole $20,000 worth of stuff in several trips, who has got away clean.

So do not accuse me of being soft on the constabulary. Like most of the human species, there is a strong case for eliminating the half of them with IQs below 100. But with what portion of the human species would we begin, in that case?

Yet even after a lifetime of not always happy interactions with these authoritarian twenty-five year-olds and older self-satisfied uniformed idiots, I still think they have a difficult, rough job to do.

Fred Reed has a great insight into the life of a cop at the Unz Review, called Notes from the Drains. It should be read by all who fulminate about police brutality and shooting. It describes the life of a normal well-motivated cop.

With time, your views on police brutality will become ambivalent, or not ambivalent. You will see the pretty blonde rape victim, fifteen, about due for her first prom, screaming and screaming and screaming, sobbing and choking, while the med tech tries to get a sedative into her arm. And you will hear the cop next to you, hand clenching hard on his night stick, say in cold fury, “I hope the sonofabitch resists arrest.” Yeah, you may find yourself thinking, yeah. Social theories are nice. The streets are not theoretical.

And you will find that the perps are almost always black. If you are a good liberal, you won’t like this, but after three months on the street you will not have the faintest doubt. If you are a suburban conservative out of Reader’s Digest, you will be surprised at the starkness of the racial delineation.

All cops know this. They know better than to say it. This can be tricky for black cops, especially if former military who believe in law and order.

You will find that there are white cops who knock blacks around, who humiliate them. You will think it wrong, and so will many of your fellows, but you will decide not to turn them in. You have twenty more years on the streets with them. You will discover that black cops exist who also mistreat blacks, and this will confuse you.

A more statistical approach is found in the City Journal this week. After showing that the number of citizen interactions with police has been going down in the past decade

 …another series of Justice Department surveys,… ask Americans whether they have been victimized by crime. Those who say yes are then asked to identify the race of their attacker. In a 2008 survey, 58 percent of violent crime victims of identified the perpetrators as white, and 23 percent as black. That compares with a national population 74 percent white and 12 percent black. (After 2008, questions about the race of offenders disappear from the victimization data on the FBI’s website.) Police frequently point to this survey and others like it to explain that stop rates and arrest rates are higher for minorities because crime rates are higher in minority areas. Victims disproportionately identify perpetrators as minority.

The real indicator would be a significant dissimilarity between the incident rate, the arrest rate, the prosecution rate and the conviction rate. Dissimilarities would indicate that too many arrest were being made, or prosecutions initiated, relative to convictions. But there are not. Blacks fill American jails, and North American Indians fill Canadian jails, disproportionately to their presence in the population, because they engage in crime disproportionately to the population.

The notion that the thug who attacked the store owner in Ferguson, punched the cop in the police car, escaped, and charged back at the cop is some kind of innocent: it revolts me. The attempt by Obama and his more revolting – if that is possible – Attorney General Holder  to divert moral judgment from the American black propensity to commit crime disproportionately to other ethnicities, and blame police, makes me ill.

It starts to make Stuff Black People don’t like look like a description of facts. Actually, it is all factual, just the selection of facts is biased.

Fred reed again, explaining the speed with which cops must make lethal decisions:

If you shoot, and the object turns out to be a cell phone, “White cop shoots unarmed teen.” If you don’t shoot, and it turns out to be a gun, your wife gets to explain why daddy isn’t’ coming back. Ever.

Cops understand this. Delicate Ivy flowers in the peat moss of the Washington Post do not.

Let’s drop the “You are a cop” narrative. Instead, let’s try an experiment. In your living room, no adrenaline, no darkness, no danger, I will turn my back on you, holding in front of me in one hand a Day-Glo yellow plastic banana and, in the other, a realistic plastic pistol. You, in calm, perfectly safe circumstances, will point a “pistol” at me. Your finger will do fine. I will turn as fast as I can with one or the other in my hand. You have to shoot or not.

You will find, no matter how many times we try the experiment, that I can turn and fire (if I turn with the gun) before you can decide whether I have a gun or a Day-Glo banana. Try it in a dark alley.

Nuff said.

 

 

 

CRTC abandons position on regulating Internet

The CRTC retreated from an indefensible position today. It will not attempt to regulate an Internet content company.  It told Netflix that their comments are being struck from the record and that the Commission can decide the future of Canadian television without their participation. The letter is sniffy and tries to make it look like Netflix was rude, but the substance is that the CRTC is backing off the threat of ordering them to provide data.

I do not know whether to congratulate them for doing getting off a losing position so quickly, or reproach them for getting into trouble in the first place. On balance, Canadians who understand the issue appreciate that the war has been called off. If I were the Chairman of the CRTC, I might like to review the legal advice I was receiving about whether the Commission can regulate the Internet as “broadcasting”, and if I were acting as my own chief legal counsel, I would remind myself about the perils of a lawyer representing himself.

And maybe something like that imaginary call from the Clerk of the Privy Council to the Chairman of the CRTC did occur.

 

The legal culture of Canada

There is no dissent.

In the C2C Journal, there are some interesting articles. This is one of them. Written by Bob Tarantino, it describes the complete hegemony of the Charter interpreting class. Says Tarantino:

Appreciating how the law works requires accepting that if you want different decisions from the courts, the only option is to have different judges.

Recall that when the Supremes nixed Nadon’s appointment from the Federal Court, they also declared themselves to be a constitutionally protected institution. At the same time as they wrecked the advancement of Federal Court judges to the Supreme Court, they insulated themselves from any change. Said the Court at paragraph 74 of Nadon:

We disagree. Parliament cannot unilaterally change the composition of the Supreme Court of Canada. Essential features of the Court are constitutionally protected under Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982 . Changes to the composition of the Court can only be made under the procedure provided for in s. 41 [1] of the Constitution Act, 1982  and therefore require the unanimous consent of Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Changes to the other essential features of the Court can only be made under the procedure provided for in s. 42 [2] of the Constitution Act, 1982 , which requires the consent of at least seven provinces representing, in the aggregate, at least half of the population of all the provinces

Tarantino again:

Injecting more conservative and libertarian principles into the legal system requires, at a minimum, injecting more conservative lawyers into the legal system. The goal is not to displace progressives in the legal community, but rather to supplement their presence with conservative/libertarian intellectual counterweights, so that the field of contest is not dominated by progressives to the point of excluding competing conceptions of the law. “Political” judges are not a problem; but uniformly political judges are. The law develops in an impoverished way if only “progressive” views dominate and inform decisions from the bench. For the vitality of the law to be maintained, judicial decision-making must be a crucible of debate over what the law is, its purpose and its application, from a variety of perspectives.

Mann vs. Steyn: Trial of the century

Here is Robert Tracinski’s article on the Mann vs Steyn lawsuit.

 

The global warming hysteria is disastrous enough in its intended goal, which is to ban the use of our cheapest and most abundant fuels and force us to limp along on “alternative energy” sources that are insufficient to support an industrial civilization. But along the way, the global warming campaign is already wrecking our science and politics by seeking to establish a dogma that cannot legally be questioned….

Here is the point at which we need a little primer on libel laws, which hinge on the differentiation between facts and opinion. It is libel to maliciously fabricate facts about someone. (It is not libel to erroneously report a false fact, so long as you did so with good faith reason to believe that it was true, though you are required to issue a correction.) But you are free to give whatever evaluation of the facts you like, including a negative evaluation of another person’s ideas, thinking method, and character. It is legal for me, for example, to say that Michael Mann is a liar, if I don’t believe that his erroneous scientific conclusions are the product of honest error. It is also legal for me to say that he is a coward and a liar, for hiding behind libel laws in an attempt to suppress criticism.

These are all reasons that the lawsuit should have been summarily thrown out. It goes beyond the legitimate scope of libel and defamation laws and constitutes an attempt to suppress opinions that are considered politically correct.

You should read all of Tracinski’s article.

Conrad Black on Mark Steyn and the American justice system

Read this, from the American Spectator. Conrad Black rides to the defence of Mark Steyn.

The context is the law suit between Mark Steyn and Michael Mann, author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph, whose algorithm turns all data into a hockey stick shape, thus confirming what catastrophists  wants to prove, that the earth is suddenly warming. Steyn called Mann some bad names and a lawsuit ensued.

This is Conrad Black on the US justice system.

 

In fact, as is becoming notorious, American justice is in a shocking condition. Too many judges in the U.S. are elected; too many are ex-prosecutors; the battle over capital punishment has taken all the air out of the room in which the infamous severity of American sentences and the unspeakable lopsidedness of prosecutorial success should be debated. This is a country that inspired the world with a vision of freedom and democracy (though Great Britain, Switzerland, much of the Netherlands, and Scandinavia were just as democratic at the time of the American Revolution). Yet the entire legal apparatus has sat like a gigantic suet pudding and the Supreme Court, in between its four-month vacations, has drunk the Kool-Aid of its own bathwater. The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guaranties of due process, just compensation for seizure of property, grand jury deliberations as assurance against capricious prosecution, prompt justice, access to counsel (of choice), impartial jury, and reasonable bail have been put to the shredder. The United States has six to twelve times the number of incarcerated people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the nearest comparable countries. Even after removing from the totals all those with unstigmatizing records irrelevant to their hireability today (DUI or disorderly conduct decades ago, for example), about 15 percent of adult males are felons.

and further:

The law may be tattered, degraded, compromised by the avarice of the American lawyer; the detached exaltedness and frequent bigotry and philistinism of the American bench; and the preening, reckless, megalomania of Richard Posners and Leo Strines (judges of the Seventh Circuit and Delaware Supreme Court). But the judiciary cannot ultimately sustain Mann’s absurd claim. It may choose to hear and try the case, but victory for Mann would, as Robert Tracinski wrote at Real Clear Politics, immunize from unfavorable comment anyone who could lay claim to high “intellect and reasoning.” If the United States ever enthrones such a totalitarian principle (Tracinski compared Mann to Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s crackpot geneticist whose theories were entrenched as Soviet dogma), then it will no longer enjoy freedom of expression. It will not be America and will have sailed into a world undreamt of in the most vivid nightmares of Orwell, Kafka, and Koestler. Only an imbecile could look with satisfaction on the contemporary state of public life in America, but it remains a democratic country that cherishes the freedom it has fought for centuries to enjoy and protect, and has sacrificed greatly to extend to other parts of the world. Such a sacred and fundamental canon of American civilization will not be thrown in the gutter to protect a mediocre academic opportunist, especially one who cannot face courts that will take a fine-toothed comb to his research (this has happened in British Columbia), one who is simply trying to use the labyrinthine, jejune American legal system to defer criticism of his infamous piece of athletic equipment.

 

 

 

Judge Nadon and the Supremes

It seems the Supreme Court has gone out of its way not to oblige the Prime Minister, and this must be maddening for him. I do not agree with the Supremes in the case of the eligibility of Judge Nadon, and I am glad that at least one Supreme Court Justice, Mr. Moldaver, agrees with my interpretation of the Supreme Court Act.

Nevertheless, I have a malicious suggestion for an aggrieved Harper. It is simple and legal. Do not nominate a replacement from Quebec, or any province for that matter, for as long as it takes to get his point across to the Supreme Court. Just let their numbers dwindle. The workload will be more burdensome. Madame Justice Beverley MacLachlan may find it increasingly attractive to retire. Harper can always go through the motions of vetting names for the the Supreme Court, and he will be plausibly defended if he does so. But do nothing Mr. Harper. Nothing at all. Do not react, but do not appoint anyone for a while.

____________________________

 

My reading of the judgment of the majority in the Nadon reference (In the Matter of a Reference by the Governor in Council concerning sections 5 and 6 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. S-26) does not reveal any overt malice of wrongheaded judges wilfully misinterpreting the statute. The matter concerned the interpretation of sections 5 and 6 of the Supreme Court Act.

The statute was very recently amended, after Nadon’s nomination, to read as follows:

 Any person may be appointed a judge who is or has been a judge of a superior court of a province or a barrister or advocate of at least ten years standing at the bar of a province.

 For greater certainty, for the purpose of section 5, a person may be appointed a judge if, at any time, they were a barrister or advocate of at least 10 years standing at the bar of a province.

 At least three of the judges shall be appointed from among the judges of the Court of Appeal or of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec or from among the advocates of that Province.

 For greater certainty, for the purpose of section 6, a judge is from among the advocates of the Province of Quebec if, at any time, they were an advocate of at least 10 years standing at the bar of that Province.

Prior to the nomination of Mr. Justice Nadon, sections 5.1 and 6.1 did not exist.

The decision of the Supremes makes any change to the composition of the Court to be a matter beyond the competence of the federal government alone, and it would require unanimous consent of the provinces.

Sections 5 and 6 of the Supreme Court Act reflect an essential feature of the Supreme Court of Canada — its composition — which is constitutionally protected under Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982.

at paragraph 40 of the decision:

                            Section 6 does not displace the general requirements under s. 5 that apply to all appointments to the Supreme Court. Rather, it makes additional specifications in respect of the three judges from Quebec. One of these is that they must currently be a member of the Quebec bar.

I did not think that a nominee had to be a current member of the Quebec Bar in an earlier opinion, and I do not think this is the right decision on the fine point of interpreting sections 5 and 6. But it is clearly an interpretation that a number of reasonable judges came to, and they get to make the decisions, not me.

It gets worse for civilist judges from Quebec appointed to the federal courts. At paragraph 60 they say:

                             Nevertheless, s. 6 makes clear that judges of the federal courts are not, by virtue of being judges of those courts, eligible for appointment to the Quebec seats on this Court. The question is not whether civilist members of the federal courts would make excellent judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, but whether they are eligible for appointment under s. 6 on the basis of being former rather than current advocates of the Province of Quebec. We conclude that they are not.

Judge Muldaver was of my view: that imposing the requirement that the Quebec appointee must be a current member of the Bar of Quebec was not a part of section 6. At paragraph 117:

                           The currency requirement is not supported by the text of s. 6, its context, its legislative history, or its underlying object.  Nor is such a requirement supported by the scheme of the Supreme Court Act.  In short, currency has never been a requirement under s. 6 and, in my view, any attempt to impose it must be rejected. 

_________________________________

 

What did they think they were agreeing to? Eating ice cream?

Occasionally the gap between what I know for a fact and what appears in the newspapers to cries of shock! horror! is wide. Take the NSA and Snowden for instance. Of course the NSA and CSE and every other British commonwealth signals intelligence agency has been vacuuming everyone’s email and phone messages for years. What did you think they were doing? Playing bridge with each other in those sealed conclaves of Cray computers? They are not looking for you or your porn habits, your secret trysts, or your bad habits, though I am sure a  moment’s tracking will reveal everything you ever wanted to hide. They are looking for patterns that indicate Islamic terrorism, needles in haystacks the size of Jupiter. We are more transparent to them than the Emperor Shaddam IV was to the Guild Navigators.

The top lawyer for the National Security Agency told a civil liberties oversight board on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s data collection – knowledge which the firms have vigorously denied having.

NSA general counsel Rajesh De said companies like Facebook and Google had complete knowledge of all communications information and metadata collected by the agency pursuant to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, whether the material was gathered by the internet data-mining program PRISM or by the “so-called ‘upstream’ collection of communications moving across the internet,” the Guardian reported.

How could they not know? The tech companies had signed agreements with the NSA, acting under authority of law, to conform to the intelligence requirements of signals intelligence agencies. This from Wikipedia:

The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act also added a new Title VII to FISA which contained provisions similar, but not identical, to provisions in the Protect America Act of 2007 which had expired earlier in 2008. The new provisions in Title VII of FISA were scheduled to expire on December 31, 2012, but two days before the U.S. Senate extended the FISA Amendments Act for five years (until December 31, 2017) which renews the U.S. government’s authority to monitor electronic communications of foreigners abroad.[8]

Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States, but is limited to targeting non-U.S. persons. Once authorized, such acquisitions may last for periods of up to one year.

Under subsection 702(b) of the FISA Amendments Act, such an acquisition is also subject to several limitations. Specifically, an acquisition:

    May not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States;

  • May not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;
  • May not intentionally target a U.S. person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;
  • May not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States;
  • Must be conducted in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Section 702 authorizes foreign surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA), like PRISM and some earlier data collection activities which were previously authorized under the President’s Surveillance Program from 2001

You ask, quite reasonably, does this not exempt US citizens?

Yes it does.

So how do you collect data on US citizens?

Simple. What do you think the CSE does? The British and Australian counterparts?

Oh. So every signals intelligence agency uses its foreign intelligence powers to snoop on citizens of other countries and then shares data with a select trusted few agencies according to long-standing agreements?

Yes. The intelligence sharing among Anglosphere signal intelligence agencies is a deeper political fact than NATO.

Without breaking any law?

Yes. But note that, if any foreigner is involved, then the NSA can legally target the communications, even if the preponderance of them involves resident US citizens. So if Abu-Jihad abd el Nasir is targeted, his American correspondents in the territory of the US are a legitimate target.

The lies and hypocrisy start when the Googles of this world deny their active cooperation. The phone companies have been hand in glove with the intelligence agencies for ever, and why should it be any different in the Internet-protocol world?

And did I forget to mention Executive Order 12333 on the subject of US Intelligence activities?

Pat Condell, Ezra Levant, and Christie Blatchford

Boldly offending Islam  since God knows when. The situation Condell describes in England since the Rushdie fatwa is the end state of what we in Canada will face, and Ezra Levant’s struggle is our struggle. It is that simple. Send him money.

I am disappointed in Christie Blatchford, who is normally a rock on issues like this. The issue, Miss Blatchford, is not whether Ezra Levant was mean to an old crone Jennifer Lynch, the late head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. He was. The issue is whether Islamic supremacism will be supported in Canadian law, with the effect of suppressing honest public discussion of what this totalitarian political ideology consists of.

A visit to Ezra’s site will show you how to send him money. Every time I see Levant I have to shell out two or three hundred bucks. Now I urge us all, me included, to send some money without the pleasure of hearing him rant.