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Canada's Bill C-26: Yet another government power grab

Mark E. Jeftovic
easy DNS
Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00 UTC
Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay.
Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay.
Soviet Era Ethos Stomps Privacy and Due-Process

Another doozy from the Canadian government.

Following along several other bills winding their way along the Road to Serfdom...
  • Bill C-11 regulates the internet under the CRTC and paves the way toward institutionalized content moderation, the requirement for licenses to publish online, and regulation of user generated content (in Senate)
  • Bill C-36 the Online Harms Bill sought to designate political dissent as "hate speech" and invoked penalties for criticizing politicians (not sure where this one is at the moment).
  • Bill C-18 throws a funding lifeline to Canada's flailing agitprop industry (a.k.a the mainsteam media), in that it will require tech platforms to pay licensing fees for content the media outlets post there (passed third reading in November). This bill will reward big media conglomerates like Bell, while freezing out small and independent organizations.
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Putin

Best of the Web: This Time It Is Different

Douglas Macgregor
The American Conservative
Thu, 26 Jan 2023 12:01 UTC
Neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight all-out war with Russia, regionally or globally
Putin Biden
© Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Until it decided to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine, Washington confined the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose, wars with weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad that did not present an existential threat to U.S. forces or American territory. This time — a proxy war with Russia — is different.

Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West's demands for regime change in Moscow. Washington underestimated Russia's societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.

As a result, Washington's proxy war against Russia is failing. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was unusually candid about the situation in Ukraine when he told the allies in Germany at Ramstein Air Base on January 20:
"We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring. That's not a long time."
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Attention

James W. Carden: Ukraine and the lost lessons of Vietnam

James W. Carden
ACURA
Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00 UTC
Marines
© Eddie Adams/APSniper fire as US marines storm a village near Da Nang • 1965
Today, January 27th, marks 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which effectively ended American participation in the Vietnam war. One of the consequences, according to Georgetown University international affairs scholar Charles Kupchan, was that an "isolationist impulse" made a "significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus."

As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter's hawkish Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as "a nice man but burned by Vietnam." Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. And for a short time, the 'Vietnam Syndrome,' (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed American policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, represented a kind of resistance on the part of the Pentagon to unnecessary military adventures.

But such resistance didn't last long.
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MIB

Is the FBI secretly running dark web terrorist recruitment?

Felix Livshitz
RT
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 19:08 UTC
fbi agennt laptop terrorist entrapment
© Nes / Getty Images
US law enforcement is known for entrapment tactics, and the secrecy around a recent terrorism case is suspicious

A high-level conspiracy of silence surrounding a US terrorism prosecution raises serious questions over whether the FBI possesses technological means to bypass dark web user anonymity, or alternatively manages extremist group recruitment sites in secret, in order to entrap unsuspecting visitors.

US citizen Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari was charged in May 2020 with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He came to the attention of the FBI due to a series of visits he made to a dark web site, which hosts "unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS" in May 2019.

The Bureau pinpointed specific pages of the site Al-Azhari perused including sections on making donations, ISIS media assets, photos and videos, and stories of military operations allegedly conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria. These actions were linked to him directly by uncovering his IP address, and therefore his identity and location.

Comment: Technology in the right hands can accomplish good things, such as shutting down child porn sites. But it seems too tempting for an organization to burnish its credentials (and up its budget) by creating the very situations it is supposed to be eradicating.

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Eye 2

Hunter Biden found to have paid assistant for erotic shows

Chris
Trending Politics
Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:53 UTC
hunter joe biden drugs laptop
Hunter Biden photo recovered from his laptop
(inset) President Joe Biden
Hunter Biden threatened to withhold cash-strapped assistant's pay if she didn't FaceTime him naked, texts show

Like his father, Hunter Biden continues to stay in the news spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

Hunter Biden allegedly used the threat of withholding pay to coerce one of his female staffers, who was struggling financially, into having video sex sessions with him. The texts exchanged between the President's son (52 years old) and his then-29-year-old assistant revealed Hunter's requests for virtual sexual acts and financial support through Apple Pay after the assistant expressed her difficulty in paying rent.

The identity of the assistant, who worked at Hunter's law firm, Owasco, from 2018 to 2019, has been kept anonymous by DailyMail.com. She is known to be one of four employees with whom Hunter Biden had a sexual relationship.

Comment: The Biden sh*tshow just never seems to hit bottom.

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Putin

Putin sets mission for Russian military to protect border areas


RT
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 18:30 UTC
putin reconstruction donetsk luhansk
© Sputnik/Mikhail KlimentyevRussian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting on the restoration of residential infrastructure in the border regions, February 1, 2023.
The president said he wanted to "eliminate the possibility" of Ukraine bombing the country's border regions

Ukraine should not have the ability to target Russian border regions, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday, adding that this was a mission for the defense ministry in Moscow. His comments came a day after Ukrainian shelling struck near a pipeline in Bryansk Region, and amid rumors the US is preparing to give Kiev longer-range projectiles.

"Of course, the priority mission is to eliminate the very possibility of attacks, but that's a task for the military," Putin said during a videoconference about infrastructure work in the border regions of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk, as well as Crimea.

Comment: Russia actually looks after the people under its care:





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Info

She's baaaack: Nikki Haley will reportedly launch a presidential bid in February

Alex Nitzberg
Blaze Media
Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:01 UTC
Nikki Haley
© Scott Olson/Getty Images
Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during a portion of former President Donald Trump's White House tenure, will reportedly launch a 2024 presidential bid in February, according to the Post and Courier.

The outlet reported that an individual in "Haley's inner circle" confirmed that Haley will jump into the 2024 presidential race — the outlet also reported that according to an invitation slated to be sent to Haley supporters, a "special announcement" will take place on February 15.

Sources confirmed to Fox News Digital that Haley will formally announce her presidential bid on February 15.

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Up

'We live in dangerous times': Austria, Hungary agree on not sending weapons to Ukraine

Chiara Swaton
Euractiv
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:13 UTC
Klaudia Tanner and her Hungarian counterpart Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky
© EPA-EFE/Tibor IllyesAccording to Tanner, the greatest danger is that the war could spread to Europe, which would not only be a matter of conventional war but also of an interplay with hybrid warfare and an increase in migration in general.
Austria and Hungary agree on not sending weapons to Ukraine, Austrian Defence Minister Klaudia Tanner and her Hungarian counterpart Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky said at a meeting in Budapest on Monday, stressing their close cooperation.

Austria and Hungary's position regarding the war in Ukraine is clear, as both countries are not sending weapons to the conflict area to prevent a further escalation, Tanner and Szalay-Bobrovniczky stated during a joint press conference.

They would be on the side of peace, with Austria being militarily neutral, Szalay-Bobrovniczky stressed, while providing humanitarian aid to war refugees. Close cooperation would be the most important as "we live in a time of danger," he said.

Comment: Hungary is proving to be one of the few EU countries with any sense left these days: 'The swamp must be drained': Hungary wants European Parliament dissolved - Orban

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Ambulance

The West has one giant financial STD and everybody is infected

Greg Hunter
USA Watchdog
Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00 UTC
wall street
Precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter said last summer that the Fed rate increases would tank the economy. Everywhere you look you see the economy falling apart. House prices and sales are down. Banks are clocking record losses, vehicle prices are falling and unemployment is rising. The economy has not completely crashed, but it will. Holter explains,
"There are over $2,000 trillion worth of derivatives outstanding on a global economy . . . that has maybe a little more than $500 trillion in asset values. So, you have this dog walking around with a gigantic tail that will shake the dog. When derivatives go, it's a 48-hour event. Who do you think holds all these derivatives? You've got the big banks, all the big brokers, all the big insurance companies and they are all going to go down. It's like one giant financial STD, and everybody is in bed together and everybody is infected."
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Stock Up

IMF upgrades Russian economic forecast to positive growth


RT
Tue, 31 Jan 2023 23:16 UTC
dollars rubles exchange rate currency
© Yuri Kadobnov/GettyA pedestrian walks past a board at a currency exchange office in Moscow on January 16, 2023 showing the ruble and U.S. dollar exchange rates
The fund expects 0.3% growth in 2023, having previously predicted a contraction

The International Monetary Fund has revised upwards its estimate of Russian economic development, projecting GDP to grow by 0.3% this year, and 2.1% in 2024.

According to the fund's World Economic Outlook update published on Monday, Russia's GDP fell by 2.2% last year. In its October forecast, the IMF reported that the decline was expected to be 3.4%. For this year, the fund previously predicted a drop of 2.3%, and for 2024, a 2.1% decline.

Comment: Meanwhile, back in the heart of Nato-stan:
The British economy will perform worst among the major industrialized nations, the International Monetary Fund has predicted. The UK will be the only G7 member to face a recession in 2023, falling behind the Russian economy, the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook update, published on Tuesday.

In its latest report, the IMF again sharply downgraded its forecast for the UK, predicting the economy will contract by 0.6% against the 0.3% growth expected last October. That places the expected performance even lower than sanctions-hit Russia, which is projected to expand by 0.3% after contracting 2.2% in 2022. A UK recession this year would be the first, excluding the pandemic, since the financial crisis in 2009.

Among the other G7 nations, the IMF's 2023 GDP predictions show growth of 1.4% in the US, 0.1% in Germany, 0.7% in France, 0.6% in Italy, 1.8% in Japan and 1.5% in Canada.

The IMF stated that while the prospects for other G7 members had improved or remained unchanged since October, the forecast for the UK looks gloomier due to surging interest rates and rising taxes. This, along with the government's spending restraint will exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis.

"Tighter fiscal and monetary policies and financial conditions and still-high energy retail prices weighing on household budgets" have eroded the country's GDP, the IMF said.

Raging inflation, running above 10% and more than five times the Bank of England's 2% target, has undermined household spending power, squeezing demand and dragging down the economy, the report concluded.


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