When we stop trusting our own government

Gill Picard writes, at his site:

PIPELINE REFERENDUM??? 

There is a person from Nanaimo by the name of Robert St-Amour who was on the Bill Good show this morning with the announcement that he is planning to run a referendum to find out if the population of BC wants a pipeline running through the province. 

Good rightly says that this is a too soon since the environmental review on the project has yet to be conducted. Good is a...lso asking if we should have, yet, another referendum. 

What both of these people are dancing around with and fail to understand, is that Mr. St-Amour is demonstrating that the people of British Columbia no longer trust any of their governments to make the right decision. 

When it comes to a major decision, the people of BC don’t trust the hired help and would rather decide for themselves. 

This should be a fairly good clue to politicians of all kinds that major changes need to occur and the first breed of politician to clue in stands to make some large gains in the race to get elected.

Cops Behaving Badly, January 26th.

A few more items while I catch up.

• The Barton County, Kansas Sheriff's Dept. Charming fellows.
• The gullibility of Nassau County and New York City law enforcement officials.
• An eighth-grader in Brownsville, Texas, was shot to death by police officers after brandishing a pellet gun in a hallway in his school.
• The latest in the War on Cameras.
• An Alabama minister has sued the Shelby County, Tennessee, Drug Enforcement Task Force after having a warrant mistakenly issued for his arrest on a drug charge, along with his photo being posted on a sheriff's most wanted list.
• A high-ranking RCMP officer in Merritt, BC, is facing theft charges for ( allegedly ) stealing seized cocaine on more than one occasion.
• A Virginia state trooper essentially performs highway robbery...and seems to get away with it.
• More on that drug raid gone wrong in Ogden, Utah.
• According to a federal court filing, more than 500 people have been wrongly imprisoned in Denver, Colorado over the past seven years.
• More on the story of Tina Funderburk, who was caught up in legal limbo for over eight years in Hinds County, Mississippi: in jail on murder charges, but not likely to see the inside of a courtroom because of criminal insanity. A judge has finally transferred Ms. Funderburk's case out of a criminal court, which means that she can now be committed to a mental hospital.
• The latest in the War on Canines.
• The many crimes of former Memphis, Tennessee MPD officer Norman Benjamin. 
• Ian Birk, a former Seattle police officer who resigned after shooting and killing Vancouver Island, BC resident John T. Williams while still on duty in August of 2010, will not face civil rights charges.

Progress for BC's liquor laws?

BC's Solicitor General and Minister of Public Safety, Shirley Bond, announced the other day that the province is considering changes to its laws governing the sale of liquor in movie theatres. Cases like this one show why changing these laws would be a good idea.

Meanwhile, Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Dan Albas' private member's bill to amend the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, which currently makes it illegal to transport liquor across provincial lines without the consent of each province's liquor board, still doesn't seem to have moved past the Standing Committee of Finance. BC NDP leader Adrian Dix has shown support for Albas' bill.

On drugs

A couple of items that caught my attention this month.

First, there appears to be an shortage of the attention-deficit medication Adderall in the States, mostly because of quotas imposed on manufacturers by the DEA. The DEA, naturally, refuses to take the blame for getting in the way of much-needed medication for a lot of people by saying that drug companies simply want to sell more brand-name drugs instead of cheaper generics: “Any shortage of these products is therefore a result of decisions made by industry regarding manufacturing or distribution." This might well be true - why sell a generic when you can sell a brand-name drug instead? - but still misses the point, and the direct harm the DEA is causing because of an arbitrary desire to regulate the chemicals that people are willing to put into their own bodies, with or without a note from their doctor.

Second, four Columbia University scientists have published an important review in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology that calls into question the amount of damage that meth use can inflict on the human brain. In the short term, they found, meth use can actually improve, among other things, attention and visual and spatial perception. More importantly, long-term users don't seem to show the kind of cognitive damage that has been assumed so far, which means that rehab treatments might be more effective against meth addiction than previously thought. This research could drastically change the way that we approach meth consumption and addiction, which unfortunately means it will probably be largely ignored by policy-makers.

Andrew Phillips: The Iron Curtain

Occasional correspondent Andrew Phillips writes:

Social Housing may go Smoke Free - CFRA 

Dear God you smoked, and have, for decades. Jerzy have the decency to die so the Smoke Nazis have another I told you so example they can use. A living smoker is of no use to them your worth more to them as a dead statistic. Which gives you a pretty good idea of the real value they place on human life and civil liberties; none. - my quote on Facebook to an American friend today.

Recently in Holland the largest party in the Dutch Parliament, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy which, as its name implies, is anathema to the public health establishment. Relaxed the Dutch smoking ban  after a grass-roots campaign led by small bar owners. Bringing about an angst filled letter about "leaving smokers to their fate". So what's the problem with being left alone and not vilified and segregated by governments, drug companies, and taxpayer funded special interest groups being bought by big Pharmaceutcial companies I wonder?

As early as July of this year a majority of Dutch bars brought out the ashtrays as you can see some of this can, in part, be attributed to the free market and both the owners AND the consumers being allowed to make a free choice in the matter. In Carson City Nevada a bill was passed back in June  that will allow taverns and bars to - once again -  operate their privately owned establishments in their own best interests and that of their paying customers.  In Germany they want the "Health Mafia" to butt out this is Germany so using the word Nazis is touchy even though it is very accurate.

In America, in Michigan, law makers have been banned from bars and restaurants as they have started a campaign to defend their property rights. Where, "Bars will be posting signs on their entrances, and providing workers photographs of lawmakers to identify them should they, the lawmakers, choose to ignore the ban. Owners have indicated they will have lawmakers charged with trespassing". The bans are being flouted and ignored in Spain, in France , and in Texas a proposed ban was snuffed out by state lawmakers. In England an English MP want to reverse the ban as it is killing the English Pub industry . Although this is a step in the right direction it falls short of the real goal of property rights. Which is putting a legal wall between the citizen and government coersion.

In Spain they have just opened up the first smokers club an action a friend of mine tried to do here in Canada. As the man said who tried to get my friend and his case heard in the Supreme Court of Canada for private establishments, even as the health issue seems to end at the front door of a casino, stated, "What is the definition of a public place?" asks Mason. "The distinction between private and public, in my opinion, was not addressed properly by (the Ontario Court of Appeals.) "As it reads in the appeals court decision, I think an argument could be made that your home is now a public place". 

Martin W. Mason was, he has since passed away, one of the most respected lawyers in Ottawa. He was a partner with Gowlings. Had served on the national and Ontario council of the Canadian Bar Association. Is past chair of the bar association's council on constitutional and human rights law. Taught constitutional law at the University of Ottawa. By the way Mr Mason and Gowling thought it was so important an issue they did the work pro bono (for free).

Meanwhile the media in Canada continues to ignore the mounting reports of the suicides and murder suicides from Champix (Chantix) a smoking cessation drug made by Pfizer which is facing massive lawsuits which you can read abouthere and here . Even as ads are appearing on TV in Canada for that very product. Ads that don't even carry the health risk warnings that - by law -  are mandatory in the United States. But corporate media ownership in Canada appears to have been given the okay to run US style drug ads by the CRTC . Giving them a huge financial incentive from potential drug cartel advertising revenue to push both the drug ads and block the above information. Winston Churchill once called this, or something quite like it, the Iron Curtain.

Great economists like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises have pointed out that when free markets disappear fascism is the end result and as this article about the very subject points out key to restoring freedom in this country is toeliminate the special interest groups in everything. What is under attack are fundamental freedoms predating our nation and its very beginning such as free choice, property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of constitutional law and the protection it accords us all from the state.

The young lady below was shot dead because the property rights of bars and restaurants in Canada are continuing to be violated. A death, along with the reason for it, that was, for the most part ignored by the Iron Curtain. It has never been about health; never. It certainly didn't help hers.

On Liberals and Libertarianism

As a follow-up to this, a guest-post by Will Wilkinson at Bleeding Heart Libertarians that I think pretty much sums up my own position on what it means to be a libertarian. Or a liberal. Or a liberaltarian. Whatever.

I’m not interested in identifying which among the many kinds of bleeding-heart libertarian I am because I’m not interested in identifying myself a libertarian. Ideological labels are mutable, but at any given time they publicly connote a certain syndrome of convictions. What “libertarian” tends to mean to most people, including most people who self-identify as libertarian, is flatly at odds with some of what I believe. So I guess I’m just a liberal; the bleeding heart goes without saying. 

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on. 

Given the prevailing public understanding of “libertarianism,” this ain’t it and I’m no libertarian. And it’s not at all clear to me what is to be gained by trying to get people to retrofit the label to fit my idiosyncratic politics. At any rate, that’s not a project I’m interested in. I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives. 

[...] 

Anyway, I would encourage other decreasingly standard-libertarian libertarian-ish types to hasten their passage through the liminal “bleeding heart” stage and just come out as liberals. Or, better yet, to come out as inscrutably idiosyncratic. You are not alone. Well, if you’re inscrutably idiosyncratic, you are. But the similarly inscrutably idiosyncratic can be alone together. I’ve heard some good things about individualism. Maybe some of us should try it.

Cops Behaving Badly, January 25th

A quick round-up while I catch up on a back-log of links and stories that I've been meaning to blog about during my hiatus.

A few things:

• In Hinds County, Mississippi, a schizophrenic, criminally insane woman was left to rot in a detention center for years in a legal limbo: unlikely to be tried, but still charged with murder.
• In Charlton, Massachusetts, a police sergeant who was sent to collect overdue library books.
• In Utica, New York, a drunk, off-duty state trooper allegedly kicked his way into someone's home and assaulted them. Nobody seems to know why.
• The ongoing fight against Chicago's wiretapping laws.
• In Seattle, Washington, the City of Seattle sued attorney James Egan over his requests for police dash-cam footage.
• In Ogden, Utah, police got into a massive firefight with an army veteran named Matthew David Stewart while serving a routine drug-related search warrant. One police officer, Jared Francom, was killed. This isn't so much cops behaving badly as a tragedy resulting from the increasingly-militarized war on drugs, but I thought it bore mention.
• In Chicago, Illinois, officer Chris Collins apparently used a motor-vehicle database to track down a woman he'd given a speeding ticket to in order to ask her out. She subsequently sued him for violating her privacy.
• The latest in the War on Cameras.

My latest for the Victoria Politics Examiner

I'm back blogging after a long ( for me ) hiatus, and my first come-back post at the Victoria Politics Examiner takes a look at a new third party in BC: the Individual Rights Party of British Columbia. I hope to have more about the party's founders and how it came to be organized at a later date, if possible.