The National Post has a column by self-declared former Mossad officer Michael Ross complaining that he cannot understand how we could allow someone with dubious ties to an international lobbyist — not to mention a second job as ambassador plenipotentiary for Sierra Leone — to chair the Security Intelligence Review
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The Sixth Estate: Science Works in South America, Too
IIf I had yesterday’s post back, I would rephrase the bit about serpent worship, which seems to be the chief magnet for complaints that I am some sort of racist missionary zealot. The point was that people who try to justify unproven medications on the grounds that an indigenous culture used them thousands of years […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Globe & Mail Confuses Medicine with Shamanism
Recently the British Columbia government ordered a B.C. physician named Gabor Maté to stop treating addicts with ayahuasca, an illegal psychotropic drug which Maté claims cures addictions. Maté had a “trial group” of a couple of hundred patients in Vancouver who have been taking the drug in their tea over the past two years. Now […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Remember: Conservatives Are Guilty of Election Fraud
Like all Canadians who respect the rule of law and the importance of firm law enforcement against reprobates, I was disgusted by yet another case of activist judges and left-wing prosecutors putting criminals’ rights ahead of the rights and needs of the general public. It is a travesty of justice when prosecutors claim they have […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Climate Change-Denying Republican Would-be President has John Turner Moment…
… and I can’t say I’m sorry to see it. Yesterday I suggested that at least Mitt Romney would be a sort of Obama-esque President, who could at least push off the final confrontation with the revolutionary nutcases for a few more years. Today I feel more confident that he has a good shot at […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: The Future of North American Politics
Today the Globe & Mail opened its commentary on the American 2012 election with a column by Pittsburgh journalist David Shribman. Shribman presents a bizarre description of the American election as a stark choice between two extremes: democratic socialism (higher taxes, more public healthcare, prosecution of Wall Street criminals) or Republican corporatism (lower taxes, less […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: John Ivison and the Case for a Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency
Today’s example of a woefully uninformed journalist spouting off on a subject of crucial national importance is John Ivison, whose Monday column in the National Post is what presently passes for “balanced” commentary on what Ivison says is a renewed push by the government to transform the Canadian Security Intelligence Service into a foreign intelligence […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Anglophone Thoughts on Unilingual Judges and National Unity
I’m probably the last person in the country to weigh in on the Harper regime’s English-only Supreme Court judges and Auditor-General. But since nobody I’ve read has yet said the only thing worth saying on this subject, I’m going to do so anyways. Plus, my interest was piqued by a scurrilous column by apparently well-meaning […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Canadian Governments Lack Political Courage?
On Friday, Chantal Hebert published a provocative column in the Toronto Star arguing that Canadian politicians are populists who lack “political courage” and, in the wake of the last courageous decision to create our new Constitution in 1981, have preferred to engage in meaningless populist grandstanding while the Supreme Court “takes the lead” in deciding […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Is Humanity Intelligent Enough to Survive?
The primary reason that I’ve found it hard to return to blogging since moving during the summer is that I’ve been struggling to find something meaningful to say on a topic which is, inarguably, more important than any other subject being talked about in politics today: whether advanced human civilization will still be around in […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Government Appoints Anti-Government Economist to Government Research Council
Some while ago, I documented the Harper regime’s attempt to privatize the leading research granting institutions in Canada to private-sector control: namely, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Today I regret to observe that, according to the Canada Gazette, Jack […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Did Conservative Appointee Break Election Donation Limit? Patronage List Updatedd
One of the longstanding projects at this blog is the Patronage List, which lists all of the new government appointments made by Cabinet ministers apparently given to Conservative Party donors, insiders, and former politicians. Currently the Patronage List stands at 762 names, and about one-third of new jobs handed out since the 2011 election went […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Silent No Longer: Sixth Estate Will Return
Presumably only the people who have Sixth Estate in their RSS readers will be reading this little mea culpa, but it’s as good a place to start as any. After a couple of months off, Sixth Estate is going to be returning to the Web with new gusto. The reason for the two month’s silence […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Daily Reading for Tuesday
// Impolitical thinks a recent speech by defence minister Julian Fantino may contain a sign that the government is willing to water down a proposed law that would require ISPs to spy on all of their customers’ Internet activity and then turn the data over to police on request, without a warrant. If you want […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Military Plans to Eliminate Subsidies to Academic Hawks
Rumours have abounded since last year that the military is planning to planning to abolish a subsidy program called the Security and Defence Forum, which funds about a dozen university research centres touching on military affairs, almost all of them right-wing and pro-military. (The singular exception is York University.) Now, according to Jack Granatstein, those […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Daily Reading for Friday
// Gary Mar, one of the new Conservative leadership contenders in Alberta, is arguing that we need to privatize healthcare to capitalize on the freed-up savings of “wealthy baby boomers.” Werner Patels says “he might just as well have put a sign on his backside that said ‘Kick me, repeatedly … please!’” Yves […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Kelowna MP Ron Cannan Wants You to Know He is a Cheap, Miserly, Nearly Useless Politician
Occasionally I like to draw attention to a Government of Canada press release which pops up in my RSS feed and which strikes me as particularly stupid or pointless. This week’s champion is a national press release circulated Monday morning, in which Kelowna Conservative MP Ronald Cannan announces that Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Peter MacKay: We Should Go Back to Rupert’s Land and New France
Before I go on, let me just say that this is a second-page story right now. It’s dismally predictable that this is attracting more attention that another issue which I have written about before and other bloggers are still writing about, justifiably so: the fraudulent stripping of tens of millions of dollars from border security […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: New National Post Climate Change Denialist Says: Don’t Worry, God Will Fix It
The latest gambit in the National Post‘s campaign against science education in Canada (specifically, against an informed understanding of climate change in Canada) is the printing of a piece by noted denialist David Legates, a bizarre attack on David Suzuki which not only claims that human-caused climate change is a myth but that our greatest […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Proof that Ezra “Chainsaw” Levant is a Paranoid Loon
Last week a commenter was highly critical of my labelling of Sun TV’s token loudmouthed brat, Ezra Levant, as a loon. Said commenter referred to Levant’s seemingly solid-gold street cred as an innocent victim of our country’s totalitarian Human Rights Commissions, and even that my labelling him as loony might actually be evidence that I […]
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