Road Warrior of the Week

Heroes and Good Samaritans

The Mark Hasiuk Show: Joe Trasolini on the Little Mountain Housing Scandal

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May 022013
 

When British Columbians head to the polls May 14, will they be educated about their provincial government, and the chicanery of Christy Clark's BC Liberals? Of course not. Join Mark as he talks to Joe Trasolini, incumbent NDP MLA for Port Moody-Coquitlam, about the Little Mountain "relocation" scandal, which has forced taxpayers to house former Little Mountain residents in expensive private market housing. And the ongoing cover-up, by BC Housing, of a damning report from the Office of the Comptroller General. It's investigative reporting, Roadkill-style!

See Mark Hasiuk’s story at The Huffington Post.

Family Freedom Fighters: If Not Human, What?

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Sep 152012
 

The Canadian Medical Association has issued a statement—political, not medical—saying that a baby does not become a human being until after it is born.

Let’s parse that carefully. We’ll start with the organization making the statement: The Canadian Medical Association. Who are they?

Well, they’re actually an imitative branch-plant of the American Medical Association. It’s an example of the “Ooooh! They’ve got one! Let’s us have one, too!” syndrome.

But where did the AMA come from?

From the Rockefeller Foundation’s largesse. Here’s how:

In 1913, when a cabal of American Robber Barons drafted legislation for a graduated income tax—a policy espoused by Karl Marx, interestingly—they included a provision for tax-exempt charitable foundations. By keeping control of the shares they put into the foundations, they were able to exert influence on the stock market without appearing to violate the anti-trust laws. But the shares they retained would benefit from their advance knowledge of what they were going to do with their Foundation shares.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to split the income earned by the Rockefeller Foundation shares between rural education and medicine. Education was no problem: he just gave the money to rural school boards. He hired a guy to disburse the medical funds—but the guy he hired knew nothing about medicine. So he went to Leipzig, in Germany to find out what state-of-the-art medicine was doing there; as it turned out, Leipzig doctors were big on pharmaceuticals and surgery—two topics being taught at only one school in the USA: Johns-Hopkins. So Johns-Hopkins got the Rockefeller cash.

But it didn’t take long for the other universities to discover how to get on the gravy train: their curricula soon included pharmaceuticals and surgery. And that became the model for medical education in the USA.

Ironically, John D’s own personal physician was a homeopath—but homeopathy, like chiropractic, was excluded from the gravy train.

The graduates of the new allopathic medicine schools funded by Rockefeller became the founders of the AMA… and their pattern and policies were copied by the CMA.

So that’s the origin of the organization that now tells us a pre-born baby isn’t human.

I have a question for the CMA: if the parents are both human, the progeny is certainly not a rabbit. If the parents are both human, what IS the baby, if not human?

Am I putting down doctors? Not at all. They’re healers, and their training and compassion are important to us. But I am pointing out that their real expertise is confined to just one part of the healing arts. And within that part, there is a tiny—and, happily, a shrinking—number of doctors who are willing to be killers, instead of healers.

Thus the absurd CMA statement that pre-born babies aren’t human beings is merely a professional group’s attempt to protect a grisly billion-dollar-a year industry that enriches those few.

Parliament will soon decide whether to reconsider the 400-year-old criterion that undergirds that grisly industry. To many politicians, an organization like the CMA represents a convenient clumping together of potential votes; and when the opinion of such a group is falsely presented to them as being all on one side, it may seem to them to have weight… and that needs a counter-weight: your opinion.

This is an urgent time for you to act: visit, call or write your Member of Parliament and urge them to support Motion 312, by MP Stephen Woodworth, on September 21.

Woodworth wants Parliament to create a committee to review Section 223 of the Criminal Code, which says a child becomes a human being when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.

Woodworth, quite correctly, argues: “If a child, five minutes before birth, can be defined as ‘not a human being’, then the question is: ‘Who’s next?’”

Don’t put this off: contact your Member of Parliament right away to make sure your opinion is heard. Best is to make an appointment to visit them at their constituency office; next-best is to phone them, and leave a message for them to call you back—then tell them this issue is important to you, and could influence your vote at the next election; If nothing else, write a letter (no postage needed), or send an e-mail. But make sure your MP knows your opinion.

Canadian-born comedian Mort Sahl used to quip, in the ’50s, that “The AMA is opposed to faith healing—or any other cure that is quick and inexpensive.” Don’t let the voice of a lobby group like that influence your Member of Parliament.

Remember: your voice matters.

Give this Conspiracy a Place to Grow

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Apr 162012
 

Dr. Gary North, in his book, Conspiracy, writes that “… [conspiracies] need a field to grow in. The field is a climate of opinion—the same field used by the rulers of any society. Change the ideas, and you change the social order. The real conflict is not over money, or military hardware, or votes. The real conflict is over ideas.” (Emphases in the original)

It’s very common in academic, intellectual and journalistic circles to sneer at “conspiracy theories”; however, as President Roosevelt once said,
“If something happens in politics, you may be sure someone planned it.”

But if the real conflict, as Dr. North writes, is over ideas, how can the climate of public opinion be manipulated to favor the conspirators? Why, it is simplicity itself! Put all the children in government schools; mandate the teaching of a world-view that favors the conspirators. And voila! In a little while (it will seem to be almost overnight), public opinion will be re-shaped. All totalitarians—for example, the Nazis and the Communists—have always realized this: “Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards,” said Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century.

All conspirators need to do, therefore, is capture the teaching profession, and by the next generation they will have the whole society. To capture the teaching profession, you need only to capture the universities. And that is exactly what has happened in North America and Europe.

So how can we free the next generation from this trap of indoctrination?

One answer is: vouchers.

If the government were to issue education vouchers to the parents of elementary and secondary students—for substantially less than the cost per student today—and to the students themselves for post-secondary studies, the free market of ideas would eagerly compete for those funds. And the efficiency of the free market would save taxpayers nearly half the present cost: cut the tax subsidy to all education to only 60% of the present funding level, but allow parental and student choice through vouchers, and we’ll get better education—real education, instead of indoctrination—and at a lower cost.

Not all conspiracies are bad. But the one crippling education today—the conspiracy by radical Left-wing activists to use public education to manipulate public attitudes by indoctrinating children with socialist and hedonist ideas—needs some healthy competition. Education vouchers would provide that competition.

Think of it as a parents’ counter-conspiracy.

How Ottawa should have handled the recession

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Mar 302011
 

It’s a tragedy that Canada’s federal government followed the Obama administration’s gallop into increasing the National Debt in their attempt to cope with the 2008 market collapse that was brought on by the implosion of a derivatives market based on sub-prime mortgages.

Granted, Canada fared better than the U.S., because our banks are more conservatively regulated. But the burden of debt imposed on future generations of Canadians is now worse than it’s ever been in history. If we take our eyes off the $14 trillion debt Obama has burden the U.S. with, we can see that Canada’s half-trillion-plus debt is going to be a drag on our economy for decades and decades to come.

And it wasn’t necessary.

The principal economic problem caused by the market collapse was that banks tightened their cash-sphincters and began retaining cash; the economy suffered a liquidity contraction that threw people out of work, and consumer demand shrank, further constricting the economy.

What Ottawa should have done would have involved a four-step revolution in fiscal policy:

  1. stop “renting” our money from the chartered banks in the form of debt, and instead have the Bank of Canada create debt-free money;
  2. loan that money, interest-free, to provinces, municipalities and local public authorities for infrastructure projects—highways, roads, bridges, ports, public buildings like schools, water and sewer treatment facilities, rapid rail urban transit, etc.;
  3. as construction soaks up unemployed workers and boosts the economy, local authorities will see increased revenues that will enable them to repay the loans;
  4. as the loans are repaid, the Bank of Canada retires the money it injected into the economy, thus preventing inflation.

The result: no debt burden on future generations; no inflation; unemployment virtually disappears; the economy is stimulated; and in the end, the nation’s crumbling infrastructure is renewed.

It’s a plan similar to what Ottawa did at the end of World War II, to prevent unemployment caused by the return to two million soldiers from pushing us into another Great Depression. It worked then; it can work now.

It’s not too late to try it again

Terry O’Neill’s Evil Commentary

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Mar 182011
 

Does anyone other than a dwindling minority of Procrustean traditionalists recognize evil anymore—personal evil, that is? Oh, sure, there’s plenty of the geopolitical variety to go around these days, especially in North Africa. And there’s more than enough being identified on the national stage by perpetually outraged critics within this country too, most notably by those on the political left, who eagerly attach the E word to everything from corporate profits and free trade to the oil sands and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s piano playing.

But we rarely hear about individual Canadians doing “bad” things, exhibiting sinister behavior, acting wickedly, or carrying on immorally, let alone sinning.

Instead, there’s always some sort of exculpating explanation for bad behaviour. Shoplifters suffer from kleptomania; corrupt officials have succumbed to stress or have manifested a previously undiagnosed psychiatric disorder; prostitutes are victims of the patriarchy, poverty or both; juvenile delinquents are the recipients of inadequate parenting; inner-city gangsters are victims of racial discrimination; and thieves are impoverished or addicted, and, if the latter, are surely not responsible for the burden of the illness under which they are labouring. You get the picture.

Look at the website promoting the recent Pink Shirt Day/anti-bullying campaign—a cause that should easily give rise to descriptions of bullies acting wickedly, etc.—and you’ll see therapeutic twaddle aplenty along with much vigorous exhortation to get to the root of the problem, etc., but nothing about the plain and simple fact bullies are acting immorally.

Which brings me to Exhibit A, otherwise known as the spark that gave life to this particular column. You might have heard of a horrible hit-and-run accident in Coquitlam, B.C., two weeks ago which left two young women dead. In covering the aftermath of the crash, which included the laying of several charges against a suspect, including two counts of impaired driving causing death, a local newspaper turned to a clinical psychologist from Simon Fraser University for some “insight” into “what might lead someone to flee the scene” of a serious accident without giving help.

Dr. Joti Samra is quoted thusly: “Assuming that it’s a true accident, the reality is… even from the perspective of the person that caused the accident, it can be quite traumatic and cause an acute stress reaction.” Got that? Acute stress reaction.

The good doctor goes on to explain that the brain could be flooded with information and emotion that would cause a person to act unusually. “The fight or flight response is something we’re exposed to when we are faced with extreme traumatic events,” Dr. Samra concludes. “Our body kind of goes into a shock, it doesn’t know what to do.”

Notice the focus on the culprit’s body and not his mind? I suppose it’s true that this human-as-hormonal-machine answer is what you’d expect from a clinical psychologist, whose business, of course, is to produce exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific analysis. But there’s no excuse for the news media to limit their probing into human behaviour to “experts” such as Dr. Samra. Why not someone with some grasp of the profundity of human existence, someone like a novelist, a moral philosopher or a religious leader– someone who recognizes we’re more than just pre-programmed biological machines?

To my mind, it would be a welcome relief—and far more enlightening—to hear some real insights into moral character, the dark origins of personal cowardice, or the nature of evil in circumstances such as these. And so, for example, when asked why a driver might flee the scene of an accident in which he had struck two innocent people, a priest might comment that such a person had become alienated from God, had too easily succumbed to temptation, and had become a sinner in need of redemption.

This would be really useful information as far as I’m concerned, and might also help many readers reflect more deeply on their responsibility—indeed, their duty—to act in a moral fashion.

But, of course, in this secular, humanistic era of ours, we see very little serious discussion about evil in the public square. Perversely, one is more likely to find scintillatingly descriptive words, purring about the concept of evil, in advertisements attempting to induce a consumer to indulge in some sort of deliciously sinful wickedness for an affordable price. Moral inversion to sell chocolate pudding.

A recent full-page newspaper advertisement for Volvo is a perfect example of this lamentable trend. Emblazoned above an image of a shiny red S60 model, the ad copy informs us, “There’s more to life than a Volvo. Like raising a little hell with 300 horses, spanking corners with your all-new sport-tuned chassis. And feeling a little dangerous in a car tricked out with safety technology. That’s why you drive the all-new naughty Volvo S60.” (Emphasis added.)

A 16th-Century proverb holds, “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” Today, however, evil doers are either the next patient for the couch or a target market.