timeimmortal

Since it has been testified under oath, by a Bell Canada employee, that members of the Canadian Human Rights Commission may very well have hacked into a private citizen’s secured wireless network, the RCMP is now investigating the CHRC.

On April 2, 2008, Marc Lemire filed a criminal complaint against the Canadian Human Rights Commission for theft of an innocent woman’s internet connection. In that complaint, Marc Lemire is alleging that:

Dean Steacy and/or other Commission employees willfully connected to the wireless access point owned by Nelly Hechme, in order to hide their online identity. Then impersonating Mrs. Hechme, via her internet connection, browsed to Stormfront.Org website and printed documents that were submitted as evidence of material fact before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

1. By wilfully and with malicious intent connecting to Nelly Hechme’s wireless access point and then using her internet connection without authorization, they have committed Mischief in relation to data in contravention of Section 430 (1.1) (c)(d) of the Criminal Code.

2. By wilfully and with malicious intent connecting to Nelly Hechme’s wireless access point and then using her internet connection without authorization, they have committed Unauthorized use of a computer in contravention of Section 342.1 (1) (a)(b) of the Criminal Code.

3. By wilfully and with malicious intent connecting to Nelly Hechme’s wireless access point and then using her internet connection without authorization, they have committed Theft of telecommunication service in contravention of Section 326 (1)(b) of the Criminal Code.

4. By wilfully and with malicious intent connecting to Nelly Hechme’s wireless access point and then using her internet connection without authorization, they have committed Interception of Communications in contravention of Section 184 (1) of the Criminal Code.

5. By wilfully and with malicious intent connecting to Nelly Hechme’s wireless access point and then using her internet connection without authorization, they have committed other Criminal Code violations which this Police Service may deem applicable.

On May 2, 2008 the Ottawa Police Service came to a decision on the criminal complaint. And the decision was to put it onto the RCMP. The RCMP will not directly accept criminal complaints in Ontario. You have to go through a local police service, and according to the rules, the local police service will then forward to the RCMP.

This is good news indeed, although one suspects that the minions of the CHRC have been very good at covering their tracks. Still, there are ways to tell if a computer has been connected to a particular network, and I’m sure that the forensic analysts at the RCMP are quite well-equipped to detect evidence of any such incursion.

The actions of the CHRC are outrageous and shouldn’t fall under the scope of what is permissible, even in the cause of upholding Canadian law. Indeed, had this been a police investigation that had abused a private citizen’s wireless internet access, the evidence procured from it would have been tossed out of court with startling rapidity.

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The list of only those scientists whose (last) names begin with ‘K’ has 1,495 entries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is a bit more than half the number of scientists who produced the latest IPCC report, no? And there are twenty-five more letters in the alphabet.

Related: It’s U.S. data, but April 2008 was fully one degree (F) colder than average in America, which makes it the coldest April on record in the last 11 years.

Muslims in Nigeria kidnap two Christian girls — Mary Chikwodi Okoye, 15, and Uche Edward, 14.

The girls are to be forced into marriages with Muslim men.

Nigerian police in the town of Ningi recover the girls and take them back to their parents.

As a result, Nigerian Muslims riot, attacking numerous Christian churches and churchgoers. (Curiously, there haven’t been any reports of the aggrieved Christian communities rioting, even in response to the kidnappings of their children).

Seriously…what is wrong with Islam?

Steveston harbour is home to a fleet of what are, for the most part, fishing boats.

The boat marked “CASH” is, I’m told, not a fishing boat per sé, but rather a boat that will meet fishers and basically buy their current catch to bring back to the harbour (so the actual fishing boats can, presumably, stay out longer).

Not a bad system, really. At least, it doesn’t sound like a bad system. If any of my readers are fishermen and would care to offer a differing opinion, I’d be happy to publish it.

Edit-wise, this picture was pretty straightforward: the calibration/Punch preset gave the image a good mix of colour and contrast, and a few adjustments to the highlights, exposure, and shadows brought out a bit more detail. I also applied a touch of noise reduction and a bit of chromatic aberration correction for good measure.

Time for another panoramic. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that I took quite a lot of panoramic images in Vancouver — while I don’t think I took as many as I did while in England, I wonder if the overall frequency, relative to the duration of the trip, was higher?

Anyhow, the picture:

This is a small harbour along Westwater Drive near Richmond, British Columbia. It’s on the road that more or less connects the area near Finn Slough with Steveston, a harbour community south of Richmond, and apparently the home to more than a few interesting shops.

Anyhow, Grace’s parents stopped the van so that both Grace’s sister and I could take some pictures of the harbour (it is a good view, even if it is a bit cloudy), and for whatever reason I decided to take yet another panoramic image set.

Edit-wise, I matched exposures between the images (as usual) and did some basic editing to clean up chromatic aberration, digital noise, and other issues. I then exported each image as a TIFF file, and loaded the whole lot of them into Hugin.

Experience with other harbour panoramics has taught me that a lot of control points are necessary for images of this nature, so I went a little bit crazy in defining said points, but I think it worked out for the best. Hugin did its job well, and I have only found one notable misalignment in the image so far. And it’s a big image (nearly 11,000 pixels wide).

Once the panoramic had been rendered, I loaded it back into Lightroom and did a few additional edits, including saturation adjustments and some additional exposure tweaking. I also set the Clarity to -100, which gave the image a slightly diffuse, not-quite-misty feel that I like.

Here’s one more shot from Finn Slough, and old boat that I can only assume has not been seaworthy in quite some time. Then again, I don’t know boats, so perhaps the one in this picture is still capable of holding its own on the water.

But I suspect not.

The more I play with Lightroom 2, the more I get addicted to the diffusion effect that comes with setting the Clarity to a negative value. It just looks good on so many images (not on all, to be fair).

Edit-wise, in addition to the above-mentioned Clarity adjustments, I applied the Vivid preset to bring out many of the colours in this image. However, because of some particularly harsh chromatic aberrations, I had to desaturate the magenta and purple hues quite heavily. Other hues — notably the blues and greens — saw their saturation boosted somewhat.

I also had to do quite a lot of highlight reduction on the sky, but this worked out (more or less), and some cloud detail was recovered from what had otherwise been a washed-out area of the image. A bit of sharpening rounded things out, resulting in the image that you see here, O Reader.

There’s a certain…”not entirely real” quality about the scene.

Once we got back to Vancouver, Grace and I wasted little time in getting caught up in preparations for her grandfather’s 75th birthday celebration, which was scheduled for the coming weekend. Her various family members had been periodically referring to the names of some of the expected guests, and had mentioned more than once that a couple of them were residents of a place called Finn Slough.

Grace’s dad decided to take us driving past the slough one afternoon, and I have to admit it was an…interesting experience. Sobering, I think, would be the best word for it, because the slough is certainly a very stark picture of the reality of poverty, especially when one can drive only a few hundred metres up the road and find decadent rural mansions.

Yes, people do live in there. It’s quite a close-knit community, I’m told; they don’t tend to welcome outsiders, and the “privilege” of living in the slough is only granted to newcomers if one of the current residents moves out or passes away.

Edit-wise, this shot received the Vivid preset that I occasionally (very occasionally) use, which boosted the colours in the shot quite nicely. I needed to do a fair bit of chromatic aberration reduction, and then manually adjusted the master hue setting to diminish the intensity of the greens in the grass. A few shadow adjustments rounded things out, resulting in the image you see here.

I do care that “truly marginal and deeply resentful fools” get caught in the HRC web as much as I do the unsuspecting restaurant owner wanting to keep his doorway free of pot smoking loiterers.

I don’t need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to “guilty until proven innocent”.

Why? Because, it’s the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence when backed into a corner, and doubly so when those doing the backing trade in provocateurism and injustice. When the unbalanced finally snap, it’s rarely the bureaucrat behind the machinery who endures their wrath - it’s the innocent at their workplace, or the police officer who pulls them over for speeding who find themselves in the crosshairs.

It’s a tricky enough business dealing with these individuals within the justice system proper. The last thing we need are the thumbscrews of the human rights racket being applied to such cases.

In recent weeks, I’ve learned again, first-hand, what “marginal and deeply resentful fools” will do when pressed to do so little as to defend a proposition with a little bit of sound reasoning. Rather than do what people might normally do (i.e. defend the point being made with a little bit of sound reasoning), they will only grow more angry and irrational, until such time as they either abandon the situation or abuse what power they possess in order to forcibly take the upper hand.

Kate is talking about much the same thing in her post, albeit using somewhat more violent and public examples. The point is that when pressed, certain categories of person will do unpredictable and/or truly despicable things, the same way a cornered animal might do.

And the human rights commissions and their investigative methods are not a factor which will mitigate this sort of problem; they will exacerbate it. So it’s not just a case of where the HRCs openly trample on one of the most fundamental human rights — they do that also, though. It’s also a case of where the HRCs, which ostensibly exist to nip the problem of violent hatred in the bud, may actually promote it in their own perverse way.

That would seem to be the contention of the Somali and Senegalese interviewees in this interview — that women in Norway who get raped (mostly by Muslim immigrants) are, by their mode of dress and social attitudes, basically asking for what happens to them.

A: But listen now, Norwegian girls complain that foreign boys do this and that, but the reason there are so many rapes is that Norwegian girls go around almost completely naked! That’s like saying “come here and fuck me”, you understand?

Q: You’re saying that Norwegian girls are asking to be raped?

A: Not exactly asking, but when then go out almost completely naked and get completely drunk in Frogner park or go to a party together with some friend, and then they complain about being raped? It’s their fault, says the 26 year old from Somalia.

It’s disgusting rubbish. Would it be too much to ask that we maybe screen for this attitude before allowing immigrants, especially from certain parts of the world, to enter into Western nations?

Or should we all just keep mumbling “cultural mosaic…cultural mosaic…” until this all blows over?