Your Daily "Shock and Awe" Report

​Your Daily "Shock and Awe" Report

If it's not contaminated food, it's "superbugs", gun violence and, omigawd, statistics!

The better to control you with, said the Wolf, who made Little Red Riding Hood very, very afraid.

What we need is a strong, handsome woodcutter, eh? (I just love saying "eh?" It reassures the nervous that I'm just a dumb Canuck, eh?)

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" Mark Twain attributed this to Disraeli.

And here may well be more of them:

AngusReid: Amid concern over spread of gun violence, majorities support ban on handguns, assault weapons

• Opposition to ban on firearms driven largely by men, rural Canadians, gun owners

Well, duh, eh?  But how "largely" and why?

• Those with more self-professed knowledge of Canada’s gun laws are more comfortable with the current procedure for acquiring a license and firearm. This group is also more likely to say Canadian gun laws overall are too strict – 37 per cent say this. Those with no knowledge are nearly three-times as likely to say the laws are not strict enough compared to the most well-informed (54% to 20%)

And it's "those with no knowledge" whose hearts and minds governments count on influencing.

CTV: Statistics Canada blames gang violence, shootings as homicide rate hits 10-year high

• the agency said there were 660 reported homicides in Canada last year.

Personally, I would never voluntarily allow a gun anywhere near me, nor did I consider toy guns to be fitting Christmas gifts for my kids, but let's, for the sake of argument, postulate that the underlying purpose of gun control is to reduce the overall power of the general population should there be any kind of uprising over government policies and/or actions.

As we all know, that would strongly smell of Dictatorship -- and I am most definitely against any form of that.

We need to remember, for instance, that Statistics Canada is an arm of the government. So if they say that gun crimes have dramatically increased, unfortunately it's not necessarily a fact. StatsCan has admitted to "errors" in the past, though neither the details nor the reasons were made public.

CBC: (2014) Statistics Canada retracts July jobs report because of 'error'

• The data agency declined to offer details on what sort of error had been detected, but they said it has been identified and corrected. 

Globe&Mail: (2017) Statistics Canada blames computer error for mistake in census language data

• Statistics Canada has to correct the census results from thousands of Canadians after finding an error in its system that reported unusually high increases in the number of English speakers in some smaller Quebec communities.

I have no wish to defend Statistics Canada (I personally refuse to participate in their surveys, and now have the wonderful excuse of "phone scam" to use when they call me up, at which they get very irritated, but after a while stop calling), but if the Quebec government, say, were embarrassed by the language statistics, it could come down pretty hard on StatsCan.

And that's precisely why StatsCan reports need to be taken with a grain of sea salt, or maybe half salt plus half Not Salt, because salt is one of the biggest scary things these days, right up there with sugar. MMMMM.... sugar!

With regard to the number of deaths reportedly caused by gun owners, it's pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the reports of death and mayhem at the hands of my lifelong nemesis, the medical profession:

HuffPost: Preventable Medical Error Is Canadian Healthcare's Silent Killer

• In Canada, medical errors and hospital-acquired infections claim between 30,000 and 60,000 lives annually. Thousands more are injured. But to the public, these incidents are largely invisible.

They're not invisible so much as they are hidden. Again, not to condone any kind of killing, but compare those numbers to the numbers of homicides due to guns, and you have to wonder who's really calling the shots.

Take your pick about what to get up in arms over. Ask yourself, who is StatsCan working for?  Oh, that's right - the government.  And believe me (would I lie to you?) the government is not whatever party gets elected, the government is The Government.

The Government has the power to declare a "state of emergency" in which our military can be set loose to swarm through the streets, breaking down doors in the middle of the night, generally shoving people around at gunpoint and definitely calling all of the shots.

The Government's job would definitely go a lot easier if The People had no means with which to fight back.

In fact, The Government, as early as 1914, under Liberal PM Sir Robert Borden (who was knighted by the flippin' Queen of England, for pete's sake!) introduced the War Measures Act that could be invoked whenever deemed appropriate.

• The Act was questioned for its suspension of civil liberties and personal freedoms, not only for Ukrainians and other Europeans during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914–1920, but also during the Second World War's Japanese Canadian internment and in the October Crisis.

It was designed to be used during times of war and insurrection -- and, right at this very moment, the globe is in an almost perpetual state of war, and has been since George W. Bush.

CDN Encyclopedia:

• The Act gave the government full authority during wartime to censor and suppress communications; to arrest, detain and deport people without charges or trials; to control transportation, trade and manufacturing; and to seize private property.
• As a result, the Act was used to ban 253 publications, including 222 American, 164 foreign-language and 89 leftist publications.Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, socialist reading materials in particular were targeted for censure, and membership in left-leaning or pacifist organizations was forbidden. As well, people were arrested and interned for their political beliefs.

They can censor and suppress communications -- which means they can also allow lies to be told and truths to be withheld. They can hold people indefinitely without charges, Mohammed Harkat being a post 9/11 example of  someone who has never been allowed to know the actual charges against him -- if any exist at all -- and it was a Liberal PM (Jean Chretien) who allowed that to happen, and  Liberal PM Paul Martin, who encouraged it to continue, while also contemplating a "Homeland Security" for Canada,  and no government leader since then, Liberal or Conservative, has revoked the so-called "Security Certificate".

Which is why I'm saying that it doesn't matter which Party rules the roost in a given time-frame; the power to literally enslave the people of Canada is The Government's privilege to invoke at any time it's felt that it can be made to stick.

And, of course, it's not just Canada.  Remember when Bush said this:

SeattlePI: 

• "... a dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier."

That was just prior to 9/11 and his sudden ability, immediately after the event, to produce and swiftly win approval for the so-called "Patriot Act" is one reason there are 9/11 doubters by the zillion.

Now it's taken for granted that even one's private parts can be examined by airline personnel.  And people go along with it because they've been taught to fear potential enemies everywhere and therefore to trust that The Government must know what it's doing.  It knows, alright.

Liberal PM Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in the '70's, unleashing the military onto anyone remotely suspected of being a member of the FLQ, which group hadn't resorted to guns at all, but instead, reportedly, had planted some bombs over a period of 7 years that mainly destroyed inanimate objects, and finally, in apparent desperation, took hostage two political figures.

Trudeau had to admit that it was his invocation of the War Measures Act that frightened one group of hostage takers into killing Pierre Laporte -- not with a gun, I should point out, but by strangulation -- and hiding his remains.  So, The Government negotiated an escape out of the country and thereby saved the life of the second hostage, James Cross.

"Macho Man" Trudeau had been asked how far he would go with his use of the military and he had replied, "Just watch me." Video

So we watched and it wasn't a pretty sight.  In the end he was forced to negotiate, as he ought to have done in the first place. These were young and determined political dissidents driven to the wall, not murderous "terrorists".

Again, I don't mean to appear to approve anyone's actions in that whole, sad affair, though one can't help but concur with the following statement:

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people."

Has the anti-gun movement gone too far?

MMOChampionForum: Are children being taught to fear?

• Maybe instead of immediately punishing a kid for 'shooting' his friends with his finger on the playground, supervisory adults could do what every other parent does when they want their kid to stop something....just change the subject. "Hey guys, why don't you play tag'? "Hey guys, why don't we go get the chalk out and draw on the cement?' "Hey guys why don't we do get the toy trucks out and drive em around the lot?' But no, lets keep slamming these kids with harsh penalties in order to push our own personal agendas.

By all means, get the kids accustomed to dictatorship rather than guidance!  The Government apparently approves because the media have not reported any of those supervisors being hauled up on the carpet.

Where does the potential for real violence lie?  It's most definitely with governments that nowadays are reluctantly (because the choices are so bad) being voted into office.

Guns can always be gotten (now they can even be printed out from computers) and there are always knives, scissors, ice picks, ropes -- and even pitch forks if it comes to that (and it has in both the far and recent past).

Notice, also, that there's no government agency called "The Military".  It's disarmingly called the Dept.of Defence, suggesting that it exists to defend its own people against bad guys, just like your friendly neighbourhood police officers.  Except that it's the military  -- and now, militarily trained and armed police officers -- who can be unleashed onto general populations when The Government loses it cool and fears for itself.

While the general population is deprived of guns, police officers are being provided with military grade assault rifles.

Popular rebellions are myriad over the centuries and governments fear them like the plague. So they prefer to keep the citizens fearful instead.  And, so far, they appear to be doing an outstanding job of that.