Month: April 2015

Letter, re: Minister Blaney arranging for United States invasion of Canada

April 23, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

From:

Peeter Joot

[address]

April 23, 2015

Cc: peeterjoot.com/

 

 

To:

The Honourable John McCallum,

House of Commons

Ottawa, Ontario

Canada

K1A 0A6

 

The Honourable John McCallum,

I’ve read a pair of very disturbing Toronto Star articles this last week:

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/04/19/could-armed-us-border-guards-be-coming-to-union-station.html

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/08/01/surprise_stephen_harpers_us_border_deal_does_imperil_canadian_sovereignty_walkom.html

These both detail an agreement between Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney with United States Homeland security, to allow armed US soldiers to police Canadian locations.  I am not surprised to find that this action to attempt to make Canadians more fearful, imposing a police state and police presence that is not justified, is being pushed by Minister Blaney.  According to prior correspondence with your office, he was also responsible for tabling bill C-51 in the parliament.

This is objectionable for so many reasons that they are hard to enumerate.

I’d first like to point out that the United States has a long history of military and covert interference in other countries, and frankly, has not demonstrated a historical record of integrity that is sufficient to be trusted with the role of policing other countries.  A concise but thorough synopsis of that disgusting history of interference can be found in William Blum’s book “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”.

In particular, note that this book also details military actions against Canada and Canadian citizens by psychopaths in the United States establishment that would be called terrorism if they were to occur in this day and age.

In my struggle to attempt to comprehend a claimed rationale for this action against Canada, I can come up with only one real possible justification, but it is only good for the United States, and is no good for Canadians in any way.  That justification is a guess that not only have Blaney has negotiated for Canadians to be vassals of United States overlords, but that we will also pay for this privilege.  With so much of the United States industrial base now destroyed by globalism made possible by agreements like NAFTA, one of the only remaining exports that they have available is military force and their armaments industry.

How much will Canadians pay for the privilege to be policed by United States military?  To station United States military personal in Canada, there will be salary cost, equipment cost, berthing cost, plus costs for expenses such as food.  In my opinion, all of these costs provide no conceivable benefit to Canadians in exchange.  This role, if it was really required, could also support Canadians instead of the United States military establishment.  I would like to know how much of each of these respective costs are Canadians expected to pay for?  Are there other expenses that Canadians will be picking up the tab for to facilitate this invasion?  How many Canadians will have to be paid to act as liaison between these US soldiers?  The cost of the law suits that will occur when one of these soldiers shoots a Canadian without justification are hard for me to imagine.  Has there been an estimate made for how much legal expense the Canadian government, and implicitly the Canadian taxpayers, will have to absorb if such an event occurs?

 

Sincerely,

 

[signed]

 

Peeter Joot

A parliamentary office response from first C-51 letter.

April 16, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , , ,

Eating crow.

Rather unexpectedly, I’ve received a response from the office of my parliamentary representative John McCallum for my questions about supporters and financiers of Bill C-51. This is the government’s terrorize-Canadians bill that’s milking the fear-porn from the recent shooting at the parliament to increase it’s secret policing and domestic spying infrastructure.

When I wrote Why you should support Canada’s bill C-51 terrorism bill, I also assumed that I’d receive no response.  With that assumption I wrote that I was sending a paper letter so that the civil servant who had to press the delete key for my first letter would have to file a union grievance against me.  Not only was that incorrect, but Mr Nicholson has done an admirable job answering those questions.

That said, it’s hard not to laugh a statement like “corporate donations are prohibited at the federal level.”

The response.

Dear Mr. Joot,

Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in responding to you. We receive a great deal of correspondence, and do our best to reply in as timely a manner as possible.

I will do my best to answer each of your questions in turn. With respect to the authorship of C-51, it would have been written by officials in the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Justice. The bill was sponsored in the House by Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney. There is no way of knowing precisely who provided the impetus for the bill in cabinet, nor how those discussions progressed.

With respect to financial backing, as I am sure you know, corporate donations are prohibited at the federal level. As such, Members of Parliament may only receive donations from individual Canadians. Elections Canada has a detailed donor database that allows one to search through the donation records of MPs and federal candidates. I have included a link to their robust search tool: http://elections.ca/WPAPPS/WPF/EN/CCS?returntype=1

As far as we know, there are no previous versions of this bill that existed prior to the events of October 22, 2014.

Thank you for writing Mr. McCallum. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or concerns.

Kyle W. Nicholson

Parliamentary Assistant

Office of the Hon. John McCallum, P.C., M.P.

Member of Parliament for Markham-Unionville

 

 Followup Q&A

In response to the additional question:

“Is there any public database of past corporate affiliations and employment history of politicians that are currently in office?”
Mr Nicholson writes:
“Unfortunately, there isn’t a central database. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner posts the disclosures every member of parliament must make, which includes an external income and assets – see https://ciec-ccie.parl.gc.ca/EN/PublicRegistries/Pages/CodePublicRegistry.aspx. As far as employment history is concerned, you’re pretty much limited to Google.”

 

Why you should support Canada’s bill C-51 terrorism bill.

April 15, 2015 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , ,

To my great surprise, the Canadian government’s attempt to enact a terrorize-Canadians bill is actually getting noticed.  There’s even been protests.

For those who find this objectionable, the stopc51 website makes it easy for people to write a form letter to their representative, but what about all those people who want to support this bill? There’s no startc51 website for people to use!

For all those people, I’ve drafted a form letter that they can use, based on the stopc51 form letter. I’m paper mailing my copy of this letter, with the hopes that a paper letter requires slightly more work to throw out. The civil servant who’s job is to press the delete key can file a union grievance against me.

EDIT: I ended up with a response to my original C-51 letter.

Form letter for support of bill C-51.

[your name and address, including postal code]

[date]

cc: [who else should get a copy of your letter?]

The Honourable [representative name here],

I’m writing to call on you to take a firm stand in support of the government’s carefully thought out, harmless, and effective Bill C-51. I’m asking you to side with Canadians and vote for this legislation.

I applaud the Canadian government initiative to exploit the fear-porn potential of the recent parliamentary shooting to its advantage.

The bill is prudent because it turns CSIS into a ‘secret police’ force with little oversight or accountability. Oversight and accountability are both highly overrated. History has proven that secret police forces have been important forces in many effective governments. Without a secret police force Stalin would not have been able to cull so many millions of the excess citizens of his country. Without a secret police force Hitler would not have been able to implement his death camps. In this day of omnipresent globalism Canada clearly needs its own secret police force to remain competitive.

The bill is useful because it opens the door for violations of our Charter Rights including censorship of free expression online. If people are able to express themselves openly, how can they be controlled?

The bill is effective because it will lead to dragnet surveillance and information sharing on innocent Canadians. Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau or any other current or future politician would love to have such powers available for blackmail and manipulation purposes.

I applaud the government for trying to push this law through parliament in record time without a proper debate. No Canadian wants to see meaningful discussion in government. Reruns of Jerry Springer is clearly sufficient debate for most people. Inhibiting discussion is prudent since questioning authority and the power elite just feeds uncertainty in these difficult times.

If this bill doesn’t pass, it would limit opportunities for the Canadian government to spy on anyone, at any time. No Canadian wants to know when such spying has occurred. We want to create a shadowy and unaccountable secret police force that will have such a critical role in removing the freedoms of a nation that cannot be allowed to question government and authority.

Please, side with the majority of Canadians who are clueless and have never heard of this bill. Please don’t talk about or vote against this important legislation. Assuming you decide to vote for this bill, I hope you also won’t have any part in educate Canadians about this bill. Nobody needs to know what government allows itself to do “in our names.”

I’m one of the millions of Canadians who are perfectly happy with the status quo, which includes politicians who will not represent us in any meaningful way. I am assuming that you will be towing the party line and will vote for this bill. I already know that free expression is not tolerated in government, so when I see an affirmative vote for this bill, I’ll know that the world as I know it is stable and cannot be changed by individual action.

Please don’t respond to this letter. I do not want a response outlining the reasons that you will not be voting for this bill. Such a response would serve to destroy my worldview that assumes no politicians act for nor truly care for their constituents or Canadians in general. I want to continue to view politicians as pawns placed in positions of powerlessness and ineptitude, incapable of altering or even accurately observing the world around them.

Sincerely,

[your name here]

Posting your letter.

Note that mail may be sent postage-free to any Member of parliament at the following address:

Name of Member of Parliament
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
K1A 0A6

Yes, we still pay for that “free” mail service through taxation, but I’m going to justify my exploitation of that service as a fair exchange for all the time that I have to spend weeding through the huge stacks of junk mail that Canada Post delivers to my mailbox daily.

My last letter to my “representative” (John McCallum) in parliament about bill C-51 went unanswered. I don’t really believe that I am represented by virtue of having voted or not. Will the actions of the Honourable John McCallum of Markham-Unionville surprise me, or make me doubt this position?

EDIT: as noted above, I did get an answer to my original C-51 letter.  It was neutral in tone, and matter of fact, giving no hint of whether or not the bill will be supported.  What sort of response will this letter produce if any?

Some notes on copying and moving text in vim

April 13, 2015 perl and general scripting hackery , ,

Emad just asked me a vim question (how to use a search expression instead of a line number), and I ended up learning a new vim commmand from him as a side effect.

I’d done stuff like the following before to move text to a new file

:,/Done/-1 !cat > /tmp/newfile.txt

This assumes you’d like to delete everything from the current position to the line just before the /Done/ search expression, and write it into /tmp/newfile.txt.

The mechanism here, is that the selection is filtered through a script, where the output of the script is empty, so the lines are deleted. This particular script has the side effect of creating a file with the selected range of lines. The end effect is that the text is moved.

If you’d like to keep it and copy it to the new file, you can tee instead of cat it:

:,/Done/-1 !tee /tmp/newfile.txt

This is faster than selecting a range, switching buffers copying into the buffer, saving, and switching buffers back.

Emad taught me that this can also be done with the w command, like so:

:,/Done/-1 w /tmp/newfile.txt

It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a faster way to copy text from one file to another than using tee, but since I knew one way, I never went looking for it.

Updated notes for ece1229 antenna theory

April 10, 2015 ece1229 , , ,

I’ve now posted a second update of my notes for the antenna theory course that I am taking this term at UofT.

Unlike most of the other classes I have taken, I am not attempting to take comprehensive notes for this class. The class is taught on slides which go by faster than I can easily take notes for (and some of which match the textbook closely). In class I have annotated my copy of textbook with little details instead. This set of notes contains musings of details that were unclear, or in some cases, details that were provided in class, but are not in the text (and too long to pencil into my book), as well as some notes Geometric Algebra formalism for Maxwell’s equations with magnetic sources (something I’ve encountered for the first time in any real detail in this class).

This new update includes the following new content:

March 29, 2015 Antenna array design (problem)

March 23, 2015 Antenna array design with Chebychev polynomials (problem)

March 22, 2015 Chebychev antenna design (problem)