Brandon experiments exposed

Alexandra Paul
Winnipeg Free Press : January 12, 2015

Children at the Brandon Indian Residential School were test subjects of extra-sensory-perception experiments during the Second World War, states a science journal recovered from a university archive.

The article, ESP Tests with American Indian Children published in the Journal of Parapsychology, is believed to be the first hard evidence science experiments were conducted on residential school children in Manitoba.

It was published in 1943 by a scientist named A.A. Foster, and its existence adds to a growing body of knowledge to show science experiments were regularly conducted in the 1940s and 1950s on children at residential schools, with the permission of federal officials.

Canada’s expert on such studies, McMaster University post-doctoral research fellow Ian Mosby, said by phone from Hamilton he’s reviewed the article. Maeengan Linklater, the Winnipegger who stumbled across a reference to the study in a footnote and got a copy, forwarded it to him, Mosby said Sunday.

It’s significant because it shows how vulnerable Indian residential school children were to administrators, teachers and scientists, Mosby said.

“When it came to science experiments, these students had no choice whether it involved experiments on ESP or nutrition,” he said. “It makes you ask the question what experiments were done in these schools? What were the conditions that made it possible for scientists to walk in and do these experiments? The children were wards of the state,” Mosby said.

Mosby exposed alarming evidence of experiments in his 2013 research findings. News reports described them as noting children at Indian residential schools were deliberately starved in the 1940s and 1950s in the name of science.

(read the full article at Winnipeg Free Press)

The NYPD’s ‘Work Stoppage’ Is Surreal

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone: December 31, 2014

On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.

Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a “virtual work stoppage.”

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a “hostile anti-police environment in the city,” the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you’re wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Substantively that mostly means a steep drop-off in parking tickets, but also a major drop in tickets for quality-of-life offenses like carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.

My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they’re pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of “protest” pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.

I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there’s the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don’t “have to.”

It’s incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it’s precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called “hot spot” neighborhoods.

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn’t the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that’s not what’s going on here. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I’m sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I’ve met more than a few police in the last few years who’ve complained vigorously about things like the “empty the pad” policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people “when they have to.”

Because it’s wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it’s even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Both policies make people pissed off at police for the most basic and understandable of reasons: if you’re running into one, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up opening your wallet.

Your average summons for a QOL offense costs more than an ordinary working person makes in a day driving a bus, waiting tables, or sweeping floors. So every time you nail somebody, you’re literally ruining their whole day.

If I were a police officer, I’d hate to be taking money from people all day long, too. Christ, that’s worse than being a dentist. So under normal circumstances, this slowdown wouldn’t just make sense, it would be heroic.

Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle.

For one thing, it’s simply another public union using its essential services leverage to hold the executive (and by extension, the taxpayer) hostage in a negotiation. In this case the public union doesn’t want higher pay or better benefits (in which case it wouldn’t have the support from the political right it has now – just the opposite), it merely wants “support” from the Mayor.

On another level, however, this is just the latest salvo in an ongoing and increasingly vicious culture-war mess that is showing no signs of abating.

[…]

The thing is, there are really two things going on here. One is an ongoing bitter argument about race and blame that won’t be resolved in this country anytime soon, if ever. Dig a millimeter under the surface of the Garner case, Ferguson, the Liu-Ramos murders, and you’ll find vicious race-soaked debates about who’s to blame for urban poverty, black crime, police violence, immigration, overloaded prisons and a dozen other nightmare issues.

But the other thing is a highly specific debate over a very resolvable controversy not about police as people, but about how police are deployed. Most people, and police most of all, agree that the best use of police officers is police work. They shouldn’t be collecting backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them, and they shouldn’t be pre-emptively busting people in poor neighborhoods because voters don’t have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities.

This police protest, ironically, could have shined a light on all of that. Instead, it’s just more fodder for our ongoing hate-a-thon. Happy New Year, America.

(read the full article at Rolling Stone)

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St. Louis County District Attorney Bob McCulloch -of the Michael Brown shooting case- has admitted that he “decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything was going to be presented to the grand jury… Even though their statements were not accurate.”

McCulloch admits that he presented witnesses who he knew were giving false statements during an interview with radio station KTRS.

KTRS Radio: Why did you allow people to testify in front of the grand jury in which you knew their information was either flat-out wrong, or flat-out lying, or just weren’t telling the truth?

District Attorney Bob McCulloch: Well, early on, I decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything was going to be presented to the grand jury. And I knew that no matter how I handled it, there would be criticism of it. So if I didn’t put those witnesses on, then we’d be discussing now why I didn’t put those witnesses on. Even though their statements were not accurate.

So my determination was to put everybody on and let the grand jurors assess their credibility, which they did. This grand jury poured their hearts and souls into this. It was a very emotional few months for them. It took a lot of them. I wanted to put everything on there. I thought it was much more important to present everything and everybody, and some that, yes, clearly were not telling the truth. No question about it.

Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 4-3.3 reads:

A lawyer shall not knowingly: offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. A lawyer may refuse to offer evidence, other than the testimony of a defendant in a criminal matter, that the lawyer reasonably believes is false

McCulloch told KTRS, “There were people who came in and, yes, absolutely lied under oath” and apparently he won’t seek perjury charges.

Sources : Prosecutor Says He Knew Some Witnesses Were Lying To The Ferguson Grand Jury
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch Breaks Silence

Scott Shackford
Reason: December 9, 2014

There are no frills to be found at www.killedbypolice.net. The site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains, though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person documented to have been killed by police in the United States in 2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve noted previously, there is no reliable national database for keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year. The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York Police Department won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report, they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the whole year.

And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it’s possible the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April. Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a two-decade high in killings by police.

(read the full article at Reason)

Public hearings on the prime minister’s Supreme Court nominees were a hallmark of Harper’s accountability promise, but now they’re gone.

Stephen Harper quietly scraps a pledge of transparency

Tim Harper
The Star: November 30, 2014

There was always less than met the eye in Stephen Harper’s use of a parliamentary committee to vet his Supreme Court nominees.

The MPs could not overturn the nomination, they were given precious little time to prepare for the hearing and they often veered into partisan show instead of substance.

Likely few Canadians paid much attention.

But they did provide some accountability and transparency to the process, a key commitment by the prime minister and something his party had pushed while in opposition.

The hearings have proved disposable. They are now gone. Montreal lawyer Suzanne Côté was appointed last week without a hearing, the second time in six months Harper bypassed the system he created.

If hearings were largely a facade, they were nevertheless a facade Harper embraced and his disposal of them illustrate two key points about a prime minister soon to mark nine years in office.

When things don’t go Harper’s way, his impulse is to just toss the initiative away rather than try to fix it.

And it is but the latest example of Harper governing in a manner he railed against while in opposition.

Essentially the hearings are gone because of a previous leak to the Globe and Mail of names under consideration by the government in an earlier vacancy.

What made the leak particularly newsworthy was that it showed that four of the six names on the government list were ineligible to sit on the top court.

When that was pointed out by NDP justice critic Françoise Boivin, Justice Minister Peter MacKay shot back that the committee may have been behind the leak.

He said the process was impugned and those who may have wanted to be considered would not put their names forward for fear they would be leaked.

“What I say about the necessity of preserving the integrity of the system, it was very much a consideration . . . when I read in the Globe and Mail that our list that we were working from, that you and other members were a part of forming, was leaked,” he told Liberal Sean Casey, who had to remind the minister he was not even involved in the process.

Irwin Cotler, the former Liberal justice minister says the lack of transparency and accountability in the last two appointments (including Clément Gascon in June) involved no transparency or accountability and represents “a serious regression to a process that is secret, unaccountable and unrepresentative.”

By cutting the parliamentary selection committee, opposition MPs no longer had a stake in the process, meaning the committee hearings could lead to embarrassing questions about Harper’s selection.

So the whole process had to go.

Ten years ago, MacKay was calling for greater transparency in the making of Supreme Court appointments, but that was MacKay in 2004.

More notably, Stephen Harper of 2014 is not the Stephen Harper of 2004.

He has walked away from previous commitments to accountability when things didn’t go his way.

He fulfilled a promise to create a commission to develop guidelines and oversee major federal appointments, but when his nominee as chair, business magnate Gwyn Morgan, was rejected by a parliamentary committee, Harper shelved the commitment.

Harper was the man in opposition who condemned the Liberals for tabling omnibus bills, but in majority government he has used them more often and made them larger.

He vowed Senate reform, then stacked the Upper Chamber, setting records for patronage appointments until that all blew up.

Just last week, the one-time champion of accountability ensured Canadians would not be told the cost of our mission to degrade the Islamic State as part of an allied air bombing effort.

(read the full article at The Star)

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