Roads are for cars, sidewalks are for pedestrians. Sadly, I doubt the police will acknowledge their role in causing this by taking over roadways as if they owned them. Don’t run in the street, people.

@newtboy,

I agree with more of what you say than you make out. You need to appreciate how different Canada is from the US, particularly in power balance within government and corresponding police action and media coverage.

Long delays in stopping illegal blockade and protest activity is the norm.
-Fairy Creek blockades persisted almost 12 months before police took action
-Blockade of Coastal Link pipepline went on for months before police intervened to allow work to continue.
-Mohawk solidarity blockade of railways in Ontario persisted multiple weeks

The difference to the protests today, the Liberal government was tripping over themselves to reach out to those protest groups, while immediately spitting in the faces of this one.

I've always been of the opinion illegally blocking a roadway, border or business should lead to arrests within the time it takes to notify and send police.

The problem here from a Canadian eye, is that the only time current government is interested in bringing a hammer down is based not upon the actions of protestors, but instead based upon their professed cause.

I refuse to accept tying the right to protest to what cause is being rallied to.

@newtboy,

Finally we're talking about my Canada .

I'm agreed with calling 90% of what the convoy and truckers are protesting as being misguided, ill informed or flat out wrong. That however shouldn't be what the right to protest is based upon.

The extent of the protestors illegal activity seems to have been blocking of roadways and borders. Which in Canada isn't exactly new:
-Blockading of roads to logging work sites to "protect old growth forest"
-Blockading of roads pipeline construction sites
-Blockading of transportation highways and railroads

In the past 2 years alone, those various sites have seen blockades ranging from weeks to months. In virtually every single one of those instances the Liberal government went out to meet and negotiate with the protestors while allowing them to continue for weeks to months. In one of the biggest protests Trudeau himself went to meet with the groups in person. Trudeau has a video of himself praising the farmer convoy and blockades in India, declaring his government will always defend the right of groups to protest.(those groups blocked multiple border crossings)

This time though, Trudeau started out with insulting, ridiculing and belittling the protestors. Within the first day of the protests, politicians and our national news corp in CBC were demanding an immediate end to the protests.

The protests that have seen comparable zero violence to the protests in the US in support of Floyd(which I support), where condemned repeatedly by the CBC and Trudeau as terrorizing the populace and inciting violence. For reference, Trudeau remained steadfast in support of the Floyd protestors right to protest.

The federal government essentially tried insults and ridicule to try and end this protest though, and when that didn't work they invoked a national emergency measures act that requires both:
-A threat to Canada's sovereignty
-A threat that can not be addressed by any other laws or means

The government then proceeded to empower themselves to not merely arrest protestors, but to freeze/seize the bank accounts of anyone considered to be supporting the protest, with no court oversight required.

The difference in how protestors are treated based upon what it is they are protesting is alarming and should be a red flag for anyone and everyone.

For reference, while these protests were going on, a pipeline worksite in BC that has been continually shut down by protests for the last several years was attacked in the night by a mob wielding machetes and axes. The workers and security were chased off and millions in damages were done to the site afterwards. Trudeau didn't feel the need to even address the incident though because he was to busy villianizing the convoy. The CBC media buried the incident under local BC news, and downplayed it as an 'alleged' incident, despite RCMP having responded and even having had an officer injured in the incident. CBC also emphasized there wasn't any verified connection to the ongoing protests against the pipeline...

When you look at the narrative, despite my disagreeing with the vast majority of what the convoy is wanting to say, I am disgusted by the attempt to remove their right to say it and everyone wanting to support a strong democracy with the right protest should feel the same.

There can be no heartbeat without a heart, which takes another 6-8 + weeks to form chambers, and 16 or more more weeks to develop valves and functional muscle tissue and actually pump blood. There is no heartbeat at 6, 8, or even 10 weeks by any definition, there's a twitch in the place a heart will one day develop.

This abdication of the state's duty to private citizens has been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court when states allowed churches to veto liquor licenses and bars challenged them and won. The government cannot deputize the populace to enforce a law, nor can it pay them with the state imposed fines even if they call it a judgement...You cannot pre set a judgement amount in a law for a civil case.

There has been no medical breakthroughs that change the standard, if it can't survive outside the womb, it's not viable. Period. End of discussion. That's what not viable means.

"Mutually incompatible"!? Nonsense. Legally there is no baby to be harmed, that's the law this is trying to end run around. Covid harms everyone. It's a paper tiger argument, a total fake red herring, there is NO public health danger if a woman has an abortion, you cannot catch abortion. Covid you can catch, and spread, and it's deadly to actual, real, fully cooked legal people AND embryos.

One wonders if the Texas legal system has nothing to do and had this passed as job security...because it's the only kind of civil case they'll be hearing now.

One also wonders if the state has too much money, because there's apparently they weren't smart enough to include exemptions for the state if they help facilitate any abortions by, let's say, offering bus service, maintaining roadways, or supplying electricity and water to the buildings. Any of these is grounds to sue them for $10000. If you live in Texas, file your case now before there's no money left and they rewrite the law to just target liberals.

They'll have to defend every case filed costing another $10000+ in legal fees (they'll have to pay the plaintiff's costs too). Pair that with the companies fleeing the state to avoid boycotts, Texas is going to be so poor they become America's Hati soon. Yee haw!

one of the very first stories ever read about a white community destroying a black community boiled down to simple envy.

two communities, one black, one white, lived adjacent to each other. the blacks were obstinately outcast from the larger white town and in turn, formed their own community.

in short, an economic downturn bankrupted many of the whites; the blacks were rock solid and continued to thrive.

the combination of blacks buying up failed white farmland; whites having to patronize black establishments for goods, and sheer unearned pride led the whites to "Tulsa" the black community.

the black folk did not reincorporate and dispersed. while the whites and their town barely hung on for a while, before it again failed. it only lives on as a name on old maps.

odd thing, even on modern maps there appears to be an area of expansive farmland where those towns once were. in comparison to the peppering of towns all along the state's roadways, that area is abnormally sparse. almost as if the map had a scar.

I love, in my mind at least, that this is a Canadian video and of course, with grass on the side of the roadway and no snow--that he has a hockey stick lol.

You are not even trying Need that scene when a car is driving on a roadway littered with automobiles and no one to be seen. Like the sifted video but with no people on the road.

(edit) maybe it's a bad idea to post lots of videos in the comment thread. I always feel bad when a comment thread goes on about something not really related to the video posted.

My bad for asking, Sorry.

Goddamnit people, when you see this crap, stop them. He's not just destroying the trailer, he's destroying the public roadway that won't be repaired for decades if ever. If you just laugh and point, don't complain when your commute feels like driving through a bomb testing range.

http://archive.is/4CVqH

10 year plan. Twice as effective as the USSR's 5 year plans

...Fully rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, restoring our natural ecosystems (needed), dramatically expanding renewable power generation (needed, but it also doesn't mean we should be throwing money away on stupid shit like solar roadways), overhauling our entire transportation system (regional flights, which sort of make up around 70% of total flights, would be targeted for elimination and massively expensive (slower) electrical trains would be put in their place), upgrading all our buildings (most businesses are already moving to green solutions) , jumpstarting US clean manufacturing (see highly expensive and non-competitive with cheaper overseas mfg), transforming US agriculture (forcing a move from cows/pigs/chickens to plant based proteins)...

While we are at it, might as well do the following:

A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security (Nice, but you can't just make these jobs available. They are supply and demand.)

High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools (Needed)

High-quality health care (Needed)

Clean air and water (Needed)

Healthy food (Subjective, is meat considered healthy?)

Safe, affordable, adequate housing (because this works, ie Projects...)

An economic environment free of monopolies (Technically this exists already, except in countries outside of the USA and EU)

Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work (SWEET! SIGN ME UP FOR THAT CHECK!!!)

I get that his spiel is comedy based, but the GND is about half reality and half looney tunes.

This Moore, OK EF5 flyover gives a good idea of what is left by the path once you get about 4 minutes into the video.

I know the Jarrell F5, which I was around 12 miles from at the time, left similar damage but it was harder to tell because it just hoovered up everything. It literally ripped the asphalt from the roadways and left them like old dirt roads. Because a lot of it was rural, entire trailer parks and farms just became empty fields.

Leaving the course (roadway) would be my opinion. Wonder where the rules stand on this. It definitely gave a small advantage.

And then on top of all this we now seem to have more and more populist snake oil nonsense like 'solar roadways', actually starting to siphon government funding away from real projects.

Good article BTW, thank you.

I found it hard to believe that simple honking is considered road rage in Colorado, so I found a lawyers web site that quoted that road rage is "assault with a motor vehicle or other dangerous weapon by the operator or passenger(s) of another motor vehicle or an assault precipitated by an incident that occurred on a roadway”. They went on to list some actions that are considered aggressive driving. One was excessive use of your horn, another was "Exiting the car to attempt to start a confrontation."
So not only is the cop a colossal prick, he doesn't know the law in his own jurisdiction. Either that or he was willing to blatantly lie on camera.

The inherently chaotic event that exists in the otherwise predictable / trainable environment of driving a car is the unplanned / unmeasured disturbance. In control systems that are adaptive or self learning, the unplanned disturbance is the killer - a short duration, unpredictable event for which the system is unable to respond to within the control limits that have been defined through training, programming and/or adaptation. The response to an unplanned disturbance is often to default to an instruction that is very much human derived (ie. stop, exit gracefully, terminate instruction, wait until conditions return to controllable boundary conditions or freeze in place) which, depending on the disturbance, can be catastrophic. In our world, with humans behind the wheel, let's call the unplanned disturbance the "mistake". A tire blows, a load comes undone, an object falls out of or off of another vehicle (human, dog, watermelon, gas cylinder) etc.

The concern from my perspective (and I work directly with adaptive / learning control systems every day - fundamental models, adaptive neural type predictors, genetic algorithms etc. ) is the response to these short duration / short response time unplanned disturbances. The videos I've seen and the examples that I have reviewed don't deal with these very short timescale events and how to manage the response, which in many cases is an event dependent response. I would guess that the 1st dead person that results from the actions or inaction of self driving vehicles will put a major dent if not halt to the program. Humans may be fallible, but we are remarkably (infinitely?) more adaptive in combined conscious / subconscious responses than any computer is or will be in the near future in both appropriateness of response and the time scale of generating that response.

In the partially controlled environment (ie. there is no such thing as 100%) of a automated warehouse and distribution center, self driving works. In the partially controlled environment where ONLY self driving vehicles are present on the roadways, then again, this technology will likely succeed. The mixed environment with self driving co-mingled with humans (see "fallible" above) is not presently viable, and I don't think will be in the next decade or two, partially due to safety risk and partially due to management of these short timescale unplanned disturbances that can call for vastly different responses depending upon the specific situation at hand. In the flow of traffic we encounter the majority of the time, would agree that this may not be an issue to some (in 44 years of driving, I've been in 2 accidents, so I'll leave the risk assessment to the actuaries). But one death, and we'll see how high the knees jerk. And it will happen.

My 2 cents.
TB

Good info. Thanks.

I don't know Canadian law, but here in the US, giving your name and date of birth is "identifying yourself", but when driving you must present a license if requested, and proof of insurance. It seemed like they had some issue with presenting the papers.
You're quite right by US law, when he improperly claimed to be a 'peace officer', he was technically 'impersonating law enforcement' and that's an arrest able crime....BUT they actually SAID they wanted to arrest him for calling 911 when emergency vehicles were already there, not for impersonating a peace officer....that's ridiculous and abusive and also quite 'douchebaggy', and also likely makes the cop a liar since I don't think there is any such law denying access to 911 if emergency vehicles are present.

Sorry, he lost me when he said "we're all human beings, we deserve dignity", because douchebag power trippers with a badge don't deserve dignity, they deserve a powerful shaming and a lawsuit if they injure you in any way during their power trip. The same goes for power tripping 'freemen', 'sovereign citizens', fake 'peace officers', and 'detaxers'.
It always makes me laugh that they use so many public systems to try to 'prove' that the public systems both aren't legal and don't apply to them. For instance, if they don't have to pay for road tax because they aren't under the jurisdiction of or in league with the government, aren't they guilty of both trespass for being on what they claim is private land (because no government=no public land) AND guilty of theft for using the 'private' roadways without paying the owners?
Also, if they aren't under the jurisdiction of the police, and they have no authority, why was he CALLING THE POLICE FOR HELP?!? ...and why are they arguing in court about the legality of the court....Just duh, Robert.