Yes, and Selfishness

To continue the discussion on Values...

Several people have added to the dialogue the elements of selfishness and the "me" generation.

This is the only town that I am aware of that sells new automobiles that come not equipped with turn signals.

Or how else to explain the Daily Guessing Game of what is that car in front of me, approaching me, beside me about to do?

I haven't seen anyone, including the police or professional delivery drivers, use a turn signal in the last three years.

But why would you? That would mean you have some small concern about that rapidly disappearing entity called "THE OTHER PERSON."

I've reported in these pages the three occasions in which I have found infants alone in cars while their deeply concerned mothers were shopping, or in one blazing case, tanning.

To stop before a zebra cross walk to allow pedestrians to cross is to risk their lives and yours and the guy who will invariably race past you blindly on the right to fly through the crosswalk. Why would anyone stop for ANOTHER PERSON.

Why would you want to be involved with the often arduous and difficult and certainly messy task of rehabilitation of addicts and others when you can just give the suckers drugs and paraphernalia and places to get high?

Harm seduction is based on the entirely selfish notion that it's OK if someone wants to be stoned all day, because what's it got to do with me as long as they're not robbing me?

But that's exactly why it's a terrible and self-defeating public policy. Because it has everything to do with you.

It says that you welcome a city or a community that has entire sub-populations that are stoned and useless and self-hating and dying.

It says that you don't care about THE OTHER PERSON as long as she isn't breaking into your home or car.

To make matters worse, you wrap yourself in the fake cloak of "compassion," and claim that you are helping, when in fact you don't even have the faintest concept of THE OTHER PERSON.

Values. Selfishness.

The other day, my son, the actor, was working in a sound studio on a radio assignment. He and a young girl were the principal actors recording a series of commercials for an educational institution. The girl was 20 years old and, according to my son, very talented and busy.

Half-way through the morning, the producer opened his microphone in the booth and asked the young girl what the clicking noise was.

She is a professional artist being paid good money to record her voice.

The clicking noise?

She was texting.

The "me" generation in full flight.

We have long, long, long passed the point where you could reasonably hope to ask someone on their cell to be quiet in a theatre, a bus, a library, a hallway, probably a funeral parlour.

Every seven year old and his dog has a cell and everybody is jammering all day long about nothing.

Madly destroying the English language saying things like, "I'm like...and then, my mom's like..."

Parents, men and women, now walk down the street with their children, not enjoying the few scarce moments of being together and noticing the world around them and sharing their observations with their children, but jammering on their cells. The kid walks silently beside them.

When my mother died many years ago, I wrote the obit and I said, among other things, that "she loved the fine, small details of life and she loved to share them with us."

The result is that I am life-long curious about almost everything. Airplanes, marshland, textiles, Turkish poetry.

What curiosity can you develop talking your life away on a phone?

So, why has Vancouver gone so far down the rabbit hole?

Identity, values, selfishness.

OY VEY! THIS JUST IN!

The Elders of Zion, the venerable and shadowy Jewish organisation that controls the international banking industry, news media, and Hollywood, has announced that it is disbanding so that members can retire to Florida and live out their golden years on the golf course.

"We had a good run," said one senior Elder, reminiscing over old photographs of world leaders in his musty, wood-paneled office at an undisclosed location. "Maybe we ran the world for just a little too long. Anyway, now it's Obama's problem."

After a humiliating year left most of its financial holdings, as well as the entire civilised world, on the verge of collapse, the organisation has re-defined its mission in terms of bridge games and making it to restaurants for the Early Bird Special.

The announcement comes after a year in which many of the Elders’ most prized institutions suffered disheartening failures. The vaunted global banking system, which lay at the heart of Jewish world domination for almost two centuries, collapsed with astonishing rapidity, requiring trillions of dollars in bailout funds. The newspaper industry, through which the Elders have controlled world opinion, is in shambles, with prominent papers declaring bankruptcy and forcing millions of readers to form their own opinions. And, in the unkindest cut, Hollywood suffered the humiliation of losing the Oscar for Best Picture to Indian film "Slumdog Millionaire".

The organization's reputation for financial probity had also taken a hit amidst rumours of billions in losses in private Kalooki games against Sheikh Hamad bin Isa of Bahrain. According to inside sources, the organization also lost close to $1 trillion with disgraced investor Bernard Madoff.

Even before this past year, though, the Elders were facing hard times as they struggled to stay relevant and attract young members. The organization has tried to project a more youthful image, setting up a Facebook page and founding a new "Hipsters of Zion" youth division, which has sponsored a number of singles nights. But youngsters haven't been interested.

"World domination just doesn't resonate with the younger generation of Jews," said Marvin Tobman, a professor of non-profit management at San Diego State University and expert on Jewish communal life. 'They want the fun of fixing the world, not the responsibility of running it."

These recent troubles have worried even some of the Elders’ sharpest critics. "I always used to complain that Jews ran the world," said Reginald Weber, author of "Zionists and Zookeepers: The Unholy Alliance." "But now, I’m starting to worry that nobody's in charge."

Values, Continued

The Facts V The Propaganda

The views expressed by the various pro drug lobbies are a distortion of the truth.

Notwithstanding research carried out by the National Treatment Agency (NTA) which clearly established that the majority of those who have developed dependence, wish to become drug free; here in the UK, the focus for the past 10 years has been on ‘harm reduction’, rather than seeking to engage users into abstinence focused recovery. The outcome of this disastrous and misguided policy has been an escalation in drug related deaths which are at their highest for 5 years, 325 of which are attributed to methadone, the flagship of the harm reductionists, together with a devastating increase in the spread of blood born disease among Injecting Drug Users (IDUs) The statistics provided by the Health Protection Agency for England and Wales are as follows:

• The level of HIV infection among Injecting Drug Users (IDUs) in England and Wales is higher now than at the start of the decade.

• In London where the prevalence of HIV in IDUs is higher than elsewhere in England and Wales, 1 in 20 IDUs is infected.

• In the remainder of England and Wales HIV among IDUs has increased from approximately 1 in 400 in 2002 to around 1 in 150 in 2006.

• The prevalence of Hepatitis C among IDUs has increased from 33 percent in 2000 to 42 per cent in 2006.

• Approximately 1 in 5 IDUs has Hepatitis B infection, which extrapolates as an increase approaching 200 per cent since 1997.

The escalating increase in blood born disease has occurred despite the plethora of needle exchange facilities throughout England and Wales, and the growth of supervised drug consumption rooms

It is self evident from the foregoing that here in the UK at least, it is not the lack of harm reduction measures which is contributing to avoidable deaths and the epidemic of blood born disease being wreaked on our society, but the use of toxic psycho active substances.

It is not so called prohibition which has failed, but the encouragement by way of the tacit permission, and in many instances, the not so tacit encouraging of continued use, inherent in the harm reduction ideology, which has failed users and society so abysmally.

The supporters of Harm Reduction, under their various guises have never allowed the truth to interfere with their propaganda, or indeed their more covert agenda, to legalise drug use; the main beneficiaries of which would be the pharmaceutical industry. Such a move would be to inflict further incalculable harm on society, since it would result in a growth of use and addiction, similar, if not more widespread, to that seen in the late 1800’s when most of the drugs which are controlled today, were in fact legal.

The growth of drug use during that period was the direct result of concerted efforts by leading members of the medical profession in promoting drug use, many of whom were influenced by Sigmund Freud, who was so unethical in his dealings that he accepted separate commissions from two competeing, large pharmaceutical companies, both of whom are still in business today, to write papers extolling the benefits of that destructive substance, cocaine, not only as the ‘elixir of life’, but also as a cure for alcohol and morphine addiction. The rest as they say is history

One has to ask is it a coincidence that many of the bodies, who are pressing for an end to what they term as prohibition, receive ‘research grants’ from the pharmaceutical industry?

Source: Daily Dose; posted by Peter O'Loughlin on 13 Mar 2009 at 6:23 am

My Home Town - Continued

Further to the posting of TURNER - THE MIDNIGHT THINKER...

Yes, identity. Agreed. that is crucial.

And values.

Values are central to this discussion.

It is always risky to open the cask labelled "values," lest a hoard of bible-based, Koran-thumping, Torah-waving zealots jump on board.

But I think the changing and abandoning of certain values is at the core of what has happened to Vancouver - and the world - in the past four decades.

Here is a lift from the morning Vancouver Sun:

"Teachers complained Sunday that school principals are ordering them to never give zeros when marking class assignments, to accept late work and to allow students to rewrite tests as many times as it takes for them to get good marks."

What does that say about values?

It says that we can never say, "No," to the precious little princes and princesses known as children for fear they may no longer love us, or they may report us to higher authorities or they may run away downtown and be given money by social workers to live in hotel rooms.

It says, that in spite of spending billions of taxpayers dollars and completely disrupting the lifeblood of the city on a sports competition called the Olympics, in spite of all that, we, as a society have otherwise made competition a dirty word. Children must cooperate. They needn't compete. Everyone gets a ribbon. Everyone is a winner.

Swill.

Soft-brained wish-fulfillment drivel.

Life is endlessly competitive. In the home, in the 'hood, in business, in politics, in war. Doesn't necessarily mean that is a good thing, but that's real life. Try being 15 years old and living in China and looking for your next step in education. You'll experience some real competition.

What about other values?

What about giving heroin addicts needles and places to shoot and giving crack addicts clean pipes to smoke?

What do those public policies - aided and abetted by pseudo-science and the agreement of the silence of the masses - say about our values?

Do you rally want to live with a using addict? Do you want to aid and abet misery? Because heroin addiction and crack addiction and alcohol addiction are misery. They are degrading hideous nightmares. Don't you want to see people get off the cycle?

What are your values when you want to help them stay stupid and miserable?

You think you are reducing harm?

Why? Because a criminologist hiding in a tiny cubicle in academia told you so? Because it is the official story?

But would you actually walk across the street to give a drunk a clean shot glass?

Values.

Vancouver has rightly and sadly gained a world-wide reputation as being soft on crime and soft on drugs.

You actually can still rationalize that your little weekend pot habit is cute and O.K.?

You have no understanding of the murderous trail that has put that pot into your hands?

Our courts long ago abandoned "protection of the public" as a core idea in sentencing.

Psychos, murderers, rapists are released every day on parole, mandatory parole, probation, time-served, double-time served, anything that will recognize the inalienable rights of the accused.

And the rights of the community?

Values.

It has been said often enough that we get the Shakespeare that we deserve. Or the politicians. Or the pop singers.

And perhaps we get the Vancouver that we deserve.

Gangs that can't shoot straight haven't sprung willy-nilly from the ooze without warning.

We have nurtured them by being laissez-faire, laid-back, oh-so-cool tolerant of the worst in our own behaviour.

We let our young girls dress like whores in public and we let our young boys emulate gangsters. It's cute, apparently.

A mother and a daughter shop at Costco wearing matching grey sweatpants that say something adorable like, "Ass" across their ass.

We make a point of parking in handicapped spots "just for a minute," even when there's a whole empty lot available. We are teenagers all, pathetically rebelling against the social compact.

Nobody can tell me what to do.

Values.

Every time we speak of public policy, whether it is about garbage or botany or tax rolls, we are speaking about our own values.

Vancouver might be a healthier place if we truly cared about what we really want in our lives.

Sooooo Good

MEMORIES OF IASI'S

Dear David As the snow comes down even in Tsawwassen. You have brought back some memories. VI,S steak house was great but the place across the street from The Penthouse was IASI’S and served the best VEAL PARMISSAN one could ever eat. That was the GOLDEN TIME. Regards Bill

TURNER, THE MIDNIGHT THINKER - ON VANCOUVER

I found this entry fascinating. There a re many reasons for all of this change which you find somewhat regretful and express so eloquently in this blog..It is a complex issue with more factors than there are spokes on a bicycle wheel.

But this is what I thought was important about one of these spokes. Vancouver and it's citizens have gone through an identity crisis (also most other rest of the planet).. And this crisis s a response to the “Marketing” of everything.

You refer to the jazz clubs and the smiling Buddha. They no longer exist in any real terms. What does exist are trendy places that are more often and not big franchised brand names playing background music that is being marketed and likely will actually not feature any musical instruments...often just loops on a computer. This transitioned store front is often inhabited by young people who have spent more money on their Nike shoes then you would want to pay for a suit.

And it is worth it to them.

Because they are not buying the coffee, the music or the shoes. They are purchasing a phantasy identity shared by their peers lasting just a bit longer than the current advertising campaign planned for them.

All of this is exactly as socially real as a tupper ware party because that is the quality of the fabric of the social interactions dribbling into the psyche of the participants..

It started with our generation. We have morphed along with the creeping incremental ism of internalized marketing messages. The generation of our kids and there kids have know nothing else. It is no longer about who and what you are. It is about who and what you are perceived to be. You are not what you eat. You are the goods and services you consume and dispense.

Having laid this groundwork....to tie it to crime, murder, mayham and violence.

If you cannot find a way to perceived identity paradise by doing “good things”...
then you can get there by doing “bad things”.

In exactly the same way you don't have to work for the Province to write a blog
you don't have to work for “the mob” to be a gangster. Get some dope and sell it. Or make a game plan with your friends and you have your own little mob.

Problem that is occurring that is occurring here is the same problem that occurs in most blogs on the Internet. There isn't the benefit of editorial control or advisement. “The so called mob” was an enduring institution with a code and occasion bouts of wisdom.

Hard to survive long without a basic honesty, integrity and most definitely - loyalty

How ironic.

In my opinion a large factor of the transition in society of which you write about here is brought on by creating perceived needs based on the marketing of ideas, products, and identity. Our youthful gangsters stand at the extreme end of loyalty to that perception.


They have bought in big time.


Marketing Marketing Marketing.

MY HOME TOWN

Here's this morning's Province lead headline:

17 hours of violence in Lower Mainland

The article chronicles the various shootings, stabbings, punchings and maimings visited upon our eager heads this weekend.

I find myself babbling.

"Why?" I ask the kitchen floor, "are we so prone to such lousy behaviour in such a beautiful setting? You would think that the ocean and the mountains would extend a sense of calm and patience."

The floor has no answers, other than, "Hey, Mr. Philosopher, try sweeping me on occasion."

When I first came to Vancouver from Winnipeg about 45 years ago (My mother was still sending me out of the house in grey flannel shorts, which is why my nickname was "Stovepipies."), Vancouvr already had the reputation for being a wild and woolly western port town. Hookers and junkies and deals gone sour, that sort of ambiance.

There were jazz clubs and pot and lots of really bad food.

Hey, it was a barely adolescent village with a natural waterway. Sailors from Russia and India mixed it up at the Smiling Bhudda and, if they could still walk or had a buck left in their soiled jeans, they made it up town to Vy's Steak House or that Spaghetti joint across from Philiponi's Penthouse.

Yes, there was heroin on the street, but it was not more than a blip, a cottage industry, patrolled by a few violent, crazed narco-cops, who kept things in line, so to speak.

Obviously, we need a couple of those good old SFU Criminologists or Sociologists to write us the definitive explanation (and no one has done one yet) of how we went in just a few decades from mildly amusing silliness to the sheer madness that prevails today.

Honduran drug dealers plying the Trade on the steps of a community centre that wins awards for civic spirit.

17 Hours of Violence.

A neighbourhood that was once a little seedy and strange and known simply as "the corner," that is now the worst and most expensive 4 square blocks in the known modern world.

Of course, it is not just the headlines.

Daily, every day, each day, daily, you and I suffer the indifferences of so-called ordinary white, middle-class assholes who NEVER use their turn signals, who ALWAYS find the opportunity to turn LEFT in a traffic circle, who NEVER stop pedestrians in striped crosswalks, who ALWAYS speed and change lanes and pass through SCHOOL ZONES, who exemplify in every possible mean chizzly way what it means to not be a citizen.

I have no idea. Not a clue.

Greed. Entitlement. Selfishness. No civics classes in school. Absent parents. Set-em-all-free courts.

You tell me.

I'm going out for brunch. Then I'm going for a walk along the water. Then I'm going swimming.

Tonight, I'll watch the rest of the tape I made yesterday of one of the greatest movies of all time, "From here to Eternity."

I'll watch the consummate skills and artistry of Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, Ernest Borgnine. I'll cry for sure.

I love Vancouver. But, let's be honest. It is a Lorelei, signaling to us, dragging us to a watery grave.

It is like craving the raspberries that give us hives.

THE SCHOOL OF GREED

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent..."

This is the straight-faced quote from Edward M. Liddy (a relative of Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy?), the government appointed boss at AIG.

He is speaking of the many, many hundreds of millions of dollars that AIG will be paying out in bonuses to the executives who destroyed the company.

The Company they destroyed has now received about $170 Billion in taxpayer bailout monies.

That's quite a trick.

You ruin a huge multi-national financial institution that triggers a worldwide collapse of economies and you get paid performance bonuses, while the taxpayers (teachers, nurses, ditch diggers, cable guys, posties, blackjack dealers) give you many Billions to stay afloat.

Why were none of us ever taught this strategy in Economics 104?

PAPERS DOWN. AND IN THEIR PLACE...?

The list of disappearing newspapers is becoming encyclopedic.

Halifax Daily News

San Fransisco Chronicle

Seattle P.I.

Rocky Mountain News

Christian Science Monitor

The L.A. Times and the Chicago Sun Times have filed for bankruptcy.

Lay-offs in all media, but especially daily print, are daily, commonplace and heartbreaking.

What does this mean for you and me?

Much. A great deal.

It means that there are far fewer reporters and real journalists who can dig deep in those stories that need public exposure.

I am not a reporter. Never have been.

I'm a columnist, an observer, a talk show host. I see the passing parade and hiss or applaud. My role is to express my reaction to the world and get you and me engaged in a dialogue about the issues.

I do not hang about City Hall, poking in all the dusty corners.

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people who do exactly that and who enjoy doing that and who are darned good at that can find work.

This means that you and I are increasingly less informed. The "official story" becomes increasingly unchallenged.

Which means that you and I are swallowing more and more horse swill as the days pass.

The Globe & Mail has written a marvelous several-page piece that asks the question:

Is democracy written in disappearing ink?

The other night I was standing in the many wrap-around windows of an apartment in downtown Vancouver. I found myself focusing on the beautiful old Sun Tower building on West Pender, and, behind it, the current Vancouver Sun building at the foot of Granville Street.

I had the same reaction that I had last year when I was in the advertising offices of the Sun, on the umpteentieth floor in the sky.

"Don't they know this is going the way of the dodo bird? Shouldn't they all be looking for other work?"

The Globe article studies in detail the inroads of the Internet and the erosion of the city newspaper financial model. But it also pints out starkly the unique role of the city daily print edition -

informing the public, animating civic culture and holding government accountable?

Blog Land is full of trenchant opinions (and pure, unadulterated idiocy), but opinions have to begin with facts and information.

So far, very few on-line papers or zines have been able to match the city daily.

Almost none have become crucial partners in the city's culture, sponsoring health and arts and sports and cultural events.

I have no idea what the coming years will bring us.

But let's be honest.

98% of the blogosphere is as productive and interesting as all those millions of teenage girls on their cells saying over and over again, "So, I'm like...and my mom's like...and I'm like..."

HOLD THAT THOUGHT - I'M AT THE OLYMPICS

The criminal justice system will be on hold for 10 weeks before, during and after the Gordon Games.

RCMP and other police will be too busy on security assignments to testify in local courts.

This peculiar news raises another other questions.

Will policing in general be "on hold" at the same time?

Does this make the calendar period from January 15 to March 26, 2010 a great time to commit murder, robbery, rape and other public mayhem?

The other day we pointed out in this space (DISRUPTION) the disturbing and undemocratic power now given to VANOC.

This is what I wrote:

"VANOC is now apparently the highest form of government in the land, unelected though it may be. VANOC can close streets, re-route traffic hire or buy buses by the freight load and do just about any darn thing it wants to in order to make its famous Games work."

How little I knew in the dark days of Thursday.

Now we learn that VANOC can close the court system (such as it is) and throw a major bone to all the scofflaws of the earth.

COME TO VANCOUVER IN 2010 AND ROB, & KILL. THE COPS ARE BUSY. THE COURTS ARE CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS.

(By the way, I suddenly remember that when I posted "DISRUPTION" on Thursday a guy from a local ad agency sent me an email.

This what he said.

"Dickhead!"

That kept me laughing all day.

Imagine a guy in an ad agency, whose entire life and source of income are supposed to be creativity. His family spends that fortune to send him to Quick Quip School, where he graduates with Honors, especially in the Fast Comeback category.

And what he comes up with when he disapproves of something is "Dickhead!"

Sharp, buddy.

I'm intuiting that what he didn't like was my slagging the Games. I realize that it is practically a criminal offense in this part of the gulag these days to not be in full cheerleader mufti, pom-poms afurled.

"Dickhead!" The man's a genius. No doubt the agency's Creative Director. Don't you want this guy lading the next new client pitch.)

What VANOC can also do is make it against the law for you to protest, no matter how humbly, the riotous financial and social costs of the these Gord games.

I've been thinking about standing at the corner of Georgia & Granville at noon - just before I leave for Melbourne, of course - with a placard that says,

"SO I DON'T WELCOME THE GAMES. SO ARREST ME ALREADY."

Does any one in the room remember voting for VANOC in any public election of any kind?

This has become the greatest example of taxation without representation that I can recall.

Shut down the streets, shut down the police, shut down the courts, shut down mom-&-pop businesses. Close the schools.

THE MIDDLE EAST IN A NUT SHELL

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said yesterday, "We will never recognize Israel."

That is all you need to know.

D.K.

MIschief

My son and I had a wicked thought over breakfast yesterday.

Elect Carole James in May and rob Gordon Campbell of his Big Wet Dream - Crying with happiness in public at the Gordo Games.

I know.

It's cruel.

But we are simple folk. We cannot help ourselves.

NECESSARY CHANGE

The Davies commission of Inquiry into the death of Frank Paul has rendered, among others, two very important recommendations.

The first is something that many of us have been hollering about for ages - a civilian office to investigate all police-related deaths.

The police investigating the police is stupid and unproductive. It must go.

The police must be answerable to the people who pay them to serve and protect.

The second recommendation calls for a civilian "sobering centre."

The police pick up a drunk for whatever reason, fine. Step One: the drunk goes to a civilian detox, where he or she is first "cared for" and the risk of dying mysteriously in the hands of hostile or indifferent people in uniform is minimized or eliminated.

Why does it take inquiries such as this to raise the obvious?

And when, if ever, can we hope to see tfese imminently sensible changes come to life?

Slowly, the screw turns

The defense team in the Basi-Virk trial have won an interesting concession from the court.

They will be allowed to subpoena the phone and email records of named MLA's.

Which I think is a good thing.

Then only question is...where is the crown on this? Wouldn't you expect the crown to ask for these kinds of evidence?

And yesterday, the name of Patrick Kinsella was uttered in this court case.

What can it all mean?

Hm?

Blackmailed by a Jeep

Chrylser has resorted to blackmail.

Give us a cookie or we'll leave.

Very grown-up.

Among other concessions and hand-outs demanded, they want Canada Revenue Agency to back off on the $500,000 lien it has put on its Brampton, Ontario plant.

Hahahahaha...

Obviously, these rubes have never dealt with the kindly folks at CRA before.

As one who has, let me assure you there is no madder dog in the yard than a CRA sniper on a mission.

To Chrysler Canada and its threats to move south, we offer the words of that great American folk poet, J. Joplin, who once gloriously sang, "Bye Bye Baby Bye-Bye..."

Disruption

Yesterday, given a hint of the chaos that will visit this city next February, I wrote in this space that I think I'll go to Melbourne during the Olympics.

But I really had no idea just how disruptive and destructive this little party would be.

Nor, it turns out did any of the many rah-rah-rah businesses that will suffer hugely. When the Downtown Business Association - perennially the biggest civic cheerleaders about almost anything - are kvetching, you know you've got trouble right here in River City.

VANOC is now apparently the highest form of government in the land, unelected though it may be. VANOC can close streets, re-route traffic hire or buy buses by the freight load and do just about any darn thing it wants to in order to make its famous Games work.

VANOC vice-president Terry Wright said yesterday that while the message will be "There's no room for the car," it will also be "There is room for you - on transit."

Really, Terry?

Which transit system is that exactly?

Portland? London?

Because the transit system that I know right here in Vancouver is and has been for a long time an unholy mess of insufficiencies.

Anyone remember the Cambie Merchants and how they have been screwed by the Cambie Line construction, not once, but ten times over?

Well, folks, you're going to see it all over again. On Robson and Granville and Hastings and West Broadway to name just a few choice locations where businesses will suffer mightily for the 17 days of wonder and awe.

And will any of those businesses receive compensation for Gord's Interruption?

Hahahaha...take another pill.

And were any of those businesses, most of whom proudly wore their "I'm backing the Games" buttons and banners and bows, told that they would be asked for this personal pocketbook sacrifice so Gord can have an emotional moment or two? Doubt.

Then, for those of you deranged enough to brave the Sea-to-Sky so-called highway, be prepared for the stop and security check. Be prepared to prove that you are not The Mad Bomber, that you have been a tax-paying church-going nose-cleaning citizen of the province for several decades.

Several commenters on yesterdays blog item asked if they could join me on my escape to Melbourne.

I think we should charter a plane and make a whole Vancouver Escapes thing out of it.

Maybe we can get a Canada Council grant or a government bail-out.

Denial on a Cheesy Scale

Patrick Kinsella is the provincial Liberal War Horse. He raises the money, he gets out the troops and he gets Gord elected.

Fine.

Now, the NDP opposition would like to know why Kinsella's company was awarded $300,000 in contracts from BC Rail, exactly at the time that Gord was selling the company off.

In an almost biblical scene, The Opaque One was asked this question in the House yesterday and 12 times he declined to answer. 12.

Gord? He let Wally hang in the wind.

Dear NDP Opposition and Dear Journalists,

Keep asking.

America, The Beautiful