DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

You've heard of VANDU?

That's the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, a "group" of junkies who, through repeated appeals to the blinkered and lazy liberal press, have claimed some legitimacy for themselves as spokespersons for somethingorother.

Real agenda?

We want to shoot dope. Now fuck off and leave us alone.

Well, turns out VANDU has a Vancouver Island cousin, hanging about mostly in Victoria.

It calls itself SOLID, the Society of Living Intravenous Drug Users.

Hahahaha...

That's to distinguish itself from SORDID, The Society of Really Dead Intravenous Drug Users.

Now SOLID has considerable traction in out capital city. They squawk and folks listen. Why I don't know, but they do.

Seems Victoria is a mighty small and cozy place.

Because a woman named Shannon Turner is not only the director of public health for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, but she is also the committee chair for the Needle Exchange Advisory Committee.

Busy, busy, busy. Not to mention conflicts of interest. But hey...

Now, SOLID and Shannon have a melodramatic little issue on their hands.

The famous needle exchange (as bad an idea as has ever come down the pike) is supposed to open on Princess Street.

But the junkies - oh, I'm so terribly sorry - the intravenous drug users who have every right in the world to use illegal drugs and break into my home and car to get goodies to resell so they can be intravenous drug users - those good people, they want the new needle exchange to be on Pandora Street.

But, oops.

The Pandora site is smack up against an elementary school and the Conservatory of Music.

Although this is not reported in today's news piece, it is also cheek-to-yarmulka with Temple Emanu-el, Canada's first and oldest synagogue.

Now, I have two very personal reasons for being truly against the needle exchange being anywhere near this proposed location.

Two years ago, I performed a one-man play at the Conservatory. The whole experience was wonderful. On the off chance that I have to go back, I do not want to step over and through crazy using drug addicts to get to work. Nor do think young men and women who are wired on Mozart and Mahler should have to run this gauntlet.

My paternal grandfather, Rabbi Marcus Berner, was the Rabbi for many years, some decades ago, at Temple Emanu-el.

I would like to say, "Rest in peace," but that will be difficult with crazy using addicts pissing on your door stoop.

Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. Israel is a pariah and a Nazi state and addicts have a medical problem and their rights. What have I been thinking?

Just a question or two before we all go out to play?

How far have we descended into the madness that we take non-groups like VANDU and SOLID seriously?

Why do we give free needles to filthy lying cheating manipulating non-tax-paying thieving addicts but not to seniors with diabetes?

And there's this:

"The high number of drug addicts in Victoria could be attributable to Victoria's soft stand on drug crime, Sgt. Hamilton said."

Weally?

You think?

UGLY THRUTHS

As dreadful as humankind can be, it is still not often that I learn something truly horrifying.

Today was different.

Geoffrey York, writing in the Globe from Johannesburg, reports about 5 year old child workers picking tobacco in places like Malawi. These children, working 12 hours a day, are poisoned by the nicotine and suffer relentless and painful injuries and diseases.

For what?

So that some fool in South Carolina or Creston can light up a Lucky Strike and some exec in New York can fuel his corporate jet?

Free enterprise at its best. Letting the markets determine everything in life. The Fraser Institute and every body's Board of Trade writ large. The Bottom Liners in charge.

Make that the Bottom Feeders?

Much of the tobacco industry was stationed here in North America, but with slave and child labour available in Africa for less than $5 a month, the landscape has changed.

No doubt the Princes of Industry who run these atrocities have families.

The compartmentalized mind is a wonder to behold.

REAL VALUE(S)

Patrick Kinsella - he who would rather not testify, thanks very much - boasted to BC Rail that his communications company had a "value-added component."

No doubt.

Getting the Premier elected and then re-elected would probably in the real world give a fella some extra grease.

You betcha.

More than once I have written in this space about the Great Triangle: Gordon Campbell, Patrick Kinsella and CN Rail Chair David McLean.

This has been for some time now the Great BC Buddies in Good Times Movie.

In this morning's Globe & Mail, Rod Mickleburgh reports: "At one point, CN Rail chair David McLean conveyed information to Mr. Kinsella that the deal appeared to be falling apart rather than dealing directly with BC Rail. Mr. Kinsella then conveyed CN's concerns to BC Rail, Mr. Bolton [Basi-Virk defense lawyer] said. “[Mr. Kinsella] may not be working for CN, but there's clearly a relationship.”

The defense will present further arguments to Justice Bennett on August 31st that they want Kinsella to be issued a subpoena.

You think?

REALLY BAD POLICY IGNORED

On Wednesday, I wrote about the truly mistaken and greedy plan for "revitalizing" the Little Mountain Housing properties at 33d and Main.

In yesterday's Courier, Tom Sandborn delivered a terrific piece spelling out even further the text and texture of this bad planning.

I had no idea until I read Tom's editorial that over 700 Little Mountain residents were forced out of their homes by this deeply uncaring government.

Where have they gone?

How much have their rents in their new digs gone up?

Who is paying for this disruption?

One sits by in horror and watches a democratically elected government in 2009 in Canada heave poor people from their homes and then say that the new development, which of course will involve corporate profits in the "new mix," will take years and years to appear.

As Sandborn so aptly closes his article, "A solution that put affordable housing ahead of a developer's convenience and politicians' expediency would be the real win/win."

Why is this public atrocity getting so little attention?

Can the mainstream media get any more complacent?

Yes,It's Silly...but it's funny.

Gordon the Chicken


Trevor the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several
hundred young layers (hens), called 'pullets' and eight or ten
roosters, to fertilize the pullets' eggs.


Trevor kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the
soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time so he
bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell
had a different tone so Trevor could tell from a distance, which
rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an
efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.


The farmer's favourite rooster was Gordon, and a very fine specimen he
was too, but on this particular morning Trevor noticed Gordon's bell
hadn't rung at all!


Trevor went to investigate.


The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets,
hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover but to farmer Trevor's
amazement, Gordon had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring.


He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.



Trevor was so proud of Gordon, he entered him into the London
Exhibition and Gordon became an overnight sensation among the judges.



The Result?


The judges not only awarded Gordon the No Bell Piece Prize but they
also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.


Clearly Gordon was a politician in the making: Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention.


Do you know a Politician called Gordon?

THREE QUICK HITS ON A RUSHED MORNING

1. Quote of the Day: "Family want to be able to see their loved ones." This is the lawyer for Kimberley Noyes, who has been charged with murdering a young boy in Grand Forks. Noyes is being held in Surrey and her lawyer is kvetching. And what about the family of John Fulton, who has been killed, allegedly by Ms. Noyes. No doubt they too would like to see their loved ones. You see, once you kill someone and get caught a whole bunch of really inconvenient things happen.

2. The Globe editorial writers felt it necessary today to tell us how wonderful the free heroin trials were. We spoke yesterday at length and in disgust about this topic in the post immediately below this. The truth about this pernicious evil is that there was nothing remotely scientific about this so-called study. The samples were uselessly small, the subjects were a mish-mash of wholly unrelated types and conclusions were drawn from the skimpiest of "evidence." But that's democracy for you: You pay your $12.50, you buy your popcorn, and get an opinion. The Globe editorialists are often bang-on. But on this subject they are flat ignorant. They don't know the territory, period.

3. The man who was convicted of killing 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 has been released by Scottish authorities and sent home to Libya because he has prostate cancer. So he dies in prison of prostate cancer? There's something wrong with that? People die in prison every day, some from prostate cancer. What has this got to do with Justice? You explode bombs on planes that kill 270 people, you can pretty much expect the occasional inconvenience, like dying in prison of prostate cancer. Compassion? Try, idiocy.

HELP IS ON THE WAY

Read this headline and weep:

Heroin helps hard-core addicts in treatment: study

Addicts provided with heroin rather than methadone more likely to stay in treatment, less likely to use street drugs

The crazy German psychiatrist who heads up this dreadful piece of work has published his "findings"in no less that the New England Journal of Medicine, which automatically confers upon the nonsense some shmeer of legitimacy.

But look a the absurdity of the statement itself.

"Addicts provided with heroin will stay in treatment..."

These are mutually exclusive propositions.

You cannot be using heroin and be in treatment at the same time, folks. Has never happened, will never happened. Never saw it, never will see it.

And what effing treatment?

These ghouls will not tell us which treatment their guinea pigs are in, because there is none!

It is a shame that the press bothers to report this foolishness.

Next Wednesday I will fly to Winnipeg for a few days to visit the Behavioral Health Foundation, the residential treatment centre for addicts and others that for 40 years now had been churning out clean and sober citizens.

Oh yes, Margaret, there is treatment available in some remote corners of the known world.

But in these programs, heroin is not given or even discussed.

So, you argue, what about the incorrigible, the hard-to-help?

Glad you asked.

Here is Justice Wallace Craig's North Shore News editorial that addresses the very issue:

TIME TO GET TOUGH WITH SKID ROAD MISFITS

August 19, 2009

VANCOUVER’S Skid Road is a slummy end-of-the-line refuge for drug-addicted criminals.

Once a vibrant district, Skid Road is now overrun by junkie marauders who plunder law abiding citizens and merchants in a predictable pattern of violence and property crime.

Just deserts for these incorrigibles ought to be detoxification followed by a significant stretch in jail as pure punishment for their parasitical behaviour.

My suggestion that we get tough with Skid Road misfits will likely draw a cacophony of cluck-clucking from big-brother medical health officers and senior bureaucrats engaged in an Orwellian scheme to medicalize drug addiction.

Medicalization is simply an expedient way to transform the deviant moral and criminal behaviour of drug addicts into a non-deviant medical issue.

You may recall that since 2000, the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority have engaged in pernicious campaign to neutralize criminalization of possession of illicit drugs. They unabashedly mislead the general public with the falsehood that drug addiction is: a particular kind of disease displaying special symptoms; that it is beyond personal agency and self-imposed abstinence; and, that it requires professional medical assistance under the aegis of an addictions bureaucracy.

They have adopted a stigma-neutral lexicon including words and definitions such as “problematic substance abuse” rather than “drug abuse”, and “illegal” for “illicit” to eliminate moral/ethical considerations.

It is indisputable that opiates are poisons; and it is equally a fact that there will always be rogue citizens who, regardless of the risk, want to narcotize themselves out of the uncertainties and rigours of daily life, even if it inevitably leads to life of crime and ill health.

In Romancing Opiates – Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, Dr. Anthony Daniels says that “medical consequences (of addiction), however terrible, do not make a disease.”

Before publishing Romancing Opiates in 2006, Daniels had worked 14 years as a doctor in a large general hospital in a British slum, and in an even larger prison nearby. During this period opiate addiction increased dramatically and Daniels began treating as many as 20 new cases a day. He witnessed a worsening of the problem even though drug clinics increased as did medication prescribed to addicts.

Based on his experience with addicts and his extensive reading, Daniels rejects the notion that opiate addiction is relatively instantaneous. He says that it requires determination to reach habitual use three or four times a day, and that “it is truer to say that the addict hooks heroin than that heroin hooks the addict. The active principle in the exchange is the person, not the drug, and the addiction is a freely chosen state: an obvious fact that is ignored by the addiction bureaucracy.”

In forming his opinion Daniels also relied on the experience of American soldiers during and after the Vietnam War: “Thousands of American soldiers, especially towards the end (of the war), addicted themselves to heroin. … What happened to them when they went home? Only one in eight of the addicts continued with his addiction after return to the United States, and by two and three years after their return, the addiction rates among those who had served were no higher than among those who qualified for the draft but did not serve in Vietnam.

“And what help or services did these thousands of addicts receive when the returned home? For all intents and purposes, it varied between very little and none. They simply stopped taking heroin and did not resume.”

When Skid Road’s drug addicts go about robbing and stealing to fund their purchases of illicit drugs, they are cunning, wily and mindful of what they are doing. They are not automatons.

The festering sore of Skid Road is a national disgrace. It is worse today than in 2000.

Parliament has the constitutional right to enact a Public Safety Act that would authorize police to arrest any person found in a public place in a state of incapacitation by illicit drugs, and to forthwith render that person to a justice of the peace for committal into a secure detoxification facility.

It’s high time to take back our streets and public places. So just do it, all you members of Parliament.

wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca. – North Shore News – Aug 19/09

I Don't Think, Therefore I have a Right to Pack

Did you know that most States in the Onion allow people to openly carry guns, including assault rifles?

And that many allow the carrying of concealed weapons?

The President is trying to bring health care coverage to millions of American uninsured citizens.

The Republicans want to kill this initiative because they know it will murder the presidency. Their interests are entirely political, self-serving and without concern for 50 million of their fellow citizens who are always a cough away from catastrophic illness.

Their M.O. is fear and more fear and then a dash more fear.

Fear sells deodorant and pampers and Kotex and cars.

On Monday in sunny Phoenix a nice man showed up at a rally protesting Obama with an AR-15 slung most casually over his shoulder.

The AR-15 is not a bag made by Prada.

So the radio and TV talk show hosts sit in their comfortable air-conditioned and totally secured studios viciously feeding more fear and frenzy to the pot, while Joe LunchBucketHead goes packin'.

This is way beyond ugly.

Try really sick.

Item 1: Once booming, B.C. to post $3-billion shortfall

Once booming, B.C. to post $3-billion shortfall

Item 2:

B.C. Lottery Corp. raises weekly play limit to $10,000

Hello...

Raising the Internet gambling limit on PlayNow is cynical and thoughtless.

The best argument this idea-and-morality bankrupt government can make in defense of the indefensible is "well, other people do it." Meaning that other Internet sites allow huge limit or no limit gambling.

Brilliant.

LITTLE MOUNTAIN MODEL WRONG

We all agree that we have a housing crisis, especially for the homeless and for low-income families.

We all agree something aught to be done.

And soon.

The first and primary villain in this continuing story is the 30 years of bad Federal Government, regardless of who was in the Big Chair.

Central Mortgage and Housing (CMHC) at one time lived up to its mandate and provided a steady flow of funds for social housing projects across the land.

The day they stopped, you started to see the results on your street corners.

But now, we add to the mix the Triple P (Public Private Partnerships) obsession of Premier Gordon Campbell.

The City of Vancouver and the Province got it into their woolen heads that the Little Mountain Housing site at 33d and Main - which has been accommodating hundreds of families for a great many years - should be torn down and replaced with something "better."

Of course, the Preem's idea of "better" always involves a profit for someone, preferably someone he knows.

God forbid, he should just build something BECAUSE IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

So, in this case, we have a company called Holborn Properties calling the shots.

The city does not control the timeline. The province, through BC Housing, chose Holborn Properties as the developer of the site in May of 2008. The terms of that deal are confidential.

Oh.

Why should any of us know what our tax dollars are doing?

Holborn, by the way, has its own problems.

Holborn put a $500-million downtown Vancouver Ritz-Carlton project on hold in February, citing poor sales of luxury condos in the hotel-condo project.

Oy Vey. Poor babies.

So a social housing project, tied by the way to almost every other potential social housing project in the province, will probably take years and years to develop and complete.

Why?

Because the whole House of Canards depends on the global economy, the fortunes of one development company and a deal that even the City Of Vancouver hasn't been allowed to see.

The Mayor is a huge advocate of solving housing problems. Or so he would have us believe.

But the Mayor, like you and me, is powerless in the face of Backroom Deals, PPP's, and the utterly wrong ideology of a Premier with no real sense of social responsibility.

TAKING CHARGE -MOSCOW STYLE

The news that the B.C. government has taken over Tourism BC - previously an arms-length Crown Corporation - is both good and bad.

The good is that someone should have wrested this agency away from its handlers ages ago. Any supplier who has had contractual dealings with the office will testify that professionalism and street smarts are not singularly evident.

Frankly, the place has been in snooze and comfort mode for a while.

The bad is that the government is behaving like Big Brother.

You just seize an operation and pull it into the bunker without any conversation?

Kevin Krueger, the Tourism Minister and ICBC claims adjuster, has some special skills in this area? He ran a front desk at a Best Western?

What gulag are we living in exactly?

Ah, yes, the Winter of Our Discontented Games.

2010 trumps all policy decisions.

Know it. Face it. Get used to it.

TRAGEDY NOT AVERTED

It appears that a mentally disturbed woman has murdered a young boy in Grand Forks, B.C.

This is a tragedy on a hundred different fronts.

The mayor "criticized cutbacks in the province that have led to reduced services for mental health patients over the last decade. “I think what we've lost here is mental health support in the community,” he said. “The community sees [this] as a health problem as much as a crime problem.”"

Governments, like individuals, have priorities, and we and they are consistent in our choices.

Recent provincial and federal governments have shown a distinct lack of interest in something as baffling and time-consuming and labor-intensive as mental health problems.

The results, on a daily basis in all our communities, speak for themselves.

Now you See it, Now you don't..

The other day, we spoke here about Lotto monies being held up and not distributed to community groups that have been promised such.

Here's the scenario.

Province yanks $1 Billion a year from our stupid pockets as we buy gambling tix that have a hope in hell of ever paying off. OK. So be it. We are dumb and poor and we dream. I am among you, believe me.

Province then passes on about 15% to charities and community groups.

Or at least, they say they are passing on this money.

So you are running the Lake Cowichan Flugelhorn Consortium and you buy new mouthpieces, music stands and a side of donuts for your group on the promise that money is soon to arrive.

Surprise!

Rich Coleman is the Villain here. He is the Social Development Minister and he's the guy who is supposed to yell down the line to the minions, "PAY THE LOSERS ALREADY!'

Alas. Rich is no where to be found.

Neither are the funds already spent.

I know, all you hard-nosed successful Type A Free Enterprise Worshippers will scream, "Yah, well they shouldn't;t have spent the money of they didn't have it."

Please. Join the real world.

ps...Rich is the tall guy.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"A bit more promotion would be useful."

The god of all gods, the Supreme Kvetch on High, the man who runs a completely unchecked world government bigger and better than any James Bond villain could have ever thirsted after...

His name is Jack Rogue...uh, sorry, Jacques Rogge, that is, Count Jacques Rogge (we kid you not, he is an actual Count, whatever that may be), and he is the president of a governing body that supercedes all local sovereign governments.

We speak, of course, and humbly and on our trembling knees, of the (shudder, shudder, genuflect) INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE.

Rogue feels we are not pushing the Games enough.

Hahahaha...

Has he ever checked into the local press?

Day after tiresome day, our print and radio and TV sources are filled to the overstocked gills with 2010 "news" stories.

Jack, baby, get serial.

ZAP!

The Globe & Mail editorial this morning has rightly called Taser International's charges of bias again st Thomas Braidwood "ridiculous."

This straight-forward condemnation of a the company points out that "Twenty-five people in Canada have died after being tasered, yet most police forces in Canada have been loath to acknowledge that the stun gun is dangerous."

Scusa me, but isn't that more than the number of people who have died from gunshot fired by police forces in the same time period?

Referring to the Robert Dziekanski incident, which I continue to call Murder, the editorial makes clear "A video of the incident showed as horrific a piece of brutal and incompetent policing as this country has witnessed for some time."

Time for the Taser executives to try a little of their own medicine or be extremely quiet.

"ISN'T sHE lOVELY?" FROM SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE...The whole album is a stamp of musical genius...More Stevie Wonder

STEVIE WONDER 1975

FIND ME A PARTY

Do you not yearn and crave for a political party or one political leader for whom you could, with full enthusiasm and endorsement, vote?

I do.

(Oops. The last time I said those two words, 20 years of my life went by.)

I need a party or a leader the thought of whom does not make me hurl.

That immediately eliminates the Federal and Provincial Liberals, The Torch Premier and Iggy Pop.

That discounts Stephen Harping.

So I return to my voting roots - the NDP.

Ouch!

I know.

Look at this exciting and productive national convention just held in Halifax.

Nothing new put forward, nothing challenging accepted, no Big Public Policy announcements.

With the national media attending in full force and the opportunity to make a minor splash ... nada.

Listen to this milquetoast: "I think the conversation certainly got started."

That's Jack Layton, and that's the problem.

All the political instincts of a rabbit.

Shiny white teeth and a moustache. Then what?

Do these folks not want to win or govern or exert some influence?

Yesterday, I mentioned that Adrian Dix might be a better leader for the NDP provincially than Carole James. No doubt there are many people who might be a better leader than Carole James. She is not terrible. Se doesn't make awful toe-stubbing mistakes. And she is up against a huge Liberal machine. But she just doesn't grab us, does she?

Does Jack grab us?

I don't think so.

Does the National party have a real war plan? Doubt.

Does it have a future?

Not until it finds new blood, a new leader and some core selling points built on core values.

I'm ready to get excited. Just let me know when it's all starting.

GETTING THE PICTURE YET?

While Carole James may not be setting new heights for political leadership, one of her camp is demonstrating the best traditions of a good opposition member.

I speak of Adrian Dix, the NDP provincial health car critic.

It is Dix who keeps supplying me and you with these delicious tidbits of flesh and flash around the Premier's ongoing disregard for citizens.

600 seniors affected by health-care cuts

Program could be kept afloat this year for less than Premier's recent pay hike, NDP critic says

In the piece in yesterday's Globe by Robert Matas, we learn, among other things, "A community home-care program in the Fraser Valley that helps more than 600 seniors stay in their home will be discontinued. But without the program, seniors may be more likely to move into long-term and acute-care facilities. The seniors' care program in Langley, which received about $88,000 from the government this year, is run by about 100 volunteers and five staff members,"

So 100 good people volunteer their time and energy to help the elderly in their community and the reward from the Premier is that the entire program may be starved shut.

Nice.

Don't forget that the Cambie Line is opening next week. Wave a flag.

And thousands of government employees are "volunteering" their PAID time to the...what's it called? Oh yah, the Olympics.

WAITING FOR LEFTY

On my continuing theme of The Olympic Premier who Cares Not a Fig for You or His Basic Responsibilities...

Community groups left in dark over funding

Thousands of cash-strapped organizations growing anxious as province freezes lottery money

By Mary Frances Hill and Richard J. Dalton Jr., Vancouver Sun August 14, 2009

What are we talking about here?

Little league sports, seniors’ clubs, school parent associations, softball teams and soccer clubs, parent advisory councils that are trying to build playgrounds.

Look.

This isn't very mysterious.

Idiots like me and possibly you buy Lotto tickets in the hope that we will hit the big one. We should get a life, I know.

Much of that Lotto money is designated to help local charities - more than 1700 local charities.

The money should be distributed with dispatch.

Keeping thousands upon thousands of citizens hanging on the edge while Rome fiddles is cruel and unnecessary punishment.

This speaks to bad policy and worse execution.

Execution may be appropriate here, but possibly in some other direction.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I forgot.

The Burnaby Little League hockey teams won't be competing in The Big Snowjob next year.