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STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND - The Pod People are mulifplying and they are winning...

I woke up at 6 am on Friday to visit the little room not far from where I sleep. My land line phones at home have a wonderful feature. There is a pre-set that turns off the ringers from 11:30 at night until 8 in the morning. I noticed in the dark, the phone light blinking. Oh, a message. No, two messages.

I knew what they would be.

The Supreme Court decision had come down delivering Insite unto the masses, Whooppee.

Sho ‘nuff, two media giants from the Mystic East had called at 5:45 and 5:49 requesting my extremely important reactions to this news. The 11-year old girl producer for one of these broadcasters ended her voice mail with “I hope you’re having a nice day.”

I yelled at the towels, “I AM having a nice day, thanks. I’m FUCKING SLEEPING!”

At 8:30, when I was already hunkering before the computer and reading about the pro-Insite decision, Nice Day Lady called again.

I asked her if, anywhere in her school life, she had been taught time zones. After a pause long enough for me to think of calling 911 to revive her, she said that she thought this was a business number.

“Besides the need to grow alfalfa, why would I be at work at 5:45 in the morning?” I asked ever so pleasantly.

Well, you get the picture.

The nice kid from local CBC-TV came over with his cameraman.

We filmed about 12 minutes in my dining room and then went upstairs to my study to film “B Roll” of me looking at the CBCTV website on this computer.

I watched the piece on the supper hour cast.

The Embalmed One was anchoring, but someone else was fronting this story.

They showed 3-5 minutes of raucous overjoyed crowds of believers cheering in triumph in front of the “safe” injection place. Then 8 seconds of my miserable out-of-step-with-the-times disagreement.

This is how the “journalists” at the Mother Corp operate. Five minutes of Hooray and 8 seconds of Just You Wait a Minute, Now.

At 8:30 that evening, the phone operator for a Radio talk show host in Alberta called and informed me that his host would be speaking to me soon. The host came on line and asked for my thoughts; then he argued vehemently with me. I asked him why he had invited me on the program. I asked him if he would ever knowingly cross the street to give a drunk a clean shot glass, or, if he knew that his daughter was self-mutilating, he might sharpen her razor blades for her.

He reckoned that he would do neither of those things, but felt it necessary to point out that I was in the minority. Translation – you are wrong, David. I asked him if he understood democracy.

He kept yelling at me, so I thanked him for calling and told him this wasn’t the kind of conversation I wanted to have with anyone, let alone him.

Later that evening, I caught about half an hour of a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The movie is called “The Invasion,” and it’s about the fourth remake of the great 1950’s black and white sci-fi flick, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It’s about human beings being overtaken and replaced by the Pod People who look just like them but who are robotic and without humanity.

(The only true oddity in this version is that Daniel Craig is such a good actor and so charismatic that when he has to convey that he has gone over to the Pod People, he is not convincing because his eyes continue to shine with some mysterious Star’s inner light.)

In the penultimate scene, Kidman and her son, pursued by the crazies, dash madly out of a building, but when they get onto the street, they must slow down and walk like zombies to fit in with the creeps around them.

I couldn’t watch because this all played perfectly into the disassociation I was experiencing all day.

There have now been at least four distinct times in my life when I felt that perhaps I had entered an alien universe or perhaps all the creatures around me where of a different and peculiar species.

The first time was watching hundreds of thousands of lunatics cheering on that creepy self-evident crook, Richard Nixon, at the Republican national Convention. They were wearing pants and dresses and they certainly looked like examples of the human species, but one could only wonder.

The second time was when the clock radio came on next to my bed in 1974/5 in Edmonton with the news that Bill Hawrelak had been re-elected Mayor of that fine Northern city. Bill had been found guilty of crimes on three occasions, but that didn’t stop the good people of Edmonton from choosing him to be mayor one last time. In 1992, I went cross-country skiing in Hawrelak Park. But that morning when the happy Hawrelak news broke, I felt like my shoulders had been pinned to the mattress by some extra-terrestrial force.

The third time was much like the first time, only instead of the true believers raising their banners on high for the oily Nixon, we had The Dumbest Person of Earth, George Bush.

But nothing in my experience prepared me for the sight of that crowd crowing with happiness for the brilliant decision of the Supreme Court, supporting the shooting gallery.

There were dope fiends and party hacks and pseudo-scientists and elected officials and doctors and so many people of holy good will cheering.

One friend of mine, a retired DTES police man, said he wanted to leave the province, leave the country. I was thinking gallactically. Maybe on Mars or Uranus there are creatures with clearer minds.

Last week, I had the joyful experience of attending the 40^th anniversary of the Manitoba chapter of the abstinence based therapeutic community treatment centre that I started here in Vancouver in 1967.

There are 136 people in residence at any given moment and a 6-month waiting list to get in. Every day, clients are getting their matriculation and University degrees and reuniting with their families and moving to transition houses and back into the world as clean and sober citizens.

Support your local prevention and treatment programs. Unlike the other nightmares-posing-as-social policy, these real places are about hope and human dignity. Anything less is unworthy of our attention.

Pardon me while I toot my own horn shamelessly, but this may be the best show we've done this year - thanks entirely to our guest, Mark Hasiuk

SWEET CANDY

"I have no doubt she'll be a success in adapting to community life as an adult."

This is the mark of brilliance from Justice Scott Brooker in Alberta.

Mmmmm.

Let's have a look-see, shall we?

"She," now 18, was 12 when she and her 23-year old boyfriend stabbed to death her parents and her eight-year old brother and then went partying.

They were both found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.

Boyfriend got life with no parole for 25 years.

Now, this girl, whose identity may never be divulged, has a phalanx of shrinks and social workers working on her rehab and they are all very jolly and optimistic.

The headline alone is a heartwarmer.

Rehab successful for girl who killed family, says judge

Convict, now 18, prepares for re-integration

Enough.

Let's get down, kids.

This young woman is a psychopath. She is not redeemable. She has crossed a break boundary. "People with problems" do not murder their families and then get better and go back into communities posing no danger to others. People who murder their families are crazed deranged lunatic nut jobs who are wired differently than most of us. They do not change or get better. They must be kept away from the rest of us.

Psychopaths are often very smart and charming and high verbal and highly skilled at manipulating the world around them.

And they are completely and totally integrated personalities. They are who they are.

Why do we watch Hannibal Lecter over and over again?

Of course, it's a great movie and run by great actors and director.

But it is the essential unapologetic madness of the good Doctor that draws us back in morbid fascination.

In the case of this adorable little murderer, all the king's horses and all the king's men have been duped once again.

They are paid to help.

So they must believe in their hearts that they are helping or why get up in the morning?

And then they announce to the judge that they have done fine work and their star pupil is now a good girl.

And the judge wants also to believe in the goodness of people and the power of good work.

That's fine.

But he also has to have a hold on reality, doesn't he? Wouldn't that be helpful to us all?

The girl has played them all like a three dollar fiddle.

My House or Yours?

Last night at 6 o'clock I was flicking between NBC News with Brian Williams and the BBC.

"Two different worlds, we live in two different worlds..."

The BBC News was appropriately giving major and thorough coverage to the Euro and debt crisis in Greece, Spain and Italy.

A few nights ago, BBC staged a fantastic panel on this matter in the atrium of one of their main buildings. The speakers and guests in the front row of the audience were all highly placed and knowledgeable (and often brilliant) people from government and finance at the highest levels.

Make no mistake, this is a dire situation. If leadership in the Euro Zone stumbles, we will all suffer mightily.

But, hey, let that not be an impediment to American inward turned sensibilities.

NBC News would have none of this.

Never mentioned.

If their news coverage is an indicator of how the country pretends to think or what they think is thinking, they and we are in deep doo.

PUBLIC ENEMY

It gave me great cheer last night to see protesters creating healthy civil disobedience in front of the Vancouver Club.

Their issue?

Some other Vancouverites had paid $500 each to hear Dick Cheney promote his new book.

Why would anyone do that?

Ghouls and suck holes with no moral compass.

Cheney is one of the most detestable thugs to ever work the corridors of power. He was always about money and power and Dick Cheney.

The protesters rightly called him a War Criminal.

He is that and more.

His favorite company - Halliburton - made billions of dollars on buttons, shoes, tanks, bullets, coffee, gas and oil and most of the other physical products one requires to operate a war theatre in say...Iraq.

Manthorpe's scathing review of Cheney's entirely self-serving book is worth the read.

Daphne Bramham's Best Column Ever

Opinion: City plan does little to support those put at risk by prostitution

If nine out of 10 fishermen got hurt at work, policy-makers would likely question whether the job isn’t so inherently dangerous that even regulating the industry might never keep them safe. If four of every 10 nurses were violently attacked every year, regulation alone might not be the solution either.

Yet those are the statistics for street and indoor prostitution respectively, and still most policy-makers simply shrug.

In 2005, 90 per cent of street prostitutes in Vancouver had been physically assaulted, 78 per cent had been raped and 72 per cent met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a report in the peer-reviewed journal Transcultural Psychiatry.

Those working from home, in massage parlours or escort agencies fare better. Still, 37 per cent of them experienced some sort of violence, according to research done in 2007 by a graduate student at Simon Fraser University.

Citing municipalities’ limited powers over the Criminal Code, education, health and social services, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and all of the city’s councillors are the latest to shrug.

They passed a plan based on a 30-page staff report, which gave only a cursory nod to the 12-year-old Nordic model pioneered in Sweden, which outlaws all aspects of the sex trade but provides generous social supports to at-risk youth and women exiting prostitution.

They didn’t ask for more information about that model or anything else, even though the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network and others among the 50 speakers at a public hearing urged them to at least consider that prostitution is a form of violence against women that ought to be stopped, not regulated.

In the end, Robertson and the others (including Suzanne Anton, the NPA’s mayoral candidate in the November election) bought into the excuse given in the staff report. Municipalities can do nothing about criminal law and little about education, health and social services, it said.

Of course, council didn’t use that excuse when it came to endorsing safe-injection sites for illegal drugs.

They didn’t balk last year from endorsing Will to Intervene, an international report that recommended Canada and the United States take leadership roles in preventing mass atrocities.

Which is odd since some people consider that 720 missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada or that more than 100 women missing and murdered from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are slow-moving forms of genocide.

This council approved the report’s sanitized language (sex work, not prostitution) and never asked why the report neglected to describe just what such work entails.

They didn’t want to hear it. When 19-year-old Rachelle Rovner tried to read a graphic and disturbing description of the services that a Vancouver man bragged online about having purchased, she was told to stop.

Children might be watching the proceedings on TV, Coun. Andrea Reimer told her.

Rovner shot back. “If it’s not appropriate for our city council, then maybe it’s not appropriate for our city.”

Nothing in the city’s plan even hints at trying to lessen demand for prostitution in any of its guises.

Educational programs aren’t aimed at the men who harm prostituted persons. The only recommended educational programs would be aimed at teaching children, vulnerable youth and women how to better identify pimps and predators.

“Stop putting the responsibility on us to survive,” Trisha Baptie, a former prostitute, urged council. “Instead of abandoning us in the name of safety, health and verbal nonsense, you need to identify the problem: Men can pay for access to women’s and children’s bodies.”

Council paid no attention.

Child prostitution was deliberately omitted from the report and recommendations. It’s “strictly prohibited,” the report’s author Mary Clare Zak said at the meeting.

Yet, she also referenced a report that found 37 per cent of youth living on Vancouver’s streets say they have exchanged sex for food or shelter.

Regulating where sexual services are delivered is part of the plan. The city’s licensing department is urged to contact other cities to see how their bylaws differentiate registered massage therapists from massage and health-enhancement businesses that front for prostitution

Renfrew-Collingwood will get improved street lighting under council’s plan. But whether it’s in a car or alley, brothel or home, prostitution will never be safe.

There are hopes for housing, detox and rehab for at-risk youth, prostitutes and those exiting prostitution. But there’s no money.

There’s also no direction to end the long-standing practice of concentrating those services in the Downtown Eastside.

Bureaucratic not brave, it’s hard to see how this plan will prevent anyone from entering prostitution or make it safer for anyone regardless of whether they’re providing sexual services by choice, coercion, or out of desperation.

dbramham@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

THE COST OF GREEN?

UNKINDEST CUT

A felon with a considerable history of public and private violence (and very little jail time) is swearing at two young women.

Another man intervenes and suggests to the offender that he cool his heels.

Maniac walks away, retrieves his box-cutters, and slashes the throat ear-to-ear of the man who asked him to calm down.

Punch line?

In our ever-vigilant injustice system?

Two years.

Thank you Provincial Court judge Frances Howard.

The criminal is deeply imbedded in his criminal life-style and his drug-dealing business.

But hey?

Why consider the community?

Let's continue to be nice to the crazies in the ignorant and desparate hope that they might one day by nice back.

Judge Howard should be removed from the bench for flagrant disregard of the citizens who pay her salary and expect some measure of protection and reasonableness from her decisions.

COLD LIGHT OF DAY

City Council is studying the sex trade.

Lord help us.

Thankfully, people who actually know what they are talking about have appeared and made valiant efforts to cut through the muck.

Rachelle Rovner was one of several speakers who took issue with some of the language in the report, pointing out the term "sex workers" implies prostitution is a legitimate form of work, when it is not at all.

Jonathan Livingston, a front line worker who deals with vulnerable youth in the Downtown Eastside, said there is an inherent flaw in aiming to make sex work "safer."

"I don't think you can make it safe," he said, adding that both prostitution and the procuring of sex need to be wholly condemned.

MacDougall said the trade is "inherently unsafe."

MacDougall also noted she hears from countless women who are abused by men while "supplementing their income in some form of sale of sex for money through inside work," but would never identify as being in the sex trade.

"They would never say, 'I am a sex worker' because they don't want to identify with that label," she said.

"This is not a career path for them; this is a survival mechanism."

Many speakers, including 19-year-old Sharlene Petigara, pointed out the report failed to adequately address the demand from johns.

"Prostitution is violence against women and there are people inflicting this violence," she said. "So why are they not addressed in this report?" Janessa Greening, director of resource development at Union Gospel Mission, called on staff to rewrite the report to include more emphasis on the issue.

"The most notable gap is the lack of reference to who is abusing the power imbalance - those who are violating these women, those whose actions are initiating and exacerbating the long-term, devastating impact these women will experience."

This is a classic example of a local authority working from the failed and morally reprehensible platform of Harm Seduction.

It is also an example of people who truly understand the issues stepping forward and casting some real light.

Officials everywhere are tragically obsessed with making self-destructive and harmful behaviour "safe" or "safer," while front line workers and ordinary citizens know that shooting heroin, smoking crack or renting out your body parts by the half hour can never be safe.

WHO DOESN'T LOVE A GOOD TUNE?

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so beautiful as this. It had me in tears of happiness in just a few moments...

The most outrageous of all time

You must read Courier columnist Mark Hasiuk's piece posted yesterday.

He explains in chilling detail how the Vancouver Coastal Health will give children crack pipe kits, because "health is health, regardless of age."

The world has gone completely mad.

RICH!

OPAQUE, AGAIN

We all knew that Wally was the worst possible choice to oversee an investigation into why it took the police so long to begin looking for the killer(s) of missing women in the DTES.

And he has proven us right again.

He phones the AG - who has since had the good sense to resign - and leaves a blathering chatty message full of personal opinions and random brain farts.

Now he takes to his favorite resource - open mikes and sound bites, the always available tools for the true public drama queen in us all - to seize the front pages.

Please, Wally.

Leave the deaths of women to the grown-ups.

Go quietly into this good night.

I am sure that there is a fishing lodge or ceramics shop on Saturna or Gabriola that needs a nice friendly new landlord.

BEANS, AND THEIR COUNTERS

Bogie said it best in a certain movie set in North Africa.

"What happens with the HST doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this world."

Killing this offensive tax may or may not be fiscally imprudent. What do I am know? I am poor and stupid.

But, when all the accountants have gone back to the front nine and the snickering, chortling and gagging have drifted off into the fog, here is what we will remember.

An arrogant, out-of-touch Premier - his name was Gordon Campbell - made a colossal balls-up of introducing a new piece of legislation. You'd think he would have learned something after all those years in public life. But no. Like Napoleon driving into the snows of Russia, Campbell simply threw this affront to the masses. A pox on their ignorant houses. Take this, ye specks of dust!

Christy, who thinks she is so clever by a half, ran head first right into the oldest trap in the book: Be the next guy after the big mess. Get covered in someone else's goo.

Yes, the old tax may not be the greatest thing since the cell phone.

But for the suffering crowds, it is a huge and laughable pie in the face for those untouchable captains of government and industry.

WHY HE'S LEAVING

Barry Penner announced yesterday that he is resigning his post as BC Attorney General.

He wants to spend more time with his wife and daughter.

Fair enough.

He is heading to the women in his life. This is understandable.

But it is hardly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Ask the other women in his life - his sister and his cousin and his aunt. (I don't rightly know if Mr. Penner has a sister, but if he did, I'd ask her and she'd tell me more than this public performance.)

What is much closer to the whole story and much more interesting is that Penner is running away from one woman inparticular.

Her name is Christy Clark and, at least for the next little while, she is the Premier of the province.

No doubt Mr. Penner is now officially part of the swelling legions of citizens who have come to see Premier Cark with a bit more clarity.

Delightful, charming, a fighter, an enthusiastic campaigner - yes, all that and more.

But she is not a policy maker or governor.

She hasn't a single idea with heft or depth or the possibility of living past the moment after it pops forth from her mouth.

One wonders if she even has or had at the outset a vision for what she wanted to accomplish in office or what she wanted the province to become under her tutelage.

No. She really just relished the race to the office and the trumphal moment of sitting in the big chair.

As a result, folks all around Ms. Clark are heading back to the sheep farms and goat teas.

At least the livestock don't pretend to offer anything more than wool and sour milk.

She will be gone from office within the year.

THE ROUNDUP

1. To see announcements in the press that health authorities are giving out crack pipe kits to addicts is merely sad and predictable.

This idiocy is, after all, just another part of the harm seductionist strategy to encourage the legalization of practically everything.

So, biz as usual.

But to see the Vancouver Sun editorial writers endorse this destructive sham is very discouraging indeed.

Distribution of crack kits is good policy

Their worst argument comes late in the piece:

"As we have seen with Insite, Vancouver’s supervised injection site, the project could ultimately result in more users seeking treatment."

This is the most spurious, devious and untrue spin by the quasi-scientists who support Insite.

The bald faced truth is that the little shooting gallery has turned over very few addicts to treatment, as anyone in the real treatment business will testify.

A friend of mine says that Vancouver Health is now helping hm with a personal problem.

He has been beating his wife regularly for years.

Now, in the interests of harm reduction, he is being given soft leather boxing gloves to wear at home so as to leave no marks.

2. Should public servants be held to a higher standard of behavior than the rest of us?

Should those who work in the areas of public safety be cognizant of behavior that help or hinders public safety?

The assistant fire chief in Esquimalt is a drunk driver.

Nice.

So he gets banned from driving for a while.

So his boss gives him a vacation.

Ze mind boggles.

3. The "Families First" Premier misses the Pride Parade and doesn't ensure that someone from the government or the party is there to represent either the government or the party.

This is not tragic or a slight or anything evil.

It is just flat stupid.

No planning. No thought.

If it doesn't spin, it's not our kin.

Une Belle Chanson

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