"If that bubble touches me, you're going to be arrested for assault"
-Constable A. Josephs, Toronto Police
Dear Constable A. Josephs of the Toronto Police,
You are such a dick.
Respectfully,
Rev. Paperboy
Seriously, arresting people for blowing bubbles? That is pretty much the Unabriged Oxford English Dictionary definition of cops without enough to do -- good thing there is no crime in Toronto.
(Video totally stolen from A Creative Revolution, who rock, bubbles or no bubbles)
Addendum: Perhaps we could all chip in and send Const. Josephs to some sort of relaxing event to help him unwind, perhaps a soccer match or something? I'm sure it's lovely in East London this time of year.
Frank Capra was neither subtle nor wrong. The opening with the words being jackhammered off the cornerstone of the newspaper building tells you all you need to know. This movie was released in 1941 and aside from the old fashioned-telephones, men all wearing hats and the homeless not being as universally shunned as they are today, it could have come out last week.
Of course, if you replace the John Doe Clubs with the teabaggers and Gary Cooper with Glenn Beck you get the Bizarro World version in which a mean spirited demagogue encourages people to hate their neighbors and be just a little bit nastier to each other.
Once upon a time, in a basement far, far away, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading comic books and The Lord of the Rings. This bit of internet comic, therefore, made me laugh until I missed my saving throw and fell over on the floor.
Also, fans of comics, gaming, science fiction and all other things geek could find much worse ways to spend an hour or so a week than listening to the All Your Basecasts podcast.
Growing up in the Sault, many - if not most- of our neighbours were Italian immigrants. They were the nicest, most hospitable people you'd ever want to meet, but a one point my brother and I were largely convinced that the Italian language consisted mostly of gestures and that the vocalizations were just misdirection. I guess we weren't the only ones who thought so.
"A young guy on the new officer shift, with reddish hair and a goatee seems ready for a fight. He says to the guys in our cell “I want to see all you guys outside in the parking lot, then we’ll see what’s what. I’ll take you down.” Wow. He walks away laughing. I inform an actual Toronto Police Officer of what he said and his name. Next we saw Milrod, his nametag was gone and he didn’t look at us or speak to us. It’s on camera Milrod, with 30 witnesses."
We keep reading about how the crowd of protesters should have taken control and stopped the actions of the few vandals among them -- how about applying some of that reasoning to the police?
As discussed in the latest Maple Syrup Revolution podcast, this particular strategy is going to be a disaster the next time it is tried, because the next time a lot of people will resist being arrested for no reason and things are going to get bloody. Don't be surprised if there is a very expensive class action suit by the thousand or so people arrested and held caged and in cuffs for 20 to 40 hours, begging for water.
If you are not at least as outraged by the gross misconduct of sworn peace officers and political leaders as you are by the misbehavior of a handful of asshole vandals, then you are part of the problem.
But Stephen Harper and the G20 leaders didn't have to be exposed to people shouting mean things at them, so I guess it was worth shredding the Charter of Rights and spending a billion dollars.
A few commenters and correspondents have accused me of supporting or at least giving aid and comfort to the Black Bloc Anarchist protesters who grabbed so much attention in Toronto during the G20 summit. Such accusations are, to use the mot juste "crap." My parents raised me much better than that.
I am most certainly NOT defending the brain-dead attention whores in the so-called Black Bloc, I think they are childish tantrum-throwing clowns. I am criticizing the ham-fisted police response to them, which is not the same thing.
As far as I can see the police played right into the hands of this tiny group of dingbats in Toronto by letting them run wild on Saturday smashing windows and giving them patrol cars to burn and then turned around let the frustrated riot cops off the leash to arrest and even beat innocent peaceful protesters. Entire blocks were surrounded by the police in a strategy called "kettling" in which they seal off an area and arrest everyone in it, protesters, reporters, residents - anyone and everyone on the street. This is a violation of the constitution. Add to that the Ontario government passing last minute laws of dubious constitutionality, in secret no less, and the Toronto police chief adding his own illegal addendums and lying about what the law allowed his officers to do and you a have the results of the G20 on Canada. Previous use of agent provocateurs by the police, such at the Montebello summit two summers ago, have lead to a situation where anytime the there is violence of this nature at a major event, there will always be some question of whether the police were involved. Public trust in the police has been drastically eroded, and not without cause. And THAT is what the anarchists really want.
In that sense, the Black Bloc were very successful. The police - who bragged they had infiltrated the group prior to the summit - did nothing to stop them, but fueled their antics by giving them free rein on Saturday and then used the damage they could have and should have stopped to justify an unconstitutional, heavy-handed response the rest of the weekend and as an object lesson to defend the ridiculous amount of money spent on security.
For the most part the television media lapped it up--pictures of burning police cars were all over the news and no one initially questioned any statement the police made.
One of your favorite journalists, Christie Blatchford, has been pushing this emotional story from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair about how the black bloc protesters disrupted the repatriation ceremony in Toronto for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Except that video taken at the event shows absolutely no indication of any kind of disruption occurring. This further erodes the credibilty of both the police and the mainstream press -- another win for the forces of stupid black bloc anarchist wannabe revolutionaries.
I am not a fan of the black bloc hooligans by any means at all. I think they are dangerous, have no agenda except breaking the system and offer no alternatives. Mostly, I think they are bunch of self-important grandstanding assholes and petty vandals. They consider themselves revolutionaries and the job of a revolutionary is to provoke a response by the state, to get them to crack down on the population and thereby provoke antigovernment sentiment and expand support for the revolution. This only works if the state panics and gives the revolutionaries what the want by cracking down and pissing people off -- and that is what happened in Toronto this weekend.
If the cops had just done their job instead of playing PR and political games to serve their own ends, there would be about 50 of the Black Bloc in jail for variations on the charge of aggravated jackassery, most of them with scrapes and bruises, the rest of the weekend would have gone smoothly and we'd be talking about how badly the government overspent on the summits. Instead, the police and government have sowed the seeds of increasing public distrust in authority and undermined the foundations of civil society--which is just what the Block Bloc wants.
This week the Maple Syrup Revolution is having a Two-for-One sale in honor of Canada Day, so get over there and download all the punditry you can stand.
Canada spent about a billion dollars on the G8/G20 summits and had an army of 20,000 cops on call with sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, clubs, shields, body armour, horses, firehoses and everything else short of frickin' laser beams and yet couldn't stop 100 skinny little punks in black bandanas and hoodies -- a group they claimed to have infiltrated prior to the summits. (some might argue they had infiltrated them during the summit too) Not only did they have the gear and manpower, they were even willing to completely make up imaginary laws to allow them to violate the rights of anyone they wanted to. Now it comes out that the cops were told to stand down on Saturday when the black bloc douchebags were having their little tantrum on Younge Street.
The conservative take on this whole thing has been to tar all the protesters with the same brush and blame the thousands of non-violent demonstrators who were exercising their rights as citizen for not doing the police force's job for them and physically confronting and stopping the terrifying masked anarchists on their own.
The Toronto police chief apparently thinks it is a cute idea to play silly buggers with the law. Ha hafucking ha. This moral cretin has destroyed what was left of public trust in law enforcement in Canada's largest city, if not across the entire nation, for the foreseeable future. Livid doesn't begin to describe how I feel about this completely wanton abuse of authority. Dismissal in disgrace? Fuck that, I want the sonofabitch in jail. Yesterday. Of all the crimes that can be committed, short of murder or child molestation I can't offhand think of any that are worse than a POLICE CHIEF making up his own laws. Call it breach of promise, breach of the peace, dereliction of duty, fraud, criminal negligence -- I don't care what charge they come up with, but this man - by his own smug admission - absolutely betrayed the trust placed in him as a peace officer and in doing so violated the civil rights of thousands of citizens. He should be in the Don Jail pending trial and if there is a single crown prosecutor in Toronto with any testicular fortitude at all, he will be in front of a judge by morning -- but I'm not holding my breath.
Cripes, you leave the country for a dozen years or so and it turns into a fascist police state. Maybe my family should reconsider our plans and relocate to somewhere more agreeable. Like Iran.
Now, admittedly the cops here are restrained--in the United States, this guy would have simply been tasered after using the word "bullshit" and arrested for "public obscenity" or some other bullshit charge, but charging an apparently peaceful crowd like this? Not to get all teabaggy or anything, but I want my country back! Stephen Harper said we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was through with it, and he was right. This is the kind of thing that used to happen in Burma or Cuba, not Canada. I am ashamed of my homeland and at a bit of a loss as to how I'll explain to my kids that this is where we are going to live - a country where police beat up journalists like their father.
And fuck you, Dalton McGuinty.
Update: My fellow inkstained wretch from the Galloping Beaver, Alison has some telling videos posted on the nature of the Black Bloc rampage, the widespread use of plainclothes cops in "snatch squads," many of whom, interestingly, are dressed much like their Black Bloc counterparts.
More updating: The objections of my good friend and former tag-team wrestling partner Sanganjaya Boy in the comments respectfully acknowledged -- and yes, Japan has a reprehensible "guilty until proven innocent" system when it comes to policing, but we aren't talking about Japan here, we are talking about Canada -- if this isn't the action of a police state, or at the very least an appalling abuse of power by the police, then what is?
That $1.1 billion had to be going somewhere and now we know where a chunk of it is going -- to a security firm that isn't even licenced in Ontario and is offering about double the going rate for its glorified bouncers. I'm sure the firm in question - Contemporary Security Canada - has absolutely no ties to the Conservative Party of Canada and that everything was strictly on the up and up in granting them the massive contract for providing about 1,000 security screeners, many of whom were hired last month so I'm sure they will be trained to a razor's edge.
“We’ve had some intense discussions about this at APSA in the last few days,” says Ross McLeod, president of the Association of Professional Security Agencies based in Toronto. “I’ve been doing RFPs and tenders for 30 years in this business, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.”
(snip)
On May 31, Contemporary Security set up a hiring office at Humber College in Toronto and was taking applications up until today.
Contemporary held the $97-million security contract for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. On its website Contemporary says they will be "Supervised by the RCMP and Integrated Security Unit" and will be responsible for providing "airport-type pedestrian security screening, including inspection of persons and items at the G8 and G20 sites."
According to its own website, CSC has received its licence to operate in Ontario and since I can't determine the exact publication date of the article quoted above except to narrow it down to sometime this month, I suppose it is possible CSC has been licenced in Ontario for as long a two whole weeks.
It is hot and wet in Tokyo and I have almost nothing to say about anything except to note that setting the air conditioner to 25+ degrees Celcius is not only inappropriate, it could be considered grounds for divorce and/or justifiable homicide. Screw the enviroment, damn the expenses, I want it cold enough in the living room that the ice in my glass doesn't completely melt before I add the gin -- It was 33 degrees here the other day with a humidity level of holyfreakingshityougottabekidding and a yellow sand & smog level that required an aqualung -- and this is only June. Thank Jebus, Mohammed and Buddha we are leaving before it get really hot in August.
In the meantime - go amuse and enlighten yourself.
I'd love to see God prove he exists by doing some smiting. I'd also love to see the pretzel logic used to admit Karl Rove to the country while trying to keep somanyothers out.
Every time I get frustrated and think that Canadian politics are completely screwy and the country is doomed by ignorance, stupidity and apathy, all I have to do is look south and remember that it could be worse, a lot worse. I could live in this dingbat's district.
I'm not sure if he's running for Congress or promoting an armed insurrection to stop poor people from seeing a doctor. The scary part is that this is a professionally done television spot, so he obviously has some money behind him.
It is unavoidable. Soon there will be a Fox News North based around the Sun newspaper chain. Goodbye reasonable discourse, nice knowing you.
Let be clear here - this is not going to be a channel dedicated to reasoned, objective journalism from a conservative perspective, this is going to be the television version of the Blogging Tories. The former press flak for the sitting PM will be running the network --- anyone care to place bets on how long it is before Michael Coren has a show? Or whether such august personages as Kathy Shaide are regular commentators?
It isn't as if Canada didn't already have a couple of conservative networks - how about CTV or Global? Hell even the eeeeevil liburl CBC gives regular airtime to Rex Murphy and Kory Teneycke. And this isn't a matter of people being able to pick and choose what channels they get at home -- they are applying for a "must carry" licence. Imagine the screeching that would ensue if the Playboy channel or some other kind of porn network applied for a "must carry" licence that meant it would be seen in most Canadian homes. And make no mistake, this is going to be ideological porn, and it will have the same kind of effect that all porn has: It will arouse and excite by pandering to base instincts, while at the same time desensitizing viewers to non-mainstream content, pushing them to crave more extreme content to get their jollies.
Five years from now, when you wonder how in the hell the network that is screening "Alberta Uber Alles with Ralph Klein" or "Honky Night in Canada with Ezra Levant" ever got a licence, remember the "freedom of speech" arguments that are being made now, and shed a tear for those well-meaning bloggers as Canada's Lowest Common Dominatrix Kate McMillan reads out their addresses on the air and urges her hordes of flying monkeys into action.
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