Not such a cracked idea

While I support harm-reduction drug strategies like needle exchanges and safe injection sites, initially I had a pretty negative response to Vancouver Island's upcoming crack pipe distribution program:

"A crack-pipe distribution program driven out of Nanaimo by city council will become available throughout Vancouver Island in the new year.

The distribution will be at needle exchanges in Victoria, Nanaimo, Campbell River and Courtenay, and mobile units running in most Island communities, said Murray Fyfe." [...]

"For the first time, the Ministry of Health's harm reduction supply and services program will fund crack-pipe components -- such as plastic mouthpieces and filters -- through the B.C. Centre for Disease Control."

Nanaimo is close to where I live, and my rural neighbourhood is routinely looted by marauding crackheads from "town" (including my place -- twice). So my unthinking, kneejerk response to the crack pipe distribution program was "Noooo!!"

But then, that was my first response to safe injection sites. I thought they were a bad idea, not because of any moral opposition to drug use (it should be purely a health problem), but because I couldn't believe addicts would actually use them. The possibility that addicts might stop shooting up in doorways because there was a safe injection site 3 or 4 blocks away just didn't square with what I knew to be true from serious drug users of my acquaintance (in another life). I knew one cocaine user who was arrested shooting up in a Mcdonald's washroom... 2 blocks away from his home. Why he couldn't wait until he'd traversed the 2 blocks to the ultimate safe injection site -- his house -- is one of addiction's many riddles. Many addicts are driven and desperate enough to indulge the moment they acquire their drugs, wherever and whenever that may to be. So I couldn't see how a safe injection site would keep junkies from shooting up in the street, unless they happened to rendezvous with their dealers right outside the place.

Happily, I was wrong. Insite has been operational for 4 years and (much to the disgruntlement of the White House) all indications are that it works. Not only does it provide a safe place for drug users to do what they'd otherwise be doing in a park or alleyway, it gives them access to medical care, counselling, and ultimately, programs that help them leave drugs behind. It removes some of the anonymity that accompanies illicit drug use and makes it so easy for such people to be victimized. It helps stem the overwhelming tide of HIV and Hep-C. What it demonstrably does not do is encourage more drug use. Like the needle exchange programs from which safe injection sites evolved, there's no reason to believe that a crack pipe program would be anything but another effective harm reduction strategy.

Of course, as long as drugs remain illegal and therefore, astronomically expensive, users will continue committing crimes to finance their habits. Harm reduction can't address the problems that our idiotic laws engender. And Stephen Harper's statement about harm reduction -- "It is a second-best strategy at best, because if you remain a drug addict, I don't care how much harm you reduce, you're going to have a short and miserable life." -- is emblematic of that idiocy.

Bad Santa

Canada Post has temporarily suspended its "Write to Santa" program while it tries to track down the Rogue Santa who sent some innappropriate replies:

"There was absolutely nothing Ho Ho Ho about the letters Rosalyn Da Costa's children got from Santa yesterday.

In fact, they included filthy messages.

They are two of 10, inappropriate letters dropped in mailboxes across Ottawa in the last two days, but there could be more.

Yesterday, Canada Post shut down its Write To Santa program across the city while it joins Ottawa police to hunt down the "rogue elf."

What?! What a travesty. The program has been around for years; kids write to Santa using the postal code H0H0H0, and postal workers speaking on behalf of the Jolly Old Elf write the replies. And check out some of the replies these sick bastards (okay, one or two sick bastards) are writing:

"P.S. - This letter is too long, you dumb shit."

"Your mom sucks dick and your dad is gay."

Huh!? Oh, man. If the letters were going to adults it would be funny in a twisted way, but when I think of my niece or nephew getting one of these it pisses me right off. Kids are, or should be, off-limits from this kind of humour.

Watch it, Santa. There's enough in the paintball gun for you, too. Prick.

Wimp!

A protesting fetus fetishist in Fort Madison has charged a 72-year-old man with assault:

"Dan Holman of the Missionaries to the Pre-Born says he was assaulted while in the process of using his first amendment rights last Friday at 48th Street and Highway 61.

The Fort Madison Police log confirms that 72-year-old James Mitchell of Fort Madison was arrested at 4:15 p.m. on Friday. He was cited and released at the Fort Madison Police Department for simple assault.

Fort Madison Police Captain Bruce Gustafson said the arrest stemmed from Mitchell allegedly telling Holman - who was protesting Hillary Clinton with the Missionaries' usual photos of aborted babies and a sign that said ‘Hillary's Holocaust' - to leave his property." [...]

"Mitchell felt the group was on his property and allegedly poked Holman twice in the ribs with a broom handle."

A poke in the ribs with a broom handle? The fetus fetishists should be thankful when a broom handle is all they get, and the ribs are the only place it's poked. How about a perfect storm of dogshit fired from a paintball gun? Want some of that? Huh? Huh?Ahrrggh! Dogshot!

Wrong number

I answered the phone at dinnertime last night, always a bad move: "Is this the lady of the house?" -- groan. I replied that I'd already decided on which charities I was supporting this year and started to tell the caller about Heifer International (hey, why not), when she got my attention with the words "entertainment industry" and "Family Values". It was "Family TV" calling. Ah. The call proceeded:

CALL: Over the years, Hollywood has gone from creating movies like "The Sound of Music," and "It's a Wonderful Life" to edgy films and suggestive TV. Forrest S. Baker III, founder of Feature Films For Families®, believes that the only way to counteract this negative trend is by creating positive, uplifting movies that both teach and entertain, movies that instill important values that have stood the test of time. Wouldn't you agree?

Okay, I'll play:

ME: Not really. Hollywood's in the business of making money -- if there was a market for the Family Values stuff, they'd make the movies. Apparently there isn't. If the Family Values people want more of that kind of movie, they should make their own.

CALL: There's a huge market for Family Values entertainment. We're not advocating censorship, but we support the promotion of traditional Family Values. Don't you agree?

ME: Wait -- Are you a real person or a machine?

I'll leave to your imagination the tone of voice I employed when using the term "family values".

The operator went on about traditional "bedrock" and family values, slagging Hollywood and, every few words, asking me if I agreed or telling me that I must agree. I continued to respond in the negative, becoming increasingly agitated until I finally said: "Actually, I think there are way too many kids' movies. I can never find a movie with enough gory grisly violence to satisfy me. Take that lame-o shower scene in Scarface -- they shouldn't have edited out all the good stuff, don't you agree?" and the discussion quickly wound down.

During the call I suggested that the values nuts should make their own movies, and apparently this is exactly what Family TV does (although I never would have known that from the call): they produce and sell movies that make the "family values" cut. Rather than going their usual route of trying to force the industry to conform to their groove through legislation or censorship, they're taking the initiative to produce the kind of movies they want -- categorized by value, no less.

Their website doesn't seem to have any menacing religious undertones, although when I checked their "Cultural Diversity" category, I didn't see any movies about gays, but oh well. Baby steps. This little project of theirs probably isn't a bad idea -- it's from them, by them, for them, and if nothing else it keeps them from bothering the rest of us. (And some of the movies look pretty cute -- "Twelve Dogs of Christmas"? I'm there.)

Fetus Fetishists park Fetusmobile© at contractor's home

More fetus-fetishizing madness in Colorado, or as I like to call it "Kansas West". I posted a few weeks ago about the problems being visited upon a building contractor who's working on the expansion of a Planned Parenthood office in Denver. The forced birth whackjobs have been marching up and down his street and feverishly protesting in front of his house, gripped in the throes of a collective indigation/persecution/fetus fetishizing high. Crazed fetus fetishists with signs. On his street. I did not make this up.

It appears they've upped the ante now, mass-emailing the contractor's home phone number to every fetus fetishist in the known universe and encouraging them to give him a ringie-dingie. For the coup de grace, they've parked a fetusmobile© right in front of the guy's home:

"On Monday, the lunatic fringe sent his home telephone number out in a blast email and encouraged zealots to call his house.

The "Truth Truck," covered with huge pictures of bloody aborted fetuses, first showed up at his home two weeks ago. It parked in front of his house and across the street from the middle school bus stop.

The truck returned last week with a sign that said his business "takes blood money from an abortion mill." "Auschwitz" is how the sign on the truck referred to Weitz Company, the general contractor for the Planned Parenthood headquarters in northeast Denver." [...]

"But so far, everything happening to the businessman appears to be legal, including the publication of his personal phone number and the solicitation of harassing calls.

Restraining orders, which some targets of anti-abortion zealots have gotten, are issued only if there is "reasonable belief of imminent bodily injury," said Newman."

Once again, the fetus fetishists dance on the edge of illegality (and way over the Threshold of Disgust)... although I can't believe a sharp lawyer couldn't make a case for harassment or stalking. But who wants to go to the trouble and expense? So the contractor is hanging tough, his neighbours are more supportive than ever, and I guess this might end up being the fastest building addition in the history of construction. The pressure washers have yet to be deployed.

If it was happening in front of my house I can guarantee you that things would be taking a somewhat different path. I'd be adding allbran to the dog's food and loading up the paintball gun with the results. Shitstorm!

Heifer International

At this time of year, we're all inundated with donaton requests from a plethora of charities. Those who are able to give do so, but most of us are limited in how much we can give and it usually means making a choice.

This year there's another great charity choice, Heifer International, a unique charity that addresses world hunger and poverty by giving "renewable" gifts like food-producing animals. Heifer International works on a "pay-it-forward" concept, where recipients share the fruits of their gift -- ie, a family who receives a dairy cow makes an agreement to share the milk with other families in need. Literally a gift that keeps giving.

Dana at The Galloping Beaver has estabished a Bloggers Registry at the donation portal for HI -- how cool is that? So if you're planning on being a Santa to some charity this year, please consider adding HI to that list you're checking twice.

Canadian DMCA not dead yet

The odious legislation that we pushed off the table on Tuesday may be crawling back up today.

Keep emailing MPs; if they're in opposition, demand they do their job and be a real opposition. One and all should be reminded to work for the interests of their constituents, not corporations. Print out your emails and send them by snail mail. An unrelenting email and paper storm of protest is needed to impress the importance of this issue on the powers that be. Tell MPs in no uncertain terms that if they don't derail this nefarious bill, you'll vote for a rock before you'll vote for them. They need to know they have a personal stake in this.

More on this later.

UPDATE: Wow. Off the table again. And totally as a result of the shitstorm of protest that was set off; in other words, we did it. The thing is just wounded though, not dead yet, so we need to keep putting the boots in. PSA has contact links.

w00t!

1337-speak hits the big time:

"BOSTON (Reuters) - "w00t," an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said "w00t" -- typically spelled with two zeros -- reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging.

It's like saying "yay," the dictionary said."

Woohoo. Although I'm sure some young whippersnapper will come along any minute and tell me that leetspeak has been passe for years. It must be true -- when old farts like me are using it, it must be deadsville, man. (Groan.)

Get ready for yer waterboarding, kid

It's not nice to fool the White House:

"REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - A teen-ager says he convinced the White House he was Iceland's president and managed to schedule a call with George W. Bush but was found out before he got to talk to the U.S. president.

"My call was transferred around a few times until I got hold of Bush's secretary and managed to book a call meeting with Bush the following Monday evening," Vifill Atlason, 16, told Reuters.

The teen-ager posed as Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson when he made the call on Dec 1.

Icelandic police turned up at his door two days later -- the day of the planned call -- and took him in for questioning.

"They told me the CIA had called the National Commissioner of the Icelandic police and asked if the police could try and find out where I received that phone number from," said Atlason."

I wonder if this Act of Aggression would qualify the kid as an Unlawful Combatant? Or a Terraist Sympathizer? Maybe just an Appeaser. Because things like this Embolden the Enemy.

Attention conservative libertarians

Right-wing libertarians might want to give a sober second thought to some of the people they're politically aligned with, because this is social conservatism:

Just in case that didn't sink in, I'll repeat the salient point:
"What you do between the sheets and in your bedroom, folks, is indeed the State's business."
Get that? The state. In your bedroom. I am not making this up.

It certainly grates on my libertarianism, but maybe conservative libertarians are even more different from left libertarians than I thought.

Would Pickton's victims be alive

if prostitution had been legal? In the wake of the justice finally done for the horrific crimes that took the lives of at least 6 (though probably 26 and possibly over 50) women, it's a question that needs to be asked.

Ever since the Pickton trial started and the magnitude of the disappearances became known, I've wondered if this would have happened had those women not been forced to live on the shadowy fringe just outside the perimeter of society. That place where few notice when someone is suddenly not around and even less care if they do notice, so consumed are they in keeping together their own body and soul. And tragically, those who cared enough to ring the bell were fringe-dwellers themselves who didn't command the respect of society's attention. Our legal apparatus is punitive rather than protective to such people -- they're by definition living outside the law, and apparently undeserving of the legal rights the mainstream enjoys. Like the right to have their reported disappearances taken seriously. So the predator was allowed to continue stalking and killing unimpeded.

Sanctimonious pearl-clutchers tut-tut and finger-wag and even suggest that women like Pickton's prey have it coming to them; after all, it's the life they choose. But while they may choose (or more accurately, be driven into) drugs and prostitution, they don't choose to be social and legal non-entities -- that is foisted upon them by society's phony morality. Play by the rules or suffer the consequences. That some of the rules are stupid -- the illegality of drugs and the sex trade only engenders even worse illegalities -- never occurs to these self-righteous dickheads. Out of sight, out of mind.

It's anathema to these idiots to think that a legal, regulated sex trade would offer some measure of protection to the women involved -- because they don't want the women protected, they want them punished. To do that effectively means consigning the offending women to a netherworld where they're such non-persons that it's possible for them to literally vanish into thin air unnoticed.

The same querulous voices that demand "legal personhood" for the unborn fetus see no hypocrisy in their refusal to grant the same to the women who dwell in society's shadow. It would almost be funny if the repercussions of their bigotry weren't so tragic.

Pickton sentencing verdict

25 years without. They got that right.

DMCA on hold

Just in case there's someone who's been under a rock (or hanging out at the Blogging Tories) for the last couple of days:

THE CANADIAN DMCA IS ON HOLD!

I'm on day shift right now so no time to go all full-metal verbal about it, but go read PSA for the lowdown.

The word is "cautiously optimistic" -- let's not let up on the pressure.

Gonna make you groove

Zep lives!

"In what will likely go down as one of the biggest reunion shows of all time, Led Zeppelin reportedly thrilled fans with 16 classic songs, including one they had never played live before, at London's O2 arena, Billboard.com reports.

It was the first full concert performance by the group — which consists of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and recent addition Jason Bonham (son of deceased drummer John Bonham) — since 1980. The concert acted as a memorial for late Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who helped launch Led Zeppelin's career and passed away late last year."

Bobby can still bust a move, look at him go!I'll refrain from the Old Fart Stories about the time I saw Zep at the Rock Pile back in 1970... or was it 68... tickets were $12, the most expensive concert tickets ever. The Rock Pile went broke and closed shortly after.

Oops, sorry, once an Old Fart gets going, it's hard to stop.

Culture war? Ya think?

(shamelessly swiped from rants from the rookery)

Stop yer sobbin'

The silliness is wearing me down.

With the recent launch of 3 human rights complaints against conservative writer and full-metal dingbat Mark Steyn and Macleans Magazine for publishing an excerpt from Steyn's book "America Alone", the escalating absurdness of the persecution parade has finally hit critical mass.

"The Future Belongs To Islam" the article's heading warns ominously. Ooh. Steyn writes for those people I think of as "the Psychological Casualties of 9/11": people who, 6 years later, remain in the same shattered state of shock that was universal in late September of 2001. Most of us respectfully moved on, the memory of 9/11 a reminder of what still needs to be fixed in the world, not some kind of ugly sign on the road warning of the sheer cliff we're speeding towards. Some did not, and continue to autoambulate through life in a stunned state of paranoia. This is Steyn's constituency, and his writing panders to their shell-shocked notions. It's a shtick. But it ain't hate speech.

There are certainly legitimate examples of hate-mongering speech that's potentially dangerous because it could incite some nutbar to take things to the next level and go beat someone up, or worse. But the Steyn article isn't one of them. While Steyn does a lot of swooning and pearl-clutching about the possibility that Europe might be "overrun" by Teh Muslims in the next 50 years because they're so much more prolific than Teh Non-Muslims, and hypothesizes that this may in fact be a world-wide Muslim conspiracy, it's more of a paranoid fantasy than deliberate hate speech. With a few other minor tweaks, you could replace "Islam" with "Catholicism" and the article might be about the feeling in North America in the 60's and 70's, when it was widely thought that fecund anti-birth control Catholics squeezed out babies while standing in line at the grocery store, and in so doing were perpetuating a papal conspiracy to take over the world.

If the CIC doesn't like what Steyn writes, and neither do I most of the time, then I'd suggest they meet him on the same ground. Rebut his arguments -- there are any number of media available to do so, starting with the lowly internet and including panel discussions, magazine articles and even books. Human rights complaints have a place and serve a purpose, but this isn't one of them.

Pickton

Guilty of 6 counts of 2nd degree murder.

*Shrieeeeeks with laughter*

Via Red Tory, a pleasant diversion on a wintery morning: the Pornolizer! Behold the pornolization of the dour, sour and sanctimonious.

Heh, I thought I was reading my blog for a second there. Come to think of it, let's try it. Oh dear -- pretty bad when you pornolize it and it comes out looking pretty much the same.

DMCA - On the Notice Paper

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Have you written your MP about DMCA yet?

By now everyone's familiar with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act: it's US copyright law that may soon be adapted for Canada. The DMCA is good for one thing: profits to corporations. Nothing wrong with that, except that in this case the profits will come off the backs of the Canadian public, and things we take for granted that we do every day to make our lives a little better will suddenly become copyright crimes. And the Powers That Be will act on the law:

"The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a U.S. federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 US for sharing copyrighted music online.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 US for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs online in violation of their copyrights."

The threat isn't limited to sharing music files. Potentially the DMCA would affect libraries and schools by choking off access to learning material. Your carefree days of surfing the net and linking up to this video or that article would be over. Imagine trying to blog without being able to link to sources unless you paid for them. For students it's even more potentially devastating, since their grades depend on being able to access information. Ominously, there are also privacy issues -- how do the PTB police this thing? Do we want/need to be policed? NO!!!

It is up to us, the Canadian Public, to express our outrage about this. If you're not sure what to say, Go here, copy/paste a portion of PSA's letter if you have to, and fire it off -- to your MP, to Harper, and to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who's responsible for this execrable legislation and for some reason doesn't want to discuss it.

More information: PSA has been on this issue from the Word Go
The Galloping Beaver has more
A Creative Revolution has still more
Join the Facebook Group
More from Michael Geist

If you haven't written, please please do -- otherwise you may wish you had.

Oh, and the by the way, the Blogging Tories are Stupid. Useless. Cocksuckers. FYI.

UPDATE: Tyler Kinch was in Calgary today and had the opportunity to see Jim Prentice in person. Questions about the DMCA abounded, but answers were in short supply. Bastards.