police state

Dealing with the Boys in Blue

I remember when I came to Canada how my great uncle taught me to respect the police. I don’t know what he thought, because I was not a gang member, I was doing well in school, I wasn’t a problem in school, my parents didn’t let me run amok breaking laws, and even though I had immigrated to Canada from what was ostensibly a Third World country, the strata of society in which I lived was anything but Third World.

Somewhere along the way, I had my eyes opened though.

I didn’t join any gangs, I didn’t engage in the sexual assaults some of my elementary school friends allegedly perpetrated or partake of the kinds of substances they abused, I just carried on being a “good kid”. I joined Air Cadets, excelled there, and went on to become an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. The Forces decided I wasn’t as good as the impression I had given them in the recruitment process, and so they kicked me to the kerb. C’est la vie. A blessing in disguise, and I think if their training was half as good as they thought it was, I’d have had the full career I signed up for, and may even be a senior officer there now. Or I may not be, and I’d be a veteran with a distinguished career behind me doing what veterans do with themselves after they serve.

Instead, I’m no longer on the books of the Forces, but the books of police services around the country, in the Lower Mainland specifically.

You see, I’m known as a speeder. Yes, apparently I drive very fast in all sorts of municipalities around Greater Vancouver and southwest BC.

So what do I do? Hundreds of kilometres an hour through school zones? Stunts on the road? Come to screeching stops at traffic lights? Not quite. I’ve had a clean driving record for 20-25 years. I don’t even remember what the number is, because I don’t remember a time when I blew through a stop sign or red light and smoked that minivan full of two families heading to the beach. If that happened, I’d remember the date and time and how long it has been since then, but it never did. But despite that, you’d think that was exactly the kind of record I had judging by what ICBC and the various police forces think about me.

Photo radar

Speed and red-light camera warning sign.

My first reminder of Big Brother was an inconspicuous envelope in the mail. Two of them, actually. I’ve recently taken up driving my mother around because she was negatively affected by damage to one of her eyes (and her other eye sucks anyway), and I’m the only son left because one of her sons decided sometime ago to estrange himself from the family, and the other is focussed on himself and can’t help out on week days between 9 and 5. (It’s called having a job, but he and other family weren’t so supportive when I was doing what I needed to do to earn income and wasn’t doing so well, and he’s a hypocrite, so I don’t feel the need to be supportive of him now.) Those two envelopes were photo radar tickets. Yes, contrary to popular belief, we still have that here. The BC Liberal government took a hint from the public a few years ago and got rid of the old photo radar where a van sits on the side of the road and takes pictures of speeders as they go by, but the NDP got the idea to combine red-light cameras with photo-radar cameras, and now you have photo radar at multiple random locations around BC.

And how fast was I going? 150 km/h? 250 km/h? For one ticket I was going 80 km/h and the other 81 km/h. About 3 hours apart. On the same afternoon and evening when the weather was dry and the light and visibility were perfectly fine. Pretty consistent! This is at the intersection of 50 km/h and 60 km/h main roads where there are multiple lanes in either direction (plus dedicated left- and right-turn lanes) and the average vehicle is going at about 80 km/h. Average! That means some are going faster! I’ve since gone through that intersection at 50 km/h, and I don’t feel safe doing so. But that’s OK, as long as I’m not going through it at the insane speed of 80 km/h, we’re all safer.

At this point, feel free to shake your head.

And how visible is that sign above? Definitely not very.

So what lessons have I learnt? It’s not to drive at exactly the speed limit, because I tried that years ago and, as with driving through this particular intersection at 50 km/h, I didn’t feel safe. No, what I do now is take routes in that area that avoid that intersection. Yup, I’m still driving as I always have, but just through different intersections. Somehow I don’t think that’s the goal of putting robots on the side of the road that see and measure everything, but that’s why I’m stupid and am not a police commissioner or the premier of the province.

I very strongly intended to fight the tickets in court, but eventually I decided, because the tickets were only monetary penalties to the owner of the car (my mother) and didn’t also come with the added sting of penalty points, I just paid them. Considering my business just failed and I have an income right now of $0.00, $342 was difficult, but that’s what credit cards are for. I’ll get back on my feet and pay back Visa eventually.

The intractability of ICBC

So what other excitement have I had with ICBC and the boys in blue? Well, as I said, I’ve been driving my mother around recently, and my 20/25-year (if not more) clean driving record was sullied. This was completely my fault (as some accidents are) when a driver in front of me suddenly hit the brakes for a surprise pedestrian and I rear-ended him. And how fast was I going? 250 km/h? No, I was barely moving, as even speeders are wont to do occasionally, because we were slowing down in a right-turn lane. I don’t know how fast we were going as it’s not my habit to glance at the speedometer as my vehicle is about to hit something, but I’d say we were barely moving. I did no damage to the other vehicle and all I have on my vehicle is an indentation on a bumper.

I reported the accident, as I’m required by law to do (I still follow most laws) to a call-taker at ICBC whose first language was obviously not English. If you want to hire foreign call-takers at your company and all you want to do is take orders for your widgets, that’s fine, but not if you’re taking statements in legal cases. So after my call I decided to log into ICBC and provide further information. This required that I re-activated my account with Service BC to integrate with my phone. I did that, and logged into my account and found that ICBC hadn’t connected my account to the “claim” (I’ll explain why that is in quotes in a moment) that I had opened. So here we are about a month after the accident, and I’ve had three (I think, Gmail is such a shit interface) messages from “CC63” at ICBC, who also seems to be challenged by English. I get between one- and four-sentence emails, but none of them make any attempt to resolve the situation in which ICBC has put me by denying me access to provide additional information about my accident. I can’t really think of anything else to say, but you can’t pretend to “resolve” an issue in one- to four-sentence emails, most of which are boilerplate. That’s just ridiculous.

(Why do I put “claim” in quotation marks? According to my education, one only makes a claim against an insurance policy if one claims a payment for something that that is covered by the insurance policy. The cars of both parties in the accident were not damaged and neither was either party injured [and there was no third-party damage], so there is no claim. But the non-English-speaking call-taker pointed out to me that by reporting the accident I had opened a “claim”, even though she heard me state that there was no claim under the English definition of the word. So either her English wasn’t very good, or she has been brainwashed by ICBC jargon to just believe everything they tell her.)

And I haven’t even got to the point where I can complain about the fact that the non-English-speaking call-taker actually said that ICBC will find out about anything to do with my driving, even if I try to hide it. First of all, WTF?! Second of all, I’m not trying to hide anything, and for someone to suggest I am — and it’s only a matter of time before Big Brother finds out — is beyond the pale unless you have evidence that I have tried to mislead someone.

I have an expletive ready to go here, and it’s one of George Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words”, but I receive complaints occasionally.

The hypocrisy of the police

We’ve all seen the police do things they’re not supposed to do, whether it’s right in front of you or on the news. It’s the stuff of legend. We write it off because there’s nothing we can do about it, because most of it is inconsequential anyway. But try telling a cop that the 80 km/h you were doing in a 60 zone was “inconsequential”, and he (or she) will laugh at you and write you a ticket anyway, because the government is expecting that revenue. I remember obeying the law recently and I was pulled over and “talked to” (I didn’t get a ticket, because I didn’t break any laws) because the cop made the assumption that I had no idea what I was doing, or that another driver would assume I had no idea what I was doing and would then act that way and hit me. It was the other driver that should have been pulled over and talked to (or even ticketed for failing to yield), because I didn’t break any laws of even rules. But I’ve had interactions with cops in unmarked vehicles where they were obviously breaking the law, but because they had red and blue flashing lights, they just flashed them at me and I quietly went about my business. I mention this now because this just happened to me on Monday.

I was driving along Steveston Highway in Richmond and I passed an unmarked (as I found out later) police vehicle, a black pick-up truck. And no, I wasn’t doing 250 km/h; I was probably doing what everyone else was doing, about 70 km/h … yes, in a 50 km/h zone, in the same lane as others doing the same speed. I have no idea if it was a Richmond RCMP officer because I never saw him or her in the flesh and got some reasonable identification. Before he (or she) revealed himself/herself to be a cop, I noticed that one of his/her headlights was out. Then he (or she) flashed his/her red-and-blues for no apparent reason (other than to intimidate me, I assume, as other off-duty Richmond RCMP officers have done in non-driving situations) and I got ready to pull over, but he/she carried on and didn’t do anything, and I continued driving as I was. However, if that cop had pulled me over, I was going to ask him/her to write themselves a ticket as well for having one headlight out. I have no idea how that would have gone, but it was worth a shot.

Back when I was doing my darnedest to be a law-abiding citizen and drive at or slower than the speed limit (referred to above), I was passed all the time by cops … in marked cars even! That’s one of the reasons I felt unsafe obeying the speed limit, because nobody else (including the cops!) was doing the same! Why should I drive at 50 km/h when I’m being passed by a cop doing 70?! Why should I do 50 km/h when I’ve got people rushing up my ass and pressuring me to go faster? Why should I do 50 when it’s obvious I’m the slowest person on the road and holding up traffic? So many rhetorical questions, so many hypocritical cops.

Driving mentality

I don’t have any deep analysis of the psychology of driving, but one thing I have noticed, as I avoid being hit by people doing their make-up, eating hamburgers, applying mascara, brushing their hair, talking on the phone, etc., is that driving is not the priority of many people. I mean, sure, they’re in the car because they want to get from A to B, but they’ve done it so much they don’t care, and if the kids in the back seat need a swat, they need a swat! You can’t put that off until later. (That would be sarcasm.) I’m not holding myself up as the model for good drivers to emulate but, besides cars, I have learned to pilot aeroplanes, and you don’t just jump in a plane in your driveway with a couple of screaming kids and your hairbrush, and away you go. Sure, it’s much simpler to “pilot” a car (and also easier to come into contact with other cars), but if people paid as much attention to driving as is required to pilot aeroplanes, our roads would be in much better shape.

When I drive, whether I’m going 8 km/h (5 mph) in a parking lot, 30 km/h in a school zone or 120 km/h along the Coquihalla Highway, I’m driving. I’m piloting a vehicle of a tonne or two, which would hurt if it ran into someone … to put it mildly. I’m not doing one of the activities I mentioned above, I’m focussed on driving. Preferably as smoothly as possible, whether I have passengers or not, because it’s just more pleasant that way. Sometimes I’m fiddling with climate controls or radios (which is one of the reasons touch screens in cars should be banned!) but only when it’s safe to do so, such as when I’m stopped or moving in predictable traffic, such as when I’m on the freeway. I don’t know, but controlling those things is never my priority.

Making suggestions

Isn’t this the point at which I, in all my wisdom, make recommendations? Look, we can’t all be experts on every facet of life, but it’s clear to me that “the powers that be” couldn’t give a shit about us becoming better drivers. They’re just after the money that citizens apparently have stashed … who knows where? … just waiting to pay fines. As our society evolves, we’ll find more and more ways to control the population by, as I say above, installing robots at the side of the road to record and measure our every move. Some people probably want that, and will work to get it; I don’t want that. But, as I watch the news tonight, I’m reminded of the fact that I can assault an innocent person with a baseball bat and be back on the streets tomorrow, but god help me if I do 80 km/h in a 60 zone, because there’s probably a camera somewhere recording that, and hooked up to a system that will automatically churn out a speeding ticket and mail it to me.

That doesn’t improve society.

The CFIA seems to have become the poster child for anti-vaxxers

Sep 9th, 2025

by Craig.

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God forgive me for taking the side of anti-vaxxers like Tamara Lich (whose surname I pronounce like the worm I believe she is), RFK Jr., Dr. Oz and others, but I’ve re-discovered that they still exist (long after the pandemic ended and their catastrophic predictions were proven wrong) through the “Save our Ostriches” website, but politics make for strange bedfellows.

When I was in elementary school I participated in a school project which was, as I recall, an in-school version of an inter-school competition called the Young Scientists Exhibition. It was a competition to create the best project, complete with posters and all the “stuff” you could come up with to make it engaging for the people touring the exhibition — so, working models, demonstrations, etc., and ostrich scat (poop) in my case. My project, the subject of which I chose, was on ostriches. (I was a bit of an ornithologist at that age, and I thought ostriches were pretty cool birds.) That was in 1979, and I still had the papier mache ostrich my father helped me create with its welded wire skeleton and marble eyes until I finally decided there was no point in my carting it around from house move to house move in the early 2000s. But anyway, ostriches and I go back a few years.

I’ve read a lot — largely through the “Save our Ostriches” website, I will admit — about the case with the ostrich farm and the cull order issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It’s hard to disagree with the assertion that the CFIA has overstepped the boundary of its authority in ordering this cull. Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold? Sure, maybe killing every single chicken in an infected flock makes some sense, but ostriches are not chickens. I’m not sure that any CFIA bureaucrats have ever seen a chicken or an ostrich outside of a picture book in their offices.

Fortunately, as of a few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeal seems to have come to its senses … for now.

News round-up, late May 2025

May 22nd, 2025

by Craig.

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The media doesn’t seem to get why Canadians are not crossing the US border

I’ve watched yet another sob story on the news about some small business just across the border in the US who are missing all of the business that Canadians bring with them across the border, and I just don’t get it.

I am one of the Canadians who used to cross the border about once a month, and I do not any more. However, I don’t cross not because I refuse to support a country or its president who talks of annexing us and imposes tariffs on us; I do not cross because if I do I will be a foreigner in their land, and the American government and its employees have shown a categorical dislike of foreigners. I do not want to be on the receiving end of that “categorical dislike”, whether it’s from a CBP employee, a Border Patrol agent or even a local sheriff!

I don’t make this statement based on hypothetical conjecture, I base it on real cases, one in which a Canadian was detained at the southern US border while she was applying for a renewal of her work visa, and then kept in custody for eleven days. One example of this insanity is all I need, no matter how it may have come about, the border at which it happened, and no matter how it may have ended — reasonably well for the Canadian after a couple of weeks in Third World-type detention! There’s even a case of a Canadian, who is a veteran who served the American forces, being deported, not to mention of the spouses of trump supporters being deported! My god!

And then, at the US’s northern border, there are so-called “random” searches being made of travellers (including American citizens, presumably) before they get to the Canadian border — so-called exit/outbound inspections! People love to say that, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about or fear.” It’s an old trope, and it’s 100% true, but OK, I’ll just randomly pull you and all of your friends over next Saturday afternoon in your neighbourhood and we’ll see how much you object to that! Besides the fact that a twenty-minute trip across the line can turn into a few hours — or days if you’re really unlucky — nobody likes to be treated like a criminal for no apparent reason. That’s not part of the freedoms on which Canada and the United States are founded; it’s a symptom of a “police state”, no matter what excuses the American government gives (through one of its many police forces, of course) about how such random searches “[make] our community safer”. Yup, police states are very safe, unless you happen to make an enemy of a police officer or have anything to say about the current dictator.

I want to make clear that I don’t believe I have anything to fear — legitimately, if you don’t count my railing against trump on this blog — in crossing the US border; I’ve never been denied entry and, other than a grand total of two speeding tickets, I have never broken any laws in the United States. However, the experiences of the people above, who had less reason than me to fear the American government, give me even more reason to fear the American government and a complete lack of desire to turn one of my twenty-minute trips across the border into a two-hour (at best) ordeal. No thanks. I feel for the American businesses in border towns like Blaine and Point Roberts, but their solvency is not worth my freedom, even for five minutes, and the Canadian media needs to get over this claim that we’re not crossing the border because we’re trying to punish Americans.

It might be useful to note that academics who are avoiding travel to the United States are also not doing so to inflict punishment on mom-and-pop American businesses, they’re doing so to protect themselves from the excesses of xenophobic American government officials.

Pierre Poilievre got CHANGED!

I realise I’m a bit late in getting to this, but I find it hilariously ironic that the constituents of the riding in which Pierre Poilievre (leader of the Conservative Party) ran in the last (2025) federal election took his policy of “CHANGE” so literally and seriously, that they voted to change their representative in parliament, away from him and to the Liberal candidate for the second time since Confederation. So the leader of the Conservative Party doesn’t even have a seat in the House. Of course, some Conservative MP is going to give up his seat so that Poilievre can get into the House of Commons, despite that fact that he’s been rejected by the public. If that isn’t hypocritically going against the will of the people, I don’t know what is.

But Poilievre was voted out for personal reasons; nobody likes him! And he’s not prime-ministerial material! I really think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Conservatives who likes his style or approach, and yet Conservative MPs will all belly up to the bar and claim that he, their leader, needs to muscle out some other MP (who will be rewarded down the road with patronage, of course) to be allowed to run in a by-election to get back into the elitist boys’ club against which he rails at every opportunity he gets. His two-facedness is just beyond belief.

I think the House of Commons will be far better off without him, but it’s a shame that the will of the people will be overthrown by the constituents in a “safe” Conservative riding in Alberta.

Ramaphosa and trump

Ramaphosa and trump in the Oval Office.

In other trump news — we can’t get away from him — he tried to ambush Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, in the Oval office yesterday. However, the thing that really pissed me off was that the media — including the BBC and CBC — just piled on top of what they described as his long-debunked claims of a “White genocide” in South Africa. “Long-debunked”? That’s news to me. The systematic killing of White farmers in South Africa has been documented for a long time, many years. Sure, we can all debate whether or not the South African government is involved in said genocide but, other than the police force’s dragging their feet on the investigating of the perpetrators, I don’t believe anyone is actually accusing the South African government of being involved. If it’s questionable, my feeling is that the investigation is still open, and it may be years and generations before we know the real truth.

So as much as I do not want to be seen as someone who will pile onto one of trump’s misinformation/disinformation bandwagons, I think he does have a point about the prolific murders of White South African farmers that is still an open question.

US aid to Israel versus US aid to Ukraine

It blows me away how disproportionate the military aid from America is between Ukraine and Israel. I’m a former supporter of Israel — although I still think they deserve more support than their enemies — but I think they’ve ridden and taken advantage of the Holocaust bus / gravy train for too long now. There’s no doubt that Hitler’s crime against the Jews in World War II is, and will remain, a black mark on world history that will exist forever, but that was almost a century ago now, and punishing Palestinians is not quite the same as going back in time and punishing the Nazis, despite the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

But my point in this post is not to get into the middle of that millennia-long conflict. The conflict in which I’m really interested is the one that started in 2014 when Russia began their destabilisation efforts against Ukraine. This was, essentially, the revival of the Cold War and the Russian imperialist agenda by vladimir putin, but either trump is all in favour of putin’s revival of Russian imperialism, or (as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again) he skipped out of all history classes in school and has no idea what’s going on. He certainly seems to have no idea that putin is playing him like a fiddle, promising peace one minute and then withdrawing that promise the next as he bombs more innocent civilians.

Since trump came to power for a second time, he has overloaded the Israelis with weapons and done all he can to withhold weapons from Ukraine in their existential fight against Russia’s invasion. That anyone in a war with Russia has to beg for military assistance from anyone in the West boggles the mind of anyone who lived during the Cold War (especially in one of countries in which the Americans and the Soviets fought one of their proxy wars), since the Americans adopted the Truman Doctrine in 1947. However, as I’ve said many times in this blog, trump didn’t read a single line of history is his very limited education, and so has absolutely no reason to be concerned about Russia (and especially putin) and his megalomaniacal ambitions. So he doesn’t care a whit about the Ukrainians, trying to work his infamous “art of the deal” on them instead, stripping them of their natural resources to a greater extent than Germany was stripped of theirs after World War II. It boggles the mind!

History will not smile on donald trump, especially if he helps putin “win” his war at the bargaining table.

This reminds me that I have been sitting on a piece I’ve written (but not fully completed) about Western companies (like Cadbury, owned by the American company Mondelez) continuing to do business in and with Russia despite the world’s sanctions against the country. I need to cut that piece off and publish it. That said, I have boycotted Mondelez products — and a huge number of others — since I found out years ago that they’re supporting Russia in their killing of Ukrainian civilians.

YVR has more snowploughs! Just as the climate is warming!

Dec 21st, 2023

by Craig.

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I noted, in a recent news report to which I don’t have a link, that Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has learned from their mistakes last year at this time and now has more snow ploughs than they can handle. If “snowmaggedon” happens again, they’ll be ploughing their little hearts out to save the day!

Except, Tamara Vrooman, CEO of YVR, apparently didn’t get the memo that the climate is warming! Talk about the former CEO of a bank (err, sorry, credit union) making misplaced investments! One wonders if she actually hired drivers for all of the snowploughs!

Listen, I’m probably no better a climate scientist than Vrooman, but winter does happen in Vancouver. I know the statistics all point to a warming climate, but I suspect that Vancouver hasn’t yet seen its last snowflake.

In other YVR news (YVR and Canadian airports rank in bottom third of global airports list), YVR sucks! I find this surprising, actually. Despite the fact that the local Mounted thugs murdered a passenger there in 2007, YVR has significantly improved the international arrivals area (where Robert Dziekański was killed) and, really, the place is quite nice. Canadian airlines, though, are probably dragging down people’s perceptions of the airport; considering all the stories in the news these days about handicapped passengers being forced to drag themselves (literally in one case!) off of their planes, some of them at YVR, it’s not surprising that perhaps those experiences have sullied the ratings of YVR in particular. Of course, the airlines will point their fingers at the airports and the airports will point their fingers at the airlines, but that doesn’t help anyone when their disability means they can’t disembark an aircraft like all of the able-bodied passengers.

Of all people, Vrooman, former CEO of the “we love people more than you do” credit union Vancity should know that. But she has seemingly gained all of her kudos over the years by suckling the public tit, or (as in the case of YVR) working at a private organisation that is essentially a privatised arm of Transport Canada. I have very little respect for her considering her legacy that I deal with at Vancity.

China releases two Canadian hostages

Sep 26th, 2021

by Craig.

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Protest sign calling for the release of Kovrig and Spavor

After 1020 days — 2.8 years, 34 1/2 months — the Chinese have finally released the two Canadian hostages (the “two Michaels”, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor) they took after the lawful arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada at the behest of the Americans.

This, mind you, was after almost consistent but vehement denials by China of any connection between the two cases! The two Michaels just happened to have been caught “spying” mere days after Meng was arrested!

The prisoner swap was almost completely in line with my suggested method, except that it was over in a matter of hours via aircraft rather than days via ship. But it was completely in line, as noted in other media, with any prisoner swap done during the Cold War! The Chinese didn’t even make any kind of an effort to make it look like there was due process in the trumped-up spying cases of the two Michaels whereby, months or years after the release of Meng, they discovered new “evidence” that their charges were incorrect and the Michaels were exonerated by the courts. Nope, just, “Get in the van, we’re taking you to the airport.”

Unbelievable!

Updated, later 2021-09-26: I get caught up in the blatant injustice of it all — three years each stolen from the lives of two innocent humans, while the reason for it all enjoyed damn nearly 100% freedom in one of her Vancouver mansions and availing herself of the near paradise that is Vancouver and Canada, all while showing off her ankle bracelet as a fashion accessory and waving at supporters like she’s a celebrity — and lash out against the Chinese government, but the fact of the matter is that I was personally elated to hear the news on Friday our time. I am immeasurably happy for the Spavor and Kovrig families, and of course the two Michaels themselves. Welcome home guys!

Collage: Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor (the Two Michaels)

Whining Jet, popular Pfizer, bad drivers with red and blue lights

Jun 10th, 2021

by Craig.

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Un-sportsmanlike conduct

Not that the Winnipeg Jets had any chance, in my opinion, but they got their just comeuppance by being beaten four games straight in the Stanley Cup playoffs by the Montreal Canadiens. They didn’t deserve to win anything after that hit on Jake Evans by Mark Scheifele. All things considered in a high-speed part of a high-speed game, if you’re too damn slow to determine that there’s nothing you can do at that point except hit a guy when he has his head down and has already scored a goal, then you’re not NHL-calibre material, and you need to go back to the beer-hockey league from which you came.

Apparently the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is “popular”!

In a recent Global News broadcast, the teleprompter reader excitedly announced that, since the Pfizer COVID-19 has been so “popular” in this country, Pfizer, out of the goodness of their hearts, will be giving us wonderful, deserving Canadians three million more doses. (OK, the reader didn’t say anything about “out of the goodness of their hearts”, but that was the whole tone of the piece.) My chin hit the floor, and I may have drooled a little. What an asinine thing to say! First of all, it’s “popular” because people are desperate to be vaccinated and get on with their lives, not because it tastes great nine out of ten times in taste tests! And since they’re selling us (not giving us for free) so many more vaccines than the other approved manufacturers, of course their product is relatively more “popular”! My god. Don’t these people have brains?!

Tailgating a cop

So I was driving along a freeway in the Greater Vancouver area a few days ago. As is pretty typical in this part of the world, our freeways are, for the most part, only two lanes wide. I suppose the government wasn’t too forward looking back in the 1940s, but neither are they today. One of the many issues exacerbated by two-lane freeways is the congestion that happens at on-ramps. In this case, as I approached an on-ramp, there actually wasn’t any congestion caused by cars moving out of the so-called slow lane into the passing lane to allow cars entering the freeway to do so unimpeded.

As I approached the on-ramp I observed three vehicles on the on-ramp entering the freeway. The middle one was a dirty, blue pick-up truck with a canopy. I maintained my speed — which, I admit, was slightly over the speed limit, but not a speed that was out of line with other traffic on freeways — as I intended to pass the slower vehicles entering the freeway. No problem, right? Except, as happens so often, the pick-up truck decides his wishes are far more important (or he didn’t bother to check his side-view mirror), and he (I assume it was a he, for reasons that will become obvious) pulled into the passing lane with little or no obvious attempt to accelerate past the vehicle that had been in front of him on the on-ramp.

I immediately disengaged the cruise control, and allowed myself to coast up behind the pick-up truck. It is not my practice to overreact to the idiotic behaviour of other drivers, so I did not slam on the brakes and immediately establish a two-second following distance behind an asshole who had impeded my progress on a freeway. As my speed bled off, I guess “he” (the driver of the pick-up truck) didn’t like my following distance. Instead of accelerating as he should have, he flicked on his red and blue police lights. OK, so instead of driving like a reasonable person and not impeding the flow of traffic on a freeway, you’re going to fucking turn on your red-and-blues and show me what a big dick you have, and how you own me. Congratulations, you win!

I again did not slam on the brakes; I just continued to let my speed bleed off until I had established the aforementioned two-second following distance, and we both carried on. I wasn’t going to start flashing my headlights at the moron.

I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t get pulled over and ticketed for following too closely or for speeding, but I have encountered this kind of asshole behaviour by cops in unmarked vehicles before. It just reinforces my view that if you’re a cop, you can do whatever the hell you want, and if you’re not, well … you can’t. One rule for the ruled, and no rules for the rulers.

Enough about COVID

Apr 26th, 2021

by Craig.

Comments are off for this post

Except to say that Ontario seems to have overstepped the mark, turning themselves into a Draconian society where everyone is pissed off by measures that don’t have any measurable impact. So much for being driven by science. (Doug Ford seems to have woken up since.)

Safeway fraud

Useless Safeway coupon (2019).

This has bothered me for a long time, at least a couple of years but maybe more. (I first scanned one of these coupons in 2019 for this post, but the first website screenshot is from 2018.) Safeway prints out a fuel coupon for “4 cents off/litre” with just about every receipt. But where can I, as a resident of the Greater Vancouver area, use this coupon? According to their own website, the only Safeway with a “gas bar” (as of yesterday) is at “South Trail Crossing” in Calgary! There did used to be a gas bar in Aldergrove, but if I’m out that way I’m usually driving further east, in which case I drive a couple of miles further and I’m out of the Vancouver fuel tax area (or whatever it’s called) and I save even more at one of the fuel stations deliberately set up there. However, according to their website the Aldergrove store doesn’t exist any more.

Unusable Safeway coupon (2021).

A couple of years ago I literally threw the coupon back at the cashier and told them it was a “waste of paper and a fraud”. I have to get back into that habit, as it’s dishonest of Safeway to “gift” their customers with something they can’t even use.

Shaw

Speaking of customer feedback, Shaw called me recently to renew my two-year contract with them. I immediately launched into how pissed off I am at their cable service, and how I will become an ex-customer if their merger with Rogers goes through. The guy actually had the balls to tell me that the merger was not his responsibility! So I told him how I don’t have the ear of Brad Shaw, so the only thing I can do is talk to his employees and tell them how pissed off I am. It’s then his job to tell his supervisor, whose job it is to then tell his manager, who passes it on up the line to Brad Shaw.

Are employees not taught any more how customer feedback works, or do companies rely completely on leading survey questions that always lead companies to conclude that they’re the most wonderful thing since sliced bread?

Robert Dziekanski

I noted that it would have been Robert Dziekanski’s 54th birthday on 15 April. If the RCMP hadn’t murdered him for no reason.

Racist attacks on Asians in the US

Did anyone notice a couple of weeks ago that the attacks on Asians in New York City caught on video where perpetrated by Blacks? Am I allowed to say that? I thought only Whites were racist? I’m so confused.

“Do you identify as an Indigenous person?”

Speaking of race, I noticed when registering for a COVID-19 vaccine recently that I was asked this question. It’s emblematic of Canada’s relationship with the country and people they colonised, but it exposes the weaknesses in “politically correct” use of language. I am fully supportive of trans-gendered people, but I can decide today that I “identify” as female; if I do, it will be politically incorrect to question me and ask to check my shorts, but I can guarantee that if I answered “yes” to this question, I’d be questioned at the vaccine site and sent away.

Off-duty cops pulls gun on unarmed arsonist; arsonist wins

Vancouver arsonist.

In the keystone cops department, we recently had a case here where an arsonist set two fires at Masonic Temples in North Vancouver, in broad daylight, then drove across the bridge and did the same at another in Vancouver. He was brazen about it! At the last a bystander videoed him walking away from the front door with a jerry can back to his car. An apparently off-duty police officer approaches him with his drawn pistol. You’d think that would be the end of it, according to the NRA in the United States, where armed members of the public are supposed to keep the world safe from criminals. But no, the arsonist shrugs off the cop, and goes home to boast about his escapades on social media. He was later arrested somewhere other than one of the scene of his crimes, where he was “threatened” by the cop.

If there was an opposite of a police medal (booby prize?), this cop should get it. But first the cops should be trained on what to do in that situation. Step 1 should not be to draw your weapon. That’s going nuclear from the get-go, and we all know that cops are absolutely incapable of backing down, or de-escalating, a situation. So if you’re going to open the confrontation by drawing your gun, the only option then is to shoot the guy if he doesn’t comply with your orders. As moronic as the arsonist is, arson in and of itself is not a capital crime. (We can argue whether or not stupidity should be.) But if a cop really thinks that a brazen arsonist is just going to get on his knees and kiss his boots as soon as he has a pistol pointed at him, the cop is almost as moronic.

BBC News website

BBC registration pop-up.

I get my news from a variety of websites, but one of the main ones is BBC News. However, they have taken to harassing me lately with pop-ups (see image) and banners, insisting that I register … which I see as an ominous sign. One banner or pop-up states that “you can get the news you want”, or words to that effect. I don’t know how an international organisation with the reach and expanse of the BBC can’t see how fucking stupid that is. The reason the whole world is becoming and has become more polarised is precisely because people are being siloed into news bubbles, never seeing anything that “disagrees” with their view of the world. This is, apparently, how they’re trying to sell me on the concept of registering with them.

Prince Philip (10 June 1921 – April 2021), BBC.

In other BBC news, they had the dates of Prince Philip’s life as “10 June 1921 – April 2021”. Yes, no actual day in the date of his death. The BBC is good in their coverages of world news, but their Web team is letting them down.

Prince Philip

Speaking of Prince Philip, I noticed a woman (not a CBC journalist) on the CBC (I believe it was) professing, quite proudly, her ignorance of Prince Philip. This is how low the CBC has gone; they now give air time to people who are mindfully ignorant of world affairs.

The coming US civil war

Oct 30th, 2020

by Craig.

Comments are off for this post

Quite frankly, I have lost my will to write this piece. It’s now as obvious as the nose on my face to just about everyone how bad the situation is in the United States. I don’t need to assemble all the facts and lay them out along with my prediction.

There are so many sides: you have a president who foments just about every negative, anti-government grievance a paranoid American can think of, whether it’s against the Internal Revenue Service, Democratic state governors (viz. Michigan/Whitmer/kidnapping/”liberation“), the US Postal Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Fauci himself personally, whatever organisation(s) is/are in charge of running elections (and collecting all of those “fraudulent” mail-in ballots), masks and the “China virus”, and Blacks, Latinos, anyone whose ancestry can be traced to a “shithole country”, killed and captured war veterans … the list goes on and on and grows by the day; you have ordinary Americans who just want to get on with their lives; you have members and supporters of the Democratic Party who would like nothing more than to get rid of the guy; you have the National Rifle Association; you have The Lincoln Project; you have supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement; and on and on that list goes too. What has been and is happening in various major American cities (especially Portland) are, in fact, small civil wars, just very disorganised and disjointed.

On 3 November, election day, Americans may not get the decisive results they are used to as quickly as they’re used to. This is apparently because about half the number of people who voted in the 2016 election have already voted by mail and in advance polls, and those votes won’t all be counted on election night. Trump has already sown the seeds that some will see as a green light to action of some sort, by claiming that, if he loses, the election will have been “rigged”. Any delay in the results will be seen as time for machinations to rig the vote. It will be the only possible explanation for his loss. And if you’re a “good, patriotic” American with a gun, a stockpile of ammunition and a few friends, what would you do? The country is riddled with those nutjobs; hardly a day goes by in America without some mass murderer or spree killer doing his thing.

You know, it amazes me; generally speaking, people get better at something the more they practise it. Some Americans love to refer poetically to what they call their “experiment” in democracy. (After a couple of centuries, you’d figure it wasn’t still an experiment!) And yet, to this day, they have those in power doing everything they can to make it difficult for people to exercise their democratic right to vote. We recently had an election here in British Columbia, and I voted in an early poll. I was in and out of the polling station within five minutes (including parking and walking from and back to my car), and yet, night after night on the news we see queues miles long of Americans trying to vote in their early polls. You really need to be dedicated! And in Texas, their governor has limited election drop boxes to one per county; one county had advertised twelve drop boxes over their 2000 square miles! Of course, it’s all in the name of “enhance[d] ballot security” and “the integrity of our elections,” not vote suppression at all. In most democracies the election authorities will go out of their way to make it so easy to vote they’ll even wipe your ass while you do, but in the American “experiment” they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible!

The US might not exactly be one of Trump’s “shitholes”, but it sure is a shit show!

Canada-China prisoner swap

Jul 10th, 2020

by Craig.

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Protest sign calling for the release of Kovrig and Spavor

It seems bizarre to me to be writing about this kind of medieval or (I suppose) Cold War-type prisoner swap in the 21st century, but it seems that some countries (namely China) are still in that kind of backwards mindset. (This is particularly ironic, given the assertion by the deputy director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department [Zhao Lijian] that other countries [namely the US] suffer from a “Cold-War mentality“! Proof that politicians everywhere talk out of both sides of their mouths.)

I’d like to make clear a few of my assumptions and biases first:

I am not under the influence of China or any Chinese pressure groups, and presumably the authors of both of the letters to which I refer below are not either,
I travel internationally as much as I can, and although I have travelled to China, I have not (so far) knowingly travelled to any countries where my life or liberty might be in danger,
I am a dual citizen.

I have read the letter from the “distinguished Canadians” to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (cached copy), and I think it forms a basis on which Canada could move forward. It disgusts me that a reasonably civilised country like Canada should be in this position, but it is; it’s similarly repugnant that a country like China, who would like to present themselves to the world as being civilised (all the while acting the global bully wherever it thinks it can get away with it), would do such a thing. But they have, and here we are. And why have they taken hostages? Well, Meng Wanzhou isn’t some low-life drug trafficker or any other alleged common criminal; she seems to be about as close as you can get to royalty in China in the modern age, just without (obviously) the diplomatic immunity. Quite frankly, their taking hostages is the international equivalent of an unhappy child throwing their toys out of their cot!

Among the objections to this course of action are those of Trudeau himself (and presumably therefore the Government of Canada) and 53 signatories of an opposing letter from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. The objections seem to boil down to three primary issues, with a fourth unstated openly by the Canadian government:

Principles: A prisoner swap would weaken Canada’s principles. It matters not that two innocent Canadians have been deprived of their liberty for a year and a half (so far), as long as some unarticulated principle is upheld. I’ll address that shortly.
Giving in to hostage takers: I see the value in not giving in to the demands of hostage takers, but in my mind there is a significant difference between a hostage taker that also happens to be a state, and a hostage taker that is an individual or a group (e.g., a terrorist organisation), i.e., not a state. Quite frankly, a state that violates the norms of international practice (if not law) and takes hostages, is a pariah state, and one that should be isolated by all states. Of course, I’m no naïf, and I know that a superpower like China can’t and won’t be isolated by all states, but there are measures that Canada, and others, can take. Also more on that shortly.
Endangering travelling Canadians: As if Canadians are somehow magically protected when they’re travelling internationally now, the assertion is made that negotiating the release of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig will result in Canadians abroad being taken hostage with more frequency. I feel that theory holds when we’re talking about hostages taken by the aforementioned individuals or groups, but not when we’re talking about hostages taken by states. If the principles of due process, comity and international law are not strong enough to prevent states from exercising their unlimited power within their own borders to arbitrarily detain random foreigners, does anyone really think that an unspoken “disapproval” of hostage taking is going to achieve the same goal?!
Canada’s commitment to lawful extraditions, and in particular to the United States: While there is no doubt that following some sort of process to “free” Chinese citizen Meng Wanzhou from Canada’s legal system will royally piss of the Americans, let’s not lose sight of the fact that her arrest under an extradition request is nothing short of the United States using an extradition treaty to prosecute their global foreign policy (particularly against Iran and China in this case) through a third party (Canada), not enforcing criminal law alleged to have been broken on its own soil by one of its own citizens. Now, I don’t claim any expert knowledge of extrajurisdictionality (especially as the principle applies to international sanctions), but it seems to me that this must be considered differently to cases involving the citizens of one’s own country fleeing to other jurisdictions to avoid prosecution in the home jurisdiction. In my opinion the United States and China — their empires colliding — need to use other means to carry out their mutual attempts to exert international control, in ways that don’t compromise their so-called allies … or in the latter’s case, the country that many of their citizens now call home, and will likely be calling home to a greater extent following Beijing’s crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong.

On the part of those advocating something more expedient (so to speak) there are the principles of fairness and humanity. It’s not news to most people that communist systems tend to “[override] individual self-interest and [subjugate] the welfare of the general population to achieve [their] goals“, and it’s quite clear to any observer that the “individual self-interest” of the Two Michaels (or their families) is of no interest to the Chinese Government. Then there’s the degree to which Canada’s foreign policy (especially with respect to China) has been hobbled by their inability to speak more bluntly where China continues to abuse its own citizens ([Hong Kong] (whose refugees will shortly be flooding Canada, the UK and other countries), [Tiananmen Square], etc.), its neighbours ([India], [Taiwan], etc.), and others around the world — as they are doing to Canada right now. If a country’s policy in one area or another is hobbled by an identifiable cause, then it certainly is a matter of national interest and perhaps security to take whatever action is necessary to address the problem!

So what’s my suggestion? Glad you asked. I think Canada should negotiate and implement these points:

The last thing Canada should do is simply “free” Meng Wanzhou and then “hope” that China reciprocates. That’s just insanity! Even if they do reciprocate, it could still be years before the Two Michaels are released under one mechanism (also trumped up) or another, simply to show who has the power in the relationship, and to give China the ability to claim (falsely of course) that the release of the Michaels was not connected. No, if China has actually gone as far as to tacitly acknowledge that they have apprehended the Michaels on trumped-up espionage charges, then Canada should publicly state to China that we are ready to negotiate a prisoner swap, and move to begin the negotiations. (To quote China: “Zhao Lijian: … we have also seen reports of an interview with Kovrig’s wife on June 23, during which she said that the Canadian justice minister had the authority to stop Meng Wanzhou’s extradition process at any point; such options are within the rule of law and could open up space for resolution to the situation of the two Canadians.“)
The prisoner swap must be very public, and televised on live television in both countries. Since Canada and China don’t share a land border, I suggest that a Royal Canadian Navy ship meet with a PLA Navy ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to do the exchange, preferably over a gangplank between the ships. Alternatively, and slightly more practically I suppose, the prisoner exchange could take place on one of China’s land borders, or perhaps in the Korean DMZ.
Canada’s Hong Kong travel advisory, 2 July 2020

One of the less obvious unilateral actions that Canada (and actually, all countries) should take in the current international climate is to start negotiating bilateral “non-hostage” treaties with other countries, possibly connected to extradition treaties. How would these work? Well, you simply make a pact with another country that neither of you will take each other’s citizens hostage. Of course, arrests in the course of normal law enforcement would be acceptable, but not arbitrary detentions with no evidence. If Canada doesn’t have such a non-hostage treaty with a country, then the travel advisory for that country would state, in very prominent and unambiguous wording, that a such a treaty does not exist and therefore Canada very strongly warns against travel to that country. (There is currently, as of 10 July 2020, a similar warning on the Government of Canada Hong Kong travel advisory [see screenshot] on the “laws and culture” tab, but it is neither prominent nor strong enough, and there is nothing on the China travel advisory advising against travel there except for COVID-19 reasons.) Without a non-hostage treaty, if a Canadian citizen (for the sake of this example) is arbitrarily detained (taken hostage) then Canada will make attempts to provide consular assistance, but will not try that hard. This is more likely to have a greater effect on dual citizens (of which I am one, I should make clear), especially for those for whom Canadian citizenship is a citizenship of convenience.

I have no doubt that the Government of Canada is indeed “doing” something in the background (as happened in Egypt recently), even if it’s just talking amongst themselves, but to the rest of us beer-swilling plebs in the deserted (at the moment) pubs and stalking the blogosphere, it sure looks like the safety and security of Canadians abroad is not a concern to Canada, contrary to their professions otherwise.

Canada is small potatoes to China, in probably every way you can think of except land mass, coastline and morals, but everyone learns when they are still a child that bullies can be stood up to. This is what Canada and most of the rest of the world must to do to stop, or at least ameliorate, China’s bullying tactics. I don’t in any way suggest that China needs to be stomped down as the “enemy”, but just as happens with individual humans they have become too big for their breeches, and for that there are or need to be consequences. Part of the “problem” with China is not even the fault of the Chinese; it’s the West’s constant obsession with “unlimited growth”. However, that’s a debate for another day.

Collage: Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor (the Two Michaels)

Civil war in the US?

Jun 1st, 2020

by Craig.

Comments are off for this post

I’ve had a piece in the works since April — but actually in my mind for years — about the coming civil war in the United States of America. But holy shit, I’m not sure I’ll get around to finishing it in time for it to be predictive!

police state