Jak's View From Vancouver

Vancouver's Race Riots

On September 7, 1907, white racists rioted in Vancouver.  They attacked and rampaged through Chinatown, and they attacked and were beaten back from Japantown.  No one died, but only through luck.  The riot was spurred by a march of the Asiatic Exclusion League, a labour union-supported group of racists seeking to exclude all non-white labour from British Columbia.

We can tell ourselves that this was now a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the riot was only the beginning. Over the next fifteen or so years, these same racists managed to have laws passed that reduced Japanese, Indian and Chinese immigration to a trickle.  They also had the Native Canadians moved to reserves.  The Chinese Exclusion Act stayed on the books until 1947; and Natives were not given the vote until as late as 1960.

Canada's racist past is nowhere near as deep nor as broad as that in many countries, but it does exist, and we will be obliged to repeat our sins if we choose to forget the sins of our own history.

Drunk Drivers Need To be Stopped

A very disturbing report was issued today, showing that we are losing the battle against drunk drivers.  We are losing it most especially against repeat drunk drivers:

"Repeat drinking drivers were responsible for 6.6 million drunk-driving trips in Canada last year; that adds up to about 90 per cent of all drunk-driving activity,” a research scientist said. “Clearly this group isn't getting the message."

We MUST do something about this.  I have several ideas:

a)  injury and death caused by a drunk driver must be treated as assault causing grievous bodily harm and murder respectively;  there can be no excuse for some lesser offense such as vehicular manslaughter.  After all the publicity, a drunk driver -- especially a repeat offender -- knows in advance that driving while drunk is as dangerous as flashing a gun around in a drunken state.  It is a premeditated offense and should be treated as such;

b) assuming no injuries or death, a first offense of drunk driving should carry a jail sentence, a long period of banning from the road after the jail sentence has been served, and a substantial fine;

c) driving while banned or a second drunk driving conviction should carry a ten year minimum sentence and a lifetime ban from driving;

d) driving drunk a third time should carry a mandatory life sentence.

e)  we should adopt a 0% alcohol limit while driving.  You can drive as much as you want.  You can drink as much as you want.  You cannot do both together.  Period.

I have no sympathy for ANY drunk driver under ANY circumstances, ever.  If they rot in jail at least the rest of us will be safe from their criminal negligence.

100 Years: Vancouver's Racist Riot

On September 7, 1907, white racists rioted in Vancouver.  They attacked and rampaged through Chinatown, and they attacked and were beaten back from Japantown.  No one died, but only through luck.  The riot was spurred by a march of the Asiatic Exclusion League, a labour union-supported group of racists seeking to exclude all non-white labour from British Columbia.

We can tell ourselves that this was now a hundred years ago.  Unfortunately, the riot was only the beginning. Over the next fifteen or so years, these same racists managed to have laws passed that reduced Japanese, Indian and Chinese immigration to a trickle.  They also had the Native Canadians moved to reserves.  The Chinese Exclusion Act stayed on the books until 1947; and Natives were not given the vote until as late as 1960.

Canada's racist past is nowhere near as deep nor as broad as that in many countries, but it does exist, and we will be obliged to repeat our sins if we choose to forget the sins of our own history.

Isn't This Enough?

Another six Canadian soldiers died horribly today in Afghanistan.   So far, we have sacrificed 66 brave Canadian soldiers to this American imperialist war.  Isn't that enough already?

Bring our troops home -- NOW!

Disrespecting The Troops

There is one unfortunate way in which Canada and the United States are twins -- that is in the disgraceful way that our governments treat the bulk of our armed forces.  The same right-wing yahoo politicians who send our kids off to war -- the same wackos who say that because people like me don't agree with the war policies we are somehow dissing our troops -- these same loons are perfectly content to see "our boys" and their families live on handouts and scraps.

This story comes from California, but it is accurate in Canada too: 

The soldiers' families "were waiting for day-old bread and frozen dinners packaged in slightly damaged boxes. These families are among a growing number of military households in San Diego County that regularly rely on donated food ... Too often, the supplies run out before the lines do, said Regina Hunter, who coordinates food distribution at one Camp Pendleton site ...

To the south, about 1,500 individuals pick up free food, diapers or furniture at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station and several military-oriented distribution sites supported by churches and the San Diego Food Bank. The numbers don't include military households that frequent other charities countywide to get enough to eat...

“(Service members) struggle because of our cost of living,” said Faye Bell, executive director for the Military Outreach Ministry. “The lower-ranking enlisted guys do all the hard work and still have the stress of not being able to take care of their families the way they wish they could.”

Here in British Columbia, some of the most regular users of food banks and government welfare are service families.

This is truly what is disrespecting our troops -- making their families wait in line for food while they fight and die for their master's profits.

The Government Needs Your Panic

Through everything I have read in the past week I have learned that the governments of the US, the UK, Canada and probably all the others have known about the possible use by terrorists of liquid explosives on airplanes for many years.  Why then did they suddenly rush to put in place new restrictions overnight?  It is obvious that the alleged British plot could have been disrupted well in advance had the new rules been in place months or years earlier.

The only explanation that makes sense is that governments need to instil a sense of immediate panic.  By creating such a sense of emergency they are able to impose "security" regimes far in excess of those required to deal with the immediate situation;  ongoing mass surveillance of private citizens being the prime example, as Chertoff called for this week.

Without a doom-laden sense of fear, do we really believe that most people would accept government agents trolling through our bank accounts, our phone records and our email transcripts on a daily basis?  No.  They need the depth of fear created by these emergency announcements, not to deal with particular terrorist threats, but to extend and expand their control of our daily lives;  an expansion we would never otherwise accept.

Leave My Money Alone!

I'm sure I have written before about my loathing for the spending of taxpayers' money on the arts and sports and similar hobbies.  Almost every day my opinions on this are hardened with new evidence.

This morning I listened to a locally-based nationally-known stage actress tell a CBC radio interviewer that, with the reduction of Federal (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies, Canadian theatres are being forced to rely on box office receipts.  She said this with shock and horror, and with that professional certainty that the vast majority of her white middle-class audience would agree with her disgust at this wanton neglect.   She claimed that this would stiffle creativity because theatres would be obliged to put on old shows with a guaranteed clientele. The unspoken corollary is that the ticket-buying public is too stupid or too stuck in its ways to pay for new and inventive works and so they have to be forced to pay for them through their taxes. 

Such arrogance!  It is no wonder that such "liberals" or "left wingers" (for they would certainly describe themselves in such terms) are detested by anyone who actually cares to listen and think about what they are saying.  Their solution to every damned thing is to put their hands in my pockets and to do it while telling me how much better they know what I need than I do myself!  Social conservatives and corporate marketers are no less grasping and omniscient.

Liberals, left-wingers, corporatist fascists, Trotskyites, fundamentalists -- they are all the goddam same!   Leave me and my money alone!

Same Old, Same Old

So we had an election in Canada yesterday;  another in those $250 million taxpayer-paid cabarets by which modern consumer-capitalism and its handmaiden democracy attempt to beguile you and me into thinking we have some say.  Nonsense, of course.

This time, the Canadian Conservatives -- a shadow of the US neocon fundamentalists -- will form a minority government.  They take the place of the scandal-wracked Liberals who had a minority government last time out.   With no hope of a parliamentary majority for anything radical, we face the next few years with the same old, same old stuff just with new faces to criticize.  Boring and wasteful.

I voted of course.  There were five candidates running in my riding and I voted for each and every one of them.  I figure that if they have the guts to put their names forward then they deserve my useless vote.

The Wrong Medium and The Wrong Message

I've watched and listened to as little of Live8 as a general scanning of the media allowed.  I just can't bring myself to associate with this event in even such a peripheral way as listening on the radio.

From the very beginning I have been an extreme sceptic of the whole affair.  The entire event has much more to do with flagging careers and strategic music biz PR than it has with poverty.  It is no coincidence that Live8 is arranged just at a time when the music industry's reputation is in the gutter, with stupid legal cases against ordinary music downloaders scarring the marketplace.

Don't get me wrong, there is no doubt some genuine goodwill behind some of the artists involved, Geldorf included no doubt.  But the managers and record labels and global businesses that actually allowed it to happen have nothing but the market in mind.  And for the television and radio stations that carried hours and hours of it live and recorded, this is very low-cost high-impact programming.

So, it was a medium created to do most well for the industry that put it on and the other media conglomerates that could feed off it.

And as for the message?  First of all, there is a great deal of doubt whether the majority of those attending and listening and watching LIve8 know what the background cause -- poverty -- was supposed to be.  And of those few who did know that there was a "cause", most thought that it was fundraiser.  Which it was not.  My reading of the audience is based on a whole series of interviews that CBC Radio conducted with attendees of Live8 Canada at Barrie, Ontario.

The message was supposed to be -- get your governments involved in helping to solve poverty in Africa.  In Canada, people were urged to write to their Member of Parliament and the relevant Ministries.  In other words, get the government to help solve African poverty by hijacking my taxes without my consent.  This is a stupid pro-big government message, promoting an inefficient and compulsory system.

Better the message should be, put your hands in your pockets and voluntarily support charities and NGOs and assistive agencies in general.  If you want to take it a step further, withhold the same amount from your taxes this year.  If a few million Canadians decide to do that, the Revenue Department won't lock us all up -- they'll sensibly come to a deal.

My message is:  don't do anything to increase the ability of the government to use your money for any purpose without consent; and don't think better of the rapacious music industry just because they staged this grand PR stunt.

Deaths Bring Wrong Reasoning

Yesterday, in a terrible tragedy, four RCMP officers were shot dead by a criminal psycopath during a raid on a marijuana grow-op on a farm in Alberta.  Immediately, there are calls for additional and harsher penalties for marijuana cultivation.  One politician at least said that harsh sentences were the "only possible response" to such a tragedy.

Totally wrong.

The officers were killed not because marijuana was being grown, but because growing marijuana is illegal.  If marijuana cultivation had been legal, there would have been no reason for the police to be raiding the farm, and the killings would have been avoided.

There is no rational reason for marijuana to be illegal (especially while other far more dangerous drugs such as tobacco and alcohol are both legal and encouraged).  It is this irrationality that killed the RCMP officers.  It is about time we recognized that and ended this sham of a War on Some Drugs that kills so many people.