Elizabeth Fry

Wikipedia article here.

The executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society talked at church today.  I’ve bitched about Sheriff Arpaio for allowing a woman to deliver her child in irons, and today I found out, while tears exploded out of my eyes THAT CANADIAN CITIZENS WHO GIVE BIRTH IN JAIL DO SO IN HANDCUFFS.

My disgust for the Canadian ‘justice’ system has never been greater.  No… words.

Staying at home….

I needed a mental health day, and by gar, I got one.

Here’s an interesting comment about the HST coming to BC.  I hadn’t realized stamps will be taxed.

An external report on the G20 riots.

Chocolate…. is there anything it can’t do?

Memory drugs that work… right around the corner? I can’t remember if this article said that or not.

Sundry and various

Cross posted from Colin’s Facebook.

Cat pee = perfume.  Now we haz prüf!

Only one burning cop car?  Torontonians are so low-key.  If the facebook posts of eastern pals are anything to go by, Toronto’s a farking mess right now – apparently they shut down the transit system, which is questionable tactics.

Bearsneezle! Watch for how loopy the bear is at the end of its sneezing fit.

Camille Paglia overgeneralizes her way into the newspapers again.  I can hardly disagree with her assessment of Lady Gaga though.

Rehearsal tonight with Orange You Glad.

Writing projects:  None at the moment, but I’m transcribing dreadfully earnest Victoria poetry for my mOm.

an open letter to Kash Heed

Dear Sir,

My initial reaction when I learned that the BC Liberals think it’s a good idea to axe the mandatory inquiry after a death in custody was, wow.  No more coroner’s inquests into government embarrassments.  Maybe articles like this will magically go away.

Then I thought, you know, just because I’m a tubby left leaning atheist with queer sympathies and anarchist tendencies doesn’t mean I have to even react to it.  After all, a 51 year old white woman who lives quietly in Burnaby (honestly, my neighbours probably wouldn’t even know I was here if my cats didn’t crap in their gardens, and if my brother’s car didn’t rumble in and out of here twice a day) doesn’t really need to put ‘death in custody’ on the top of her most feared methods of checking out.  I’d just pull out all of my priviliges and a harassed looking lawyer would show up and I’d waltz out of whatever misunderstanding had occurred.

Then I thought, well, sheeeeit.  It’s not like the BC Liberals do 5/8ths of a listless denial about deaths in custody right NOW, so why should anybody care that they are legally mandating what’s happening in truth in the cold light of spring, 2010?

But won’t someone please think of the children?  I tried to think of how an appeal to the interests of children might get spun by the BC Liberals.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of children growing up in BC – and other places, thank goodness – who want to be po-po when they grow up.

They want the gun, the badge, the pulling prostitutes over and getting free blow jobs in cars.  They want the skittery way meth-high teenagers deke down alleyways just before the Tazer comes out.

I kid, I kid.  Really what people want when they grow up wanting to be cops is to be on the right side, to catch dirtbags, to jail pedophiles, to bust drunk drivers.  Nobody who wants to be a cop when they are little thinks about the mental hardships and physical perils of being po-po.

Right now all police departments are having a bitch of a time hiring.  The RCMP nationally is looking to hire 8000 newbies in the next five years to handle resignations and retirements.  Things are so bad that they are hiring – so I have heard – people with known mental illnesses.

So I guess one way of looking at it is that the BC Liberals are canning inquests into deaths in custody as a recruiting ploy.  Come and join our police forces, all those with barely concealed personality problems and contempt for minorities!  If you get a little enthusiastic with a scumbag and he or she dies, not only will you not lose your job, your badge or your benefits, you’ll never have to face the scorn of the public and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that it was all a tragic misunderstanding.

Good job, Kash, hope that works out for you and your somewhat tinted kinfolks in the years ahead.  Yeah, I know you were the first Indo-Canadian chief of police in Canadian History, and that you have a storied career.  I just have one last question to ask.  Given that the Chief Coroner in BC is a political appointment given to a retired cop, do you have your eyes on that job after your political career moves away from you?  Cause if the omnibus bill passes, the Chief Coroner’s job just got easier.  That’s what I call planning ahead.

Peace love and anarchy,

Allegra

Give me a frakking break you asshats!!!!

Okay, thanks to the incompetence being shown by the cops and the Crown in Victoria (and no, I’m not talking about it on my blog because I don’t have permission to) I FnCKING HATE the cops and their apologists in the halls of the legislature of BC –  and everything to do with them right now.  But this latest is FnCKING OUTRAGEOUS.  They are hiding it in an omnibus bill.  The BC government wants to END mandatory inquests into deaths in custody.

Get off your asses and protest.  If you think that giving cops a licence to kill teenagers, immigrants and First Nations people, and that the right of the government to appoint a retired cop as Chief Coroner, makes BC a better place to live, you can go back to sleep now.

Tuesday WTF roundup

There is no gravity; the Earth sucks. Gravity does not exist as a separate property of matter, it’s a byproduct of entropy.  Go go gadget string theory!  Oh, and this is a neener neener to Jeff; I have supported string theory since the instant I first heard about it, and he pooh poohs the notion.

This is not gonna end well. DNA REV 2.0

Olympics, so no Castle.  Wah.

Italian hillside heads for the rhubarb.

Free trade (in quotes) and massive local corruption and crappy infrastructure make for African starvation.

All five of us (me, Paul, Keith, Kate and Jeff) were here last night eating, not drinking, and watching TV.  That’s right, Jeff let the beer run out.  Secretly I am pleased, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell from my undeviating stream of complaint last night.

Do you suppose Canada can actually learn from the mistakes of others?

Greece is hosed and the Euro dooooomed. Doomed I tell you.