Importing workers to Canada - Over 100 jobs qualify still!!

It's sick.

They just pulled some industries out, but right now there are 87 industries, representing over 100 different jobs, that qualify for being able to import a worker from oversees straight into the job.

At wages lower than a Canadian will do it.

It's bloody sick.

While thousands of people of all races who've lived in this country their whole life scramble and scratch to match that measly wage and need those same jobs.

Information Technology is one of those industries where they can import foreign workers.
It's for alberta, but I'm sure you'll see the relevance of this page, there's more than one like it for every province.

Let's make it McEasy for millionaires to import more docile meat robots.
Keeps the rest in line

It figures eh? Live Video Assist pays more than TV series...

Just got a one day gig for an event production company as a tech.
It pays 7 bux more than I made at Atlantis. Just one day though.
Funny eh?
I think it's kind of messed up....
Running cables, wiring up a live event console, connecting configuring testing old beat up live event video gear,
Pays more than packing up image sequences on a $20, 000 workstation for a multimillion dollar tv show.

Time for the right surveillance....

So I'm still being persecuted by a police officer of the VPD.

the story is here.
And I'll be updating it with more details soon, because I'm pissed off.
This fucker is actually going to try and lie his way through this to cover his ass.
And it looks like the surveillance video is being made to secretly disappear.

It bothers me a lot. Because I don't have time or energy to deal with all this fucking bullshit.

And that's what's the big problem here. Time and harassment.
Because this pressure tactic is being used all over Canada
Truth is regularly cast away to make harassment of targeted demographics institutionalized in nature. It's regularly used to silence people, including numerous activists for poverty and human rights.

It's a good way to shut people up, while they look for food, a place to sleep, talk to lawyers, use bus tickets they can't afford, waste time when they could be trying to get themselves moving in life. Can we even call it life? Perhaps its just survival.

I get beat up for maintaining my human right to live without harassment,
and someone with a badge can perjure themselves on numerous points in the case presented the judge, and I don't get a say. I don't even get 2 cents worth.
I have to wait 6 months to get heard.
And during that whole time I'm a target for reprisals by police.

What really galls me is that since Police officers are human, they can be discriminatory, apply law unfairly and unequally, even commit crime, and then lie. And when they're caught they get a slap on the wrist and practically never pay out compensation to the victims.

We live in the new surveillance society.
Police and governments are pushing for it all the time.
It makes their job easier.

So let's start with them first.
Maybe it will make them more trustworthy.

We have reality shows all over TV with little cameras and recorders on people.

Instead of Tasers, we need to have personal camera's and recording devices on every officer.
Unable to be switched off, constantly running, in their car, during coffee, during every incident.

From the time an officer reports for work to the time they leave for home there should be an unbroken recorded record of their audio and the video of what they are doing, a teeny camera and mic strapped to the shoulder of every officer, uniformed or not. Constantly on.

It's really the only way that a corrupt or lying officer will get caught, outside of a sting by their internal review board.

Trust would go up, if the actual incidents could always be viewed from each officers viewpoint, without personal colorization.

No selective interviewing of witnesses, discarding statements and notes of ones who aren't conducive to the slant they are injecting into an incident.

You could even put it inside the badge. If the badge can't see the "criminal" then the badge isn't visible, is it?

It would cause a lot of problems at first, sure, people would get caught in the act,
but maybe those are the ones we should be catching anyways, with yearly reviews and assessments. Which obviously aren't catching the liars and violently aggressive ones.

I guess I have to go though.
3 sets of sirens just stopped outside the front street of where I'm typing this, while I help a friend backup her computer.
I'll probably become one of Canada's very own "disappeared"

Who'll care eh? Homeless people in Canada are probably worth even less than missing prostitutes. Regardless of who they are and what they've done....

Pariah

Call me Pariah.
I have earned the name.

They would have killed me at birth
had they known then where I would go

I say what I will,
what I think,
what I see,

As I wander the outskirts and darkness of my former home

exiled

I am not welcome,
no place is set for me
no place is mine to sleep
unhindered

All this cement,
fields of grass
this grass and cement is worth more
empty and bare
than my life is worth.

I watch with my sight
through the bars,
prisoners eating

They eat well
compared to me

All the leavings and cast off foods
rot in their bins
locked
beyond my reach

I starve and grow stronger
I live
only to think

One day I will pay them
for the stones cast upon me

One day they will listen

In this wilderness of cement and steel and law
peacekeeper to clans I am not part of
I see Law that is lawless
Law that lies
Law that is different
for the rich and the poor

Seeing their cracked honor
I howl the rage that unrighteous persecution brings
bearing witness

I have earned the title Judge

As I have earned the dust
in my name



(this poem is still a WIP-
C. Taylor)

The way things are going....

Christ you know it ain't easy
you know how hard it can be...
the way things are going
they're gonna crucify me

-J. Lennon

We'll kill them off
take their land
and go there for vacation

-Z. De La Rocha

Ain't it funny how the school doors close
around the time that the factory doors close
around the time that 100, 000 jail cells
open up to greet you
like the reaper

-Z. De La Rocha

Good to see that RATM is back together, maybe we can support them, since they are still being blacklisted across the states.

A great story, the way of the new colonialism, and so much scarier than blankets - the Screwfly Solution

And my favorite book of all time I would say - The Lord Of Light
compare it to the original Stargate movie, 20+ years later...so many similiar plot elements, with a switch to egyptian instead of vedic/buddhist/hindu as a base.

and check this out

That's why you'll never see this amazing Zelazny book being made into a film, it was scooped up and used for a cointel operation. Hmmm. Might be worth reading eh?

This is a bit wacky, but I'm on a roll. I wonder if they consulted The Amazing Randi?
Kind of like that cool kingsley thriller.

Too much x-files, but I hear truth is stranger than fiction.

Like the pedophiles I've tagged in my life. The baptist preacher, the guy 2 streets over with "nieces" who didn't look like him (and always looked sad)...there are a couple more.
That was before I was 16. I got in a lot of trouble at the time for suggesting it (slapped in the face, exiled from "church", ostracized), but voila, years later I hear they each went to jail. Wierd. Probably just coincidence.

Want to read some really freaky scary stories for Halloween?
Try this woman's short stories - Poppy Z. Brite

In the anime scene I want to plug a matrix-telepathy mindfuck called Serial Experiments Lain
and Ergo Proxy, a sort of "beast within" thing
and maybe even a bit of the eternally recurring hero Karas and the machine-body parts with intelligent functions apocalyptica Texhnolyze

I really dig this dude
"thanks, for a nation of finks!"
If you can find any of his live readings, they've got atmosphere to spare...
and cigar smoke.

When I think of the concept of "groupthink" I'm always reminded of the Emily's in "Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang"

Always loved Blade Runner, especially Roy Batty's last lines:
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time
like tears in rain...
Time to die..."

And I'll leave you with something from Uncle Albert:

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form.

-A. Einstein

Guess what Jack, you're LOSING again.

You're just following along still Jack,
scrounging about on the edges, yapping the same BS as all the other parties.

You're a follower right now, not a leader buddy, and we can see it clearly

Is it working for you?

It's not working for me. Or for millions of other Canadians who want a REAL alternative.

If you're just going to follow along with the topics that the American run Canadian media sets as the agenda, if you're just going to yap about like that little dog following the bulldog around in the Sylvester cartoon, who fucking cares?

Canadians don't REALLY care about 70 billion dollars of "Green Credits" going to the people who are already wealthy.

70 billion dollars going to the people who really need it, the poor, lower class, and lower middle classes, would clean up this Americanized mess that ground level Canada has become, for the next 20 years!!

I'd rather have a society where cops were solving crimes and attending accidents, not cleaning up the fallout from American made social policies. Where banks didn't need security guards, where transit was for the poor to get to work, not a multi-billion dollar cash cow, where women could walk home alone again, because there weren't any people who were so fucking hard up and screwed over that violence has become their only answer.

The Conservatives and the Liberals are all talking policies that take gov't money from taxes and hand it out to wealthy corporations and individuals. NONE of that money is going to save any jobs or get anywhere near the ground level where it's needed.

It going straight into the bank accounts of the rich, many of whom are actually Americans.

They figured out down south how to suck all the tax money out of gov't and keep it for themselves, and now they've hooked up the feeding trough here too.

In case you haven't figured it out Jack, ITS YOUR supporters over the last 20 years who they've been decimating.

That's why you can't win. The people that are being marginalized and sucked dry, overworked and denied services, scrounging and suffocating

are the people that once voted NDP.

You really need to watch that flick, The Corporation again, before your election defeat party.

What I REALLY think about police.....

I'm a dissident Canadian writer.
I write about social justice, abuses of power and authority, and poverty,amongst other lefty things.

I know a lot of people who say "I hate cops".
They've had bad experiences.
I've listened intently and often with horror to their stories.

I don't hate cops. At all.
I have a huge beef with people in authority positions who step beyond their mandate and play the power trip. Sometimes police officers fit that description.

I do not hate police.

There are soooo many good-hearted men and women who supply incredibly important services and resources to their community and wear a police uniform.
They help people who have been attacked, they are there to help when someone has been in an accident, they listen to stories of harassment and implied violence, they take notes.

We have movies about bad cops for a reason. Centuries of policing has shown us that power does corrupt unless it's properly checked by government, judiciary, and civilian oversight.

We have these works of art about bad cops, because bad cops DO EXIST.

We all know about having to pay bribes to police in certain parts of the world when you travel.
We know there are cities in Canada and around the world where police culture is full of institutionalized violence, racism, homophobia, and domestic abuse.
We see reports of certain forces that have no oversight about taser use abusing the tool and not paying consequences.

We hear our friends stories, about 15-17 year old runaways having to give head to get out of a threat of imprisonment, of assault victims being labeled by an onsite seargent as "self inflicted wounds for sympathy" when later analysis proves this is not the case, raped women being asked about "well, what were you wearing", queers being beat up by uniformed rednecks.

These are real stories I've heard directly from the source.

We wonder how 26 hookers can disappear into the night over a 10 year period and no one seems to care.

These are warning signs to us that certain cities aren't making regular assessments of attitudes and institutionalized violence. Training after initial recruitment alone is not enough for those who serve their communities wearing guns.

We need them, to help, to protect, to serve their communities.
But for us to feel pride and trust, we need to see it for real.

An officer who breaks the law, breaks all of our trust in his/her brothers.
When one innocent personis harmed or treated disrespectfully by that 10% of the force who is just collecting a paycheck and power trips, our whole society is cheated, and all the good police officers who help us are cheated of some of their due.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for police,
When they themselves can see the need for more stringent standards, and a weeding out of the neanderthals, all of us will benefit.

And maybe one day we won't hear ANYONE say
"I hate cops"

#15 - NDP secret election plan - Free universal childcare that's gov't run like elementary and high schools!!!

I don't have much time today, but this one is easy for EVERYONE to wrap their head around:

The government of Canada over the last 20 years has created a society that is living on the edge of survival, to raise kids and actually OWN a home takes 2 working lower and middle class adults.

The childcare needs of these people is the responsibility of gov't. It is the government's fault that a single adult's wage can't support buying a home and caring for a family.

Just as elementary school and high school is gov't run and funded by taxes, so must the childcare system.

It's plain and simple.

Right now people are paying $30 per child per day.
3 kids in childcare cost more than a mortgage.

If everyone must work, the gov't must have childcare systems available.
Because we can't have a system where only the upper middle class and above is allowed to have children.

And we ALL know that the best thing for all of society is to actually have children raised by a home parent, because the reality of life is that separating children from their parent figure before 5 years of age creates sociopaths and dysfunctional family units, latchkey kids are always higher risk for future poverty.

We need a government that takes childcare seriously or enables one parent to stay home for the first 5 years of the children's life. Something they obviously don't want to do.

My 3D Works and airbrush paintings - links

Here are some links to my work in 3D ( some Sub D spaceships made in Lightwave 9.2 - all started from a box) and my airbrush artworks (most of which have been stolen)

picasa "slideshows" of the 3d and paintings are available too...

and here's a cool morph I did of a couple of my paintings in Elastic Reality

#14 - NDP secret election plan - Federal Gay marriage and threesome marriages!!!

On a lighter, more gay note than my previous post....

Let them tie the damn knot. Whoever the hell they are.

If they love each other, let them get hitched!!!

And while we are at it, let's allow 3 people to form a marriage.

Why the hell not. Lot's of people who aren't christian get together. Let them do it their way.

As long as everyone involved is of age and not being coerced, let them make their vows to each other.

You'd have every queer in Canada on your side, and all their friends too Jack.
That's a lot of votes.

#13 - NDP secret election plan - CSIS mandate refocus on US counterintelligence!!!

I'm really not much of a CIA conspiracy freak. I don't pore over hours of web material on the Illuminati. There are too many factions fighting over power and money for me to ascribe too much force to any one single entity.

It might even be that this 13th post is an unlucky number 13 joke. Or not.

I lived with a REAL CIA conspiracy freak for a number of years. You know the type, never misses a show of Art Bell or his replacements

I didn't believe more than 1/4 of my buddy's rants. Maybe even less. He ranted a lot.

He was an Icke freak too. I never bought into the whole spaceships on the other side of the moon, spaceships hidden below Norway, or alien lizard men chameleoning themselves into power on earth. But I never read any of his books so I shouldn't judge them by second hand information. A book by its cover and all that.

But the 1/4 (or less) of his frothing rants that I did believe coincided very closely with my own extended reading of real and fictional espionage and spy stories written by real former intelligence agents. Those couple hundred books I read were about ground level real shit, and they were very detailed and frightening. Filled with whores, psychological warfare, brainwashing, payoffs, media manipulation, industrial secrets, drug deals, alliances with gangsters, and a billion dirty tricks.

I have to say my favorite was always Le Carre. George Smiley was the coolest agent ever.

We have as much oil as Iraq. Canada has craploads of valuable fresh water, land, and other resources as well. Canada is a SOCIALIST country. We are definately a target for COINTELPRO

Yet it seems to me that CSIS looks at the CIA and FBI like tough big brothers, helping them grow up in the New Intelligence Society.

They really need to be looking at them, at all times, as possible enemies to Canadian freedom and human rights. The UN seems to think human rights are an important topic btw.

In my own personal opinion, there are at least 1000 American agents operating in every Canadian city. They get their extra paycheck, on top of whatever they make working for whatever company or organization in Canada, and they work for American interests from this side of the border, destabilizing our culture with Project Mockingbird style tactics.

Get tough with CSIS Jack, make their mandate stronger to sniff out Americans working on Canadian soil, even Americans who are supposedly "helping our security structure".

Or working in high positions in our cultural sectors, influencing our culture and media.

Those 9/11 conspiracy freaks....

I don't endorse every 9/11 conspiracy theory out there.
I do believe there is a lot of fishy stuff surrounding the events of that week, long ago.

The disaster made it real easy for the 
New Order Security Surveillance society 
to get fully implemented.

Human rights, privacy, free speech, all took huge hits in the following years.
Riding the nationalist wave of indignation and anger, war and it's huge money sucking implementation completely obliterated our medical and social security systems.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, all of our "initiatives"
are based on this one event as a trigger. 
So if this event was a lie
or falsely attributed
then the rationale
on which hundreds of thousands of more lives were lost,
or shackled in "surveillance societies"
That "rationale" may have been a prefabricated lie.




Here's an interesting one you can find on youtube or buy:
http://loosechange911.com/finalcut/


The one little tidbit I really found interesting - 

a few days before the tragedy of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was addressing the press about 1 Trillion dollars of defense spending money that was unaccounted for. 

That's one thousand times one billion, in dollars.


And the 3 places where there would be accounting evidence regarding that money and accountants working on that evidence, the 2 main towers and the section of the pentagon that was destroyed, all those places were disintegrated.


approximately 4000 victims, divided into 1 trillion is 250,000,000
250 million dollars per victim.


I guess some unscrupulous person might consider that a good deal eh?
Worth blowing the shit out of some stuff?

You decide. I'm a Canuck so I'm "neutral".
Just putting a perspective on it.

There were 3 planes.
3 buildings were destroyed, tower 1 & 2 and building #7
Building #7 didn't get hit by a plane.
the plane that was supposed to hit it crashed 
or was more likely hit with a rocket when it was obviously not going to hit it's target.
Yet building 7 still went down, off by itself
building #7, which was a newly built disaster operations center 
and was earthquake proof
and also held a number of seismic recorders 
which would have registered demolition charges
at times slightly before plane impact.
But why on earth would it suddenly flatten itself?
Nothing hit it.
It wasn't right next to the other two,
it was almost 2 blocks away,
and it got flattened just like the 2 towers.
Poof!
Like tinkerbell the magic muslim waved her wand
and an earthquake proof disaster response building gets flattened.
Hmm.

I remember.
I watched it happen.
I have the footage
as do millions of other people
we can rewind and replay it.


Its amazing how much mileage we get 
out of nationalism
it can make lies seem so righteous
like the last half 
of To Kill A Mockingbird.
When everyone KNOWS
the black man is innocent.



one thing that's always tweaked ME about that day,
is that the "hijackers" were not Afghani or Iraqi, 
they were Saudi Arabians.
Saudi Arabia,
The biggest American military complex in the middle east is there.
Yeah. Sure.
The "extremists" got on there...


I'm not saying that's what happened
but it seems like the obvious explanation.
Planned demolition by mercenaries
with a huge payoff
the New World Order
is the end of Democracy
and the resurrection
of military fascism.

#12 - NDP secret election plan - Reinstatement of previous Media Ownership rules!!!

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sick of it.
All across Canada, one story is repeated over and over. They don't even bother to rewrite it. It all trickles down to us from one or two actual sources, and we hear it regurgitated ad nauseum.

Our country used to be filled with reporters. Communities actually had their own reporters.
Not now. Now every paper in Canada is owned by one of two companies, and they're both a bunch of right wing fuckers when you look at the top executive.

Break these TV, newspaper and radio monopolies up. We're all getting the same feed. We need variety of thought and opinion, we need more journalist eyes and brains and mouths working.

Didn't anyone else get taught about the horrible practice of "state run" media in communist countries? What's the fucking difference between that and what the CRTC has served us up for the last 10 years.

Different owners of different city and community newspapers gave us different, very different views about what is going on.

Now it's all about "personalities" instead of actual journalism.
It's bullshit. They've become monopolies and they are being used to direct our minds away from the real shit that's going on, by focusing on only the outrageous or mind numbingly stupid, then squawking repeatedly about that same shit for days on end.

slice and dice them Jack, and those little community newspapers and co-op radio stations will once again hail the exploits of the NDP as they used to do.

The CRTC sold us out to big American media interests at Paulie boy's request. Chop that fucking dragon up before it turns us all into front page mantra-zombies doing the payola shuffle.

#11 - NDP secret election plan - Smokers rights - Federally protected!!!

I agree it was out of hand way back when.
When you smoked in the halls of every business, airplane, library, university....

But too clean is just as much a rights infringement as too much smoke is.

We need BALANCE. Not knee jerk overreacting. The people who work for committees have got their way, over the good of BALANCED society.

I should be able to go to at least ONE FUCKING CAFE WITHIN 4 BLOCKS OF A CAFE LADEN DISTRICT TO HAVE A FUCKING SMOKE WITH MY PURCHASED TASTY BEVERAGE.

Give them their squeeky clean aromatic flourescent light boxes with sterile atmospheres to slake their coffee urges in smoke free bliss.

For me to actually feel that I have FREEDOM in Canada I need to be able to walk somewhere that has some kind of license or special air cleansed area where I and my fellow rebellious nicotine cranksters can watch the smoke curl between our fingers while we drink our coffees and expurge our convoluted philosophies of disgust at society.

It's been a way of life for humans for centuries. Millions of works of ART, poetry, fiction, social commentary, philosophy, and humour have been created by rebellious, smelly, cigar and pipe chomping thinkers.

And that's REALLY why its being made illegal.
Because smokers are the REBELS.
They always have been, over and over.
They are the ones who refuse to work through their break, or their lunch. They are the ones who will sit together outside, trying not to bother others with their smoke, sitting in their little COMMUNITY pools of smokers, talking shit about the clean freaks and administrators with their belligerent attitudes.

Smokers converse with other smokers they have never met before. While all the non-smokers stick to their own tables, not interacting. Smokers are always interacting with others, bitching about the world as they see it.

That's why they are being outlawed. They TALK too much to each other.
Instead of just being good little meat robots walking around consuming, they talk about stupid shit and call it stupid right out loud. And we certainly can't have THAT.

It's not smoking that causes 90% of the cancers in our hospitals.
Its industrial pollutants, building materials and their fumes, solvents, paints, home pesticides used at far higher than standard concentrations, manufacturing processes, toxins created by industry. That's where 90% of cancer comes from.

If they wanted to reduce lung cancer in smokers they could make a law that only pure organic tobacco, untreated in any way, can form a cigarette. Tobacco tested and turned away because of benzine or cyanide taints (which are common and not present in organic tobacco).

No smoking anywhere is as much an infringement on our personal rights to congregate and converse as is some kind of state enforced religious practice. Which it is. Most anti-smoking organisations have a STRONG christian bias, and this is really about prohibition and control.

Make laws enabling one or two out of every 5 cafes to pay extra for a smoker license and mandate that only smokers can work at them. A pagan can't get a job as a technician for the catholic church, so a non-smoker shouldn't be serving coffee at a licensed smoking cafe.

Back this one to the hilt, Jack, and the NDP ranks will swell with every smoker in Canada.

Imagine William S. Burroughs (or insert your own heavy smoking cultural icon) coming to talk and being told he couldn't have his cigar on stage. That's all his ambiance out the window.

#10 - NDP secret election plan - Huge fines and actual investigation of foreign worker importing!!

Timayyyyys! That oil company with the mollusk logo, shipyards, fruit orchards, nannies and caregivers, nurses and laborers, any low wage big franchise you point to in Canada is doing it along with millions of unscrupulous small business owners.

They actually advertise in foreign countries. The workers are hired directly from their home countries, given all kinds of passport and help finding lodging, then they are flown right into your local big chain coffee shop, gas station, super mart, or into a rich person's home to take care of their brats and their elderly.

There isn't even an ad placed locally. It's only posted in another country.

The wage is unlivable, so the worker has a low quality of life. They come with $$$$ signs in their eyes, because it seems like its a lot, but in Canada this cost more than their homeland, so they really go only further in the hole, and they never complain about long days or being ripped of for overtime, breaks, holidays, and medical benefits.

Give companies involved with this type of importing some hefty real fines and actual mandates for the RCMP to investigate. Give whistle blowers some kind of compensation for turning these unscrupulous employers in.

If the wage they've been paying is unlivable for Canadians, and they can't get Canadians to do the job for that wage, they need to raise their remuneration and better the working conditions so Canadians will take the job.

Higher paid workers mean more taxes paid. By CANADIANS of all races. There are plenty of people already here from other countries who have lived their whole life here being paid shit by these outrageous wage and employment policies that have crept up over the last 2 decades, while we were being distracted by media concentrated doom and gloom headlines.

The employer drives off in his SUV complaining to his wife about the cost of employees while they ride out to the golf range he pay's more than an employees salary to be a part of.

Low wage workers are one of the NDP's largest demographics Jack. Stop sucking corporate dick for party coffers and back up the grassroots Canadian and you'll get their votes Mr. Layton.

Take a look...

Subprime mortgage destruction - banks failing - the gov't get's control of banks and personal information...

They smashed OPEC under the guise of WMD sniffing.

They rigged elections under the guise of "electoral mistakes and errors"

They knew perfectly well what would happen when they made those subprime lending laws down south. They knew in the end they would own a whole bunch of land, have a whole lot of poor people's money and investments, and a whole crapload of lender's personal information.

When the checks and balances that democracy places in the way to safeguard citizen's becomes a problem, they just create a crisis to get around it.

Who are "They"?

Any guesses?

The current bank crash is a fabricated as the last one, and a whole bunch of wealthy fuckers are gonna walk away with barrels full of cash and shitloads of property they bought for cheap at the gov't fire sale.

The sky is falling!!! Look up, look up! So we can take it all away........

#9 - NDP secret election plan - Federally regulated minimum wage and work hours - set by costs per municipality !!!

The minimum wage is now so far below the real poverty level it become a disgusting human rights violation in this country.

The minimum wage should be the average cost of a one bedroom suite and utilities times 2.

So in Vancouver, where the average price for a one bedroom suite is $1000, add $300 for utilities (as if they would be that low) and double it. That's $2600 minimum wage for 40 hours a week. In other cities it would be lower because the cost of a suite is lower.

Right now, someone on minimum wage makes about $1300 before taxes. Its an unlivable wage.

As well, we need to make it illegal to make someone work a holiday for less than double their standard wage. Its happening all over Canada, poor people work holidays and get another day off. They should get 2 days off because they worked a holiday. 2 days off with pay. Almost every worker in Canada gets "laid off" or an "unpaid holiday" at Christmas. Right when they need money the most, at the holidays, this Christian country starves them - legally. Its a huge ripoff.
If someone works all year for a company, they should get paid for any time the business is closed during the Christmas break.

Its costing our society more than you can imagine having people working 12 hour days. People who work too many hours have way more sick days, more serious problems when they do get sick, and bring down the quality of life all around them.

In the last 20 years the gov't has stripped away work hour limits. We need to bring them back. Overtime should be once in a blue moon. It should cost the employer a lot. Instead we have companies where people are working 12 hour days 5-6 days a week and getting their 2 days off split so they only get one day at a time off. It makes people sick.

If it was illegal to work over 40 hours a week, there wouldn't be any job shortages anywhere.

We (had) a legislated 40 hour work week for a reason. During the industrial revolution workers were exploited by the land/resource/factory owners and were working longer than a person should to be healthy. So we had worker's riots and protests, where cops and private security killed people for daring to speak up, and in the end they legislated the work day to 8 hours. For a reason. It's healthier for everybody, and there are more and better paying positions for everyone.

In most Canadian workplaces, workers are EXPECTED to work through their lunch and their breaks.

Wise up Jack! The NDP's core supporters are working class and they're tired of being too tired when they get home to do anything but sleep.

#8 - NDP secret election plan - Real Welfare - Federally administered !!!

Our parks and streets are full of homeless people and junkies, crack dealers sit in the playground, while swings and slides go unused for fear of needles.

In less than 10 years the economic consequences of Paul Martins savage dismemberment of Canada's social safety net have surfaced in our face like toxic sludge bubbling up from a landfill.

Security guards in every bank, even watching the ATM at night.

Security in fast food stores. Private security everywhere. More than half of the private security firms are owned at the top by American conglomerates.

Jails are full. New ones are being planned for this "growth sector". Arrests for petty theft and harrassment of homeless people trying to sell their pitiful little blankets of stuff at the side of the roadway. The cops are as fed up as everybody at the mess, they have better things to do than move people along who have nowhere to go.

Let's put this in perspective. Welfare per province was a little under 20 million per year.
Every major city in Canada spends 3 times that on parks in a year. 5 times that building new convention centers and libraries, art galleries, etc. A single municipality spends so much more than that on contracted out services for the homeless "problem" that barely existed before.

Before, we had parks full of hippies. Hippie girls sitting on the grass drawing, or knitting things for their neighbors. Twirling their sticks, singing, playing their drums and guitars, smoking their joints and being GOOD people of the earth.

Are the drug dealers and gangs better? Do you really like the streets filled with shopping carts and toothless beggars better than the hippies?

You didn't worry about your children on the swings when there were tons of do-good hippies helping you watch the young at play. You could leave your child with one of the ones you knew for an hour, or an afternoon, for much less than current childcare rates. No one can leave their children with the crackheads.

The junkies would get together and rent a flat. they'd crash in the flat, head in the clouds, not crash on the street. When their money ran out, 4 would chill in the flat and only 2 would go out to scrounge. Alcoholics for life would lie on a couch with their buddies, evaporating their vices, not out in the grass of the park.

We have to accept the fact that 3-5% of people will not be able to work at any fucking McJob.
No one is going to hire toothless Eddie the former bum. No one wants their McShitburger served to them by a toothless 60 year old man, no matter how clean and gleeful his McUniform is.

There are millions of Canadian artists, writers, poets who were enriching our lives, our coffee shops, our restaurant stages at night. They've been decimated by working poverty, hand to mouth, cultural dissolution policies. They were the rebels, and Paul Martin's attack on their measly $6000 a year that they were subsisting creatively on was as destructive and sneaky as a federal tainted blanket giveaway.

Colour in our cities has been starved away, replaced with expensive landscaping, shiny opulent edifices of machine culture, and sneering middle age muzak.

We look silently for our books in the library, while the security guard oversees the scene.

Is it really better?

Every Community center in every major neighborhood, should have a Social services office, a nightly soup kitchen for the poor, a thrift shop with free clothes for SS recipients, and the place should be manned with welfare recipients getting a bit of extra money over their check. Remove the barriers, cut the number of social workers and rigamarole. Return Community support to the poor from EVERY community. Instead of sending everyone down to skid row to stand in line for a religious meal of zeal.

I got so much more to say about this, but on we go.....

They're paying more out to consultants and rich person "committees" to solve the homeless problem than they ever paid out to the poor themselves, and most of welfare was cultural creatives, not alcoholics like they tried to make out when they were axing things.

#7 - NDP secret election plan - Comprehensive Federal Regulation of the Credit, Banking, and Insurance, and Checque cashing industries !!!

In a hurry, so must embellish later

The Nobel Peace Prize winner just recently was for an amazing and zany idea

Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank

won the prize for giving credit to poor people.

Credit is one of the major methods being used to limit opportunities for the working poor in Canada.

If you have none, there really is no way to get it, pay as you go credit cards, for some reason, don't seem to build up your credit, and its necessary to have a credit card to do any kind of online sales, sign up for a phone, and a dozen other things.

Credit checks of personal information are easily obtained, regardless of federal privacy rules.
Credit companies owned by US corporations can give their client data to the US through the Patriot 2 act at any time.

Banks, for some reason, won't cash a cheque for EI or welfare issued by the gov't, yet every Money Mart will. For a fee.

Pretty much everyone who collects one of these gov't cheques is in line at a private casher an hour later, and those businesses don't have to follow the same privacy regulations as banks.

Its designed that way.

Our gov't should be taking a cue from the nobel peace prize winners and cleaning up this mess, because billions have been bilked out of Canadians, who can't afford to wait a week to cash their cheque.

I know people who pay more for the insurance on their vehicles than they pay for their rent or mortgage. Its a huge arm twisting scam, and Canadians are fed up with it.

Well, I am at least. What about you?

This guy at http://www.corporatebully.ca tells me:

RBC Bank President Gordon Nixon - Salary $11.73 Million !!!

Beaten up and arrested for being homeless - the new VPD hobo extermination tactic?

So.
I'm currently homeless, as I've stated elsewhere in this bloggy scream into the void.
Some nasty shit just happened, and seeing how it seems I'm being "sandbagged" as my cousin puts it, I'm going to tell the story here. Because I don't know if I will get to tell my side of this story in court. It appears to me I'm getting railroaded into a nasty splotch.

I got beat up by a VPD officer yesterday, and he charged ME with assaulting HIM.
I never threw a single punch. My hands were on my backpack, trying to keep him from stealing from me and throwing it away, when he started whaling on me. I just spent almost 20 hours in the lockup, because I thought it was wrong for a police officer to take my stuff.

Wrong in the same kind of way that driving a First Nations person who's drunk out into the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter and leaving him there to walk home.

I have no criminal record, and I intend to keep it that way. But I was just vilified today by a prosecutor who lavishly and darkly embellished second and third hand information to try and make me seem like some kind of perverse social deviant.

Maybe in the end I'll be vindicated and it will all be fine. But I won't ever get compensated for 20 blows to the head and chest. For having to scream out loud at the top of my lungs the whole story 5 or six times so that all my old neighbors in my community would come out to witness my arrest, so that I couldn't just be beat up and hauled away quietly like they wanted to happen. For days of my time when I should be trying to find a home, find food to eat when I'm broke since my guitar was stolen, take care of my dog, arrange job interviews. I'll never be compensated for being targeted. Or watching my dog shake and run around scared wondering what's happening to me.

I'm just another ILLEGAL homeless person. So I don't have rights. After 11 pm anywhere I lay my tarp is actually illegal for me to sleep. Its all private property or the Queen's land.
And now, due to the actions of an aggressive, homeless person hating police officer and his partner, on the prompting by the one neighbor out of 10 that hates me, I have a "violent" tag on me. So every cop from this point on that runs across me is going to treat me with the same aggression and violent attitude. I'm fucked, no matter what. Even if I win in court, every encounter with police is going to go sour after this, because the officers involved with this particular incident are selectively taking notes to cover their ass.

It sucks, because there are a LOT of really reasonable good hearted community minded cops out there that I've met, and the 10% who are dicks makes them look bad as a whole.

So...
A week ago, I needed to print something. I didn't have money for the library printer, so I asked my cousin if I could print it when I saw her on the street catching a bus. She said she'd be back about 11 pm. so around 10 pm I went to her place and waited in this little lane beside her house.
Now this little lane has been in dispute in the neighborhood for years.
It's actually a gas line access lane and no structures can be built on it, no one owns it, but it isn't big enough to be a full alley and doesn't run right through. If you look at the city plan (which I have when we dug something out there years back) it's a city gas lane.
But the house beside my cousin's and the one next to him both try to lay claim to it, over and over. She was late, so I crashed in it.
3 feet by 4.5 was the footprint of my military style tarp when folded that way.

In the morning, the one next door neighbor, the most uptight yuppie in our formerly laid-back cultural community neighborhood, with his expensive Triumph motorcycle, and his new cars and locks and video surveillance all over his uptight property, sees me as he's off to work.

He gets that asshole gleam in his eye, runs back into the house, gets his uber-expensive digital SLR camera, runs out to the end of the lane and pints it at me, feeding my dog and getting prepared to roll up my tarp once the dew evaporates off in the morning sun.
Snap!! Snap!! He gets me, facing the dog with my middle finger gesticulating as if it were flexing his anus. "I'm calling the police!!!" he exclaims, "this is private property!!!"
I know for a fact that he knows this is not private property, because he was around when we all looked at the city plan that day, back when I lived in the house my cousin is in.
I've spent close to 11 years of my life living in that house. I'm not some random person in the lane, and I wasn't planning on making it my home. Just the back lane has skunks and racoons.
I told him go ahead, I'd be gone in a couple minutes if he'd cool down. Off he stomps.
Like I said, I'm waiting the 10 minutes it will take for the dew to burn off and my cousin isn't up yet, so I take the dog around the 2 blocks that I call my old neighborhood. She sniffs about for a pee, and I scrounge some cigarette butts to roll a smoke. That's what broke, homeless people that smoke do in the morning right?
So 10 minutes later we round the alley, she's half a liter lighter, and I have my splendiferous trove of butt-raunch, including the glorious blessing of a couple of Prime Time ends to sweeten the stew. I look to my tarp, ready to pack it up and roll a smoke.
There, at the end of the alley, is asshole yuppie bitch man, dragging my tarp and pack over to his Smithwright bin, throwing it inside, and then locking my stuff in his garbage can. Locking it in.
What a fucking asshole.
I'm homeless, but my tarp and pack doesn't touch garbage. I don't collect bottles for the same reason, it's unclean.

I'll describe the altercation in detail later, but suffice to say there was no way for cooler heads to prevail in this little child shitfest of nonsense.
The police officers that attended the scene, all 3 of them, were some of the most respectful, non-judgmental and just plain nice officers I've ever dealt with. Everyone said so, my cousin, her downstairs neighbor, the neighbor across the street, the ones on the other side of the house, everybody liked the way they acted and treated everyone. Like I said, it was a shitfest that got a lot of people involved that didn't really need to be bothered at 7:30 am, but the officers on the scene smoothed the fracas down very positively and I got my stuff back. They told him that he would have been charged with assault for starting the whole thing, but really I wasn't in the mood for gloating, I just wanted my stuff out of his sick little boy garbage can.

So, forward 2 days. I've been about doing stuff, starving. I stop by my cousins to drop off a couple of things out of my pack and pick up something to read, and check my email and messages for work. It's 9 pm, she's still at college, so I wander the little access lane and pick the blackberries to eat, then get some figs from the back yard tree. Having had some basic nutrition, I sit on my cousins front porch, with my pack against the house, and have a smoke while my dog hangs with our cat, who's been chilling at my cousin's. Cat's don't do so well on leashes, so he's just been hanging out with her for a couple months. I wait for her to get home so I can do my 20 minutes worth of internet and then I'll schluff off to find a spot to crash. I have no intentions on using the access lane, because I promised I wouldn't after last time, and its too visible of a spot anyway for an ILLEGAL homeless person to chill. I've been there about 30 minutes total at this time, with berries-figs-smokes taking my attention.

And suddenly there's a very cranky looking plainclothes policewoman standing at my cousins gate asking me my name. She's being VERY bitchy and disrespectful about her interrogation of this obviously evil person she's confronting, as he scratches his cat and dog and inhales his hunger suppressing nicotine death stick.
She's not being polite. She's out to arrest and fuck with one of those horrible illegal homeless people that obviously need to be eradicated from the landscape of the New Canadian Order.
She's grilling me imperiously, and I inform her that this is not South Africa during Apartheid. I do not need a pass to show I am allowed to live or walk or sit, and I do not have to fulfill her information requirements unless I am doing something for which I am to be fined or arrested for. If she had been polite I would have told her my name and birthday. But honestly, it is against the law for her to force even that information out of me unless I have committed a crime for which she is about to write me up. We supposedly do have basic human rights in Canada, one of which is to not be forced to submit to spot interrogations of our personal information based on our appearance or race.

She starts to use social pressure tactics, which probably work on most of the homeless people she harasses. People with mental disabilities or shitfaced on this or that. But I actually do know how to read and research, and in case you haven't noticed, civil rights and social justice issues are a very large part of my research. It isn't communist Russia or China, it's Canada.
The True North Strong and FREEEEEEEEEE.
Being interrogated for my personal information so she can go digging in her little computer to try and find some kind of dirt to fling at me is NOT freedom. Move along, move along, illegal human.

I'm welcome at anytime to sit on my cousin's porch and have a smoke. I'm even allowed to crash in the back yard, I just can't because the raccoons and skunks scare the hell out of koala, and there's a lot of them in the green jungle that is my non-conformist uncle's back yard. You can't mow there, there are rhubarbs and various other plants as tall as your head. Heaven for racoons at night. They have their raccoon combat arena back there. Ever listen to racoons fight? Almost makes ME shit myself, never mind my mellow little dog. But I digress.

Oh right. Pressure.
She say's she's going to charge me with trespassing on my uncle's/cousin's property.

"I am allowed to be here" I say quietly. Smoke curling through my stressed out fingers.

That's not good enough for her redneck male partner. He's obviously pissed that she doesn't have me shuffling of down the street with my loads, moving along, or coming quietly into the back of the cruiser for a ride with her righteousness.
He hops the fence, stomps up the stairs, bangs loudly on the two suite doors like he's making a bust at a known gang breeding facility, can't get an answer from the obviously out and about no-shows who live there, goes around back, stomps, bangs, comes back, acuses me of not having the right to sit on this porch and smoke, and then....

He grabs my pack.

I have nothing.
All my paintings, my musical recordings collected over the years, my few good books, my computer, I lost all those things when some fucking asshole gangsters tried to dummy me up in my house I was renting.

The only things I have are in that pack, and none of them are sentimental.
It is a survival pack, with a -35 degree rated sleeping bag, a military tarp, DOG FOOD, a small pouch of documents necessary to try and get SHELTER/WELFARE, a pouch with tie- downs/ropes/Velcros, a slingshot to scare off crows who like to filch sandwiches, and a saw to cut wood for files or shelters.

He grabs my SURVIVAL,
takes it off of my cousins property
and goes to put it in his police car.

He stole my pack. He purposefully instigated a confrontation.

He knows if he takes it and throws it away, there will be no record, I won't be able to sue, or go to the cop shop and complain. It goes to about 2 degrees these days. I need the sleeping bag, I need the dog food. He has directly threatened my base survival and ontological security and he knows that, hungry and tired as I am I am not going to be able to let him just steal it and drive away, because like a native in the freezing Winnipeg countryside, there will be no record or recourse for me. I'm homeless, I have no rights compared to him.

My dog is confused, where is the man taking her dog food? Aren't we going to hang out with the nice cousin and the cats for a bit?

So I run out, panicked at my survial being STOLEN illegally from the side of my uncle and cousin's house, grab my pack in his hands and he immediately screams out
"You're assaulting me!!! He's assaulting a police officer!!!!"
My hands are still on the pack alone, as he then begins to whale on my head, 3 full punches aimed at my temple, then 5 knee strikes aimed at my stomach.

My Sensei in my early 20's was Farid. I didn't have money to go far in his dojo, and I turned to soft-style as well (tai chi, yoga, bo, etc.) because I needed to tone down the agression that is necessary for the whole champion thing I never wanted much of. I was into the whole wax on wax off thing really, zen and all that, but at my orange belt after a year with Farid I had learned how to avoid getting hurt. Because he could pretty much break your leg or ribs with one shot. He and his wife are excellent teachers if you ever want to go into competition. I'm more interested in the whole Aikido concept of diffusing situations and not causing harm if possible these days.

My hands were still on the pack. I'm yelling "You can't steal my pack, I've done nothing illegal"
Except be an illegal human being of course.

The blows kept coming, the screaming foaming cop assaulting homeless man continued, I made absolutely no strikes. And the neighbors came out to see the ruckus. To watch the cop continue to beat me throughout the next half hours as I continually reiterated the sequence of events loudly so my old neighbors would get the whole story, not the bullshit "he was attacking a police officer story that the two officers were trying in vain to brainwash them with. It's a good thing I'm fairly solid or I'd have a lot of bruises.

These people let their kids play with my dog.
I watched their children grow, eating berries from the lane and playing in the street I'm now lying in.

All of this, the officer stealing my pack, the officer beating the crap out of me while my hands are on my pack, him continually punching me in the back of the neck and kneeing me in the side as I'm on the ground to try and stop me from telling the assembling neighbors about what he had done,

It's all on the yuppie ashole's security camera. You know, the two cameras he has watching his nice cars and bikes from being theived. He has a contract with a local high security company to secure his property. So the whole thing is on a camera.

In jail, 18 hours later, the duty council (lawyer poor people get) smirks at me. "If it's not going to help their case against you, I don't think they'll be getting a copy of that videotape for the trial from the neighbor".

Interesting eh?
That, or it'll probably "go missing" very conveniently, unless there's an offsite backup.
Oh, as I edit this later, what do I see?
The "24 hour video surveillance monitoring" sign is suddenly gone from where it was the last 3 years. Who wants to bet that some policeman had a talk withthe owner and suddenly all traces of this evidence will disappear. That's the way things work here in Canada.
Soon they'll just flat out take bribes.

Later, as I started to write this, my cousin tells me that the officer who beat me was calling the 5 neighbors the next day. Asking if they would like to lay charges. The old Japanese (I hope it's Japanese) gentleman whose family lives across the way says "yeah, I'd like to make a statement against YOU, and the guy across the street, for what you did to Chris"

I don't think the officer took those notes down. He probably discarded the phone numbers of my neighbors that he had collected, because he got the same reaction from all of them. Gone, just like the video tape. "What witnesses, what are you talking about?"

So.
I didn't throw a single punch or kick, my neck and head are sore from being pummeled, I'm stiff all over from being stored in a 16 dgree jail cell with no headrest and no blanket, in a T-shirt (which is how they treat people in the jail, everyone is freezing the whole time) and I have to try, with no money to phone around and get legal help because I'm charged with assaulting a PEACE officer.
Kind of ironic, that title.
PEACE officer.

Of course, non of this really matters does it? Because I'm an illegal human.

And finally, I have to relate another previous incident. Because the prosecutor trotted the third hand information out in court to make me look evil and dastardly.

A couple months ago, I was down on Hastings street, going to the Canadian tire to get a cart for my homeless wandering. So I'm standing next to the Waldorf hotel, which is only a tiny bit less scuzzy than it once was.

Two crackheads start jiving me. Puffing themselves up. 2 skinny little scumbags acting tough. No front teeth, splotchy red marks on their skin (aids maybe), dirty and scruffy, they try to pick a fight with me when I tell them to fuck off and leave me alone. Instead of fucking off, they try to get a fight going even more, harassing me. So I wave them off with my little 4" inch knife. Not that I need it, I could fight these two with one hand tied behind my back, but I'm sick of wasting time with their shit.

They take off, flag a cop, and tell him I was attacking them. I was minding my own fucking business until they started razzing me. 15 minutes later I have six cops surrounding me on hastings street, guns drawn, me on the ground. A female cop pulls out my little bag of LACTAID pills and TYLENOL and starts screaming at me -"you're a fucking drug dealer" over and over.
They throw me in an ambulance and drag me off to St. Paul's to have a chat with a psychologist, where for 2 hours I have cops trying to grill me illegally for my personal information, even though I've been told over and over that I'm not being charged with anything. They checked everything out, and apparently the two crackheads are off to jail, the psychologist is looking at the detective who dragged me there, asking him "Why did you bring him here? he's not crazy at all." Three hours later I walk out of the hospital, a day wasted, cold, hungry, all my stuff and money locked up at the cop shop, no bus pass.

And there, in court the other day, the prosecutor trots this story out, recolors it to say I was attacking the two crackheads, makes no mention of the outcome, relates with great trepidation and fear that I was assessed for craziness at St. Paul's, but neglects to mention the outcome of that assessment.

In case you haven't clued in, Mr. Railroading Prosecutor, police are often called by the actual ASSHOLES in an incident, so that the decent person gets harassed, until the cops actually figure out what's going on. I wasn't charged and this is being used as evidence against me in my "assaulting a police officer by grabbing my pack out of his hands so he couldn't steal it" charge.


I do have to say though, innocent or guilty, if you are in jail you eat WAY better than any homeless person in Vancouver. It's just 2 ham sandwiches, juice, fruit and cookies, but it comes 3 times a day every single day. Homeless people have to walk miles between the various places that only serve one meal a week. Miles from their home communites, just to eat.

#6 - NDP secret election plan - Massively increased sentences for large scale white collar crime/fraud and Public Servant crime !!!

If Mulroney really took a bribe for the airbus, he should be up for a 20 year sentence.

That fucker in the whole gomery shitfest should have gotten 20 fucking years. Not 3 years.
He was laughing at us all on tv, the fucking prick.

Some corporate fucker bilks hundreds of thousands of Canucks out of millions of dollars, minimum 20 fucking years.

Give the RCMP more of a mandate to investigate and prosecute corporate fraud.

In most poor places in canada, if you offered $500, 000 to have someone killed someone would probably take you up on the gig.

So make corporate or government employee fraud of over $300, 000 worth the same amount of jailtime as 1st degree murder.

#5 - NDP secret election plan - Let them have their fucking drugs already !!!!!

Millions of Canadians use drugs.

Weed. Coke. Ecstacy. LSD. Magic Mushrooms. and on and on.
Stop trying to lock them up for it. Its a socially acceptable way to stigmatize and criminalize large numbers of the canadian population.

And Jack - a HUGE chunk of those potheads and mushroom munchers are already in the NDP fanbase.

Tap in to the zone you fool. Get with it you ungroovy wallflower.

Make your average Canuck going to the bar with his couple of does of whatever the fuck he wants to snort/pop/smoke/and even inject LEGAL. Anythings under the amount it takes to kill a fucking human should be legal.

I can go to the liquor store and I can buy enough BOOZE to KILL 10 people legally.
seriously. I can buy 30 x 60 oz bottles of booze at a liquor store. If 10 people drank 3 of those each in 4 hours they would be dead.

So let any hardworking Canadian who wants puff a joint after work, snort a line before they go out, or pop and E before they dance all night....LET THEM for fuck's sake.

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." - Albert Einstein

Let them grow thieir own weed so they don't have to buy it. Let them grow their own tobacco plants.

I can make a hundred litres of wine and beer in my basement, but if I grow a couple pot plants for myself to smoke I'm a criminal?
Fuck off with this CHRISTIAN prohibition shit already. The RCMP and local police have better things they could be doing than busting potheads and working class drug users.

50+ years of prohibition hasn't made everyone a fucking clean freak.
Don't believe me?

Try this.
If we could immediately freeze all of the drugs in Toronto,
the TSE would fucking collapse in a day and you all fucking know it

#4 - NDP secret election plan - Federal Election Reform - for real !!!!!

Elections have become a one horse show of finger pointing and bullshit.
Let's cut through the bullshit before we get American-style rigged election and electoral fraud.

The NDP's largest supporter base is among the working and poor classes. Potentially the great majority of Canadians.

1. Make voting mandatory.
Put a choice after all the candidates so people can choose "none of these candidates represents my views". So if they don't want to pick the least bad of a rotten bunch they can choose that.

If voting was mandatory for everyone of age, and your drivers license and tax returns hinged on you actually voting, millions of votes would pile up on the NDP side.

The People that don't vote are those who don't believe any of the parties are worthy, and those working so many hours and being paid so little that they don't have the time or energy to vote. Regardless of the "law", most people of the working poor can't get time off work to vote, and many work late into the evening.

Right now, less than 1/5 of Canadians are actually responsible for getting the ruling party in power. And 10% of Canadians own 90% of the property and monetary resources.

It was designed this way. We are getting FUCKED.

If everyone of age actually votes, then we might be able to call a majority true democracy.

2. Give the RCMP more accountability for rooting out improper corporate payments to political parties.

CITIZENS are the ones who vote for their leaders. We are plunging into an American style system where corporates try to act as citizens and sway our leaders. Companies are not people, they should not have a say in our political processes AT ALL. And many of the companies currently influencing Canadian politics are really foreign subsidiaries. Remember COINTELPRO?

3. Ban computer based electoral machines. We've seen the problems in the states with these machines. One "upgrade" before an election, and whammo, the election is rigged. Paper and pen can be recounted, digital memory on foreign machines is not as reliable.

4. Dissallow all party private advertising. Each Newspaper can have a pullout section where EVERY party has the same amount of space. Each TV channel that covers electoral politics in Canada can have a 2-3 hour section where EVERY party gets the same amount of airtime.

Parties are kowtowing to every corporate dick they can suck so that they can afford bigger and better ads to slag the competition with. It's NOT democracy, it's Canadian Political Idol idiocy.

5. Make sure every election has at least 5 subjects it is centered around. Don't allow the media to focus on ONE SINGLE FUCKING TOPIC.

There's more, there is sooooooo much more, but again I'll move on....

#3 - NDP secret election plan - Federal regulation of Cellphone, Internet, Bank fees !!!!!

Canadians are getting nickel and dimed every day,
and it's poor Canadians, the working poor, who bear the brunt of these costs.

Almost everyone I know has to use pay as you go by the minute phones.
You need a credit card to get a cellphone plan, and a $20 service when it was gov't owned is now a $60 - $100 a month bill when you finish with the fees.

Communication is a basic right, and the land line is history.

Every Canadian, regardless of their credit history, should be able to get a cellphone with unlimited local calls, any time of day, with voice messaging, for $20 a month and no additional access fees.

Telco's have made their billions bilking us, now they must be reigned in.

In Britain and Scotland, and much of Europe, there are no bank machine fees.
We pay $1.50 on average. It's bullshit. Set the fee at 20 cents and make it stand firm.

Internet providers should be forced to offer basic high speed cable for $20 a month with at least 3 emails included and 5 gigs of downloads. No extra fees, except for more gigs.
But even more importantly, the gov't needs to make it illegal for the telco's and cable co's to force Canadians to buy other services in order to get basic internet.
Right now if you try to get ADSL, the telco tells you you must pay for a landline to get it, even if you have a cell and don't need a landline, if you try to get high speed cable internet, the cable co tells you that you MUST get at least a basic cable package.

The internet is necessary for children to do their schoolwork, people to communicate, to pay bills, access gov't services, etc. Everyone needs internet today, but LOTS of people have no interest in cable. 100+ channels of shit on the tv to choose from. Flipping for half an hour to find something we've only seen once, to kill time in our meat-robot brains.
This bundling of services that are not wanted is a huge scam that the gov't has allowed its corporate cronies to bilk us for years.

Rich people don't pay these fees. They all run some business or another out of their home so that they can write off all the costs of these things.

#2 - NDP secret election plan - Federal Medicare once again !!!!!

The provinces are fucking it up.

Barriers, barriers, barriers.

Anything not life threatening and you're fucked with the new american-style Canadian McMedicine.

Go to the hospital when you're elderly and you might die from a superbug, because janitorial services are done by a contractor, cleaning is done 1/10 as often as it used to be. The food services are serving up the nutritional equivalent of wieners and jello, again contracted out. MRI machines sit empty at night or night time is sold on the machine to private pet clinics and clinics for the wealthy while wait times grow. But the MRI is provided by a contractor who gets more because there aren't so many of them.

You try to get some help and you get the 3rd degree from nurses and doctors working 18 hours or more, and you spend more time waiting in a room with 20 other people than you ever did since the 40's.

No care card? sorry.

That's fucking bullshit Jack.

If you have a canadian ID that should be all you need. Nobody should be grilling you about an unpaid premium. Turn of all the administrative bullshit and make it so a Canadian can go hassle free to the doctor. That's what TAXES ARE FOR.

Shortage of doctors? Bullshit.
At every medical school let them sign up.
Your medical education paid for by the gov't
You sign a paper that doesn't let you leave Canada for 8 years, and you serve as a doctor/nurse for 10 years in Canada, then go off to the states with your experience and education and make your big wad. 8 years of service to get a free medical education.
Same with nurses and other specialists. We'll pay for it and you won't have any debt. Just stay in Canada for the allotted time.

There wouldn't be any shortage of nurses or doctors then. Even in rural practice.
Offer them tax breaks for staying an additional 4 years over the first 8.

I've got a hell of a lot more to say about this common sense shitfest, but I want to lay out the basic ideas first before I embellish them.

How the NDP could win the 2008 Canadian federal election

I don't have a huge amount of time, catching computer time on the run,
I do actually do a job search during my snippets of computer time too....

But I've got a LOT to say about our very own charlie brown act-alike Mr. Layton.
So much its going to take a week to get all of it in, I want to give him lots of input for his little round head, enough that he might say something intelligent and ballsy, instead of whining "good grief" over and over.....

but #1- top of the list,

God damnit Jack, shave the fucking 70's mustache off so we can see your upper lip.
Your wife might groove on it buddy, shudder to think, but most females under 30 are never going to trust you with any kind of upper lip hair.

How many PM's in the last 30 years had 'staches you fool?

Wake up. Smell the fucking coffee Jackie boy,
and don't go into any more TV debates without snorting a couple of rails of good coke you wishy washy pussy-whipped mumbler. Make sure there's an assistant there to bump you up during the commercials too.

We could also make him do a couple of rounds of steroids to alter his skinny frame and get some actual testosterone flowing. Buff him up a bit.

And get rid of the fucking black suits and those little-boy bow-ties. Put him in a brown pinstripe or paisley suit with a nice patterned tie. Every corporate hen sqwaking "out of the box! Out of the box!" wears a black suit while pecking the sides of their beloved fucking boxes, Jack. Get gay tailor to gather some beautiful patterned cloth and make you a sweet suit and some ties buddy.
Be eye catching. Right now you're a scrinched up Bert-head with hands sticking out of a black hole.

We'll make a man of you yet, I swear.

60 blocks for poverty services, after walking that much the day before, and then that much again, and again... Keep on running homeless ratboy !!!!

So I finally find a welfare office.
They've made it almost impossible to find them in the phone book.
And I've been sent to a "employment training program"
over 60 blocks from where I stand outside the welfare office.
The Social services is on willow and 8th
I've been told I have to go to 38th and Victoria

I'm on foot, homeless, undernourished, in need of sleep, wet....
and I have to get 60 blocks further by 2 pm tomorrow.

between here and there are a number of hills, I'm pushing my belongings,
I still haven't had a shower, I was given no information at the welfare office about where to get a meal, clothes, shower, or any other services for the homeless
I have my dog, my guitar, and my cart with my sleeping bag, dog food etc.
I also have a bad knee.
My Anterior Crucial Ligament is stretched from a ski accident 15 years ago, and working heavy jobs in Audio Visual Presentation where I was pushing half ton carts of drape over carpet has torn it further over the years.
There's a bunch of munged up cartilage in there.
I specifically told the social worker about my fucked up knee, and the fact that I have other serious medical issues for which I have to go downtown for Tuesday.
Downtown is the opposite direction from where I'm being sent.

and I have to walk 60 blocks.

To an area where I can't play my guitar for a few coins and there isn't much else and nowhere to stay.
On broadway I could make a few extra dollars a day playing my guitar.
Where I'm going isn't a neighborhood for busking.
I could play for hours and only make a toonie there.

Why isn't it next to the welly office, or closer to civilization?
Or why don't they have a van to pick people up, since they service HOMELESS people who usually are pushing their belongings.

I'm pretty sure when I get there, I won't be offered a bowl of soup, a change of clothes, a dry spot to park my cart and rest, or a shower. Somehow I doubt there will be any services near there and I'll be given a little piece of paper that tells me where to go for a shower/food etc. and that paper will point me right back to the area I just came from.

as of 11 am I'm only halfway there in the pouring rain, and I started at 7:30 on my journey.

I'm probably the only one who sees something wrong with this picture. To me this seems like a human rights atrocity.

But in a country that doesn't keep poverty statistics for fear the world will see the true picture, being given the runaround for poverty services is the norm.


So.
I finally made it.
60 blocks slogging through the rain.
Cart, dog, guitar, slogging away through the pain in my knee, which is swollen now.
Nowhere near here is ther a place to get a daily meal.
There's no shower services for the homeless anywhere near here.
I'm 100 blocks away from where I need to go for my medical appointment on Tuesday.
There's nowhere around this facility to park my stuff and crash.
The neighborhood is all Asian.
Culturally, as a demographic, Asian peoples are not receptive to busking.
It's not part of their culture. Most here are speaking native tongues.
Bob Dylan and U2 are not going to fly on the street here, and I really don't know any J-Pop off the top of my head. Not sure it would work on an acoustic anyway.
There is nowhere to crash on the streets, the sidewalks are narrow.
The parks have few trees and bushes.

The people here don't even have my information from the ministry.
I have an MCSE and a CCNA, so I don't think their "basic computer skills" course is going to be of benefit for me.

Looks like I'm fucked.
and I have to return to the office where I signed up for Social Services to bring more paperwork in next week.

My knee is swollen.

They have nice computers and printers here.
There's almost no one here. Clients I mean.
Good place to be for computer use, if I had a home.
Supposedly they're good at finding one.

She raises her eyebrows.
"well, we try..."
So what did I get?
NO information on free meals
year and a half old info on places for shelter
3 tinsof sardines, some crackers, a bottle of water, and a cellphone
for GPS tracking of the homeless my undernourished mind "paranoically" thinks, but then again, pop the battery out and it becomes disabled.

All in all, they didn't have a clue where service were.

Yet 4 days later at "The Kettle", a mental health poverty services centre that's full of people on venables at commercial, I got a full list of clothes, shelters, food banks, etc. within 3 minutes of entering, an hour later I was given some fruit and a decent sandwich, a change of clothes, and with an onsite nurses recommendation, laundry and a shower. I can't eat there often though because I'm not a mental health care recipient, they helped me out though. If you have some spare time or money you should consider helping them out.

Who would take my crazy rantings serious at all if I signed up for mental health services. Hmmm. Crazy is the new burning pyre in many societies. Waas Nietsche really mad for a while? Or maybe people didn't like what he had to say.

I've been thinking about Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris".
He probably ended up there because he was rocking the boat, and it was only after his works became more widely read that they couldn't continue to suppress his mind. Hunger paranoia again I suppose.

On Wednesday I went to the Three Bridges Clinic.
An additional 100 blocks later. On my wrecked knee.
My tire on my little dolly blew out going away from the original place I was sent to. So I hiked to 3 Bridges with a pack of my belongings.
More weight on my messed up knee.
I got no medical assistance there. My second visit. 2 visits, no examination, oops, times up Mr. Taylor, please schedule another appointment. Condescension and smirking from the doctors for the smelly half mad homeless fuck who "thinks" he's intersexed, with no examination.
No specialist referral for my knee. No examination of my extra bits. No to my other health problems. McMedicine at it's finest.

And when I left the doctors office, my guitar, my source of income, was gone.
3 Paladin McSecurity guards gobbling about like plump idiot hens, 2 security cameras operating fine, but apparently only reserved for "crimes"
And me with no medical problems addressed, and no guitar to make money for food for the rest of the month.

36 hours without food later, another 40 blocks walking, and there I was at the Kettle, food in my stomach, a nurse with no smirking condescension on her face actually listening to my health issues and making arrangements to get something done.

They are trying to destroy people at the bottom, I firmly believe,

I'm almost certain I'll be dead soon now.
But at least I'm clean and I've eaten, thanks to the Kettle, the only place I've seen that has it right, everything in one location, for people with no cars to zip around with.

Funny eh?
Frothing mad idiot homeless man has to arrange a dogsitter now for his interview tomorrow at UBC Health Sciences Learning Institute for a Q/A Analyst position. Wonder how a homeless loser manages that eh?

At least the clothes I've worn for two weeks are clean, even though a T-shirt of Shiva is not really the best interview clothes.
I really should go barefoot. My shoes reek.

I guess they would, I estimate I've walked over 40 miles in the last 2 weeks with an 80+ lb load and a dog. I should throw away the heavy tarp I guess, but it works as a tent when the sky piss comes down.

What a great life we have in Canada.

I'm writing a new version of the Canadian anthem as I go. I'll share it with you if I survive to finish it.

I'm sure I'll have lots more to add to this thread.

Gang member or RCMP - hmmmmmm.....

Being an RCMP seems to pay well.
Too bad you can't be a pothead, or I might consider

"Academy Graduate: $46002.00. annual
Top Pay: $74538.00. annual
The RCMP pays Overtime and Shift Differential for working during other then business hours. The RCMP will also pay for up to $1200.00 in post secondary education every year."

Being a gang member pays a lot more though, at least if you believe the movies, and the bling all around you on the streets. You can definately be a pothead and join a gang.

Too bad I'm such a non conformist.

I'd end up telling the big cheese to suck my dick and find myself floating in the straight with concrete shoes. Or be surrounded by the bodies of my "homies".
Depending on whether or not I had my coffee that day.

My advice for young people graduating in Canada

Young person, fresh faced and ready to take on the "thriving" Canadian job market,
listen close:

If your tongue is long and you lick ass well, you'll be rewarded well.
If you LOVE working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, you will thrive.
If you don't care that you are paying over 80% of your wage just on rent, utilities, transportation, and food, you will be happy.
If being a meat-robot is a primary goal in your life, you're set.
If you can stomach being a whore and selling your ass for money, this current economy in Canada is designed to to make you one, so just go with it if you're of that type.

If none of that appeals to you, be smart.
Avoid going to university and getting into debt for more than you will make over the next 10 years.

You'll be better off in Canada if you:

Join a gang and work hard for your organized crime boss

Grow pot. Its not very dangerous, and you'll have money and pot to smoke. The cops will steal it from you if they can so hide it well. Don't be a schmuck, do it right. Nobody likes kife weed.

Sell any other drug. It pays better than McDick's. Try not to stoop to crack, but hey, money is money.

Steal from rich people. May sure you get their PIN if you beat the crap out of them.
Try not kill them, but remember, they want you dead if you're not in the same class as them. So have at it.

Steal from large faceless corporations at any opportunity, even if you have to smack a lock or two to make off with da goods. Security guards are warrior pawns, sad to say, so whack em before they get that talkie squelching.

Lie to all people in authority or higher classes when they ask if you are a devout servant of their GOD. Say yes. Try not to believe the bullshit coming out of your mouth. When they bow to pray hit them over the head and take their wallet.

Destroy all hummers and porsche vehicles you see. If you want to show off your "bling" drive something old and cool and tricked out. Keying is second best to destruction.

Give money to buskers and wandering wizards. The ghost of Robin Hood will bless you.

You'll be so much better off if you start selling drugs right out of high school.

Being a whore fucks up your head. It's better to be a pimp or pimpette.

Try not to get too high on your own supply. It's better to have variety so trade with your competitors. Remember to say hello to their little friends. It's the polite thing to do.

sing Happy Fucking Birthday to me while you resolve to follow my good advice.

More amazing quotes from the masters...

They dedicate their lives to running all of his
He tries to please them all, this bitter man he is
Throughout this life the same, he's battled constantly
This fight he cannot win. A tired man they see...no longer cares.
The old man then prepares to die regretfully
That old man here is me.

- J. Hatfield

"Ours is the age, that is proud of machines that think
 and suspicious of men who try to".
- M. Jones


These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave...
-S. O'connor

Revolution in their minds - the children start to march
Against the world in which they have to live
And all the hate thats in their hearts
They're tired of being pushed around
And told just what to do
They'll fight the world until they've won
And love comes flowing through
- O. Osbourne

Artists and writers, creatives that I like...

So in this post, which I'll add to every once in a while, I'm going to put the better links to works by creative artists I admire in all mediums.

There's a lot of them, but I want to link to sites with better quality images and biographies, so I'll add to it slowly.

Johfra Bosschart

H.R. Giger

Hieronymus Bosch


The list will grow I promise, but back to my job search...

The Sentence

I'm writing on paper....
devouring trees.

Newspaper I read,

scavenging
scraps of information,
I throw it down,
pick up another,

Sit on my oak chair, at my ash table...

Wood,
so beautiful,
it's bones laid bare.

Many times I have killed trees as they spoke,
they never finished their sentence,
and I'm reading this sentence.

Maybe I can write smaller,
use it again,

Maybe I can burn a log slower,

or put it out with white bleach poisoned water.

I can sit on a stump
in a vast plain of tree-bones,
no shade in sight,

only a spectre.

from "A Voice of Dissent"
-C. Taylor

Good for Nothing

Good for Nothing

-C. Taylor

Unsightly,
isn't it ?

This ragged man,
holes in his clothes
burning your pride

with his scribbled words about
injustice

and hunger,
amidst plenty.

Why can't he just shut up and be happy ?

Not everyone can be well off

he should serve coffee,
or gas

not hurt people
with visions

of the scars of the world.

"Don't judge a book by it's cover",
he's saying,

“my mind burns

like the sun,

and my soul touches

the blood of this earth,

rock that moves like water..."

How can we believe
his crazy rantings,

he is only a bum,
good for nothing.

----------------------
From the book
"The Butcher's Block: Poems of Poverty"
by Chris Taylor
-------------------------

Stargate Atlantis - happened to me there...Beyond R.Cooper Stealing my concepts and not paying me...

So here's what  happened to me at Stargate Atlantis - beyond R.Cooper Stealing my concepts and not paying me... does any of this sound like hypocrisy if you look at the content of their show?

I have been discriminated against and ripped off by a film production company in vancouver.

I am also going to write an article on my blog later about how hard it is to file a human rights complaint in BC and Canada, there is no email links, not because email is not secure, a secure form can be made, it's so there won't be an easily trackable complaints process. I need assistance in this, the police in vancouver are being paid by these rich people to attack me and shut me up for standing up for my rights.


"No one gets left behind...."
right.
So its 6 months later,
I still don't have any work
broke and homeless

My buddy tells me to keep my mouth shut,
"You'll never work in the Vancouver film scene again!"
he exclaims.

Like I fucking care.

I never worked in film in Vancouver before,
each company I sent and received work to while I was at Atlantis has posted a position since I left, and I didn't get a phone call, never mind an interview.
Blackballed for sticking up for myself.

despite knowledge, skill, talent, ability, creativity, efficiency...

1.
The Starry eyed hopeful Techie gets shafted

So I get this call. A gig in TV.
Sounds good. The dude likes the fact that I know Lightwave, even though the position is "VFX IO"

I agree to come on board at a ridiculously lowballed starting wage.
I had asked for $3500 a month.
I got offered $500 a week, with it going up to $700 a month later.
That's before tax BTW.
Shitmoney in an expensive metropolis like Vancougar, but "a foot in the door" I figure, like so many idiots before me.
Multimillion dollar TV show, and I'm being offered $500 a week to do actual technical work that requires brain cells.
10 bucks a fucking hour basically.
To put that in perspective, Production Assistants(coffee gatherers and clipboard holders) make almost $15 plus they get overtime, and janitors at the Bridge facility make over $15 hr.
An actual Editor makes $3k-$4k a WEEK, and an Assistant Editor makes somewhere around $6k-$8k a month. So I'm lowballing when I talk about what a VFX Editor makes.

The guy who hires me isn't the people I actually work under.
He's a cool cat, excellent 3D animator and art director type dude, interesting to talk to. A teeny bit uptight and stingy, but hey, that's what contracted supervisory roles do to people.

So I get to work.
Never had money for a Mac, but I'm a Mac technician as part of my long experience with Network Systems Administration, and a couple of different technical roles in the publishing industry.
I have to get up to snuff on Final Cut Pro.
No problem. I study applications for a living.
Make some nice word documents with all the shortcuts that would be useful laid out in large text, print em off, tape em up all over, and get to it.
Its not like its rocket science. Maybe it is to some people, but I've used, studied, and taught the usage of a couple hundred applications in my career.

The HD timeline templates are already in place, its just a matter of tweaking my compression settings and getting proper overlays for timecode in place.

Basically I get a list of VFX shots, broken down into the various separate shots, called elements that together when compositied with special fx make the final shot. I find the elements, set the in and outs for them, output the elements to frame sequences, and organise/package them on removeable disks for the FX vendors who are contracted to take the elements they get from me and put the shot together.

Its called pulling plates. Its what a Visual Effects Editor does.

If a shot comes back and someone needs to compare the last version recieved of the shot with the latest one, or needs to check the footage recieved from the vendors for compression or some other bad fuggum, or needs to look at the various elements and raw footages that make up a shot, they come to me.
I also make log DVD's of intermediate show "cuts" with frame accurate timecode burned in so the VFX coordinators can "log" the shots, check them for accuracy as to what was requested. The "selects" process of collecting and trimming elements can be over 2000 mouse clicks for one episode if it has a lot of VFX, since a single 4 element shot takes about 18 mouse clicks and 3 cut-pastes

Like I said, it's basically what a Visual Effects Editor does.
VFX Editors make about $400 a day. I make $500 a week.

There's always those who talk about learning curves and blah blah blah.
I was up and running in 2 weeks and didn't even have real shit coming down the pipeline yet when I was ready to go.

In the first month I had all my timecode burns set properly, labels for log dvd's set and ready, extensive keyboard shortcut tweaking to make "selecting" the elements fast as possible, compression settings to fit full log cuts on a dvd with the highest visual quality and frame accuracy, etc.

I always take my work seriously. I'm a pro at whatever I do. I always streamline processes, and important people actually ask my advice on things. Its always been this way.

So the month goes by, I've been kicking ass, what I do is running smoothly, despite the fact that I actually need more ram and a faster pipeline between my two workstations, since things bottleneck fast at HD image sizes, but I'm rocking.

And the $200 raise doesn't come.

Everyone is busy, these are important people, there is an accounting department, I'm sure it will work out. 3 weeks later I actually have to bother my busy supervisor about the raise, and when it comes through a month later, guess what? I don't get the $200/week for the month previous.

Someone just put $800 in their pocket and it wasn't me.

So I choke on it, cause what are you gonna do.

I work the whole of Season 4, and get hired back for Season 5, I guess because I did good work.

But no more raises. I don't get a single other raise in Season 4, and I get hired back in Season 5 at the same wage.

You see, by changing the name of the position from what it is, to something else, a la "sandwich artist", the wage of $400 and the film CREDIT that a VFX Editor would get suddenly disappears into someone's pocket, and the "VFX I/O" is born. Gets around unions, and those credit things add up to big money over time.

Not for me though. Damn my ass is fucking sore from this shit.

I gotta say, the VFX coordinators that I worked with were good laid back people. Post was a bit more snooty on occasion, but mostly positive and nice.

Even the supervisor Mark Savela who reamed my ass with this rip-off wage shit was actually a nice guy to talk to, but still, getting fucked is getting fucked. I guess he made a nice $40k+ bonus in Season 4

So I finally said "Honey, I'm not enjoying this..."


2.
The Experienced Techie Consultant Screwover

I fucking hate this one. It's the eternal ass-rip. It never ends.

So there I am, Season 5. I have a new office. No raise, but I got a new office of my own and no longer have to share the former broom closet with the IT dude.

One day, in walks a Lead Compositor.
She's unnamed at this point, but preggo by a good number of months. Nice lady, obsessively compulsive and perfectionist like all good compositors are.

So it's a hot day, and she walks into my office with a heavy wool jacket all buttoned up. No pregnant woman in her hot flashing right mind would be wearing that on a day like today, and the sweat on her brow isn't even from the jacket.

She's nervous. Because she's been sent on a mission.

You see, this is TV land, where micro miniaturization is only a couple of years behind the early adopters in Spookland. And those fuckers had cameras the size of a pinky way back in the early 70's.

So she's got this heavy wool jacket, and it's covered in camera buttons.

Yeah, that's what I said, camera buttons. I'm an early adopter of technology and I study surveillance gear for fun. The buttons on the front of her jacket, most are lookalike duds, but the center one is a camera button, and she's got her hands in her pockets, resting on the baby bulge, so she can steady that camera button and aim it. She's trying to look like she's just hanging out asking some simple questions, but she's not an actress.

You see, on set they have a multimillion dollar camera problem that's affecting the cost of compositing in the pipeline.

The compositors are getting crappy dirty source footage, and the 2 million dollars per episode "Video Village" truck with it's team of 4 "professionals" isn't making it better at all over the last 4 months. That's quite a few million bux.

So someone, like her boss, has sent her over to my office.

To pick my brain. She makes more than twice as much as me, the other people involved in this nasty video stew shitfest make humungous amounts of cash more than I do, and they've sent her to pick my brain.

She's obviously not happy about and is squirming. Because anyone with 2 or more braincells knows that its a shitty thing to do.

I've been in this situation a few times.

Now, you're probably asking yourself why a bunch of video pro's with a fancy new HD pipeline would be wanting to pick the brain of a lowly "VFX I/O" who makes $10 an hour.

I've said it before and here it comes again.
I'm a professional at almost everything I do. My memory is borderline photographic, my observation and analysis skills are top-notch, and I've been studying visual effects since I was 12 years old and first learned how to blow up plastic models with mothballs and gasoline and make planets from painted beach balls with lights inside them.

So.
A consultant would make about 5% of the amount saved by the results of his consultation on a problem. Along with all those big wig producer folks and their golden slaps on the back.

I'm not gonna get those prizes, someone else will, and I know it.
So I look straight at the camera button, watch her squirm a bit more, ask her why she's asking me. Her boss said I might have some "suggestions".

$10 bux an hour and I'm being asked for suggestions. I snort derisively while giving the little camera button the evil eye. I bet they had a good laugh when they watched that later.

So we pull up one of the scenes that's recently been giving her problems.
I look at the footage closely.

Its the central command of a Wraith hive, with a couple of actors playing plastic gun shootemup, and dry ice smoke swirling about. Smoke is a killer for compositors, but I can see almost immediately what's up.

Smoke moves with a stringy motion caused by "brownian movement", this has little dots that point to algorithmic manipulation. A program or device has inserted its own approximations into the clip. There is also clear evidence of video gain being used to processes the footage.

I've been doin this shit for years.

I ask her some questions about the pipeline, since I've never been on set, and I've never talked to these particular camera crews, except when I'm having a smoke maybe. I ask a few more questions until I get the full picture.

Pregnant as she is, she refuses to sit down, see she has to get both me and my monitor in the field of view. Pregnant women do not stand for 45 minutes when they can sit. Analysis takes time, and I'm stretching it to see how important this is to her. Damn she's sweating in that coat.

So I tell her....

First of all, scrap the "Video Village"
I'm paid shit, so I don't give a fuck about the white collar uptight yuppie fucks who will moan at my suggestions. I'm telling it like it REALLY is and NEEDS to be for the best QUALITY.
Because I'm about quality.

So.
1. Scrap the big truck and the techs.
2. Put the best quality lenses on the HD cams and set all filters OFF and all camera gain to default. Camera gain and filters introduce NOISE. Turn it all off and go with top level optics.
3. Put a dedicated high quality video amplifier directly at the output of the HD cams and connect the P2 drives directly to the high quality amplifier.
4.If the output is digital from the camera, still don't put anything in the pipeline to the p2, add gain in post
5. Take the P2 footage directly to ingest and do not touch it anywhere between the P2 drive and Ingest.

She asked me "why?" at a number of points. I gave her my scientific explanations. I gave her comments gleaned by long conversations with HD cameramen , tech geeks, and editors at smoke breaks and coffeeshops

And that's all I get out of it. A thank you. A big fuck you techie.
Damn my ass hurts.

I thought about it later.
The reason for the Video Village, is the same reason that recording artists are forced to use recording facilities owned by their record companies.
It's all about the money flow.
Save a bunch of money on this and that, switching to digital let's say, and suddenly there is a big wad of cash sitting there. The head company has to find a way to get that money out of Canada, so they send up the Video Village. It's not REALLY there to do anything at all, except to make sure that 2 million dollars per episode goes straight down to the states, instead of remaining in Canada and circulating in the Canadian economy.

3. Alchoholics, Weedheads, Powderheads and Hypocrites

So this lead Editor and Production Manager are telling me about
The Old Days
plates of coke held under their nose by Directors
So they can keep editing while they snort
Free. Piles of it. Just keep the slicer rolling and churn it out.

The Old Days.
Hmmm.

This is the bloody movies.
Vancouver sells itself as the little Canadian lap dog
starting to get big
Big names on the screen.
Tell me there's no blow.
Seriously tell me about multi millionaire stars coming to Vancouver to shoot
And tell me they go cold turkey while they're here

Fucking bullshit.
That's part of why I hate that Intervention show so much
The film industry has been hand in glove with drugs since its earliest forms

Don't get me wrong, I LIKE drugs.
I think they should all be legal
the only thing that should ever matter
is are you being a dick.

3/4 of any film crew in Canada are serious alcoholics
Like drink a 26'er and then some to yourself each Saturday,
They've got money to burn when they're working
My cameraman friend says they'll never really get hired on other productions after Atlantis
Because people "know"
I figure the crew on his gig probably drinks as much, he just doesn't hang with drinkers so much anymore.

I have my 3 or 4 beers and I'm just fine, I did my bottle slinging long ago
I didn't meet more than 2 people while I was there who actually drank less than me.
I smoke my little joints of crappy dimebag weed
Every pothead (there are lot's, believe me) I've ever met in film
has a connection to the good ganja
half a doobie and you're begging for it to be put out
space weed
I could never afford that stuff,
but I'll gladly smoke it.

Could you imagine some big star in Van, heard about the glistening BC Bud for years
They sure don't send him down to the streets to get it.
It gets delivered. Hotel, set, wherever, and no ones gonna stop it
because they shouldn't really
and why would big stars come here, if not for the perks they get everywhere else
If the VPD or RCMP were to clean up the movie lots of drugs,
no big productions would ever come here again and everyone knows it.

We have a HUGE hypocrisy problem in Canada
The rich man can chomp his illegal cigar at a table where he eats
They'll escort him to a special room with a big poofy chair
Get blow or weed delivered
Drink spirits that are illegal to purchase here

But a poor man,
sitting by some tracks
with a couple cans of beer and a joint
listening to birds
is a "drunk" or "junkie"

While plates of blow still fly up noses
And honestly
no one goes insane and kills people or self explodes
There are Hollywood and Hollywood North parties all the time
Plates of blow on the table
As much of anything you like
And they don't die by the dozens
Betty Ford is only for those who get caught

Those are the fear stories, the fnords we are programmed with.

So why do I bring this up?
Who cares, thousands of dollars of coke and weed a day go through Wall st.
and every major film lot

Everybody knows that, why bring it up?

Because, for some reason, throughout my job at Atlantis, from at least 8 different people, things were said to me that insinuated that I was some kind of former(or current) heavy alcoholic, or druggie. It was as if, before I got hired, someone had gone around telling people
"We have this guy, a total washup druggie alkie, who we're hiring cheap"
And almost every time I saw that in their eyes, the funny thing was, I was looking at an alcoholic who drank more than me. The expensive shit too, not the $2 tall can of cheap beer. The $50 to $100 a bottle shit. People who, at one time or another(or a few times) in their past life, had more than $100 worth of coke in them. People who had done lots of drugs in their mid 20's to 30's.

I really fucking hate hypocrisy.


4.I know how many people think I'm crazy.
Talking about pedophile rings, sick little covens hell bent on human sacrifice, cia backed canadian gangs and film production company fronts, cointelpro in canadian coffee shops, corruption in gov't and law enforcement, human rights violations in our friendly happy land of poverty....

I really don't give a shit if you want to believe I'm crazy.
There's a reason I run into these things, I've been a target for a while.
I got used to it by the time I was 20.
It still wears me down.
I could cry I guess,
but I decided to pick up stones and swing my slingshot
long ago I decided that.
Like when I was 12 and knew I wasn't going to get anywhere
in this "suck rich cock to succeed land of ever present bullshit and stupidity"

Fuck.

I'm one of those guys that talks this shit on the coffee shop patio
I'm one of the reasons you can't smoke on a patio anymore
to shut people like me up
fucking sheep we've become

Live music in Vancouver pretty much sucks these days
they've migrated to colder cities with warmer hearts for live music.

So I know there are a lot of people who are mad at what I've said about my stint at Stargate Atlantis. Suck my dick, its true.

I came back to Van in Jan. 2003
I spent that winter-spring-summer hanging at a coffeeshop on commercial drive
shivering with various other malcontents on the patio as we smoked and bitched about the destruction of culture and the rise of the new culture of misery

I am fucking serious about Robert C. Cooper ripping me off at that coffee shop across from the park.
with his little marantz recorder
asking me about what I thought about Atlantis, the lost city.
I know a lot about myths and science fiction.
I told him I thought it was not an island, but an island submarine, it didn't sink, it submerged
and after he pried and dug more I suggested that it was never found because it launched into space a la Eric Von Daniken. Of course it went on a journey of enlightenment, but if they ever made a movie about it they'd fill it with something stupid like "Army vs. Space Vampires"
Then I was talking about my "universal power block" idea which I've been going on about for a few years. Sound familiar? Is it zed or zee?

this is in 2003, early summer late spring

I know you don't believe it. But it's true,
and someone is out there whohas worked with the bastard and hates Robert Cooper.
Someone who has heard him boast about ripping off that crazy hippie cat.
Maybe they even have a copy of that cassette, or one of Robert boasting.

So consider that all of the nasty assholes I've run into in the last 2 years, all of the people trying to bring me down, losing my place, people tracking me, gangsters actually trying to drug and kill me, all of this started AFTER I started working for Stargate. As soon as they had my address, robert had people targeting me to mess me up.
Think about it. I may never be able to prove he stole some ideas from me, but he doesn't want to take the chance, he's made a couple million off of even a couple of the ideas he snarfed from me sitting at Turk's, I'm a loose end, he has connections through the entertainment industry to gangsters. He tried to get me discredited, f'd up, and possibly even killed.
I can't prove it at all, but I've been a target for assholes since I gave my original address to my SA employers. Don't believe me, I really don't give a shit.
But when I disappear of get sick and die, keep in mind, I'm healthy right now.
Other than a hernia, a f'd knee, I have had recent xrays and I have no cancers in my chest or abdomen. I state right now that someone in the next year is probably going to try and kill me in a staged "mugging" or I'll be poisoned somehow. If you trace it all back, like anyone would care, it's going to point to R. Cooper. Call me paranoid, it doesn't mean I'm not right about being a loose end some rich fuck wants to tie up.

Would you set some gangster assholes after someone if that person could cause you to lose more than $500k? Seriously, you just gotta shut them up and you'll have tons of cash for life?

I wondered a lot why they hired me at SA. Why people said wierd things during my time there like "this is the guy!" "This is him?" lot's of odd looks. Like something wierd was going on behind the scenes. Questions out of the blue about what I'd do if something I wrote was stolen. I wondered about it a lot, I've been doing Info Tech for the last 10 years, why hire me instead of a film school brat. It was tweaking me the whole time I was there. As soon as they had my address for administration, the shit started happening in my life. The house I was renting rooms out to people in suddenly filled with gangsters and whores. Tagged for removal.

Maybe my punker friend will realize that she witnessed the ripoff sitting there at Turks that day, and that might be why she's having some hard times too. Another loose end.

I'll never be able to prove it unless someone else speaks up
All those people on the crew, RC had to boast to someone.
Consider, if the lighting guy works all day on a scene, and the props person spent a week on the set, is it cool to send them home with no money?? How about credit? If someone works on a show, in a gig where they are supposed to get credit, does everyone just laugh and say "oh well" if they get their credit ripped off? You there, Ms. Coordinator, would you laugh off the removal of your credit? Or your salary?


I can write, that's all I can do I guess, short of amassing an arsenal.
and I write a lot of satire and science fiction
so get prepared this coming year
for the online novella

"Space Tunnel to Asslandia"

You'll laugh so hard you piss yourself
I guarantee it....

The You Tube version will be even better, when I can get something faster than a 486 to work on. I'm an animator/artist/writer so maybe I'll make something funny enough that every SA fan will want a copy sitting beside their box set.

I'll make the RC character a bit like Kenny, dying 10 times per episode in some disgusting way, only to be revived for his next unpleasant death.


5.
Outed by a Sharpie Pen

I was at Atlantis less than 2 weeks when this humongous fat bitch named Allison
(about 350-400 lbs of fat bitch I'd say, and I don't normally give fat people a hard time, but that's fucking obese)
She comes up and offers me some highliters.

I'm a pro at what I do, technical stuff.
I needed bright colors.
So I chose yellow, bright green, and PINK.
OMG I chose a pink pen.

"Oh, so you're one of those..." she intones, in front of the guy who hired me.
It's hard not to get a bit red faced when someone who is clearly a hetero fag hater outs you.
I did my best to let it slide.

But the back story is:
I'm bisexual and have an Intersex anatomy.
Let's clarify:
on the Kinsey sexuality scale
I would be a 1 or 2
anyway, I did my best to let it slide.

But that was the beginning of constant harassment by this cow.
5 fucking months of it.
Backstabbing gossip,
the wonderfully childish sounds of lisping speech every time I'd walk by a group

culminating in the "cheese incident"

where about $50 worth of cheeses went missing from the fridge
and it was pinned on me by The Cow.

Oddly enough, I'm severely lactose intolerant, so only one pack of that cheese would even be edible to me, and more than 2 slices in a day would give me the most severe heartburn you could imagine.

Details like that don't really matter though, not in "high school".
I mean work.

For 5 months I hid out and did my work as efficiently as possible.
Avoided the kitchen at lunch to reduce opportunities for so and so to slag me for whatever the infraction of the day would be.
Smoked twice as much as usual,
because it kind of stresses me out to be in an environment where I'm a target for bored children and their finger pointing games.
Fucks with your ontological security

After 5 months of ever increasing harassment, someone else in my department (vfx) finally stepped in.

So for the last 4 months of work I had peace.
And she wasn't there at the start of Season 5 when I was rehired.

It's not like you can really do anything about stuff like that.
You just have to put up with it.
There's no number to call.
No one's going to slap her on the fingers for it.
Complaining just gets you fired, not matter how much the attacks hurt your feelings.

Fucking screaming monkeys flinging their own shit at each other.
My, how we've grown.
So much for the efficacy of evolution.

Sometimes I wish it was a more primitive time, when you could just split your oppressor's head in two with an axe and pay their family the blood price.

6.
Headbanger Karaoke Shitslinging

So my final months of Season 4 were peaceful and productive, and I gradually felt like less of an outsider. Less I say. It wasn't like I was suddenly accepted.

Around Christmas time the people in Post where my job was (a vfx "I/O" in Post) went out for karaoke.

It stank like a setup.

I'm over 40. I know the feel of a set up. Inwardly I cringed at the thought of being subjected to cruel renditions of Boy George or George Michaels.

But I knew I had some chance to shine and fight back the playschool taunting.
I started in music as a singer. In fact I started in choir with a 4 octave range, and then went in to rock.

So what kind of knives would I be stabbed with?
Ahhhhh.
It was glam metal.
You see, I had grown my rocker hair back while working at Stargate Atlantis.

So, after listening to awful renditions of White Tiger(actual, Ryan did pretty good with the White Tiger), Poisoned, Crue, Warrant, etc. and every other spandex jerk off schlock that I hated throughout my teens, it was my turn.

When I went into rock, as I mentioned before, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Roger Waters, etc. were where I started.

So I sang "Lithium"
"- Light my candles in a daze, cause I found god, yeah yeah.....!"
I could practically see their hair blowing back.
because I'm actually pretty good.

So each round I had to counter less and less cheese with something rocking and fucking good, until it finally became what it should be, a bunch of drunk people singing together and having fun.

Setups like that are just a symptom of an underlying bitchfest, that creepy shitflinging crap that anyone who is outside of the norm is used to.

9 months of getting the job done and being professional and efficient doesn't matter.

Monkeys need targets for their shit.
If they throw their shit at someone else, then the other monkey won't see that they've shit.

I really did like working there a lot. The shit flinging and lisping behind the back crap is standard practice in the workplace in Canada.

You just get used to working and living while smothered in shit.
And try not to let it stick to you too much when you go home.