The Grumpy Owl

pic nicked from here

“The D.R. is baseball’s puppy mill. The buscones develop and sometimes feed and house these teenage players, with the intent of selling them to the highest bidder, a major league team willing to fork over thousands, if not millions, of dollars to secure a prospect. As a reward for their work, buscones typically pocket 25% to 50% of the prospect’s signing bonus. Many folks in the Dominican Republic resent being labeled a buscón because of the term’s other connotation: swindler.”

pic nicked from here

“Baseball, which has been played in the D.R. since the late 19th century, glorifies the rags-to-riches tales of so many Dominicans who make it to the majors. But buried beneath these charming yarns are the often cruel, sometimes criminal, ways in which all that Dominican talent gets curated. The absence of a school-based sports system forces teams to lean on buscones like Papiro. These trainees find prospects, sometimes as young as 11 or 12 years old, and tutor them in baseball so they can be signed once they turn 16. Buscones often pull kids out of school — Papiro’s players, for example, attend class once a week — to focus them on baseball. They have huge economic incentives to cheat. Age fraud and performance-enhancing drugs, which in the Dominican Republic can be bought like candy, are rampant. The families of these players see the sport as the only way out of abject poverty.”

“Over the past decade, just 2% of Dominican players who signed with a team have made it to the majors. The country’s roadsides are lined with the failures — those who gave up school to chase a baseball career only never to see a single offer from a big-league club. Baseball has provided many real economic benefits to the Dominican Republic, plus immeasurable psychic delights to its citizens. But with these benefits comes a great social cost. “It borders on child exploitation when you’re a dream merchant,” says Charles Farrell, an American based in the D.R. who is trying to start a baseball-centric high school there, “and not delivering the dream.”

–Baseball Dreams: Striking Out in the Dominican Republic – Time Magazine

Tags: baseball, D.R., Dominican Republic, exploitation, kids

Tags: Canadian idol, Khuram Sher, terrorist

Subway, Lifeblood

“As a kid growing up in the eightees’ who naturally gravitated towards GrandMaster Flash, The RockSteady Crew and writing graffiti, I always had an affinity for the New York City subway during the late 70′ and early 80’s. It represented the blood-filled arteries of a city pumping with organic, authentic, city-brewed culture. It was covered with tags and pieces while filled with people of every size, shape, age and color. It was reckless and untamed and most importantly, it was New York City.”

Tags: lifeblood, new york city, new york subway, nyc, photography, subway

Is Rob Ford a fat fuck or is he just fucking fat?

Rob Ford squints at the world through little swine eyes while wearing novelty ties.  In a panicked, squealing falsetto, he says things like:  ”I can’t support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.”  He thinks “orientals” are “slowly taking over.” He gets so drunk and shouts so many insults that he stands out at the hockey game.  He gets charged with assaulting and making death threats against his wife.  Most recently, it turns out he was caught with a joint in Florida and has just said about immigrants: “Right now we can’t even deal with the 2.5 million people in this city. I think it is more important to take care of people now before we start bringing in more people.”  He stands a decent chance at being Toronto’s next mayor.

It’s hardly surprising.

A lot of people say those sorts of things and some of them actually believe them.

The good news is that you’ll never hear Rob Ford say: “Let them eat cake.”  You will, however, hear him say, “I have no idea where the cake went.  Really you left it there?  Nope, never saw it.”  And then he’ll wipe some icing off his chins.

"My dinner was this big."

Though often portrayed as being a right winger, Rob Ford is not any sort of winger.  Wings require flapping and flapping is a lot  like exercise.  Rather, he is a radical populist and a demagogue.  He panders to the bigotries of the common man and pretends such pandering is policy.  He presents no conservative theory of government or economics and his appetite for bon-bons is best described as liberal.

His comment “I think it is more important to take care of people now before we start bringing in more people” is about as far away from any genuine conservatism as you can get.  He seems to think the government should be taking care of people.  That it should be in charge of bringing people in.  That it should act as a brutal nanny enforcing the prejudices of the populace while rewarding its worst instincts.  Probably with ice-cream cake.  If there’s any left.

Mr Ford’s comments would make more sense if they were about the food on his table.  “I think it’s important that we take care of this steak before we bring in seconds and dessert” would be a sensible policy.  It’s probably not one he has ever believed in.

He explains his remarks and describes his perfect world thus: “I’m going to play the cards that I’m dealt and you know what? More people will come. But in a perfect world, what I’m saying is that I would like to deal with the 2.5 million first.” His goal is not smaller government but a government that deals with each of its citizens just like he deals with each of his fries.

I do not want to deal with the government.  I wish it did not deal with me. Like Rob Ford, the government is a fat fuck.

I’m married to an immigrant from America who brought herself in.  We do not need the government to take care of us.  We need it it to get out of our way and allow us to build our life together.   We just want to make some money and buy some shit.  Right now, our greatest obstacle to doing either is the government.  If someone wants to work and can get a job, they should be allowed to.  This does not steal jobs – it makes them.  The free movement of people and goods does not damage the economy – it is the economy.

Unlike Mr. Ford, whose job is paid for by my tax dollars, we do not intend to suck at the government’s teat.  From the looks of him, that milk is fattening, from the sound of him, it addles the senses.  Frankly, I hope the man is hit by a car.  Or I would, if the collision would not do so much damage to the car.  In the meantime, he should just sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

That is, if he can find a chair large enough to support him.

Tags: conservatism, crime, fat fuck, immigrants, rob ford, toronto

“Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,–opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,–endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.”

–Emma Goldman; The Psychology of Political Violence

Tags: anarchism, aranrchy, emma goldman, the psychology of political violence

Is this man a mother?

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is at it again: Come August, if you are below 22, you will need a zero alcohol blood level to drive a car.

It’s unreasonable but not unexpected.  This is one of the very worst charities in existence.

MADD was founded by a decent woman with decent intentions.  Candy Lightner, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver, set to work raising awareness about the issue and passing legislation about it.  She quit the organization in 1985, feeling that MADD had been hijacked and saying that the group had “ become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”   This is a distinction that MADD seems incapable of making.

They recklessly inflate their statistics.  Notice that they talk about ‘alcohol related accidents.’  This is any accident that can be related to alcohol in any way.  Did you have a beer at lunch and a sober person ran a red light and crashed into you?  Did your passenger have a blood alcohol level higher than zero?  Was an empty beer can found in your car even though you had no alcohol in your system? According to MADD, these are alcohol related accidents.

Even for statistics, it’s corrupt.   I have not looked at the numbers for car crashes involving people below the age of 22 but I imagine that there are more accidents  in general -not just “alcohol related- than in older drivers.  Hence the insurance costs.

As far as fundraising goes, MADD just received a D (a scale from A to F ) from the watchdog organization, The American Institute of Philanthropy.  This was caused by its poor spending practices and lack of victim support.

“The AIP says while most charities spend $35 to to raise $100. MADD has spent nearly double that amount. It also says in recent years they have spent $30 million on salaries, leaving just one third of its budget for victim services.”

The American Beverage Institute (a restaurant trade organization)  agrees, saying that, in 2008 MADD spent almost $30 million on salaries, leaving just a third of its budget, or $15 million, for charitable work and victim services.  They add that:

“Ten to fifteen years ago, Mothers Against Drunk Driving really did shift their focus away from hardcore drunk drivers and targeting them, getting them off the road and policies that did that and going after social drinking of all kinds. They need to shift back, go back to basics.”

And they probably would get back to basics if they could.  Problem is, they’ve already achieved every single legislative goal they started with and quite a few that drove their founder straight into the arms of the liquor lobby.  Yet they’re still making laws.  No wonder.  They make a lot of money from doing so.

Now, while one should believe The American Institute of Philanthropy, one could sensibly point out that the American Beverage Institute has a vested interest in badmouthing MADD.  But if one is concerned with vested interests, they might also consider the one that MADD has.  They too are a multi-million dollar organization.  One that has a male CEO.  For those of you unfamiliar with biology, it is possible for a male to be against drunk driving but impossible for him to be a mother.  This matters because so much of MADD’s cache is based on “motherhood.”  Would you expect a group called Canadian Fathers for Change to be headed by an American woman?

For everyone involved,  MADD is a money making scheme.  They should have no place in forming the laws of this country.  That the media gives them respect, air time and acts as if MADD are serving the interests of the people, when they are simply serving the interests of a small, greedy and puritan group while taking advantage of their mostly well-intentioned but hopelessly naive donors, never fails to amaze me.   Then again, MADD does buy a lot of advertising.

Tags: canada, charity, chuck hurley, corrupt, drunk driving, law, madd, prohibition, zero alcohol

The real problem with any authoritarian regime is neither moral nor idealistic.  It’s practical.

When power becomes concentrated in only a few people, these people must adapt a large and brutal security apparatus to protect that power.  The size of their security is directly proportional to the size of their influence.  Taken to the extreme of a dictatorship with a cult of personality, where all the power becomes concentrated in only one man, assassination suddenly becomes an effective tool of change. Because assassination is effective, its likelihood increases as does the importance of preventing it.  This often causes the leader to act in way that may look paranoid but is actually logical.   The security apparatus eventually grows into an uncontrollable counter-power.  It no longer needs the leader it protects and, sooner or later, it becomes aware of this.

Beria bumps off Stalin.

pic nicked from here

What comes first, the chicken or the egg?  The power or the security?  The answer is that they both emerge at the same time.  The engine of evolution is a feedback loop.  A change in a creature causes a change in the environment that causes a change in the creature and so forth.  It magnifies into interesting results.  Society is much the same.  Police and power are just two mirrors facing each other; a reflective Narcissus that vanishes into itself.  It can be no other way.

People usually see the problem with a police state as being torture, the curtailing of liberties and that sort of thing.  These are actually symptoms.  The virus that causes them is economic.  Security is fundamentally unproductive.  At best, it can provide a safe environment to allow trade and manufacturing to occur.  But it does not actually make anything.  It could never hope to pay for itself through anything other than stealing or being paid by the people who generate commerce.  A police force does not and cannot create wealth.  At its ideal, it creates a space for wealth to be generated without interference from criminality.

Yet this unproductive industry always manages to grow through unnecessary laws often produced by fear-mongering and bigotry.  As it grows it’s more likely to interfere with commerce than it is to facilitate it.  More money was lost due to police presence in the streets during the G20 than was lost due to smashed windows or burned cars.  Indeed, insurance makes it unlikely that those actions actually lost anyone any money.  It made money.  More windows were produced, sold, transported and installed.  People were put to work in a productive enterprise.  The amount of money that was not spent in the downtown core that week combined with the cost of policing was, however, a dead loss.  It was done to host a party for people who could afford to host their own.

The welfare classes.

pic nicked from here

The security apparatus stops creating a safe place for commerce and starts interfering with it.  Being fundamentally unprofitable -always being paid for by taxes rather than self supporting- it becomes a leech on capitalism.   Money is given but never returned in profitable services or goods.  As this happens, the mandate of the security apparatus changes.  It stops being a tool to protect the market and becomes a tool to protect the rich.  In some cases, security forces are privately contracted and, in others, the publicly funded police performs this function at the expense of the people whose business it now disrupts.  The market, being thus compromised, stagnates.  Rather than decent money being made by all, all the money is made by the indecent.

This destroys the economy that succors the power.

With power’s doors closed to outsiders, the power becomes more  concentrated.  More police are required to protect it.  Unable to produce wealth, the state turns to imperialism.  It seeks out new and distant people to rob.  From Alexander, to the British, to the Soviets to Us, this ends in Afghanistan.  Once you have become so broke that you have to go there, your game is almost up. Afghanistan does not kill empires.  It’s just the last place you want to be.  Needing that hellhole for strategic or financial reasons, having any vital interests there, is a real sign of trouble.

It’s not the cancer of empires but the graveyard.

What's left of the British Army (him) leaving Afghanistan.

The cancer is the feedback loop between the power and security apparatus.  As the power concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, as the economically insane security apparatus grows, even those who were the beneficiaries of the police state find themselves its victims.   The circle shrinks and it eventually leaves you outside.  There is an important saying here:

“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

This does not point to any sort of nefarious planning and foresight on behalf of the Nazis.  Rather it points to the inexorable logic of the police state.  Once it begins, it runs like a windup toy until it exhausts itself in unprofitable but necessary enterprises like war and suffocates in its ubiquitous security.  Those who were privileged by earlier versions of the system one day discover that they are no longer a part of the power.  Their privileges have been removed.  They are treated the same as they allowed others to be treated.

It comes as a shock.

It only appears sudden because they have not paid any attention.

All that happened during Toronto’s G20 was that the white middle classes got a tiny taste of what they have done to every minority group in this country for years upon years.  No one was shot for protesting as Dudley George was.  No one was tortured as Mahar Arar was.  And no one was forcibly evicted from their homes because the government cannot be bothered to provide them with clean water as whole Native reserves have been.    Do you think you would ever see a young black man so stupid as to blow bubbles in a police officer’s face?

Why do you think that is?

What do you think would happen if he did?

Oscar Grant was shot for less than bubbles.

And why are you shocked to see a pretty blonde just get arrested for something that would get many people beat?

This might be the first taste that the former beneficiaries of the police state have had of it.  It’s the first time they’ve gotten the stick instead of the carrot but it will not be the last.  The concentration of privilege and the expansion of powerlessness is inexorable and inevitable.   The good news, however, is that its collapse is also a foregone conclusion.  Remember, the police state does not make money.  It’s not just a cruel from of government but a completely unworkable one.  When it runs out of victims to rob, it will bankrupt itself.

Try to avoid getting smashed up in the meantime and try to be ready when it does.  As anyone who has gone through a breakup can attest, freedom is terrifying.  Don’t panic and bring a towel.

Tags: anarchy, police state

pic nicked from here

Gregory Ryskin, professor of Chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, believes that BP’s oil spill might have started a world killing extinction event.  His notion seems simple: huge methane bubbles released from the Gulf of Mexico started two mass extinctions: One 251 years ago and the other 55 million years ago.  He believes that BP may have caused a rupture in the ocean floor that is in the process of releasing another such super-bubble.   Basically, Ryskin thinks that in the next six months, we might see a massive release of methane, held close to the surface by water droplets, poisoning the landscape through both rain and air while causing massive, fire-balling explosions.  It would be a world killing event.

All I can think is T.S. Elliot:

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang but with a whoops!

I lack the geological expertise to say whether Ryskin is right or wrong.  Once you accept that such huge and basically incomprehensible catastrophes are possible, the theory seems plausible enough.  I suppose the question is just how much methane is buried in the gulf, what state is it in and if BP has managed to rupture its containment.  If there’s enough methane and it is in a gaseous state, if BP did rupture it, I assume the release of a vast super-bubble of explosive, poison gas would be decidedly unpleasant.  But I just don’t know.

The question that interests me here is this: If the world is ending in six months or less, what do you do?

I’m not sure I’d change all that much.  I’ve checked off a lot of my things on the ‘to do before I die” list.  If you haven’t, perhaps you should get on that.  But whether you have six months or sixty years left, that’s always decent advice.  It’s not like you’re going to get a second chance.  Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tags: apocalypse, bp, extinction, gregory ryskin, gulf, methane, oilspill

As I take people like Oscar Wilde, Cicero and Friedrich Reck-Malleczenwen as my models of political dissent, I think it’s important to remember that even in horrible times, especially then, beauty, dignity and basic human decency are of paramount importance.  Although they are the first things to become improbable, you must never allow your better parts to become impossible.  So, as counterpoint to the barbarity of the weekend, I’m collecting some images of myself in some nice bloody suits.  Because this is an image heavy post, there’s a jump.  So, if you want to see more, jump!

(more…)

Tags: anarcho-dandyism, dandarchism, dandy, G20, style, toronto

It’s Canada Day and I usually like to mark the occasion with some flag vandalism, a rant against the nation state in general and this one in particular, and then spend the next six months sifting through a selection of insults, threats and various other comments.  I’m not in the mood this year.

Usually, my Canada Day post is a visceral  reaction to the idiotic, nationalistic exceptionalism that most Canadians feel.  They think this country is so much better, so much more free and so much more egalitarian than any other place on earth. Just like people do on any other place on earth.

This year, in Toronto at least, where white folks got a tiny taste of how Canada treats so many other people both here and abroad, not many people are feeling like that.

They want to.  I can sense this.  And I’m not one to kick my enemy when he’s down.  Not unless he’s trying to get back up.

So let me just slip one to the ribs here.

I’ll be attending today’s protest to have an independent inquiry into the events of the weekend (hopefully by Amnesty International) and I fully expect to hear the protesters singing the national anthem.  It’s not a practice I’m ever comfortable with but now, after that nation spent a drunken weekend chasing people about with sticks and on a day when our taxes are being raised, it now seems especially ludicrous to gather together and sing its praises.  But people will.

They want their rudely shattered delusion back in place.
These post-summit protests are an exercise in reassurance.  Many seem to feel heartbroken about the events of the weekend.  They feel like their boyfriend has broken up with them and now they don’t know what to do.  Mainly, they want everything back to normal.  This urge for a return to status quo is called reactionaryism.  They’re not terribly concerned that it was the status quo that created this situation in the first place.  They simply think: If you just stop drinking, everything can be like it was before! They want the police chief to resign.  A scapegoat.

As if any other police chef on the the planet would have handled things differently.

I can’t really blame them.  Change and loneliness is a frightening situation, especially for those who are dependent on the state for their livelihood.  The people are much like a battered housewife.  They want the husband to stop beating them, desire a return to a happier time and, lacking any self-esteem, are now eager to believe any Sunday morning apology they might get.  Yet it’s a dysfunctional relationship.  We saw an expression of that dysfunction –not its cause– over the weekend.  Our hubby, the state, might promise to quit drinking but can we believe him?  Has he earned our belief?

I don’t believe he has.

And yet, while I will not condemn black bloc tactics as their violence is nothing when measured against that of nations, I cannot ever endorse anyone ever purposely breaking something they cannot rebuild.  If you cannot install a window, you have no business breaking one.  Smashing is the easiest and most meaningless aspect of anarchism.  If we are ever going to leave the state behind, we must do the hard work and form better systems.  We must make ourselves less dependent on it so that we can leave.  Conflict will then arise, to be sure, but it will be on our home turf, not theirs, and we will have something to protect.  We need to be independent.

The first step, I suppose, is admitting that you have a problem.

That you might be suffering from a carefully cultivated Stockholm Syndrome.

I know the bulk of this city will accept the flowers and apology, then talk itself back into the lie, probably within the month, but I also know that some of you won’t.  I would urge those ones not to turn to the smashing of things but to the building of them.  We are hostages and breaking the dishes, while satisfying in the short-term, will accomplish nothing.  We need an escape plan and place to go to.  That is where we need to direct our energy.  Not towards politics but towards removing them from our lives.

Tags: canada day day, G20, toronto

Friday was George Orwell’s birthday.  We have an odd way of celebrating such things in Toronto.  We like to mark occasions like this with large art installations featuring performances by the local police.

There was a moment,when I thought of the old fellow.  Not in a This is so 1984 sense (that got old about two years into Bush Jr.) but in a reflection about how inadequate his books are to explain this current mess.  It was, for me, the strangest experience of the whole G20.  I don’t know what to think of it so I’ll just describe it.

It was bright, hot day in July and the clocks struck nothing.  I, with my head held high in an effort to spot snipers, quickly walked towards the security fence, though not quickly enough to avoid the notice of a small and shy looking man.   He approached me with a camera and asked if he might take my photo for a street style column in some magazine.

I allowed him.  I’m used to this sort of thing.  Bored by it, even.

Beside us were two minivans full of police, behind him were even more.  There were few civilians about.  The state was gearing up, locking down and getting armed.  And here, in the middle of it, was me, having my picture taken by this improbable little fellow.  I started laughing.    It’s not my custom to do so when my photo is being taken.  But I could not help myself.

The situation was so utterly absurd.

I thought:  ”Not even Orwell could have imagined this.”

The rest of it, I’m sure, he could have.

Tags: birthday, G20, george orwell, toronto

The guardians of the state.

On the twitter, I’ve recently heard many people declare that “Toronto has become a police state.”  If you’ve said something along those lines, you need to take a deep breath.  You are only experiencing clarity.  It will pass.

Canada has been a police state for years.  Over the weekend, we just saw how a police state handles protest.  In other words, the police state on a bad day.  The only reason the police did not use live ammunition is because they didn’t need to.   Had there been half a million people in the street, if there had of been a real threat, the police would have used real bullets.  They did not because they were never threatened enough to risk the optics.  As their overreaction and their indiscriminate application of power proved, they are not interested in any sort of fair fight.  and when you looked up, you saw snipers.  Just what do you think those people are for?  They’re for you and me.  To shoot us with bullets we paid for.

Did you ever think our government would act any differently than the Iranian regime if too many people took to the street?  When power is threatened, life is cheap.

The only difference between Canada and any other police state is that Canadians are remarkably compliant.  Why shouldn’t they be?  They are the benefactors of this sort of behavior and much worse all over the world.  For the most part, they enjoy the police state.  Love it even.  Some, like Albert Speer, simply prefer to avoid looking too hard at it.  Most Canadians will never face up to what this country truly is: they will not acknowledge its wars, it genocides and its oppressions.  It easier to believe in the lie.

From cradle to grave, we’ve all been lied to.  We’ve been told things like Alexander Graham Bell was a Canadian, that we are a nation of peacekeepers and that we are, always and without doubt, the good guys.  It’s not true.  We’re not.  Here is where we see the delusion conflicting with the reality.  And the reality wins.

The police state is not what happened on the weekend.  It is what allowed that weekend to happen in the first place.  It is what you’re returning to this Monday.  Maybe you enjoy living in a totalitarian regime – many people have– and perhaps you even actively endorse it – many have done that too.  Everyone who doesn’t, however, needs to take a deep breath.  You are only experiencing clarity.  It will pass.  A meaningless report will be made, perhaps a futile inquiry will be drag into boredom and increase our tolerance for the images that now shock us, a few reporters will be upset that their rights were violated and you will get your crumb from the table.

You will be returned to your regular programming.  A celebrity will do something and your pleasant fog will be back in no time.

Tags: canada, G20, toronto

Tags: canada, g20. toronto, protest, queen's park, riot cops

Peaceful G20 protest at Queen & Spadina from Meghann Millard on Vimeo.

Peaceful protesters sing Canada’s national anthem, riot police respond with force.

Tags: G20, protest, toronto

A wonderful Saturday afternoon in the park wrecked by impertinent civil servants.

In all the hub-bub about burning police cars and smashed up Tim Hortons, we’ve missed something rather important: Our police officers are impolite.  Forget enforcing the rule of law, many of these “gentlemen” do not even subscribe to the rules of manners.

Just today, I was in Queen’s Park with the wife and there was rather a lot of these fellows.  Apparently, they wanted us to leave.  I have no idea why as they never gave me a reason.  Instead of approaching us like reasonable adults and offering us an umbrella (it was raining – serve and protect)  they charged towards us, banging shields and beating the snot out of whomever they could find.  I have not seen behavior of that order since my Nan was healthy.  To top things off, they kept riding about on their horses, never thinking to bring a pony for the children.

They hogged the horses, allowing no one else to ride or even stroke these magnificent beasts.

Had they bothered to find out, they might have discovered that my wife was new to this country and they were giving her a rather bad impression of it.  When I had my photo taken with them, only one responded to my request that they say cheese.  The others were a real bunch of sourpusses.

From what I’ve heard, they’ve spent much of the weekend acting like this.  They’ve built fences all over town, tore up all sorts of trees, closed down the subway system and then tried to blame all of this on “anarchists.”  I’d like to know when exactly we started allowing anarchists to run our public transport.  Or the police for that matter.

Trying to understand the sudden shift in police attitude towards me. Did I offend them? Are they racist? Just what is their problem?

And I hate to accuse the police of racism when they have so much reason to hate every race in this city, but I feel I must.  For yesterday, I walked around the security fences with a white girl (Danielle from Final Fashion) and the police acted like decent human beings.  They smiled, said hello and good day, answered me when I asked them how they were doing and were altogether pleasant.  But today, when I went to the park with my black wife, they completely ignored me and then came chasing after the pair of us with shields and truncheons.  If that’s not racist, I don’t know what is.

If a waiter acted that way, the man would be sacked.

The amusing thing about all this is how deeply the police object to their being any weapons at a protest.  I recall a protest their union held a while ago where a bunch of them showed up wearing guns at City Hall and none of them even faced job discipline.  Considering that, it seems indecent to object to sticks or whatever these people carry to fight men with guns.  And they also dislike masks but almost every officer of the law I saw today wore one.  They also carried more bondage equipment than one of the G20 delegate’s whores.

It's not always easy to keep smiling when people are acting badly but it is quite rude to point out their poor manners. You must assume they know no better.

Really, the police and black bloc should find a nice little thunderdome where they can fight all this out with the same weapons.  If they cannot agree on a proper duel, they could at least settle this dispute with a softball game.  That way, the rest of us could go about our business like the peaceful, more or less decent folks we are.  Uninterrupted by the elite, their cops or any window breaking.

And while I long ago gave up on people like this holding to the rule of law, is it too much to hope that they hold to the rule of manners?  Or can we really expect worse behavior from our police than we can a child at the dinner table?  If that’s the case, perhaps we should get them their own little table.  Until they grow up.

Tags: anarcho-dandyism, dandarchism, G20, toronto