Category Archives: Crime

VampireFreaks fundraiser for Montreal Children’s Hospital

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from, obviously, VampireFreaks. Again I say, I’m just not seeing all these Goth-bashing articles they’re whining about (links, please?), but I’m perfectly fine with Saint Sebastian Syndrome in somebody else if it raises money for sick kids.

Goth Help Us

VampireFreaks and GothHelpUs present:

The VF Charity Fundraiser

Welcome to the Vampirefreaks Charity fundraiser. Here we are raising money to donate to charity, to help people in need, and to show the world that goths are not the scary, evil criminals that some people make us out to be.

Unfortunately, Vampirefreaks.com and gothic culture in general has been receiving negative press, most recently for a school shooting in montreal where the criminal was a member of this website. It was a very tragic event and it’s unfortunate that the faults of one user has been attributed to our site and goth culture in general. In response to these events, we have been watching the site more closely and also asking users to be on their best behavior and show that we are a friendly and caring community. A few members have taken it upon themselves to get involved with local charities, and I applaud you for your efforts.

Vampirefreaks is now officially hosting a charity fundraiser for the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation, towards providing hospital care to children in Montreal. We have chosen this charity because Montreal is the city that was affected by this tragic event and we would like to help out children in need [Montreal Children’s Hospital is also the charity chosen by Anastasia DeSousa‘s family for donations in her name].

All members who donate will be listed on this page as a thank you for your support, and if you donate $50 (US dollars) or more, you will receive a free 1 year premium membership.

the T factor; thieving Italians in Vancouver

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Anybody know these guys? The link to the video was posted over at Waiterblog, so believe me, they’d better not dine out in Vancouver again. I don’t know why, but chefs here tend to be both burly and armed with an interesting and vast assortment of very sharp implements.

Two dirty italians decide to film their dinner and a dash in Vancouver BC. This happened on February 2005. The restaurant was the Rugby Beach Grille. Alessio says: “their service one night sucked real bad and they were rude…so we decided to come back and get our money’s worth…”
Well done boys.

Cane-Fu: the revenge of Oak Bay

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Oak Bay Cane Fu

Everybody was Cane-Fu fighting…or they will be, if this man has his way. Gordon Muir is a martial arts teacher in God’s Waiting Room, and he’s a very clever marketer.

Rather than bemoan the shortage of poorly-behaved adolescent boys whose parents are looking for a quickie external application of discipline, he’s come up with a new martial art that he is confident will appeal to the local market.

Cane-Fu.

from the Victoria Times-Colonist, via Fark.

Muir calls the cane “an interesting weapon” especially since it is “completely legal.”

He’s offering his course at Oak Bay’s Monterey Centre for anyone who doesn’t feel confident about walking down the street.

But he cautions that he is not recommending people go around whacking people indiscriminately. “Definitely not. It could be a hapless panhandler just wanting a quarter.”

I dunno; I’ve dealt with a few cranky seniors in my time, and I wouldn’t want to be some clueless Montreal punk, vision impaired by hoodie and hangover, just lying outside McDonalds, minding my own business, when something in Grandma Moses snaps.

Seventy-year-old Jerome Pauls has signed up for the October course…

“I’m not taking it so I can go out and be aggressive,” said Pauls.

“But if I can’t have a gun, then let’s go with a cane.”

Thorazine, fun for the whole family!

Arar report is in

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Maher Ararand Metafilter‘s got it. And, of course, I’m so out of touch I only found out because somebody linked to my blog in a post on Metafilter and I had to go see.

Note to ECNPA members; if you find the photographers responsible, I’m perfectly happy to credit them if that’s what they wish, or reduce them to thumbnail size in accordance with Fair Use legislation. I got these from Google Image Search, FYI.

Warning: I changed all their links to open in a new window. Normally I would just do that and not say anything, but there are a bajillion links here because it’s Metafilter after all and I don’t want you blaming me if your monitor suddenly looks like a weird 21st-century mosaic.

Yesterday, the Arar Commission released their report on the handling of the Maher Arar case, previously mentioned here or here. The findings are widely reported; Canada is self-flagellating for being complicit in the United States’ abduction and Arartorture of a Canadian citizen. As President Bush goes to Congress to lobby for the legal authority to abduct and torture anyone without a trial, Arar should consider himself lucky: although Canada didn’t help him out for a year, the Canadian government and news media were aware of and interested in his confinement, which likely saved him from the worst tortures. As a famous legal scholar commented some 240 years ago, “To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
posted by jellicle at 8:18 AM PST – 93 comments

Photocredits: John Lehmann (Arar alone) and Bill Grimshaw (Arar and family) as far as I can tell from this posting on ECNPA. Updates and corrections welcomed in the Comments section.

9/11 5.0

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from the Archive

September eleventh feels weird. It won’t ever feel normal again, not for those of us old enough to flip channels or turn on the radio.

Safeway has turkeys on special, right there in glorious colour, 4X6 on the front page of their flyer, with a patriotic red-white-and-blue backdrop, which would be understandable if it were Thanksgiving or America, but it is neither. It is September eleventh, in Canada.

Of course, they could move the US Thanksgiving up to 9/11. The original settlers had lost many of their members by Thanksgiving, so it was a bittersweet time for them, too. In part, it was a chance to rejoice that they were still alive, that they had worked together and survived adversity and reached across borders with extended hands, making friends and acknowledging that we are all in this together. That seems appropriate for 9/11; rather than mourn a day of attack, celebrate the “Let’s roll” American spirit of bold action and the subsequent coalition-building that indicates the US has reached maturity and leads more from the power of earned respect than from the power of adolescent riches or force.

I wonder about the way I spent the first hours of 9/11 today. Shortly after midnight I went to one of my favorite sites, The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) to read their Document of the Day. This is usually an arrest report on some two-bit celebrity, but they’ve also featured “How we bought John Gotti’s Pants,” the dress code for P. Diddy‘s birthday party, and shots of a Survivor contestant participating in hardcore porn. Today it was different. Very different.

When I saw it I knew I had to be listening to Dead City Radio, the William S. Burroughs album which features both his Thanksgiving Day Prayer and readings from the Book of Revelations.

“Thanks for a nation where nobody’s allowed to mind his own business…

thanks for the American Dream, to  vugarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through…

thanks for a continent to dispoil and pillage…

thanks for a nation of finks…

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.”

What was it that I saw there? Al-Qaeda’s terrorism manual in full, and in English. It took me an hour to download. Every now and then I stopped and asked myself if I was doing the right thing; I still don’t know for sure. “Know thine enemy” is a pretty big component of my mental life, but there’s also a fascination with the dark side; I just like to look at it, it’s interesting. So I wondered if this was voyeurism or historical interest. Certainly I believed that the site would be forced to take it down in 24 hours at most, so if I didn’t grab it now it would be gone.

Was this just another thing to put on the shelf beside Aleister Crowley and the Anarchist’s Cookbook, or was this in a separate category? Those other books caused pain and even death to innocents in their day, the difference is that this one caused so much, and so recently, and to allies. Sure, getting this info is in execrable taste, I acknowledge that, but besides an aesthetic distaste, is it wrong?

Certainly it could have had better timing; it could not have had worse.

Now I wonder about that. I have been thinking about the events of a year ago more because of this book than because of any single other reason. I have been thinking about the victims, about innocence and war and how in the name of God anyone could do this, believing it right. I have read part of the book; its tone is kind, respectful and encouraging. It also takes events of war and puts them into a theological context; not just what to expect and what to do, but what that means to God, and what God means to you. I don’t believe that any padre in the American military could do as good a job of making clear the importance of human action in a metaphysical context. They give meaning to actions; if the Americans, or indeed any secular force, could call on this power they could defeat these outcasts easily, but they cannot. They have to fight this war keeping Church and State separate, though war is the crucible that brings them together; are there athiests in foxholes?

Obviously I have more thinking to do, and no typing until I have done it.