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Three Gothic Revival-style buildings, located on a 170-foot bluff overlooking the Ottawa River, house the offices of the members of Parliament, the House of Commons and the Senate. Free guided tours delve into Canadian history and explain the workings of the political system. 128
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Explore #12
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Foro Romano - Roma - Italia / Roman Forum - Rome - Italy
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de/from: Wikipedia
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es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foro_Romano
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Foro Romano
El Foro Romano (en latín, Forum Romanum, aunque los romanos se referían a él comúnmente como Forum Magnum o simplemente Forum) era el foro de la ciudad de Roma, es decir, la zona central —semejante a las plazas centrales en las ciudades actuales— donde se encuentran las instituciones de gobierno, de mercado y religiosas. Al igual que hoy en día, era donde tenían lugar el comercio, los negocios, la prostitución, la religión y la administración de justicia. En él se situaba el hogar comunal.
Series de restos de pavimento muestran que sedimentos erosionados desde las colinas circundantes ya estaban elevando el nivel del foro en la primera época de la República. Originalmente había sido un terreno pantanoso, que fue drenado por los Tarquinios mediante la Cloaca Máxima. Su pavimento de travertino definitivo, que aún puede verse, data del reinado de César Augusto.
Actualmente es famoso por sus restos, que muestran elocuentemente el uso de los espacios urbanos durante el Imperio romano. El Foro Romano incluye los siguientes monumentos, edificios y demás ruinas antiguas importantes:
Templo de Cástor y Pólux
Templo de Rómulo
Templo de Saturno
Templo de Vesta
Casa de las Vestales
Templo de Venus y Roma
Templo de César
Basílica Emilia
Basílica Julia
Arco de Septimio Severo
Arco de Tito
Rostra (plural de rostrum), la tribuna desde donde los políticos daban sus discursos a los ciudadanos romanos.
Curia Julia, sede del Senado.
Basílica de Majencio y Constantino
Tabulario
Templo de Antonino y Faustina
Regia
Templo de Vespasiano y Tito
Templo de la Concordia
Templo de Jano
Un camino procesional, la Vía Sacra, cruza el Foro Romano conectándolo con el Coliseo. Al final del Imperio perdió su uso cotidiano quedando como lugar sagrado.
El último monumento construido en el Foro fue la Columna de Focas. Durante la Edad Media, aunque la memoria del Foro Romano persistió, los edificios fueron en su mayor parte enterrados bajo escombros y su localización, la zona entre el monte Capitolino y el Coliseo, fue designada Campo Vaccinio o ‘campo bovino’. El regreso del papa Urbano V desde Aviñón en 1367 despertó un creciente interés por los monumentos antiguos, en parte por su lección moral y en parte como cantera para construir nuevos edificios. Se extrajo gran cantidad de mármol para construcciones papales (en el Vaticano principalmente) y para cocer en hornos creados en el mismo foro para hacer cal. Miguel Ángel expresó en muchas ocasiones su oposición a la destrucción de los restos. Artistas de finales del siglo XV dibujaron las ruinas del Foro, los anticuarios copiaron inscripciones desde el siglo XVI y se comenzó una excavación profesional a finales del siglo XVIII. Un cardenal tomó medidas para drenarlo de nuevo y construyó el barrio Alessadrine sobre él. No obstante, la excavación de Carlo Fea, quien empezó a retirar los escombros del Arco de Septimio Severo en 1803, y los arqueólogos del régimen napoleónico marcaron el comienzo de la limpieza del Foro, que no fue totalmente excavado hasta principios del siglo XX.
En su estado actual, se muestran juntos restos de varios siglos, debido a la práctica romana de construir sobre ruinas más antiguas.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum
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The Roman Forum
The Roman Forum, also known by its Latin name Forum Romanum (Italian: Foro Romano), is a rectangular forum (plaza) surrounded by the ruins of several important ancient government buildings at the center of the city of Rome. Citizens of the ancient city referred to this space, originally a marketplace, as the Forum Magnum, or simply the Forum.
For centuries the Forum was the center of day-to-day life in Rome: the site of triumphal processions and elections; the venue for public speeches, criminal trials, and gladiatorial matches; and the nucleus of commercial affairs. Here statues and monuments commemorated the city's great men. The teeming heart of ancient Rome, it has been called the most celebrated meeting place in the world, and in all history.Located in the small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, the Forum today is a sprawling ruin of architectural fragments and intermittent archaeological excavations attracting 4.5 million or more sightseers yearly.
Many of the oldest and most important structures of the ancient city were located on or near the Forum. The Roman Kingdom's earliest shrines and temples were located on the southeastern edge. These included the ancient former royal residence, the Regia (8th century BC), and the Temple of Vesta (7th century BC), as well as the surrounding complex of the Vestal Virgins, all of which were rebuilt after the rise of imperial Rome.
Other archaic shrines to the northwest, such as the Umbilicus Urbis and the Vulcanal (Shrine of Vulcan), developed into the Republic's formal Comitium (assembly area). This is where the Senate—as well as Republican government itself—began. The Senate House, government offices, tribunals, temples, memorials and statues gradually cluttered the area.
Over time the archaic Comitium was replaced by the larger adjacent Forum and the focus of judicial activity moved to the new Basilica Aemilia (179 BC). Some 130 years later, Julius Caesar built the Basilica Julia, along with the new Curia Julia, refocusing both the judicial offices and the Senate itself. This new Forum, in what proved to be its final form, then served as a revitalized city square where the people of Rome could gather for commercial, political, judicial and religious pursuits in ever greater numbers.
Eventually much economic and judicial business would transfer away from the Forum Romanum to the larger and more extravagant structures (Trajan's Forum and the Basilica Ulpia) to the north. The reign of Constantine the Great saw the construction of the last major expansion of the Forum complex—the Basilica of Maxentius (312 AD). This returned the political center to the Forum until the fall of the Western Roman Empire almost two centuries later.
Bisbee, Arizona
the smaller signs in the window, rather faded from southern exposure, say:
children born unwanted often live lives of sadness and despair.
oppose mandatory motherhood.
Margaret Atwood was right!
invite Amy Coney Barrett to your baby shower.
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity.
Robert Kennedy
Thank you for your kind visit. Have a wonderful and beautiful day! ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
The United States of America has a new pair of glasses we are demanding that all politicians wear. these glasses are made in fairy land, are all bent and croaked and are free to all politicians. lenses are not needed since all politicians have their own agendas and their own bent and croaked fairyland ideas. the only requirement is that they must stop two things. first; stop telling us that they are not raising taxes and second; they stop telling us they are working for the american people. since, they cannot abide by these rules the next step will be to provide them with liars undergarments. stay tuned.
Goast town Varosha / Famagusta / Northern Cyprus
The sad story of Varosha:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varosha,_Famagusta
Please have a look at my albums:
....for Adlai Stevenson, US Democratic presidential candidate in 1952. Captured for Macro Mondays theme: Pin Badge.
HMM everyone!
Nick Cave is a phenomenal artist for several reasons. One thing that I loved about this exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is that there were audio pieces explaining some of the works. The main work the couple are viewing is called Speak Louder but the work above it is one of a few in his Tondo series. When Nick Cave started making Soundsuits, it was right after he heard about the police brutality and the Rodney King beatings. I posted a shot of his Soundsuits here:
www.flickr.com/photos/kirstiecat/52075785831/in/dateposted/
When he speaks about Tondo, he speaks about the effects of inner city violence on children. This is something that is a dear issue to me as I work with kids with disabilities in the public schools in Chicago. At one school I work at, kids come all over the city and 97% must be drawn from the highest poverty areas of the city according to the last census. So, when a parent is concerned because of a child's lack of attention or behavior and a nurse asks, "How much sleep does your child get each night?" and the parent replies "None because there are constantly gunshots and police sirens going off," you know something needs to change in this world.
As many of you know, I believe in proactive means to building better communities. As we continue to put more budgets into funding police, we actually have more crime because less is going into quality education, libraries, mental health facilities, preventing food deserts, equitable employment and low income housing. As our policing has increased, it means that there is also less of a viable public transportation system as well, at the same time that many families earning lower incomes cannot afford these astronomical gas prices and we all need to take an active role when it comes to climate change.
In my 21 years of working with children at Chicago Public Schools, I've worked at a few different schools. In 2003, I had the great honor of working with kids in the Cabrini Green neighborhood before re gentrification and racism (profit over people time and time again) unfortunately forced many people out. I've worked on the West side and lately on the North side. I love children all over the city. When I bike to the far South side to see art, some ask me if it's safe. Wherever children go, we should be willing to go. And, if we are not wiling to go there, we need to think about making it safer there. Chicago is a microcasm of the whole world in that respect. We have the ability to make a world where everyone has a basic level of human rights and a higher quality of life. We don't need little boys getting to go to space again. We don't need billionaires who have 10 homes. We need sustainability.
In all my years at Chicago Public Schools and in the hundreds upon thousands of children I've met (and hopeful helped), not one of them has ever told me he/she/they want to rob or kill people for a living. However, there was an eight year old girl who told a Speech Therapist I worked with that she wanted to be a cop "because they get away with murder." We need to be better.
I am an active voter and donate money to charity and some politicians. I wish I had more power. I wish I could also create something as beautiful as Nick Cave does when he falls into despair. Some people ask me what protesting does. Others ask me what making art does. Still, others ask me what voting does. I'll tell you I don't have all the answers (or any some days) but I can tell you this much, if we were ALL trying to make the world a better place. If we were all making decisions based on trying to be more kind, just, and human, this world would in fact change.
So, if you're kind, Speak Louder. If you're a fan of human rights, Speak Louder. If you want children of all races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds to grow up in a better world, Speak Louder. If you want Environmental Justice, speak louder. If you want immigration rights and body autonomy, speak louder. If you want those in the LGBTQ+ community to have the same quality of life as those who are cis gendered and/or heterosexual, speak louder. If you want an end to the For Profit Prison Industrial Complex, speak louder.
Speak Louder.
mcachicago.org/exhibitions/2022/nick-cave-forothermore
**All photos are copyrighted**
MOVE OVER, DICK CHENEY!... now what's not to like here?
I have no idea whose photograph this is, I got it as one of those thousands of "funnies" we get every day. I couldn't help myself so I did a conversion on it.
As you can see, there is not much to read... I am still trying to catch up. But I really wanted to show you this book. When I was in DC, there was an exhibition of Herblock's political cartoons. Amazing person, amazing drawings. You can pretty much study American history by looking at them. Recently they published a new book which includes a dvd with 18,000 cartoons. I loooooooove them!
CRETE
Knossos (alternative spellings Knossus, Cnossus, Greek Κνωσός, pronounced [knoˈsos]) is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and considered as Europe's oldest city.
The name Knossos survives from ancient Greek references to the major city of Crete. The identification of Knossos with the Bronze Age site is supported by tradition and by the Roman coins that were scattered over the fields surrounding the pre-excavation site, then a large mound named Kephala Hill, elevation 85 m (279 ft) from current sea level. Many of them were inscribed with Knosion or Knos on the obverse and an image of a Minotaur or Labyrinth on the reverse, both symbols deriving from the myth of King Minos, supposed to have reigned from Knossos.[5] The coins came from the Roman settlement of Colonia Julia Nobilis Cnossus, a Roman colony placed just to the north of, and politically including, Kephala. The Romans believed they had colonized Knossos.[6] After excavation, the discovery of the Linear B tablets, and the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris, the identification was confirmed by the reference to an administrative center, ko-no-so, Mycenaean Greek Knosos, undoubtedly the palace complex. The palace was built over a Neolithic town. During the Bronze Age, the town surrounded the hill on which the palace was built.
The palace was excavated and partially restored under the direction of Arthur Evans in the earliest years of the 20th century. Its size far exceeded his original expectations, as did the discovery of two ancient scripts, which he termed Linear A and Linear B, to distinguish their writing from the pictographs also present. From the layering of the palace Evans developed de novo an archaeological concept of the civilization that used it, which he called Minoan, following the pre-existing custom of labelling all objects from the location Minoan.
The site of Knossos was discovered in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos. The excavations in Knossos began in 1900 by the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) and his team, and continued for 35 years. Its size far exceeded his original expectations, as did the discovery of two ancient scripts, which he termed Linear A and Linear B, to distinguish their writing from the pictographs also present. From the layering of the palace Evans developed an archaeological concept of the civilization that used it, which he called Minoan, following the pre-existing custom of labelling all objects from the location Minoan.
Since their discovery, the ruins have undergone a history of their own, from excavation by renowned archaeologists, education and tourism, to occupation as a headquarters by governments warring over the control of the eastern Mediterranean in two world wars. This site history is to be distinguished from the ancient.
Iran: Deliberate poisoning of schoolgirls further evidence of continuous violence against women and girls
www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/03/iran-deliberate-p...
The interior of the governor's house, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania after an arson attack targeting governor Josh Shapiro and his family after the Passover seder.
Not my photography.
Photo credit: Commonwealth Media Services
Il. Title- ( - sang sur mains - ) Mike Mullen having a nice steak dinner with a 'clear conscience' ... ( On top of dead Afghani civilians & dead soldiers.. Egomaniac.. ) Yes Wikileaks shared this piece inspired by them & their work: twitter.com/wikileaks/status/21824111844 it & the entire Wikileaks series is not- for sale.
At some point there may be an exhibition with funds going towards WL & Bradley Manning.
But for now none of the pieces in the series are commercially available or for sale to private individuals.
They do have free use by Wikileaks however.
More work to be posted soon.
Dimensions: 18" x 24.5" acid free paper, acrylics, gouache & ebony pencil
"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Mullen said."
www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/29/pentagon-wikileaks-bl...
MMm no- Mullen..How can we end these wars ASAP- & STOP you from getting any MORE blood on YOUR hands..
( News from Wikileaks Twitter feed, 8 - 19 - 2012: "In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice -- that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.” "
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/06/opinion/main6748239.shtml )
War Diary - wardiary.wikileaks.org/ Timeline: wartimeline.haineault.com/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mullen#2007_Senate_testimon...
& from the Pentagon- "“We want whatever they have returned to us and we want whatever copies they have expunged… We demand that they do the right thing. If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing." mashable.com/2010/08/05/pentagon-wikileaks-demand/
The NERVE.. -
Wikileaks - "What we didn't hear from the Pentagon last week: "killing all those innocent people is bad. Sorry. We will stop that" Thursday, August 05, 2010
YES.
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"Thousands of children and adults had been killed and the US could have announced a broad inquiry into these killings, "but he decided to treat these issues with contempt''.
He said: "This behaviour is unacceptable. We will continue to expose abuses by this administration and others."" - www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/30/us-military-wikileak...
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( From Wikileaks twitter- Aug 19 2010 _ ) -
Wikileaks vs the Pentagon: Phony Fingerpointing
Tom Engelhardt:: Who Really Has Blood On Their Hands?
"Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement. After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.
The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes...” Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA paramilitaries’ role in civilian deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies.
The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.” Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. special operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”
Admittedly, the events recorded in the Wikileaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the last six months of the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan. Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question.
He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party -- 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women -- on a road near the Pakistani border. They were "escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates." The bride, whose name we don’t know, died, as did at least 27 other members of the party, including children. Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children. Among the dead were 76 members of one extended family, headed by Reza Khan, a "wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport."
Mullen was still chairman in April 2009 when members of the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, were killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. Among them were his "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department.” Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.
Mullen remained chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night raid; as he was -- and here we move beyond the Wikileaks time frame -- when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children; as he also was when, in that same month, in a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot to death in their home in a village near Gardez, the capital of Paktia province. After which, the soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the bodies, washed the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover the incident up. He was no less chairman late last month when residents of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed 52 civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople and is now being “investigated.” "
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/06/opinion/main6748239.shtml
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"What is interesting is who is responsible for the killings.
Of the 1,325 civilian deaths recorded by the Afghan human rights group, 23 per cent were attributed to Nato or Afghan government forces. The Taliban and their allies were responsible for 68 per cent of the deaths.
The UN study claimed the civilian death toll was slightly lower at 1,271 with anti-government forces blamed for 76 per cent of the casualties.
Chronicling precise figures is extremely difficult because most parts of the country are inaccessible.
Crucially, both studies suggested that the proportion of deaths attributed to Nato and Afghan government forces were down compared to last year because of fewer air strikes.
This is important because clumsy air strikes on innocent villages and unfair raids on their houses has been driving a lot of Afghans to pick up arms on behalf of insurgents."
by, Hamida Ghafour
More: www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100811/OP...
& -
"My countrymen called me a prostitute
(Filed: 26/10/2004)
Fourteen months ago, Hamida Ghafour went to Afghanistan to cover her native countrys postwar reconstruction for this newspaper. But, as a westernised Afghan, her homecoming wasnt as welcoming as she had hoped"
www.afghanistan.org/news_detail.asp?17220
I am skeptical about agendas.. It can be confusing, this is why for better or worse one must have THE FACTS - it would have been better if we had them from the START.
Without facts no one cares what we do- or who we kill, because we simply don't have ANY concept of how a decade long war is going..
“The government is engaging in selective prosecution to ensure that employees keep their mouths shut,” says Stephen Khon, a lawyer specializing in whistleblowing cases. “All of a sudden the whistleblower becomes public enemy number one. There is no proportionality.” www.alternet.org/world/147778/how_the_military_destroys_t...
This- - you MUST watch-- It's of Afghani's asking for peace & for us to leave- "Wikileaks Assange, stand freely for love & we in Afg will stand with you.." From: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9E_nXiPj9g
US war crimes: soldiers speak out. - www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj6s1V0Dpuw
From Wikileaks Twitter- "UNAMA Human Rights Unit issued recommendations in the report including:
• The Taliban should withdraw all orders and statements calling for the killing of civilians; and, the Taliban and other AGEs should end the use of IEDs and suicide attacks, comply with international humanitarian law, cease acts of intimidation and killing including assassination, execution and abduction, fully respect citizens’ freedom of movement and stop using civilians as human shields.
• International military forces should make more transparent their investigation and reporting on civilian casualties including on accountability; maintain and strengthen directives restricting aerial attacks and the use of night raids; coordinate investigation and reporting of civilian casualties with the Afghan Government to improve protection and accountability; improve compensation processes; and, improve transparency around any harm to civilians caused by Special Forces operations.
• The Afghan Government should create a public body to lead its response to major civilian casualty incidents and its interaction with international military forces and other key actors, ensure investigations include forensic components, ensure transparent and timely compensation to victims; and, improve accountability including discipline or prosecution for any Afghan National Security Forces personnel who unlawfully cause death or injury to civilians or otherwise violate the rights of Afghan citizens."
unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1741&ctl=Deta...
From Wikileaks Twitter- CBC
"A bomb is found tucked into a school typewriter. Insurgents dressed in military uniforms attack an education chief. School guards are tied up while the building is bombed to smithereens. Teachers and students at an all-girls high school are poisoned through the drinking water."
"School attacks
Year Number of attacks against schools
2005 98
2006 220
2007 236
2008 348
2009 610
Source: UNICEF. Data for 2008 and 2009 are from the UN Country Task Force on Children, and previous years are from the Ministry of Education."
"Education for children up in Afghanistan since 2002- .
"Nine years ago, about 100,000 students were enrolled in schools. The figure now stands at more than seven million students, one-third of whom are girls, according to the Afghanistan Ministry of Education.
"It's one of those sectors where we've seen radical and dramatic progress since 2002," notes Rowell.
"No one knows where the country is going … but education is a beacon of success."
Read more: www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/08/06/f-afghanistan-education...
& www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/database-afghan-war-logs/
""
"New Petition Gains Prominent Signatures: “Defend WikiLeaks – End the Secret Wars” - Sign: seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/64042
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Jung.
Treating Soldier Stress: www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2008931_2172992,00...
"Afghan War Diary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Afghan War Diary (also called The War Logs) is a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the War in Afghanistan published by Wikileaks on 25 July 2010.
The logs consist of 91,731 documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Most of the documents were classified as "secret", which The New York Times called "a relatively low level of classification".
As of 28 July 2010, only 75,000 of the documents have been released to the public, a move which Wikileaks says is "part of a harm minimization process demanded by [the] source". Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, Wikileaks made the logs available to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in its German and English on-line edition which published reports per previous agreement on that same day, July 25, 2010."
&
"In June 2010, Guardian journalist Nick Davies and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange established that the US army had built a huge database with six years of sensitive military intelligence material, to which many thousands of US soldiers had access and some of them had been able to download copies, and WikiLeaks had one copy which it proposed to publish online, via a series of uncensorable global servers.
Wikileaks describes itself as "a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public."
In an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that "we have a stated commitment to a particular kind of process and objective, and that commitment is to get censored material out and never to take it down." He contrasted the group with other media outlets by saying that "other journalists try to verify sources. We don't do that, we verify documents. We don't care where it came from." He denied that the group has an inherent bias against the Afghanistan War, saying that "We don't have a view about whether the war should continue or stop – we do have a view that it should be prosecuted as humanely as possible." However, he also said that he believes the leaked information will turn world public opinion to think more negatively of the war."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary
"War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford." -
Hannah Arendt
"The leak of tens of thousands of Afghanistan war-related documents tells us more than the sum total of many official communiqués about the war. On balance, more disclosure is a good thing, but the leaking of raw military intelligence is a special case that requires a careful, rather than a cavalier, approach.
There is not enough information about the war, and much official information is misleading. In Canada, the federal government's quarterly reports contain a few updates based on its goals in Kandahar, but little else that informs. The government has already shown itself to be an unreliable source on issues relating to Afghan detainees.
The situation is now too dangerous for the most trustworthy chroniclers – journalists, UN personnel – to go outside NATO-protected areas.
So reliable, independent information is lacking. The circumstances in this war make such information even more necessary."
www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/we-neede...
"Instead, many eyes will now pore over this data from many different directions, looking for patterns and attempting to eliminate the noise, disinformation and fog of war.
Many will look to it to criticise and condemn the US presence in Afghanistan, but if those on the other side – those who support such military incursions – have any sense, they too will use it to understand better the war in which they find themselves and adapt their counsel to fit more accurately the facts on the ground.
That’s the benefit, usually, of an open society. We get to triangulate on the truth by gathering facts in the public space, then providing them to all sides to chew over. We use this against our own illusions and those of more closed societies who can only view the world through one narrow perspective.": www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0730/1224275801...
( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology )
"The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly."
Read more www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khat...
"With the release of the WikiLeaks documents, Arab media may finally feel vindicated, as Western media finally start to give greater prominence to civilian casualties." newamericamedia.org/2010/07/wikileaks-documents-validate-...
"Wikileaks confirmed: A plan to kill American geologist with poison beer
The Wikileaks documents contain a claim that Pakistan and Afghanistan insurgents were working to poison alcoholic drinks in Afghanistan. While that's unproven, one US adviser in Afghanistan tells the Monitor he was almost poisoned that way in 2007." : www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0728/Wiki...
"This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn't break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan—which it wasn't going to get anyway—the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants."
www.billoreilly.com/site/rd?satype=13&said=12&url...
"How to read the Afghanistan war logs: video tutorial
David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, explains the online tools we have created to help you understand the secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan": www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/video/2010/jul/25/afgha...
"Jonathan Foreman, writing for the right of center National Review's Corner blog, hopes the documents will force America to deal with the possible deceptions being made by ally Pakistan. "It is possible that the publication of documents that provide actual evidence — rather than rumors — of the role of ISI personnel in Taliban planning, logistics, and strategy will give the West greater leverage in dealing with Islamabad and might force Pakistan’s political elite to confront the reality of the ISI’s secret activities. If so, that would be a silver lining to what is otherwise a military disaster abetted by the U.S. and British media."
www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/NATL-The-Importance-o...
"The real significance of the Afghan war diaries lies in what Wikileaks represents as a movement, as an evolution in journalism. One analyst has called it the emergence of open source journalism. Julian Assange makes it possible for anybody anywhere in the world to submit secret documents for publication." www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Sevanti_Ninan/article541...
A War Without End: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html
"Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war'
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, explains why he decided to publish thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan Afghanistan war logs expose truth of occupation": www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jul/25/julian-assange...
The history of US leaks: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10769495
Freedom of Information Act: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_...
"A long-delayed Afghanistan war funding bill, stripped of billions for teachers and black farmers, is back before the House and walking now into the storm over the Internet leak of battlefield reports stirring old doubts about U.S. policy and relations with Pakistan.": www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40254.html & www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40251.html
This is a large study/drawing, Assange/Wikileakers of the organization Wikileaks ( wikileaks.org ) uses 'matches from sources' to disclose US gov secrecy ( behind large black curtains ) & to also finally bring some much needed attention & closure to some of these revelations ( set ablaze ).
This ongoing series is dedicated to everyone who has needlessly had their lives destroyed, been injured or die in this almost past decade of war. For the sources, journalists & average citizens who risk their lives to inform us.
Reuters reporters Namir Eldeen, Saeed Chmagh & the good samaritan ( father ) who died trying to save them & of course his two surviving small children who will forever be impacted by the brutality of war for decades to come.
Please help Private Bradley Manning- www.bradleymanning.org/
"One surprising consequence of the war in Iraq is the surrender of postmodernism to a victorious modernism. This has been largely overlooked in North America.
In reaction to the U.S. intervention in Iraq, Jacques Derrida, a famous postmodernist, signed on as co-author of an article drafted by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, previously an opponent of his, in an unmistakable endorsement of modernist Enlightenment principles. Derrida, the apostle of deconstructionism, is now advocating some decidedly constructive and Eurocentric activism.
The article appeared simultaneously in two newspapers on May 31, in German in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as "After the War: The Rebirth of Europe," and in French in Libération, less triumphantly, as "A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy: The demonstrations of Feb. 15 against the war in Iraq designed a new European public space."
Other famous intellectuals joined in with supportive newspaper articles of their own: Umberto Eco (of The Name of the Rose) and Gianni Vattimo in Italy and an American philosopher, Richard Rorty. This provoked much discussion in Europe, but only a few comments so far in North America, the Boston Globe and the Village Voice being rare exceptions.
This week in Montreal, there was an anti-globalization riot in which windows were broken in protest against a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting. But the Habermas-Derrida declaration praises the WTO and even the International Monetary Fund as part of Weltinnenpolitik: maddeningly hard to translate, but something like "global domestic policy" or "external internal policy."
Yet it is not much of a stretch to claim the young anti-globalists as disciples of postmodernism and Derrida, who has hitherto been a foe of "logocentrism" (putting reason at the centre), "phallologocentrism" (reason is an erect male organ and, as such, damnably central) and Eurocentrism (the old, old West is the homeland of all of the above).
Derrida added a note to the article, observing most people would recognize Habermas's style and thinking in the piece, and that he hadn't had time to write a separate piece. But notwithstanding his "past confrontations" with Habermas (Derrida had objected to being called a "Judaistic mystic," for one thing), he agreed with the article he had signed, which calls for new European responsibilities "beyond all Eurocentrism" and the strengthening of international law and international institutions."
More: www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000361.php
"In early 2003, both Habermas and Derrida were very active in opposing the coming Iraq War, and called for in a manifesto that later became the book Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe for a tighter union of the states of the European Union in order to provide a power capable of opposing American foreign policy. Derrida wrote a foreword expressing his unqualified subscription to Habermas's declaration of February 2003, "February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,” in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe which was a reaction to the Bush administration demands upon European nations for support for the coming Iraq War[25]. Habermas has offered further context for this declaration in an interview."
More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%c3%bcrgen_Habermas#Habermas_and_D...
Habermas: ”The asymmetry between the concentrated destructive power of the electronically controlled clusters of elegant and versatile missiles in the air and the archaic ferocity of the swarms of bearded warriors outfitted with Kalashnikovs on the ground remains a morally obscene sight
I consider Bush' s decision to call for a "war against terrorism" a serious mistake, both normatively and pragmatically. Normatively, he is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies; and pragmatically, one cannot lead a war against a "network" if the term "war" is to retain any definite meaning.”
Derrida: “To say it all too quickly and in passing, to amplify and clarify just a bit what I said earlier about an absolute threat whose origin is anonymous and not related to any state, such "terrorist" attacks already no longer need planes, bombs, or kamikazes: it is enough to infiltrate a strategically important computer system and introduce a virus or some other disruptive element to paralyze the economic, military, and political resources of an entire country or continent. And this can be attempted from just about anywhere on earth, at very little expense and with minimal means. The relationship between earth, terra territory, and terror has changed, and it is necessary to know that this is because of knowledge, that is, because of technoscience.
It is technoscience that blurs the distinction between war and terrorism. In this regard, when compared to the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of the world, "September 11" is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a "great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends.”
www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000361.php
I am incredibly- delighted at all the vital discussions about the war & US gov that are FINALLY taking place- & on a mass scale- as a result of this leak .. Simply miraculous..
FREEDOM & PEACE ( transparency, diplomacy & the evolution of such ) FOR ALL WAR NATIONS.
( WARNING - links ( after excerpt ) are NOT for sensitive viewers- ) "Wikileaks have released over 150 supressed images. This is the tip of the iceberg, keep looking, keep publishing.In the last week Wikileaks has released over 150 censored photos and videos of the Tibet uprising and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the Chinese internet censorship regime — the so called “Great Firewall of China”The transparency group’s move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau’s carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people’s recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet."
fortuzero.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/tibet-western-media-sa...
file.wikileaks.org/file/tibet-protest-photos/index.html
FREE TIBET!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also other dire & serious issues ( out of countless ) - that expose corruption by corporations & gov's:
"A documentary about intensive pig farming due to be screened at the Guardian Hay festival on Sunday is facing a legal threat from one of the companies it investigates. Pig Business criticises the practices of the world's largest pork processor, Smithfield Foods, claiming it is responsible for environmental pollution and health problems among residents near its factories."
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/29/pig-business-document...
"In an investigation broadcast on BBC Radio 5 on November 14, 2004,[79] it was reported that the site is still contaminated with 'thousands' of metric tons of toxic chemicals, including benzene hexachloride and mercury, held in open containers or loose on the ground. A sample of drinking water from a well near the site had levels of contamination 500 times higher than the maximum limits recommended by the World Health Organization.[80]
In 2009, a day before the 25th anniversary of the disaster, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi based pollution monitoring lab, released latest tests from a study showing that groundwater in areas even three km from the factory up to 38.6 times more pesticides than Indian standards."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
-
The Blue Mask - Lou Reed - www.goear.com/listen/9960779/the-blue-mask-lou-reed ( & O Superman ) www.goear.com/listen/02cf55d/o-superman-(for-massenet)-la...
Lou Reed The Blue Mask
Lyrics:
They tied his arms behind
his back to teach him how to
swim They put
blood in his coffee and milk
in his gin They stood over the
soldier in
the midst of the squalor
There was war in his body and
it caused his
brain to holler
Make the sacrifice
mutilate my face
If you need someone to kill
I'm a man without a will
Wash the razor in the rain
Let me luxuriate in pain
Please don't set me free
Death means a lot to me
The pain was lean and it made
him scream he knew he was alive
They put a
pin through the nipples on his chest
He thought he was a saint
I've made love to my mother,
killed my father and my brother
What am I
to do
When a sin goes too far, it's
like a runaway car It cannot
be controlled
Spit upon his face and scream
There's no Oedipus today
This is no play you're thinking you
are in What will you say
Take the blue mask down from my face and
look me in the eye I get a
thrill from punishment
I've always been that way
I loathe and despise repentance
You are permanently stained
Your weakness buys indifference
and indiscretion in the streets
Dirty's what you are and clean is what
you're not You deserve to be
soundly beat
Make the sacrifice
Take it all the way
There's no won't high enough
To stop this desperate day
Don't take death away
Cut the finger at the joint
Cut the stallion at his mount
And stuff it in his mouth
---
-
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. "
Albert Einstein
IMAGINE THE HAPPINESS & GREAT WORK AHEAD OF US WE COULD HAVE AT THE END OF THE WARS!!!!!!!!!
www.goear.com/listen/48d6016/hora-de-la-mehedinti-romania...
NO MORE WAR & FREEDOM FOR ALL WAR NATIONS!!!!!!!!!
Peace.
Exmouth, Devon isn't really known for its baseball so this theme proved to be a bit tricky...a lack of bats, balls and mits meant that until yesterday, inspiration was well and truly lacking...until I read the weekly round up of news...and hey presto...Ed Milliband saves the day!!
Hier haben alle geklebt, die Linken, die Rechten, die Dazwischen und die äußeren Flügel.
Keiner ist geblieben - finde ich irgendwie unglaublich beruhigend.
[some Photoshopping]
Loved watching these two LOUDLY talking about something...which they clearly did not agree on... and thought it would be perfect for today. Happy Fence Friday, my friends! And, if you're from the U.S., Happy July 4th, too! Once Hurricane Arthur blows past us later today we should have a beautiful long weekend! :)
Let me explain the symbology behind this picture:
I know that right now it seems that the whole USA is focusing mainly on the 2008 elections, but I care more about the political situations around the world, particularly Venezuela, since that's where my mom is from and that's where some of my family lives.
Ever since Chavez was elected president, I feel like the whole Venezuelan government/political situation is broken, or ruined like this mug. Sure, you can still use the mug, but it's broken..
I was raised to be seriously Anti-Chavista (against Chavez, Venezuela's president, and his whole administration,) and I know he's always been a horrible president (well, really more like dictator) but I was really shocked when I heard he was assisting FARC. I know FARC is a funny name, but there's nothing funny about them. FARC is a Colombian extremist group who kidnapped hundreds random people and held them hostage for years (most of them still haven't escaped). On top of that, they kidnap children from the Venezuela/Colombia border and turn them into child soldiers. This has been an ongoing problem in both Venezuela and Colombia for years, and Chavez has publicly spoken about how we need to stop them, and supposedly taken some action about it. but it turns out that he was SUPPLYING THEM WITH WEAPONS.
how could ANYONE be supportive of a group that makes children into CHILD SOLDIERS!? how could a LEADER OF A COUNTRY even do that!? and the worst part is, that he LIED to the whole world about it, and he's not even getting impeached or anything! How is it that Bill Clinton gets impeached for having an affair, but Chavez doesn't get impeached for supplying FARC with all the supplies they need to do what Chavez is trying to stop them from doing!?
But of course, Chavez is a known liar, because he promised during his presidential campaign in 1998 that he would change his name if there were still homeless children on the street by the time he was done with his term, and he hasn't done ANYTHING about it, and he's been in power for almost 10 years! (and, by the way, the length of a presidential term in Venezuela is 4 or 5 years (I can't quite remember), but of course, he changed the constitution so that he could be in power for even longer!)
the whole situation pisses me off to no end.
and that is why I took this picture.
01 April 2018
Its into the 9th year since I shot this and the situation in the DTES has only deteriorated. Governments have worsened the situation by piling more social housing in the area adding to the “customers with no cash” syndrome. The area is named “Canada’s poorest postal code” by activists and the poverty pimps love the situation making the area one of “Canada’s richest postal codes”, the only differenence being the pimp money goes home at night. Helpful groups support too many by offering them food daily with zero obligation. Its become an impossible sitiuation to address given the current state of political governance.
I wish this was just a sick April Fools Day joke but unfortuantely not.
Sleeping on a sidewalk in the Downtown East Side (DTES) of Vancouver BC takes on a different sense of survival than is observed in many west side sleepers. A combination of mental issues, drug sale and use, area resident poverty and the resulting community of "Customers With No Cash" combine for a perfect locale to take advantage of people on the edge where living is not comparable to what most of us bring to mind in our own comfortable world. Prostitution and drugs are a large part of this community. One can not help feel sorry and remorseful this exists in self important Vancouver.
The irony of this photo is it was shot about 10 feet from the entrance of BC Housing's recently opened Orange Hall office (open 10 am to 4 pm Monday to Friday) 297 Hastings Street at Gore Ave. This situation has steadily gone downhill since the Federal Governemt cut back funding for social housing.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH:
From BC Housing website:
October 3rd, 2014
VICTORIA – The B.C. government is strengthening the non-profit housing sector by transferring provincially-owned properties to non-profit housing providers.
The Province owns approximately 350 parcels of land throughout British Columbia that are currently leased long-term to non-profit housing providers who own and operate social housing buildings on these properties.
The non-profit housing sector has been asking for this step for many years. Having ownership of the land will improve a non-profit’s ability to support better long-term planning and selfsufficiency. Owning the lands they operate on will also help non-profits secure the financing they need to be sustainable.
In order to transfer title, the Province will end these leases, and then transfer ownership of the land to the societies. The properties will be transferred at fair market value. The Province will assist the societies to secure mortgages on the properties. The current operating agreement that BC Housing has with each non-profit society will remain in place. Approximately 115 properties will be transferred by March 31, 2015, and the rest will be transferred over the next three years.
In addition, the Province is looking to transfer ownership of two properties currently managed by BC Housing to non-profit societies. The Province will begin the process by posting Expressions of Interest for Nicholson Tower and Stamps Place in Vancouver shortly.
Tenants will not be impacted by these transfers, and the amount of affordable housing stock will remain stable. Non-profit societies have been providing social housing in B.C. for more than 60 years. Today more than 90% of social housing is managed by non-profit societies.
THE GLOBE & MAIL:
FRANCES BULA
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Oct. 13 2014
Vancouver won’t solve street homelessness until both the city and province focus on targeting the limited supply of expensive social housing to those who need it most, say experts.
That means help can’t go to anyone who passes through a shelter or an outdoor camp or even to someone who sleeps outside temporarily. In the vast majority of cases, people who become homeless experience it briefly and are able to avoid losing housing again.
But people working on eliminating homelessness do not always understand that the thousands of people who experience homelessness in a year don’t all need expensive subsidized housing. That should be reserved for the chronically homeless, who are not sufficiently helped by temporary assistance with rent or other social supports.
“For nearly 90 per cent of people counted as homeless, they’ll get themselves out of homelessness on their own,” says Tim Richter, who led Calgary’s 10-year plan to end homelessness and is now the president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “It’s critical to set priorities. It shouldn’t be first-come, first-served.”
One of the region’s most experienced homelessness researchers, former Vancouver city-hall staffer Judy Graves, said the city is reaping the results of city and provincial staff not always setting the right priorities for the past six years. This past winter, Vancouver still had a count of 533 people sleeping outside (less than in 2008, but more than in 2011), even though the province and city have opened up thousands of new social-housing units rented at welfare-level rates.
It’s an issue that is returning to haunt Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, who promised in 2008 to end street homelessness by 2015, during this fall’s civic-election campaign.
His administration, which has pushed the issue non-stop since he was first elected, has recently exceeded previous efforts by jumping last month into paying for all the costs of converting a downtown Quality Inn to transitional housing, as well as all the costs of a new shelter nearby. Usually the province covers the majority of costs for both of those kinds of housing.
But Ms. Graves said even that unusual effort, accompanied by several hundred other new provincial units about to open, isn’t going to solve the problem by January, 2015.
That’s because the province is only committed to using half of the incoming housing units for the chronically homeless. And city staff also don’t always correctly identify who is the most in need.
“Both the city and province have bought into housing by wait lists,” said Ms. Graves. “It just can’t work. You have to work as though you’re in a disaster zone.”
She said she had doubts that the majority of people who camped in Oppenheimer Park over the summer were homeless, but they got priority for the scarce number of rooms available.
As well, in the early stages of the province’s big social-housing construction push, which will see 14 towers completed with around 1,400 units by the end, non-profit operators were simply moving people from residential hotel rooms into the new buildings.
That meant the housing didn’t go to the chronically homeless and the most in need, but worse, it then allowed landlords in the residential hotels to do renovations, raise rents, or refuse new low-income tenants once the former tenants were relocated to social housing.
That then reduced the overall number of private, low-cost housing units in the city. Ms. Graves said the whole region is experiencing an acute shortage of those kinds of private units now. It has become a game of musical chairs for housing-outreach workers to get a low-cost unit for someone trying to get out of shelters or off the street, she said.
All cities are grappling with constant pressures that create more homelessness at the front end: low working-class incomes that can’t keep up with gentrification and rising rents key among them, said Ms. Graves. That has left cities trying to solve the problem at the back end, trying to house all the people made homeless as a result of many larger forces.
24 HRS VANCOUVER - 16 OCT 14
16 Oct 2014 24 Hours VancouverJANE DEACON Comment at vancouver.24hrs.c
Laura Dilley, PACE Society Action Week, PACE plans to draft housing recommendations for city council before the coming election.
“Oftentimes we will create housing models not including the voices of those we would be housing,” said Dilley.
Rising rent prices that force people out of SROs is a significant factor, as well as landlords who refuse to rent to sex workers out of legal concerns, said Dilley. Low- income housing conditions that require tenants stay in at night or guests to sign in are also significant barriers. She estimates between 10 to 15% of sex workers fall under the category of “survival” or street- based prostitution. For that vulnerable population, simply switching professions is often not an option, said Dilley.
“They’re really forced and entrenched to continuously do that work because they have no options out of it, because we have such stigma in our society that they can’t seek help, they can’t find affordable housing, so they’re really stuck in that situation,” she said.
17 April 2019:
B.C. drug users demand clean supply, but fear they won’t live to see it happen
By David P. BallStar Vancouver
Tues., April 16, 2019
VANCOUVER—Several hundred Vancouverites marked three years since the province declared a public health emergency over the thousands of people killed by overdoses.
But as they marched Tuesday from the safe-injection clinic Insite through downtown Vancouver, advocates say “contaminated” drugs have taken a toll on their own leaders.
For B.C. Association of People on Methadone member Garth Mullins, the losses are mounting, and it’s been destabilizing and “disorganizing” for the drug-reform movement.
“We’ve lost rank and file members and leaders in such high numbers over the last five years,” he said, wearing a distinctive black case of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone on his belt. “It’s hard to organize or think strategically when you’re always doing triage, planning a memorial.”
Just last month the president of his organization, Chereece Keewatin, died from a fentanyl overdose. Mullins knew Keewatin for at least six years, and invited her to join the editorial board of the podcast Crackdown, of which he is executive producer.
“Chereece was really little, but she had this tremendous capacity to lift people’s spirits,” he said in an interview. “You’d have meetings where we talk about really, really bleak subjects, but she had these funny asides to cut through the bleakness.
“She made people laugh. In that way, she took responsibility for the whole collective emotional state of the group.”
It’s not just the B.C. Association of People on Methadone that’s seen the direct “casualties” of what Mullins called “a war.” The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and the national Canadian Association of People who Use Drugs have also lost high-ranking board members in recent years.
Since 2016, nearly 11,000 people have died across Canada from opioid overdoses, according to the most recent federal and provincial data. The majority of those deaths were from opioids such as fentanyl or its more deadly variants, but B.C. remains the epicentre for roughly a third of those deaths, 1,500 of them last year alone.
On average, four British Columbians died every day from overdoses last year, much higher than the national average and largely unchanged since the province’s April 2016 declaration of a public health emergency.
11 May 2020
.
A wall mural in the DTES poses a valid question, "how do we end the drug crisis"? A more basic question, how did we get here?
Vancouver, B.C. is consistently ranked at the top of the list for the world’s most liveable cities - but not for many in the DTES.
The city has a dirty little secret that it has been trying to suppress for decades. The historic four-block area near East Hastings and Main Street — the DTES — known as one of the “poorest postal codes” in Canada, has a combination of drug use, HIV, homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, and crime all making up this poor off neighbourhood.
To be successful as a drug lord you need a steady, reliable, cheap supply of product, a location where you can operate relatively free from prosecution and away you go. The prime location ingredients Vancouver offers is the DTES.
Over the decades continuing city administrations have built a community of “customers with no cash” by loading the DTES with blocks of not for profit social housing. Along with the myriad of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SRO's) the area is prime territory for the drug trade.
Social housing should be spread throughout the city to provide a society of different financial means for common support - IMO.
Administrations over the years have been loath to attempt social housing in the rich city enclaves due to onerous push back. It was and still is more expedient to keep adding more social housing in the DTES where there is minimal opposition.
***** Today there are at least 6 City of Vancouver development permit applications on file for more social housing in the DTES.
The process is welcomed by the myriad of DTES support service groups who like their clientele close at hand and the clientele are fine with it as services are nearby.
DTES government and service support groups along with poverty pimp lawyers who have a hissy fit if anyone tries to change the dial, while also making money off the situation, has resulted in the perfect condition for drug dealers to flourish.
Social housing residents, many older, Asian and often mentally challenged are living in a hell hole neighbourhood with little individual voice.
In recent years, the area is seeing an east creeping gentrification. This is causing the DTES street population to be squeezed into a smaller footprint resulting in more confrontation and the appearance of a worsening situation even though overall the numbers of street people remains fairly constant.
The amount of taxpayer dollars spent in the area is staggering with little to show for the investment.
Vancouver has always had a drug problem. The opioids of choice — and the increasingly staggering death toll — have changed over the years.
In 2017 Fentanyl killed so many Canadians it caused the average life expectancy in B.C. to drop for the first time in decades. But for crime kingpins, it became a source of such astonishing wealth it disrupted the Vancouver-area real estate market.
SOME BACKGROUND:
Excerpt from the Province Newspaper by reporter Randy Shore 18 March, 2017.
When members of the Royal Commission to Investigate Chinese and Japanese Immigration came to Vancouver in 1901, they got an eyeful.
“There were whole rooms of Chinese lying stretched out on beds with the opium apparatus laid out before them — all unmindful that their attitudes and surrounding conditions are being taken note of to assist in keeping the remainder of their countrymen entirely out of Canada,” reported the Vancouver World newspaper.
The fringes of Vancouver’s Chinatown have always been the centre of Canada’s opiate trade. Ever more potent and easily smuggled versions emerged through the decades, culminating in the scourge of synthetic opiates — fentanyl and carfentanil — thousands of times more powerful and many times more deadly than opium.
Opium was a source of revenue for governments of the day. A federal duty imposed on importers fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars between 1874 and 1899. In B.C. ports, and cities charged hundreds of dollars to purveyors in the form of business licences.
Between 1923 and 1932, more than 700 Chinese men were deported for drug-related violations.
Under constant pressure from the police, opium users began to inject their hit, as the technique created no smoke or aroma and used smaller equipment, which could be easily hidden. In the 1920s and 1930s, white users tended to be young criminals, “racetrack hands, and circus and show people” who smoked opium or sniffed heroin.
By the mid-1930s, heroin was one of the most common drugs in circulation and white users were increasingly taking the drug intravenously, especially as prices rose due to scarcity brought about by vigorous law enforcement.
The outbreak of the Second World War put opiate addicts into a state of crisis, as opiate drugs were required in great quantities for the war wounded. The street price of a hit — whether heroin, morphine or codeine — shot up and crime along with it.
In the post-war period, right through to the mid-’60s, Vancouver was ground zero for Canada’s intravenous drug scene, made up mainly of petty criminals, troubled youths fed by drug lords.
Before the ’40s were over, highly refined white heroin had appeared and it was coming from overseas to satisfy a hungry market in Vancouver, home to half of the country’s drug users.
Heroin use remained a constant undercurrent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside during the ’70s and ’80s, even as alcohol was the neighbourhood’s real drug of choice.
But a flood of a new and even more potent “China White” heroin arriving into the city reignited public outrage in the early ’90s. A spate of 331 overdose deaths in 1993 spurred B.C. coroner Vince Cain to call for the decriminalization of heroin and addicts be prescribed the drug to legally maintain their habit.
It would be nearly 15 years before the Study to Assess Long-term Opioid Maintenance Effectiveness (SALOME) began in Vancouver, just about the time a new threat emerged.
Up to 80 times as powerful as heroin, fentanyl hit the streets and reduced the risk for traffickers as it was so concentrated, transportation was easier.
The carnage wrought by fentanyl has been without precedent.
Heroin seized in drug busts is routinely cut with fentanyl and in recent months the presence of carfentanil.
SUMMARY:
Where will this go next, who knows ?
The richest of societies should be especially judged by how they treat their least fortunate, and Vancouver has its challenge set out for the foreseeable future.
UPDATE 23 MAY 2020 - VANCOUVER SUN
John Mackie: The Downtown Eastside is a war zone disaster — stop ghettoizing it.
John Mackie, Vancouver Sun 23 May 2020
Twenty years ago local musician Kuba Oms was recording at the Miller Block, a now defunct Hastings Street recording studio near Save-On-Meats.
He jaywalked and was stopped by a cop, who handed him a ticket.
“I said ‘Are you kidding me?’” Oms recounts. “You know there’s a guy shooting up over there, and a crack dealer over there. And the cop said ‘That’s a health issue.’”
That story pretty much sums up the city’s attitude toward the Downtown Eastside over the past few decades.
In some ways the cop was right — it is a Vancouver health issue. But letting people openly do drugs in public and turn Hastings and the wider Downtown Eastside into a ghetto is political correctness gone mad.
Drive down Hastings Street between Abbott and Gore and you’ll see dozens, even hundreds of people hanging out on the street, in various states of sobriety. They are definitely not social distancing. It’s a miracle that COVID-19 hasn’t swept the entire area.
The height of this madness was the recent occupation of Oppenheimer Park. Vancouver has real issues of homelessness, but to some degree Oppenheimer was about a fringe group of politicos manipulating the homeless.
Many police resources were diverted to the park and there was a crime wave in nearby Chinatown — one business closed because they were being robbed a dozen times a day.
The province recently made hotel rooms available for the homeless people occupying Oppenheimer Park, so things have calmed down somewhat. But the big question is what happens in a few months? Is government going to find permanent homes for them?
Odds are if they do, it will be in highrises in the Downtown Eastside. For decades that’s where the city and province have been concentrating social housing, especially for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
Their argument is these residents feel comfortable there. But the reality is the more poverty is concentrated, the worse the area seems to become.
Maybe it’s time for the city of Vancouver to give its head a shake and realize that its much-ballyhooed Downtown Eastside Plan is actually part of the problem, not the solution.
Part of the plan decrees you can’t build condos on Hastings between Carrall Street in Gastown and Heatley Avenue in Strathcona, or in historic Japantown around Oppenheimer Park.
Development in those areas has to be rental only, with at least 60 per cent social housing. This pretty much ensures that no market housing is built in the poorest area of the city.
When the plan was unveiled in 2014, Vancouver’s former head planner Brian Jackson said the aim was to ensure that low-income people in the Downtown Eastside weren’t displaced.
“The plan is attempting to achieve balance,” he explained then.
In fact, the plan does the exact opposite. There is no balance in the Downtown Eastside: It’s been turned into a ghetto. A friend who’s worked there for two decades calls it a war zone.
The city desperately need some market housing, co-ops and development on Hastings and around Oppenheimer. The anti-poverty activists will scream blue murder that it’s gentrification, but it’s actually normalization. You don’t have to displace anybody, you just have add a different mix to make it safer.
I live in Strathcona, where about 6,500 people live in social housing and about 3,500 in market homes. It’s a close-knit neighbourhood that has the balance Brian Jackson was taking about — it’s diverse and features a variety of incomes.
Japantown and the Downtown Eastside could be a real neighbourhood again if the city retained its stock of handsome historic buildings but allowed some development of its many non-descript structures.
It could be like Strathcona, even the West End. But I fear it could get even worse, if the planners and politicians continue to concentrate all the Lower Mainland’s poverty and social ills in one small area.
jmackie@postmedia.com
John Mackie is a veteran Postmedia reporter who has written several stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Plan.
13 JULY, 2020
Vancouver can’t catch up to its housing crisis
ADRIENNE TANNER
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED 13 JULY 2020
It is obvious now the cheers that erupted when Vancouver’s longest running tent city was dismantled were wildly premature. Fearing a COVID-19 outbreak would take hold in the overcrowded inner-city camp, the provincial government in April acquired emergency housing in hotels for homeless people living there and cleared the site.
Many camp residents embraced the offer of a clean room. Some refused and relocated outdoors. The camp shifted, first to some empty Port of Vancouver land, and when a court order quickly shut it down, finally landed in Strathcona Park. With each move, it grew.
Today there are about 150 tents Strathcona Park, roughly double the number there were in Oppenheimer Park. How many inhabitants are truly homeless is anyone’s guess. Some of the tents were erected by activists with homes. Others belong to people living in single room occupancy hotels, the worst of which are noisy, bug-infested and so hot that some residents prefer to spend summer outside.
There is already an air of permanence to the camp; the city has installed porta-potties, fresh drinking water and handwashing stations. Park rangers drop by a few times daily. The area is reasonably clean, but these are early days.
Strathcona residents are largely sympathetic to homeless people, but are understandably unhappy about losing a large chunk of park space. They fear the same violence and social disorder that cropped up at Oppenheimer is inevitable; there has already been a small fire and there appears to be a bike chop shop on site. There are cries for the city to sanction a permanent tent city location – elsewhere, of course.
So how exactly did the province’s efforts to shut down a tent city and house homeless people backfire so badly? The city and provincial officials have been out-manoeuvered and out-organized by anti-poverty activists who seized a COVID-19 opportunity when they saw it.
The pandemic raised fears the Oppenheimer tent city would turn into a reservoir of disease that could overwhelm the health system. The activists know that’s why the government cleared the camp and purchased hotels for social housing. They understand this is the moment to highlight society’s failure to solve homelessness, even if their end goals seem to differ. Some are calling for permanent housing – others prefer the idea of a permanent, free-wheeling tent city.
The sorry truth is, even with the addition of 600 units of temporary modular housing and, more recently, the purchase of three downtown hotels, there are still more homeless people than homes. Successions of governments at all levels have allowed this crisis to grow. They’ve failed to build enough social housing. Failed to provide adequate mental health services. Failed to fund enough drug rehabilitation programs for those who want to quit and provide a safe drug supply for those who can’t.
So, now here we are with the largest homeless camp the city has ever seen and another stressed-out neighbourhood. Legally, the new tent city may prove more difficult to dismantle – it’s a large park and the tents are well spaced so the pandemic may not wash as a valid reason. And unless housing is available for everyone who is homeless, it is unlikely the courts would grant an injunction.
Solving problems associated with homelessness is a huge challenge. We can start with housing, but that alone is not nearly enough. Many of the people living in the hotels and park are drug users. Many are mentally ill. Some are both. It takes money – and lots of it – to provide decent housing and supports for this segment of society.
But to cave to demands for a permanent tent city is an American-style admission of defeat. The park board seems resigned to tent cities in parks and is considering a bylaw seeking to control locations. City council has resisted sanctioning a permanent spot, instead offering up land for new social housing. The province has stepped up with money for temporary modular housing and purchases of hotels.
It will be tough to keep neighbourhoods onside if more parks are rendered unusable for recreation. There is only one palatable solution; the provincial government must stay the course and keep adding decent, affordable housing. It won’t be cheap or easy. Catchup never is.
01 APRIL 2022
More than 2,200 British Columbians lost to illicit drugs in 2021
The toxic illicit drug supply claimed the lives of at least 2,224 British Columbians in 2021, according to preliminary data released by the BC Coroners Service.
“Over the past seven years, our province has experienced a devastating loss of life due to a toxic illicit drug supply,” said Lisa Lapointe, chief coroner. “This public health emergency has impacted families and communities across the province and shows no sign of abating. In 2021 alone, more than 2,200 families experienced the devastating loss of a loved one. In the past seven years, the rate of death due to illicit drug toxicity in our province has risen more than 400%. Drug toxicity is now second only to cancers in B.C. for potential years of life lost. We cannot simply hope that things will improve. It is long past time to end the chaos and devastation in our communities resulting from the flourishing illicit drug market, and to ensure, on an urgent basis, access across the province to a safe, reliable regulated drug supply.”
The last two months of 2021 saw the largest number of suspected illicit drug deaths ever recorded in the province, with 210 deaths in November and an additional 215 in December. The 2,224 total number of deaths is 26% more than the 1,767 illicit drug-related deaths investigated by the BC Coroners Service in 2020, and equates to an average of 6.1 lives lost every day.
The provincewide death rate in 2021 was 42.8 per 100,000 residents. Every health authority in B.C. experienced a record loss of lives.
Since the public health emergency into substance-related harms was first declared in April 2016, more than 8,800 British Columbians have been lost to toxic drugs.
Toxicological testing once again underscores the reality that the illicit drug supply continues to be unstable and increasingly toxic. Fentanyl was detected in 83% of samples tested in 2021. Carfentanil was present in 187 results, almost triple the number recorded in 2020 (66).
Additionally, 50% of samples in December tested positive for etizolam, more than three times the rate of detection in July 2020 (15%). Benzodiazepines create significant challenges for life-saving efforts as naloxone does not reverse its effects. As with previous reporting, almost all test results included the presence of multiple substances.
“We need decision-makers at all levels to recognize and respond to this public health emergency with the level of urgency it demands,” Lapointe said. “The reality is this: every day we wait to act, six more people will die. COVID-19 has shown what is possible when goverments act decisively to save lives. And in order to save lives in this public-heath emergency, we need to provide people with access to the substances they need, where and when they need them. Time has run out for research and discussion. It is time to take action.”
Additional key preliminary findings are below. Data is subject to change as additional toxicology results are received:
In 2021, 71% of those who died as a result of suspected drug toxicity were between 30 to 59, and 78% were male.
The townships that experienced the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in 2021 were Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest numbers of illicit drug toxicity deaths were in the Fraser and Vancouver Coastal health authorities (765 and 615 deaths, respectively), making up 62% of all such deaths during this period.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver Coastal Health (49 deaths per 100,000 individuals) and Northern Health (48 per 100,000).
By Health Service Delivery Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver, Thompson Cariboo, Northwest, Northern Interior and Fraser East.
By Local Health Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Upper Skeena, Merritt, Enderby, Lillooet and North Thompson.
Quotes:
Dr. Nel Wieman, deputy chief medical officer, First Nations Health Authority –
“The number of deaths due to toxic drug poisonings for 2021 translates to devastating losses of First Nations people: daughters and sons, aunties and uncles, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. These are people who loved and were loved. In every year since this public health emergency was declared, B.C. First Nations people have been over-represented in toxic drug-poisoning events and deaths. We must change our understanding of the root causes of substance use and addiction, and work together to address the stigmas surrounding toxic drug use and the people who use drugs. We must continue to invest in Indigenous-specific, culturally safe harm-reduction, treatment and recovery services that are accessible, timely and free from discrimination and racism.”
Guy Felicella, peer clinical adviser, Vancouver Coastal Health –
“I join the thousands of British Columbians who are heartbroken, frustrated and angry over this unfathomable loss. Every one of these deaths was preventable and represents a failure to act, a failure to learn from mistakes. Change nothing and nothing changes. That’s been the story now for years as the approach throughout this crisis has been to meet policies where they’re at, rather than meeting people who use drugs where they’re at. This approach is killing and continues to kill people. Who has the courage to step forward and make this stop?”
AUGUST 2023
Today’s release of the report on drug toxicity deaths for the month of July 2023 by the BC Coroners Service is a stark reminder that the ongoing toxic-drug crisis continues to have a devastating impact on communities across our province. We hold in our hearts the memories of the 198 people lost in July in British Columbia.
The coroners service said the 1,455 deaths from January to July are the most ever reported in the first seven months of the year since a public health emergency over drug poisoning deaths in the province was declared in 2016.
It puts the province on pace to potentially exceed the 2,383 deaths recorded in 2022. A total of 12,739 people in the province have died from drug overdoses in the seven years.
30 NOVEMBER, 2023
At least 2,039 British Columbians have died from toxic drugs so far this year, according to preliminary figures released by the B.C. Coroners Service on Thursday, 29 November, 2023.
Of those, 189 people died in October, which is about 6.1 deaths a day. Most of the dead were between 30 and 59 years of age, and more than three-quarters were men, according to the coroner.
While the largest number of deaths reported so far has been in urban centres, such as Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria, the health authority with the highest rate of death in 2023 is Northern Health, with 61 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the coroner.
As in previous months, fentanyl was found in most — 85 per cent — of the illicit drugs tested, often combined with other opioids or stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Earlier this month, Interior Health issued a drug advisory warning for people who use drugs that some substances being advertised as hydromorphone on the black market contain isotonitazine, a drug the coroner says is as potent as fentanyl.
Unregulated drug toxicity is the leading cause of death in B.C. for people aged 10 to 59, accounting for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural disease combined, the coroner said.
Since a public health emergency was declared in 2016, more than 13,000 people have died.
JANUARY 2024:
Jennifer Whiteside, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, has released the following statement regarding the BC Coroners Service year-end report on illicit drug toxicity deaths:
“Today, as we reflect on the year behind us, our hearts are heavy with the loss of 2,511 people in British Columbia to toxic drugs. Each of these lives was precious and important, each with their own story, their own dreams and people who love them. They were part of our community, and their loss is felt deeply by us all.
So what is the game plane to stop it?
C. seeks to keep cash seized from Downtown Eastside gang
Courtesy Kim Bolan and the Vancouver Sun.
Kim Bolan is an experienced and award-winning journalist who has covered gangs in British Columbia for the past 40 years. Bolan also investigated the Air India bombing for 25 years until the publication in 2005 of her book, Loss of Faith.
The B.C. government has filed a lawsuit against a group of alleged Downtown Eastside drug traffickers, seeking the forfeiture of more than $150,000 seized from them.
The lawsuit, filed this week by the director of civil forfeiture, names four defendants that it alleges are part of a criminal organization investigated by the Vancouver Police Department.
While the group is not named in the statement of claim, details of the VPD probe outlined in the court document match an investigation into Zone 43 — a gang that originated in Montreal but has taken over the Downtown Eastside in recent years. Zone 43 has connections to B.C.’s notorious Wolfpack gang alliance.
In June, the VPD announced arrests of several Zone 43 gangsters, though they were released pending approval of charges.
The VPD said it had seized firearms, 24 kilos of drugs and $150,000 in cash during searches on May 14 in Vancouver and Burnaby.
The civil forfeiture lawsuit refers to three VPD searches done on the same date in the same cities and alleges Shayne Cozier-Flanagan, Evantee Jevontee Eustace Stoney, Tristin Johnson and Raimon Geday were “participating in the activities of a criminal organization.”
When police searched Stoney’s apartment on the 30th floor at 2388 Madison Ave. in Burnaby, they found $143,910.75 in Canadian currency and $607 in U.S. currency, the lawsuit said.
Officers seized another $5,800 at Cozier-Flanagan’s suite, also on the 30th floor, at 5665 Boundary Rd. in Vancouver, it said.
About $3,417 was seized from Johnson, who also lives in the Madison apartment, when he was arrested in the 300-block of East Hastings. Another $1,920 was found in Geday’s room in a supportive housing building on Kaslo Street, the lawsuit said.
The VPD also seized a 2017 Acura RDX, of which Stoney is the registered owner and which was used “to facilitate the trafficking of controlled substances,” the civil forfeiture director alleged.
The statement of claim notes that both Stoney and Geday have previous trafficking convictions and are banned from possessing firearms.
All four men named in the lawsuit “trafficked in controlled substances in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the surrounding areas,” the lawsuit alleges.
In the Boundary apartment, police also found a money counter and business cards with the number to call to purchase drugs — known as a ‘dialer’ number.
In the Madison suite, the VPD also found dilaudid pills, oxycodone pills and “score sheets” documenting drug sales, collection and debts.
In Geday’s room, police found crack cocaine, powdered cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and another 275 dilaudid pills, as well as score sheets, bear spray and “miscellaneous drug packaging materials.”
The cash and car should be forfeited to the government because they are proceeds of or were used for unlawful activity, the lawsuit alleged.
The crimes committed include possession for the purpose of trafficking and trafficking, committing offences for the benefit of a criminal organization, conspiracy, money laundering and failure to declare taxable income, it alleged
No statements of defence have yet been filed on behalf of the four men.
Vancouver Police Insp. Phil Heard said at the June news conference that Zone 43 gangsters “pose a very significant risk to the public. They’re involved in a well-documented conflict ongoing in the province of Quebec with a rival group.”
Sources say the gang is still selling drugs in the Downtown Eastside.
AUGUST 2025:
The law protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair
Pete McMartin: I'm tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse.
Published Aug 03, 2025
In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Over 100 programs existed just for housing. Thirty provided health care, 30 offered family services and a miscellany of another 100 services — including a food bank for pets — brought the total to 260 social welfare agencies operating solely within the eight square blocks of the DTES.
Those 260 programs served just 6,500 clients.
Five years earlier, in 2009, Province reporter David Carrigg also did a survey of the programs available in the DTES, and he identified 174 social welfare agencies offering services to about 5,000 clients.
In other words, in the five years between Carrigg’s survey and Culbert’s and mine, not only had the number of people needing help grown but so had the number of agencies serving them.
And the cost to taxpayers?
Over $360 million annually.
That astounding figure — almost a million dollars a day — did little to satisfy the DTES’s voracious appetite for tax dollars. More to the point, it did nothing to eradicate the misery and living conditions of the people who lived there.
Rather than winning the war on poverty — and what a quaint phrase that seems now — governments engineered a truce, with the unstated understanding that if they couldn’t solve the problem or spend their way out of it, they could contain it. Those 260 social service bureaucracies weren’t solutions to an intractable problem; they were barricades. They ghettoized their impoverished clientele by concentrating the services on which they depended.
And let’s be honest: The public was complicit in this, and content for it to continue as long as the misery stayed confined within the borders of the DTES.
And yet here we are. The squalor spreads. It corrodes a once-vibrant downtown core. It infiltrates the suburbs. Daily acts of random violence and vandalism have become normalized, while a cornucopia of drugs — some decriminalized, some tolerated, many deadly — act as accelerants.
In 2016, a year after our survey, provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Act due to the alarming rise in opioid-related overdose deaths. Since then, over 16,000 people have died from those opioids. That’s not progress. It’s a plague.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has worked. Over the decades, the problem has been studied to death — admittedly, a poor choice of words — with consultants and academics and the legions of poverty industry advocates offering up solutions that ultimately fail. They fail because they’re predicated on two simple criteria:
1. Give us more money.
2. Give us more of everything — housing, hospital beds, food banks, drugs, injection sites, counselling or — and this is always implicit — empathy, with a side order of collective guilt.
I’ve seen this in my own newspaper.
In one recent opinion piece, the author laments that it has been the public’s and governments’ norm “to daily bypass our downtrodden, our homeless, our addicted or mentally ill on the street as though they are either invisible or merely equivalent to lampposts” — to which I have to reply: ‘Are you f—ng kidding me?’
The public and its governments have done exactly the opposite and, short of bathing their feet with Christ-like piety, have directed billions of tax dollars not only to ease the suffering of the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill, but also to make them completely dependent upon those dollars.
Another Sun story — this one again by Culbert — examined the merits of involuntary care through the experiences of three addicts who underwent the process, and while two saw it as beneficial and helped them get clean, the third condemned it as “dehumanizing” and a cause of her PTSD. Though she no longer does drugs, she said that if she relapses she would prefer to take her chances with street drugs that could possibly kill her rather than be readmitted to hospital against her will.
Well, OK, I thought, ‘You’re an adult. Good for you for having the honesty to express that choice, however idiotic I may find it.’
But what I thought was missing in her testimonial was (a) any appreciation of the monumentally expensive efforts governments and the public had tried to make on her behalf, however ill-informed she may have believed those attempts to be, and (b) her failure to recognize the destructive effects that a relapse would have not just on her own health and family, but, more importantly, also on the collective health of the public, who would be asked to offer up yet more money, and deal yet again with her relapse — providing she survives it.
Finally, in The Sun, there was another column, this one by Sam Sullivan, who wrote that, after 52 years, it was time to end the DTES “experiment” and the restrictive housing policies that he believes led to the homelessness and violence bedevilling it.
Funny thing about that.
Between 1993 and 2005, Sullivan was a Vancouver city councillor, and for three years after that, he was mayor. Yet despite the fact that his 15-year tenure at city hall placed him in the midst of that DTES experiment, if not close to its helm, it is only now, 20 years later, that he publicly declares the experiment to be a failure, and — as far as I could tell from reading his opinion piece — without taking any responsibility for it.
I will refrain here, in my own column, from claiming to speak for the public or with any inkling of what popular sentiment might be.
But this is how I feel:
My patience is Exhausted.
I’m tired of the endless, self-regenerating calls for more studies and more funding when all I see is a colossal waste of money and effort leading to no improvement. I’m tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. I’m tired of civil rights that supersede my own, and treat the right to defecate in the streets with greater regard than my right to be offended by it.
Finally, I’m tired of a social welfare system that not only encourages dependency, but refuses, out of moral timidity, to also admit its complicity in it, and which shies away from asking hard questions about personal responsibility and the consideration of measures more draconian than safe injection sites — measures like a return to complete drug criminalization, a higher threshold of minimum sentences for trafficking, the establishment of rehabilitation centres or work camps exclusively in wilderness areas far from the temptations of cities, the discontinuation of any efforts that facilitate drug use, and yes, the robust expansion of an involuntary care system.
It’s also my opinion that none of these measures, given the current legal climate, will become reality, at least for the foreseeable future. Under our Constitution and the Criminal Code, the law, in its majestic equality, protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair, and, as so often happens, bring about their own deaths.
How enlightened we have become! What progress we have made! We’ve reached that point when now sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing one’s daily bread are no longer evidence of a system’s failure.
They are the system.
A left party political rally, it shows all the typical elements; billboards with inflammatory inaccurate information, street vendors selling propaganda and other stuff. Most of the people attending the event have little idea about what they are protesting.
Christie Pits Park, Toronto ON 10 May 2021
Doug Ford is the premier of Ontario. He has proven electable, but not much of an intellect. Once in power, has no idea what to do with it. It is unfair to insult his waistline, but legitimate to object to his government.