joe posts

The Kids in the Hall’s “The Customer” skit, performed on an anon chan.

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Update: The boycott worked! The franchise owner rehired her and even offered to make up her lost pay. I guess someone has some common sense, or at least took a college course in PR.

Heh, forget unions, forget the ministry of labour; next time you get screwed over at work, just get a story in the national newspapers.

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I’d say this is pretty low! Funny that it made it to the front page of the Globe and Mail website:

“I have been fired for giving a baby a Timbit,” Ms. Lilliman said Wednesday.

“It was just out of my heart — she was pointing and going ‘ah, ah. . .’ I should have gone to my purse and got the change, but it was busy.”

Ms. Lilliman, who has worked at the store for three years, said she thought little of the incident since Timbits are often doled out to dogs and children.

She said the baby was about 11 months old, and she gave her the treat to quiet her, since her mother – a Tims’ regular – had been “having a bad day.”

“I could see [the dismissal] if it was a sandwich or something,” she said. “But it was a Timbit.” – Globe and Mail

Getting fired over a $5 sandwich, sure! That’s just good restaurant management – keeps the wage slaves scared. But a $0.16 piece of fried dough? I actually thought, when I read the headline, that someone had been fired for giving unhealthy food to a baby. Like maybe the mother complained or something. I thought THAT would be excessive, so I had one of those ‘2g1c’ reactions when I actually read the Globe and Mail story. Whaaaa? Naaaaahhh!

But let me tell you – this injustice will not stand.

I’m calling for a boycott. A boycott of Tim Hortons!

I’m off to picket them right now, I just need a sign and a blanket and a folding chair and some donuts and a large double double from Tim… dammit.

You have the right,
Not to be killed.
Murder is a CRIME!
Unless it was done,
By a Policeman,
Or aristocrat!
Know your rights.

-The Clash

Here’s an article that would be shocking if it was about an isolated incident. Usually, though, it’s the “drug dealer” who is executed at the scene.

Another Drug Raid Nightmare

excerpt:

Imagine you’re home alone.

It’s 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you’re already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn’t take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you’re awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he’s trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Virginia, home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The intruders were from the Chesapeake Police Department. They had come to serve a drug warrant. Frederick’s bullet struck Detective Jarrod Shivers in the side, killing him. Frederick was arrested and has spent the last six weeks in a Chesapeake jail.

He has been charged with first degree murder. Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

Now you might be thinking, “Well, hey now, the cops know what they’re doing. He was a drug dealer, and drugs are bad. What do you expect from a drug dealer?” But…

Friends and neighbors describe Frederick as shy, self-effacing, non-confrontational, and hard-working. He had no prior criminal record. Frederick and his friends have conceded he smoked marijuana recreationally. But all—including his neighbors—insist there’s no evidence he was growing or distributing the drug.

According to the search warrant, the police raided Frederick’s home after a confidential informant told them he saw evidence of marijuana growing in a garage behind the home. The warrant says the informant saw several marijuana plants, plus lights, irrigation equipment and other gardening supplies.

After the raid, the police found the gardening supplies, but no plants. They also found a small amount of marijuana, but not much—only enough to charge Frederick with misdemeanor drug possession.

I wonder if anyone thinks it’s worth a life to charge someone with misdemeanor drug possession. With a clean record he might not have faced any jail time at all, but now he’s looking at the death penalty. And there’s more.. remember how he was skittish because someone had broken in earlier in the week?

More disturbingly, the search warrant says the confidential informant was inside Frederick’s house three days before the raid—about the same time Frederick says someone broke into his home. Frederick’s supporters have told me that Frederick and his attorney now know the identity of the informant, and that it was the police informant who broke into Frederick’s home.

If they had already searched the place and found nothing, why bust down the door to raid the house?

Maybe this is all just a messy mistake and not an example of how lopsided and paranoid our justice system is becoming.  If the situation were reversed, and someone went to answer the door and was shot on the spot by the police for no reason, one would expect the officer who fired the fatal shot to face the same kind of penalty, right?

The raid in Chesapeake bears a striking resemblance to another that ended in a fatality. Last week, New Hanover County, N.C., agreed to pay $4.25 million to the parents of college student Peyton Strickland, who was killed when a deputy participating in a raid mistook the sound of a SWAT battering ram for a gunshot, and fired through the door as Strickland came to answer it.

In the case where a citizen mistakenly (and allegedly) shot through his door at a raiding police officer, the citizen is facing a murder charge; in the case where a raiding police officer mistakenly shot through a door and killed a citizen, there were no criminal charges.

The Clash was right.

Isn’t it just insane to send people to their deaths because someone might be smoking weed? Even harder drugs don’t deserve this much attention – we’ve spent billions and people get murdered all the time and we’re not any closer to attaining this absurd Utopian vision of a “drug-free” society.  Cokeheads still get coke, potheads still get pot, heroin is more available than ever thanks to our war efforts in Afghanistan. Any taxpayer who thinks we should get actual results for the money we spend should be up in arms over the War on Drugs, because it’s just a complete boondoggle that does nothing but erode civil liberties and enrich the businessmen that run prisons and sell shit to cops.

Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point – all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion. Things look so bleak that Walters was recently moved to describe a momentary upward blip in drug prices as “historic progress.” – Rolling Stone (emphasis mine)

I guess recording industry bigwigs are still running out of bad ideas to protect their jobs. Cary Sherman, RIAA President, recently talked about implementing ‘piracy filters’ on the ISP and user level. Since network-level filters could easily be defeated by the most basic encryption options available, Mr. Sherman ‘mused’ that encrypted files could still be filtered by your own computer:

“Filters can be put in the applications for example. You know, one could have a filter on the end user’s computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from … encryption because if you want to hear it, you’d have to decrypt it, and at that point the filter could work.”

The video can be found at Gizmodo. Though the RIAA is now saying their president’s statements were only ‘musings’ it’s still an interesting window into the mindset of Big Media distributors. And it reveals that the RIAA president knows pretty much nothing about computers or computer users. How exactly would a filter be able to “listen” to analogue output? Who in their right mind would encumber their machines with complex filtering software?

Much of the focus has been on his comments about filtering copyrighted files, but I was glad to hear the bit at the end when he explained that the RIAA considers personal-use CD-copying as copyright infringement in principle (they won’t take the legal position that it’s allowed), but that they’re generously not hunting down people who do that sort of thing. So we should feel lucky that we’re not being sued for using an mp3 player? Hmmm! I’m just glad they’ve made their position somewhat clearer.

Talk about a lack of perspective. Someone has say “Heh heh heh… gentlemen, it’s just music.” The RIAA and CRIA seem to think their products are important to our health and wellbeing; we have to be protected at all costs from the ravages of “piracy,” and if the industry is sinking it’s the fault of us consumers, not the fault of a business model that hasn’t really changed in a century.

There are plenty of independent artists out there releasing music outside of their control. There are mainstream artists breaking away from their broken business models. There’s lots of legitimately free music online. And there are still used record stores and record shows where you can buy all kinds of music without a dime flowing to the industry.

And if it comes down to it, I have a couple of guitars and will never be bored even if my large, expensive music collection becomes enough of a legal liability that I have to get rid of it all.

So yeah, relax about the whole “piracy is killing music” thing. Music will survive. Recording industry executives, however…

I found this confusing. You know how they’re confiscating liquids at airports, because someone, somewhere, maybe possibly figured out a way to create an explosive mixture using liquid chemicals in an airplane washroom?

So they take your bottles of shaving cream and shampoo and mouthwash because it might be explosive. Naturally they take these dangerous little bottles and store them in secure containers to be disposed of by a properly-trained bomb squad, right?

“At most Canadian airports, said CATSA spokesman Mathieu Larocque, the confiscated material ‘goes straight to the garbage.’” – The Toronto Star

When I first found this out I thought, hmm, that’s odd, they aren’t worried about the liquids mixing together and blowing up some poor garbage collector?

Now some airports are considering that a waste (duh) and are selling or giving away the confiscated items. That’s right, these objects are too dangerous to have on an airplane, so… poor people can have them?

It’s almost as if they don’t take the threat of a bomb being made out of little bottles of chemicals in an airplane washroom seriously. There can’t be much of a threat if these potential bombs are just being tossed in a dustbin or sent to charities.

But I guess it’s a good way of keeping people scared and frustrated, which seems to be the point of most government security measures these days.