Is It Time to Revamp the Vancouver Police Department?

July 25th, 2010 Thomasso

Lets start off with a woman named Sandy. When we talked about this after class on back Thursday, which was fittingly a class about human rights, I was applauded, shocked and embarrassed from both watching and hearing the news about the women in the Vancouver Downtown East Side who was pushed to the ground by a Vancouver Police Officer because she walked into him. The embarrassment escalated when it was discovered that the women has cerebral palsy, and because of this she has difficulty walking at the best of times.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties (BCCL) are an organization of lawyers who volunteer their time that fight for the rights of those who otherwise could not, or challenges our legal and moral values that have being corrupted and that treat people unfairly. They released the video from a street cam that takes video for the purposes of surveillance along Hastings Street where there is no doubt a high concentration of the poor and homeless, and where drug addicts and malcontents gather. Ironically, that same video is what brought justice, the public’s view as in this case, to the forefront.

The public outcry has been deafening in my circles of friends. I have not heard so much outrage about the police since the Robert Dziekanski Tasering murder at the Vancouver Airport back in October 14, 2007 by four RCMP Officers.

The impact that video has is immediate and stands on it own in the public’s mind. Unlike paper that can be censored by government, special organizations and the courts, or testimony that is based on memory that is tainted with objective spin and well rehearsed lines, video is the ultimate eye witness, even when there is no audio to accompany it. It is very difficult for the pubic to see the extenuating circumstances, and to allow legal ambiguous speak to interfere with the actors’ case who is trying to change public’s opinion as the legal system is constantly under attack by the public from all angles.

Does the moral compass of the VPD and other police forces need to be fixed? This was one of the questions that we debated back on Thursday. With the riggers of police training, one would assume that police would be more attuned to the area that they are serving. As one colleague put it, “all it takes is one bad apple…”

Here is the email I sent after class:

Things That Make Canada Questionable in its Stance on Human Rights and the treatment of the Weak and Disabled.

Last night in one of my classes we debated the aspects of what transpired from an incident that occurred along Hasting street in Vancouver, BC on about July 1st 2010. We focused on the communication by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), not what the media is saying. At present, the VPD is saying very little as it seems that the department is still reviewing the case; however, they are satisfied that the officer did apologies, but the three officers have not comment on their conduct before, during and after the incident occurred.

Have an opened mind when viewing this video. Reflect upon it, and then ask yourself these questions, what would you do if you were the police officer, and the person with the disability? How would you react? If you were a bystander, what would you do? There were Good Samaritan’s along the sidewalk, but would you look the other way, or would intervene regardless that it was police offers who started the action?

Courtesy of CBC NEWS

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/07/22/bc-civil-liberties-police-push-ms-woman-video.html

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/07/22/bc-woman-shoved-sandy-police-downtown-eastside.html

Just blowing off of some steam when I see imbalances in power and misuses of authority.

Please go to these links:

CBC New Website -

“Police Shoving Woman On Video Raises Questions.”

“Woman Shoved By Police Says, ‘He Has No Right.‘”

You can watch the video for yourself, and you be the judge, “was it provoked, or a bad move on the officer’s part?”

Sincerly

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Law, Law and Order, Social Justice, University classes, Video | No Comments »

The Discovery of the Opposite Sex – Enlightenment and Truth: A Young Boy’s Tail – Very Funny.

July 24th, 2010 Thomasso

For us boys, girls were the weirdest thing. I believed that girls had us figured out, so it seemed, but they really didn’t, as time would tell becuase they acted totally different from the way we acted. When I discovered that they had different parts, or plumbing as I my father would tell me, that just threw me over the edge – how do they pee? I found this you-tube clip from a classmate’s post on the class blog in my Communications 3100 class I am taking this semester. Her post was on the 60-something steps for breaking up with your girl friend, but I also found this little gem from the same you-tube author.

Enjoy!

Tom

Posted in General, Humour, Video | 2 Comments »

Finally Truth in Advertising! Thanks to the Onion – Ya Baby

June 7th, 2010 Thomasso

OK, before I go full steam into my diatribe, I want to put a word of caution on this next You-Tube clip I am posting–course language. This clip contains some very nasty language, so keep the kids away from this.

With Apple releasing its latest great piece of consumer gadgetry, I could not resist posting this clip made by the Onion News Network–God I love these guys–on just how close they got it. Unfortunately, all of the latest stuff released by Apple and other manufactures so far this year amounts to garbage on the scale of usefulness for me. What I need to succeed, has not come close to me busting the doors down at the local buy-more store, becuase, frankly, the stuff is pointless and will not help me in my daily life’s routines. So far, my four year old cell phone and three year old lap-top are doing very well for my daily needs.

Sure, I know, everyone is trying so hard to make me part with my hard earned money, but really, you got to give me something that is practical, especially in today’s’ piss-poor economy, it’s gotta do something for me. Wheels for my fifteen cylinder, two miles to the gallon, SUV,  now that is important; not some lame, I-have-to-use-my-fingers, touch-screen, no mouse, whatever it is–lap-top. If they want to sell me something, then they got to get their priorities right! Make me a better lap-top. Make me a news paper that you see on Harry Potter and Serenity–then we will talk, me parting with my legal tender.

Watch the video, and then think about all the stupid junk that is being pushed on you, and the cheesy ads that promote it. And then when you are done, click on all the other videos that the Onion News Network has made, and laugh out loud!

Posted in Diatribe, General, Humour, Video | 1 Comment »

Drawing Tablet meets MyPaint In the Freedom of Open Source

May 22nd, 2010 Thomasso

I finally had some time to sit down and dabble with some of the art and graphics programs I download from a few weeks ago after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04. I called up MyPaint, and it shocked me as it opened up. I used this program a few years ago when it was very young in its development, but I never got back to it until now–and what a surprise!

MyPaint is loaded with some very cool brushes and FX tools that you can paint with. It works very well with my drawing tablet, and seems very stable.It is one of the best open source programs that I have seen that has some good oil brushes. I also like the many different canvases that you choose that are defaulted in the start-up menu.

There was one little downer that I found: the brushes seem to be listed in Spanish, or some other language. I can live with it, but if you want to create or manage your brushes, well, you may want to find a translator as it could hard to remember which is which, even with the icons to help you . But hey, it has very good icons for each type of brush. I do not think anyone would find it that difficult to navigate through the different options.

I will be trying this program out more often.

This is one of the many time-laps video and tutorials from YouTube that you watch and get a feel for the program. It is amazing what you can do with a computer these days. Forget about buying paint and paper any more when you have it all–and no mess to clean upwards! It also seems to be for both LINUX and Window$.

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Photographs, Software, Video | Comments Off

HST – I’m Mad As Hell, and I’m Not Going To Take It Anymore!

April 17th, 2010 Thomasso

I feel better now that I took the time yesterday to sign the (anti) HST petition of British Columbia. In fact, I felt so good that I went and told as many of my friends as I could that they should show their support and sign too-and many of them did. I met a lot of angry people who are feed-up with all levels of governments, especially our provincial government for the implementation of this new tax structure called the Harmonizing Sales Tax, or HST.

What is the HST? In my own words, it is the consolidation of both the federal, GST (Goods and Services Tax), and the PST, (Provincial Sales Tax), and lump them into one tax, where everyone will pay the one lump tax, and the various governments then divvy up their take form the total sum left over. There are a number huge problems that I see with this new tax regime, and they cancel out any of the positive good that this tax does make. Net widening, and increases in the number of  items being taxes are my biggest gripes with this. The New tax will reach more people than ever before, and also, items that only had one tax applied to it, will have both wrapped up into the HST. This is more hardship for the consumer in what is already a very difficult time for most British Colombians  who are still struggling with the wrath of the recension, like those who are still unemployed.

So I got off my butt and did something about it. I saw the HST petition sign-up station along Glover Road, and I rushed right back to it after I changed at home. I live only a five minute walk from the sign-up station so I walk there to sign up.

I felt great after I singed it. Though, there were two things that I pondered while I was walking home afterwards. First, I never thought I would ever climb on board with anything that involves Bill Vander Zalm, the man who spearheaded the HST petition campaign. Second, what will our governments do if the people vote overwhelmingly in favour of having no HST? I shutter to think what these megalomaniacs will do to us? Medicare is one thing, but Corporate Welfare is another.

Some Good Links To Check Out:

http://fighthst.com/

The Straight.com/

Posted in Diatribe, General, Photographs, Social Justice, Video | 1 Comment »

Playing Around With Ubuntu 10.04, Alpha-3. Code Name: Lucid Lynx.

March 26th, 2010 Thomasso

Yay! It looks like Ubuntu 10,04 LTS (Long Term Support) will be a “hopeful” success. I took some time to play around with the early, bleeding edge build, to see how it is shaping up, and took it out for a test drive. With the predicable bugs and hick-ups, it went very well. There are some surprises that caught me off guard, like my tablet still worked, after reading all bugs that were causing that device to brick. My Lexmark E210 laser printer still worked, and my Nvidia card still pumped out the 3D desktop and eye candy that I love so much.

The final release with April 29th, 2010. I strongly recommend that you do not install on your main machine! The Alpha 3 is still bug ridden, so you might as well save yourself the headache and wait the 30 to 40 days for the final release. The Ubuntu Web Site “Alpha 3 Page,” strongly says this.

Although at first there didn’t seem to be that much of a change from 9.10 Karmic, once I started to poke around, the subtle yet drastic changes started to pop up. I would also strongly recommend a total install, not a upgrade due to all the configuration issues most people will have, like with certain peripherals and PCI cards. I lost all of my MIDI functions from my Audiophile 24 x 2 sound card, and along with it my digital audio out.

Oh, the look and feel are great with a fresh install. Way faster than 9.10. I can honestly say that this blows the door off of Windsow$7, both in performance and time. Window$ still has way too much “stuff” to load while 10.04 only takes what it need to boot-up. Window$ 7 = 1.24 sec., Ubuntu 10.04 = 0.21 sec., from boot-up to desktop. This is using a PhenonII X4 965 Quad Core CPU with 4 Ghz of DDR2 Ram, and a 1TB SATA 32M Hard drive Seagate, 7200PRM, SATA2, with 32MB Buffer. Note too that I have always had this USB issue with Window$7 that I cannot get rid of.

Here is the release schedual, if you are interested in this: Ubuntu Release Schedual – 10.04.

Below are two YouTube clips, the first is from mark Shuttleworth, the brainchild of Ubuntu, and the last one is a short demo of the boot-up sequence for 10.04, and what to expect while installing.

Note: this guy below is using virtual machine to load and use 10.04 and he is suffering from a slow boot up while running virtual box. The jumping and skipping on the video is him using a time-laps fast forward speed while going through the start-up and installation process. It is quite funny. And it didn’t work, I got Alpha 3 to run in Virtual machine.

So, I’m looking forward to installing Ubuntu 10.04, LTS,  the Lucid Lynx out in April 29, 2010!

Posted in General, Humour, Linux, Software, Video | Comments Off

I Admit it, I’m a Lost Fan Too! People Hate Me for it.

February 13th, 2010 Thomasso

For Ten long agonizing months I waited while rerun after rerun played before the launch of season six kicked in on the boob-tube, or flat-screen this month. As of two weeks ago, season six of the television show Lost finally started, and life seems to be back to normal, although normal is such a loose word these days. I have being capturing the last two episodes on my home-made PVR so I can watch it during the times I have to myself. Many I know love the show. I love the show becuase it has a cool narrative and a plot that would make a prime-time soup-opera look like a skit on kid’s TV.

The nice thing about the whole plot are the never ending twists that each character takes. I mean you really need to take notes on some of these details that go on. I also enjoy finding mistakes, especially the continuity of one scene to another, or editing mistakes where make-up changes dramatically–a cut, or gun shot location on a actor’s piece of clothing. There are some really good websites too that have hundreds of them listed.

I also love it when people poke fun at the show. The Onion News Network is probably one of the best American parity shows on the web that I have seen. There are many spoofs of the show Lost on the web, but this one has a lot of truth to it–you either love it, or hate it to death.

We will see what the final season of Lost brings, 17 episodes of suspense, drama and gut wrenching plot. Hopefully they (the writers and producers) can really make everyone heads spin with weirdness as the plot goes where no plot has gone before. I can’t wait!

Posted in Events, General, Humour, Video | Comments Off

I Tip My Hat with Honour

August 15th, 2009 Thomasso

Since I’m on a run with catching up with all the of the blogging I have missed from writing exams over the last two weeks, I thought I would pay tribute to those who have worked hard and made it to graduation, before I call it a day. I know how much of a big deal it is when you climb the highest mountain, swam the deepest water or completed the highest degree, you just want to stand for a moment and breath it in, those priceless few seconds as you reach the summit. It is when your pen drops on the desk and you walk over to table at the front of the class and hand in the fruits of your labour that those few seconds start.

Very dew people will know how much effort, time and money went into reaching that point, the end of a very long road. This year, from my institution, an estimated 30 student will have reached that milestone in my degree program. Although I will not be up there with this term’s group of graduates, basking in the limelight of the convocation, I will be there as a spectator as several of my friends have invited me to share this highly prestigious moment with them.

From my last Monday class, lovingly called CRIM4900, I found that six or seven of the student in that class alone were spending there last few moments as students as they handed in their exams. At this level, all of them will have completed their Bachelor of Arts in Criminology or some other degree. They all have paid their dues, four years, 120 credits, 40 to 50 courses. It’s nuts eh?

So I raise my glass to you all for a job well done! Aaron, who I have had the privilege of sharing many group and research studies with in all those classes we shared. Carol, who showed me that no matter how hard-ass the prof is, they to are people and have feelings—although they sometimes don’t like to show it. Evelyn, Sheryl, and Candace who made poster making in social sciences that much more enjoyable—glue bonds more than the word to paper—it bonds the pen as well. Parhm, the silent genius who rescued me from the wrath of hard-base quantitative statistics and foiled the bell curve. There are many more, and I will miss you all.

Please queue the song, “School’s Out Forever,” by Alice Cooper 1972.

Posted in Criminology, Events, General, University classes, Video | 2 Comments »

They didn’t say it was Going to be This Ugly Out?

July 26th, 2009 Thomasso

Yesterday had turned out to be a very muggy, wet, stormy day as a small thunder storm rolled through over top of us. It sort of approached us really slowly, and we could hear it from about 5:00pm onwards, but by 9:00pm, it was right over top of us, and it seemed to have just parked for the night. Right up until 2:00am there were random flashes of light and the distant rumbling of thunder.

What was so bad about yesterday was the sudden down-pour of rain. It came down hard and fast. And the temperature was not dropping either, so you had this muggy effect that left us hot and sweaty, but soaked from the rain.  I was with some friends doing the BBQ over on Brey Island, aka the Fort Camp site in Fort Langley, when all this happened.

Awe-yes, the barbecue. We planed for this a few weeks ago, and the weekend looked like it was going to be one of those very nice ones, you know, with the sun and all of that perfectness that you need for the best group outing ever. In fact, right up until Friday we figured that we were going to be in camping utopia.

The video was taken from the cell-phone.  The resolution is garbage, and there is no audio; however, I may have access to a copy of it taken from a really nice video camera that one of our compatriots had with her—who braved the elements and took some really good scenes of the lightning. When I get a copy of it, I really want to post that here. The lightning was spectacular! We don’t get lighting shows like this very often here.

Posted in Bitching about weather, General, Video | 5 Comments »

Hate is Alive and Doing Well In My Own Backyard

July 12th, 2009 Thomasso

I don’t like talking about this, and I know most other people don’t either, but this is something that keeps popping up in a country that everyone here thinks is a utopia of the most tolerant place on earth. I see it, and most of my friends see it as well. We do it without even knowing we are doing it. And worse, we have buried it so deep that we can easily say, with a strait face, we would never do it.

I have read authors who have spent the better part of their lives tracing the root causes of racism, and they try to explain how it trickles in from within our society. They write about how laws and social norms are created to protect the dominant class from the “in pure” creeping into their ideals. How law enforcement seems to use surveillance of ethnic groups more closely with this concept call the “white gaze,” that authors such as Carol Tator and Frances Henry who write about this in their book called, “Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of a ‘Few Bad Apples.’”

Canada is by far no perfect place. All you need to do is look at our legal history to see how deep this ethnic divide is. See one of our current laws, the Indian Act for example, where an entire group, a race of peoples, is effected by status and class, and where they carry cards that identify them as aboriginal, and they have special communities that they can live in that we call reservations of which they cannot own the property individually. A reservation is no grand place to live, and statistically these places have a ten times higher rate of poverty than the rest of Canada.

Then you should look back further into our history of legislation where there were laws that targeted most ethnic groups through exclusion, limited mobility, and even gender. Even though most of our laws today reflect a more somewhat equal society, the deep seeds of racism are still germinating throughout society.

Am I surprised that hate crimes like the Phillips beating in Courtney, British Columbia are happening? No. Education is the key to correcting this wrong.

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Law and Order, Social Justice, Video | Comments Off