From Flanders Fields in France to Opium Fields in Afghanistan: Maggie, what have we done?

Flanders Fields is a famous patriotic poem about poppies growing in the spring of 1915 on the battlefields of Belgium, France and Gallipoli. The medieval County of Flanders spans the southern Belgium and north-west France.

The symbol stirs us to remembrance, mourning and duty. Today I was speaking with someone who works in a local grocery store. They said there was an announcement over the PA at 11:00 AM that called for one minute of silence. One of the customers said what's the matter did the computer freeze? No we're having a minute of silence for Remembrance Day. Are you kidding me?

It reminded me of a moving song and video by Terry Kelly called A Pittance of Time which one blog reader recently just sent me. Is it really that hard to stop for one minute and remember the great sacrifices made on our behalf for the freedom we now enjoy?

Yet others understandably have mixed feelings about war and glorifying murder. One blog reader wrote a post in their blog about how they're not wearing a poppy today out of remembrance of the civilian casualties of war which one source claims is a 10:1 civilian to soldier loss in war.

Then there's the politics of war. Self serving politicians and war profiteers exploiting the moment. Peter McKay's publicity stunt in Kandahar comes to mind. Of anyone Stephen Harper and Peter McKay should be hanging their heads in shame on Remembrance day not exploiting it for a photo shoot.

I remember reading a news release about some vets being offended by a cartoon about glorifying murder. They said if you oppose the mission in Afghanistan blame the politicians don't blame the soldiers. Yet at some point our duty is to doing what's right not doing what we're told.

Cultivating and harvesting Opium in Afghanistan mocks the sacrifice made in Europe in the great war. If there really is such a thing as a great war. As Yoda once said Wars not make one great.

It reminds me of the movie Passchendaele written, performed and directed by Paul Gross. It's a story about his grandfather's experience in World War I. It became a love story which in turn was how my own grandparents met. My father's father was wounded with mustard gas burns on his back and met his future wife who was a librarian from New Brunswick serving as a nurse in England during the war. I remember seeing a building in Vancouver near the arts centre with a statue of what I thought was a nun. Turns out that was the uniform of a nurse during the war.

In an interview about the movie, Paul Gross recounts a heart wrenching story his grandfather told him about the war. He said his grandfathers patrol as taking heavy sniper fire from the enemy. There were many casualties but they finally broke through. His grandfather came across one wounded German soldier who was just a kid who reached out his hand and in broken English with childlike innocence said "camera"? He claimed the Germans heard that the allies had cameras and were intrigued by them. After incurring all that loss of his patrol he explained how he then raised his rifle in the air and drove a bayonet through the child's skull ending his life instantly. He said that memory haunted him ever since.

It's a stirring message we don't normally hear. The humanity of war. All the torture, oil wars, war profiteering and opium production has clearly tainted modern warfare. It's not so clear cut good verses evil any more. There's a lot of blurred areas that call upon our duty to stand up for what's right. Torture is not right. Invading a country for oil is not right. Smuggling cocaine to raise money for war is not right.

In Flanders Fields, it says take up our quarrel with the foe to you from failing hands we throw the torch. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep though poppies grow in Flanders's fields. The Afghanistan mission has broken faith with those who died in Flanders despite the fact that we have lost many very good, sincere and genuine soldiers there. The invasion of Iraq was completely wrong. Doing our duty means honouring the dead by doing what's right. Not by exploiting them for a photo op to promote war profiteering. Maggie, what have we done? What happened? What happened to the post war dream? Mind how ya go. Take heed of the Dream.

Kelowna's Cocaine Christmas

"It's a shoe store, not a drug store." so we're told. But the window display, would suggest differently. Steven Johns Shoes, had a front window display of a gold reindeer beside a table with what looked like a line of cocaine and a rolled up dollar bill sitting on top of it.

The reindeer was beside a Christmas tree donned with "little baggies" filled with a cocaine like substance (Ajax) and measuring utensils. The display went up on Sunday, and store employee Mary-Anne Litzenberger says the phone has been ringing off the hook with complaints. "This was not my motivation, it was the owner's. He wanted to shock (people) and that is exactly what he did."

Steven Johns, set up the display and took off for Mexico leaving Lizenberger to deal with the brunt of his actions. Johns told Lizenberger before he left not to take the display down for any reason, and now she fears she could be reprimanded for her actions. "I told Steven it would kill his business, but he said what business? It has been really slow, so I guess we kicked it up a notch."

If the business has been really slow, how can he afford to go on a holiday to Mexico? That's rather suspicious. The reindeer snorting cocaine is one thing but the signs that say Let it Blow, Let it Blow, Let it Blow is another.

Vancouver Civic Elections

I met someone from the George Bush in Surrey protest at the Occupy Vancouver site and he came right out and asked me who we should vote for in Surrey because as he said, no one at that demonstration is going to vote for Dianne Bush. I told him that even though the election is coming up soon I still have to go through the booklet and see who is running for what.

In Vancouver, they have a humours plastic Humpty Dumpty on site with a sign calling it Mayor Gregor Robertson telling everyone to be careful not to push him off the wall. Yet we do need to be careful because sometimes the devil we know is better than the devil we don't know. Suzanne Anton is indeed a devil. She represents the same cruel NPA that was defeated by the legendary Larry Campbell at the time of the Woodwards squat. Vancouver's own Da Vinci.

Typically we have COPE on the left and the NPA on the right with Vision Vancouver reaching above and beyond the two. I won't refer to them as centralist because often we have seen centralist parties in Canada take the worst from the left and the worst from the right instead of taking the best of both worlds. I'd say Vision Vancouver is different. I wouldn't say they are linear left and right I'd say they are visionary looking at issues not party preferences. I like Raymond Chow. I think he's a good man.

As I keep saying no two people agree on every issue. Although many candidates run for mayor in Vancouver usually the people that get in are the ones who have been counsellors or have experience in the filed. Although I hate strategic voting, Darrell Zimmerman doesn't have much of a chance of winning that election. Don't get me wrong, everyone has a chance. It's just opinion polls do have some merit in predicting who the candidates are with the most popularity. Zimmerman didn't even get his picture or write up in the Vancouver's Voter Guide.

Right now Gregor Robertson is firmly ahead in the polls. Unfortunately, he lost some of his popularity of late with regards to his determination to shut down the Occupy Vancouver site and those supporters are voting for other candidates. Unfortunately Suzanne Antoinette appears to be rising slightly in the polls. This is not the person we want to be Mayor of Vancouver. This would be a time warp back to the era of cruelty prior to the Woodwards squat.

The good news is if she is defeated, then we get rid of her on counsel. This is not the time to split the vote. Gregor Robertson got carried away and made a mistake with the court application. Yet I do think he is capable of reason. Suzanne Anton is not. I will note that Adrianne Carr is also running for counsel and I think that would be a good choice. She was the leader of the BC Green Party.

That was my Surrey friend's conclusion. Vote green. People who are concerned about the environment are more likely to be concerned about the people as well. He said BC should be proud for having elected the only Green Party MP in Canada. Indeed. Banning her from the last debate was wrong. She is smart and has a lot to offer the discussions.

The Friendly Faces of Occupy Vancouver

This is a picture of Sean O’Flynn-Magee from the Occupy Vancouver site. He is the one named in the City's court injunction. I can't over stress the nonviolent nature and quest of the Occupy Vancouver movement. During the first week there was a guy silk screening T-shirts for free with his own designed logo. It was an open hand with Vancouver in the background and the caption "You can't shake someone's hand with a closed fist."

They just ran out of the more recent buttons in the information tent that said Vancouver Occupation with a big red heart on it. Day one we saw the peaceful meditation section. Now there's a tent devoted for that.



I went to the site yesterday and they had the sacred fire lit again and a wonderful young lady with an amazing voice was singing hymns for the sacred fire. Then she broke out in a chorus of O Canada to which many joined in. Then to my amazement she even sang Amazing Grace. It was wonderful.



Another talented musician pulled out the guitar and sang some stirring pop songs. Not everyone likes the same kind of music but everyone has their say. This is a political protest but it's much more than that. It's a movement. A movement of awareness, of unity, of listening, of activism and of nonviolence. It's a wonderful thing to see. Go down and check it out. Gandhi would be proud.

With regards to bylaws there are some real concerns and some manufactured concerns. We all know how the City or the Corporate drive like to use technical bylaws to shut down lawful assembly. A few years ago there was a heart wrenching story of a homeless women on a busy Vancouver street who had a candle in her make shift tent to keep warm on a cold winter's night. The candle tipped over and she tragically died in the fire. Very sad. No one wants that to happen on the Occupy Vancouver site. Especially when tents close together could pose a risk for the fast spread of fire if one started. No one wants that to happen.

Banning candles from inside tents is a good idea. Yet the Arts centre was the site of the candlelight vigil for Jack Layton. You can't really say no one is allowed to have a candle in the open. Yet that does make candles in tents harder to enforce. I went down one day with a propane barbecue and a whole bunch of hamburgers and food I bought. The place was crawling with City workers and they said I wasn't allowed to set up the barbecue even in an open area because of the propane flame so I took it all home. The spirit of the law and the letter of the law had become confused.

The key thing here is intent. Is the real intent personal safety or is the real intent shutting down a political protest and lawful assembly? This is a political protest not a safe injection site. The police do have the right to come in and make an arrest if anyone is doing hard drugs on site. A society without laws leads to chaos. No one on site wants anyone to come and steal their personal belongings. Enforcement of law and order is in everyones best interest. Abandoning them with the intent of giving them enough rope to hang themselves is not.

The whole point of the movement is to build a better society. That better society does include police. At first the place was crawling with young bright eyed enthusiastic police officers who were pleasant and polite. After using violence to put out the sacred fire which was safe, self contained in the centre of the open area, things changed. Now that Jim Chu has publicly pledged to shut the political protest down and has threatened physical violence against anyone who doesn't leave on their own accord people's backs are up against the wall. Even in Canada we have the legal right to defend ourselves against violence with equal force. Yet no one on site wants that. They truly are nonviolent pacifists who want to lobby for change.

Instead of focusing all our energy on the negative, trying to find reasons to shut it down, let's take a page of inspiration from the movement and take a look at some of the valid concerns the movement is addressing. Protecting the environment is one and facing corruption on Wall Street is another. We need to remember why Vancouver doesn't have a stock exchange anymore because that is a key focal point of the protest.

MacKay marks Remembrance Day in Kandahar

MacKay marks Remembrance Day in Kandahar: Torturing prisoners and cutting half a billion dollars for Veterans. Yeah we remember. Lest we forget. Another Harper U turn: Recent events suggest that despite its past rhetoric about transparency and accountability, this government is determined to silence whistleblowers rather than protect them.

Murdoch phone-hacking hearing

James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, the embattled News International executive facing mounting evidence that he knew about widespread phone hacking at the News of the World, insists that he was kept in the dark about the illegal practice before the scandal broke.

Former News of the World editor Colin Myler told MPs in September that Murdoch was not telling the truth by denying that he was made aware of the "for Neville" email. That assertion was backed up by Tom Crone, the tabloid's former legal affairs manager, who also told MPs in September: "I told [Murdoch] about the document."

In late October, the Independent newspaper in London reported that, far from being a secret at News of the World, a special cellphone known as "the hub" and devoted to phone hacking was kept at the paper's news desk.

"Despite detailed company logs recording every call made on the hub phone, it was left unexamined by two internal News International inquiries, which dismissed the notion that phone hacking was rife at the title," the Independent said.

Specialist detectives from London's Metropolitan Police found that the hub phone was registered to News International and used illegally to access 1,150 numbers between 2004 and 2006, the paper said.

In one particularly heated point of questioning, Labour MP Tom Watson asked Murdoch whether he was "familiar with the term 'Mafia,'" and said that word could be used to describe the "criminal enterprise" that was the News of the World.

"You must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn't think he was running a criminal enterprise," said Watson, who has been told that he was targeted by News International for surveillance, among other politicians.

Arthur Porter steps down as Canada's spy watchdog

The chair of Canada's spy watchdog committee has resigned his position, Thursday, amid reports he had questionable ties to a lobbyist. Dr. Arthur Porter is also the chief executive officer of the McGill University Health Centre. Porter has been noticeably absent from that job busy with a few other enterprises.

Porter’s moonlighting has raised questions after the National Post reported about his activities as chairman of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). The article revealed that Porter wired $200,000 in personal funds last year to an international lobbyist named Ari Ben-Menashe based in Montreal for an infrastructure agreement in Sierra Leone that ultimately fell through.

A former Israeli government employee, Mr. Ben-Menashe was arrested in the United States in 1989 and charged with illegally attempting to sell three military transport airplanes to Iran. He went to trial and was acquitted in 1990; a jury believed his account, that he had simply acted on orders from his government in Israel to attempt the aircraft sale. He then wrote a memoir called Profits of War, filled with accounts of international espionage and conspiracies he says he either participated in or was privy to.

“This is the book the Israelis tried to stop, written by the man they said didn’t exist — the book that the CIA tried to sabotage,” reads the book’s provocative dust cover.

Wow, an Israeli government employee, accused of selling military planes to Iran but that was OK because he was simply acting on orders from his government. He even mentions the "C" word - conspiracy. His book is about US and Israeli arms dealing tied to Iran Contra. Surprise surprise. It sure does sound like a spy novel.

In June, 2010, Dr. Porter signed a consultancy agreement prepared by Mr. Ben-Menashe and his privately owned, Montreal-based company, Dickens & Madson (Canada) Inc. Dr. Porter signed on behalf of his own company, Africa Infrastructure Group (AIG), which is one of numerous private “entities” he says he maintains in his native Sierra Leone and in other countries.

The contract obliged Mr. Ben-Menashe to secure a US$120-million grant from Russia “for infrastructure development in Sierra Leone managed by the Africa Infrastructure Group.” Dickens & Madson also agreed to “use our best efforts to secure an opportunity for Sierra Leone to be considered as a site for the development of new port facilities for the use of the Russian Federation for non-military purposes.”

This all sounds like CIA shell companies to me. So here we have a crook, keeping eye on crooks that reports to crooks. Why does this not surprise me?

Arthur Porter is the federally appointed chairman of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). The committee reviews on a regular basis the activities of Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and examines complaints made against it. According to SIRC, its committee members have “access to all information held by CSIS, no matter how highly classified that information may be,” with the exception of federal cabinet secrets.

Western Wind Skipper gets caught with another 400 kilograms of cocaine

Well, speak of the devil. We all remember the Hells Angels 2 1/2 tonnes of cocaine on the Western Wind that was seized and the senior RCMP official who prevented charges from being laid. Well this time that same skipper has been caught with 400 kilograms of cocaine off the coast of Florida. Wow, Gyrator lost 400 keys this time. Somebody's gonna pay.

Latest news from Kim Bolan is:

“The plaintiff Marlene Stirling also told the defendants that two Hells Angels members sat at her kitchen table and had coffee on multiple different times,” the documents said. “The defendants have videotape evidence of the plaintiff John Stirling threatening to kill more than one person at gunpoint,” the documents said. “On Sept. 10, 2011, the defendants were informed that the plaintiff John Stirling has been seeking to hire people to burn down the defendants’ house and cause physical harm to them.”

Martin and Beckman said “a man calling himself Ryan showed up at the defendants’ residence wearing a black leather jacket with a Hells Angel patch and was looking for the plaintiff John Stirling because John apparently owed this guy Ryan money.” Martin said in the court statement that he called Stirlings’ house and warned Marlene that someone was looking for John “and that he sounded really p---ed off.”

More RCMP Sexual Harassment Allegations

I don't know what to say. I find these new RCMP allegations from a former senior member astounding. Cpl. Catherine Galliford was the face of the B.C. RCMP for years. During her tenure as the RCMP's spokesperson, Galliford announced the arrest of Robert William Pickton and revealed charges had been laid in the Air India bombing.

But in an internal RCMP complaint, Galliford makes serious allegations about misconduct inside the RCMP. Galliford says she faced constant sexual advances from several senior officers from the moment she graduated from the RCMP Academy in 1991.

She outlines years of harassment in a 115-page internal complaint that the RCMP has yet to respond to, including allegations a supervisor on the Missing Women's Task Force lied to colleagues when he said they were intimate and that he even exposed himself to her.

Here's what I'm having trouble processing: She claims she endured years of sexual harassment in the RCMP during the time of the Pickton murder announcement and for years prior to it. We have sex trade workers testify at the Pickton Inquiry that police would blackmail them into having sex with them. We even hear claims that off duty police frequented Piggy's Palace. I don't know what to say. I can see a pattern.

The sexual assault allegations during the Olympics and the claim they tried to smuggle a prostitute on board a police cruse ship in a hockey bag. It's had to process. Galliford says the command and control structure at the RCMP means Mounties are instructed to do as they're told, or risk getting reprimanded. This needs to change.

Two more Vancouver gang shootings

Gang shootings, right, my bad. It's really hard to keep up with the play by play on all the gang shootings. We know Mehrdad Saki was shot in the face in New West last Monday and Axel Curtis was shot dead walking his dog in Vancouver Sunday morning. He was shot six times in the chest. at 8:10 into this Youtube video you can see a clip of Axel.

The Vancouver Province claims "Latest gang killing highlights growing Metro Vancouver drug war." OK let's do the math. Axel was a member of the UN. So the UN didn't kill him neither did the Dak Pack. The Red Scorpions work for the Hells angels now so if the Red Scorpions shot him who do you think is ultimately responsible?

The Hells Angels killed three guys connected to the Surrey drug trade in five weeks not long ago. It was all about doing what Eric Sandburg told Agent 22 they were going to do - eliminate all the competition in Surrey. Let's not forget the recent Hells Angels shooting in an Ottawa shopping mall.

Here you thought I forgot about the Hells Angels just because I was writing about cocaine dealers in Victoria. Who do you think they work for? One of the suspects is friends with the son of the owner of the Western Wind. Go figure.