Puddling Along

I was two years old when I saw my first television test pattern. There was me squatting in my puddle all ready to be tested. The virgin mind. After 50 some years of exposing myself to the programming efforts of ad copywriters, bellringers, sound mixers and lighting wizards, plot developers, casting couch predators, snake oil producers and creative directors of more gravitas than God, I venture to suggest that I’m pretty much the same blob of personality I was way back then staring at the Indian chief, peeing in my nappies.

And that’s gotta be trillions of dollars later. Wall Street advertising agency executives would sell their grandmothers to discover the formula for penetrating my psyche. But they’re catching on. They’re getting their numbers in order having plumbed the fact that a brand needs to be placed in view of the consumer at every possible turn and its slogan must be repeated as often ("Two mints in one!") and with the same reverence as one might chant a private mantra ("…when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent."). After all, it’s your disposable income at stake here, the holy grail of consumerism.

And now that advertising strategists, the Freuds and Carl Jungs of today’s circus barkers ("Head on…" groan), have determined that repetition is the name of success ("How do you spell RELIEF?"), the only companies who can afford this kind of extreme exposure are the multi-nationals. And among them we find the psychopathic corporations selling us their reasoning for why they allow people to die from AIDS rather than provide an affordable remedy; pharma-ceutical giants advising us about "possible side effects including heart failure and in rare instances, death …" and Hummer peddlers who deny global dimming straight-faced. And with the limitless arrogance of a smug real estate agent remaxing his Platinum Card, would it surprise anyone to find the ad industry types planning a new category for their next awards party: The Moses Fangs Memorial Award for Mendacious Marketing?

We are finally at risk of being programmed to desire shit. And to take shit. We are buying into banks managing our money for us while stealing us blind with henpecking fees. Ever since they got away with corralling us into the interior architecture of ropes and stands in their little line-ups we have been willfully subservient. Your RRSP return is pathetic but you are told to hurry before it’s too late to make your "contribution." What a lingo. At Investopeadia.com I average more than 40% return on my portfolio of stocks.

Some poor sucker of a tree hugger is out there in the cold drizzle on Vancouver Island, teeth chattering, trying to get the attention of a Vancouver Sun reporter to his cause while the Canwest media conglomerate, the owner of The Province, The Vancouver Sun and dozens of other formulaic papers, reduce the forest by megatons every year to pay occasional lipservice to ‘green’ causes. Two sections on Driving in every Friday edition of The Vancouver Sun says it all.

The conventional media, recently involving both broadcast and print, by its being beholding to its shareholders and the whims of its majority owners are compromised. Publishers are appointed by MBA’s and editors dare not tread beyond a certain party line. Investigative reportage is ultimately circumscribed by corporate agendas which demand room for all the unchallenged repetition that successful campaigns for their products demand. Recent political polls clearly indicate that the body politic is confused, unprincipled and tilting with the latest breeze, including backwards.

Wholesale immigration policies which favour the wealthy without inquiring as to the source of that wealth (criminal or otherwise) tend to weaken democracy altogether in that new voters will cast their lot to protect a healthy economy before a just society. The elite herd with the elite. And when it comes to breezes stirring a panic, witness the electronic stampedes at the markets. Again, no principles, no rationale for the occasional mob frenzy trying to outpace the lemmings. And curiously, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange that afternoon traders were frozen out of calling their bids. So much for built-in securities.

This whole house of cards called the economy is verging on global collapse. As is the balance in the ecological affairs of our planet. Having cast an infected blanket over the delicate face of earth, no accident there. The foul smelling Climate Jam we’ve allowed the greed-addicted to concoct is only a manifestation of the malaise in our spiritual climate. When Vancouver’s charity runners are bounding over blanketed corpses littering their streets there’s a serious disconnect in the societal works. Our collective lack of will and compassion will invite disease and right now pneumonia threatens to invade lungs indiscriminately, crossing class platforms and depositing its victims into ‘emergency’ wards already backed up by 12 hours. It’s no surprise the well-heeled are screaming for private health care.

Nature itself is advising us. With wild weather phenomena and melting ice caps, and the list of endangered species growing in rare frog leaps, how much more obvious and dramatically can the point be made?

Life was given perfectly for the enjoyment of humanity. All of humanity. Hording and continued industrialization are threatening the sources of survival for all of us. Eco-criminals need to be singled out and stopped. We have the science, or will soon, to use the innovativeness and that same wit that created these problems in the first place to dismantle them. We have a natural responsibility to return the earth to a state of grace.

We need to come alive as a spiritual force, a humanity with a character of godliness where saints are ordinary and living with our inherent magnificence and an automatic charity are expected. Damn right this is a radical shift from mediocrity but it’s this brisk awakening or return to that sheepish little line-up, barely trudging forward while the mavens of this establishment continue to escort us to our dismal, obese and truly pathetic fate.

In the thrilling event you concur and sense this same urgency, raise your voice. Raise a Banner.

Changes Coming!

A web site is being planned to host...

An online Vancouver news.medium featuring
_short and feature length news stories with photos
_video reports from professionals and street witnesses
_news and entertainment podcasts
_artistic feature story posters for personal download
_all presented with an anti-establishment flair
and positive attitude.

Departments
_local crime & policing
_science & medicine
_health & aging
_your money & stock shots
_local and global politics
_real estate finds
_local sports
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and climate issues.

Address at First Vancouver Salon

Thank you Mary Anne for opening your home tonight. And I thank each of you for the opportunity to make this brief presentation about my work.

And I thank Larry Martinello, my high school history teacher who permitted philosophical discussions in his classroom back in ‘67. It seems just like yesterday when Larry was teaching us one day that Einstein believed man was defined by his relationships to his fellow human beings, that he was who he was in relationship to others (a brother, a son, a sister, a father, friend or lover). So I am thankful to Larry for hearing me when I ventured to disagree.

I took the position that man is who he is in relationship to God.

And this position set me on a course of contemplation throughout my life which has permitted me to explore in different ways than most people. Not better. Just different.

And one of those ways included my bald self strolling with Prahbupad A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, chanting mantras and listening to him explain that “once Krishna has injected himself into your spiritual bloodstream you may leave him, but he’ll never leave you.”

Shortly after fleeing the L.A. temple later that day, this 17 year old was in the back seat of a beat-up station wagon parked in a driveway in San Diego waiting for my host to return from the biker party to find me a place to crash. I was nodding off by my packsack, when suddenly I felt something had cracked over the crown of my head and I experienced a downpouring of bliss. And during this exquisite sensation, I heard words which I sensed were being spoken from a bygone relative who assured me that I was part of the infinite. I was thankful that night too.

That experience had a profoundly reassuring effect on me … and affirmed my relationship – though vicarious – to what I now call the personality of the infinite.

One more noteworthy experience to mention about my formative years occurred at Big Sur CA where I had found a kelp-covered cave on a secluded beach to overnight in with fellow hitchhikers. The next morning, high on psilocybin, I pretended to be orchestrating the tumbling of the clouds while hallucinating that wise feminine faces were smiling down upon me. After a day of reckless leaping from the rock outcrops onto the beach, I lay prone, unconscious and exposed to the incoming tide. My bluish teenaged body was carried back to the cave. The long-haired strangers left me in a heap by the fireside.

It’s hard to say whether I would have died or not… but for the voice I heard. And it spoke only one word. So beautiful in its timbre and full of loving authority and as though thrust from a great distance and across eons. I tried to emulate it, repeating this word over and over. The other occupants of the cave, my dopesmoking saviours, were annoyed at my repetitiousness - attempting to respeak that word just the way I had heard it - and they shook me to arouse me from my stupor. At that instant I became self conscious and the mystical experience dissipated.

So I was becoming who I was in relationship to that fierce, authoritative, explosive, daunting, seemingly arbitrary, and wickedly ironic personality of the ever-expanding cosmos who has told us all before: “By single-minded and intense devotion that form of mine may be completely known and seen and entered into,” but then added “I am come as time, the waster of the peoples, ready for that now that ripens to their ruin.”

Recently, it has dawned on me that to enjoy a kind of safe harbour, all I need is to reconcile myself to this Infinity.

Through simple observation and contemplation I may be fortified with knowing. By just respectfully walking alongside, as though just within earshot of a master, we may all hear and absorb the affirmations from nature which signal us in ways to come to life.

By permitting godliness in every interaction we may be enshrined in a state of grace; attractive even to Nature; and then to discover saintliness as ordinary.

The first thing a seer sees is that this exalted state may belong to all of us; and is accessible equally to each of us. This divine experience is nothing less than our birthright.

Along our way we hear many ideas and witness innumerable souls beseeching us to follow them. Sirens and lights, soothings and promises… but the prayerful and most quiet among us permitting godliness, will have attuned themselves to the signals from the personality of the infinite who directs us to take refuge in knowing.

And there is something intimately mutual and rewarding being exchanged as the memories of a good man increase the body of God, and so are retrievable. And God focuses through us on all that He has given and takes His greatest pleasure from the enlightened individual who explores with a random exhilaration.

Modern science is on the verge of acknowledging this organic relationship as it examines our biological and cerebral reactions to acts of goodness.

This living individual is constantly sampling from the knowing which is omnipresent and ultimately distinguishes himself to his fellow knowers, each unique in their radiant perfection.

This commingling of entities born into a state of original grace and ultimately sustaining that grace may create an exalted spiritual climate.

Knowing our vital place in continuity, enjoying perfection and speaking the language of Creation - all this is being heralded now as it is this generation which will discover that we have used these edenic faculties before. The vague prompting to “be here now” is infantile in comparison to living as participants with creation.

And as we thrill to know how close we are – despite the harbingers of doom and the apparently overwhelming challenges we face in the crisis of our current spiritual climate and reflected here on the brink of ecological ruin – we will hurry to heal and bring healing as we finally realize: There is no time, There never was. Just your relationship to the truth… and perhaps for you the extreme and intense peace of knowing.

We’re that close. Now all we have to do is continue finding the words which will thrust us forward, shield us and throw light on each of our long-lived souls.


My first book, The Dead Sea Revelation, expounds upon these ideas which tonight I am touching upon. This book represents to some extent a clearing of the road ahead as it deconstructs guilt-drenched theologies and scary dogmas. Hopefully it will simplify for people the way to enjoy a state of holiness in their day to day lives. A private state of quiet thrill and steady but visceral joy.

Such peace and blessedness is the triumph of humanity.

Wish you were here?

DAY ONE: Vancouver on Trial

Willy Picton is coming soon to the living rooms and newspaper stands around the world. The international media are camped out on our doorstep salivating for the gruesome details of how 26 women from Vancouver's downtown eastside were murdered. Picton is becoming the new media dahling, our very own poster boy for all of Vancouver's dirty little secrets.

Recently recovered from guilt-free shopping on Boxing Day, Patricia Graham, the editor-in-chief at The Vancouver Sun informs us: "...our relatively safe, civilized and peaceful community is going to get ugly for a while," as her staff dig in for the two year Picton Media Hoedown. I don't know what colour her lenses are but things in Vancouver haven't been "safe, civilized and peaceful" in the 13 years since the provincial government hasn't cast an eye on the welfare rates and the mayors have been basking in the glow of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics .

Civilized is the last word that comes to mind to describe this continuing vicious neglect of our homeless. With all the well-intentioned yawp, their numbers are increasing. In the days of independent newspaper ownership, a publisher or editor of character would have shamed the city and province long ago into tackling the homelessness and drug addiction issues of Vancouver and the province.


Returning to the Keyboard, Raising the Banner
Time to kick the tires. Turn the keys again. Stir things up. As a home, Vancouver leaves a lot to be desired and a lot of people out of a home. Joy willingly evades continuity in the face of indifference and the absence of compassion. And most fleeting for the poor saps driving by in their Jaguars, nipping at pesky pedestrians' feet, gunning their engines on a congested Robson and sneering at the panhandlers; all of which seems to constitute their answer to life's little riddle: Why am I alive? For the rest of us, as we witness the gulf between the grotesquely rich and the extremely poor grow ever wider, we may feel helpless in the sad drift but perhaps it is best to heed the heroic among us, one of whom, Stephen Lewis, offered recently, "Despair is a self indulgence."

The Time's Picayune Editorial, New Orleans, Sunday, Sept 11

AN OPEN LETTER TO GEORGE BUSH

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

the english bay banner

VANCOUVER - CANADA'S NEW ORLEANS?
What has been exposed of the Great American Way in New Orleans all last week, the plights of their homeless and poor left behind with no doctors, priests or social workers (but a kissy-faced latecomer George Bush) is the shame of their nation and its guilt for its classism, elitism and racism.

Vancouver, with its unemployed, its binners (who St Todd of the Sun would have you believe are all squeaky-happy) and welfare cheques of $510 a month (still not changed despite whopping provincial surpluses!) is not so different from New Orleans. Those poor and homeless among us would be the first to suffer any upheaval and would suffer the longest because we as a people have already shown our indifference in allowing this social situation to have collapsed into such hopelessness and despair.

They may not be starving to death just now but they are suffering, and the diseases and malnutrition they experience are all quietly contributing to their insanity and thoughts of suicide. The rage we see expressed now in New Orleans by those left behind is the rage we will see here soon enough when the earthquake or some equally devastating natural catastrophe visits us.

If the Vancouver police, the RCMP and other front line establishment functionaries could manage to stop bullying the poor and the native aboriginals long enough to understand their circumstance of destitution, a stitch of their compassion might introduce into our whole social mosaic that new thread of humanity which would absolutely preclude from happening here what is now unravelling in the southern states and before the eyes of a stunned world. What used to be the most spirited and fun place in the richest country on the globe - its Mardi Gras the very icon of joyous parading - has metamorphosed into a city of gloom and floating fecal matter and now is forever stigmatized as America's unholy shame.

The sneermeisters of Vancouver's elitists might be wise to get a good whiff of the new New Orleans and as they ask themselves, "Isn't that familiar? Smells really familiar," they may discover it's the same stench of that rationale which explains why so many Vancouverites are blithely charity-jogging over the bodies of the homeless.

the english bay banner

What's happening boychuk? Two weeks in a row I've tuned in for the latest issue of cyber commentary and found nothing new to pique my interest. Has all of your staff gone on strike or have you run out of relevant gossip to bedazzle the common folk with? -Steve

I'm working on a one-liner to drop in and then continue my holiday from indifference; something along the lines of... "While we view pictures of starving children swatting at flies and hear of violence erupting across our civilized world and witness weird weather responses to our global pollutions, the world media is breathlessly informing us about the richness in scent of some new celebrity's fart, the attendance count at the gay day parade where all of nothing was raised for hunger relief (but weren't their outfits to die for?), and reporting the number values of the latest golden handshake for yet another corrupt banker to sneak off the scene, I, your increasingly lonely little voice here, am stupefied, despairing and learning how to live with a steady disgust." Too long? Oh well, like I said, I'm working on it. -H

The English Bay Banner

Summer holidaying. Play safe and keep those cards and letters coming.

Issue 17.  

Cameo Appearances of Common Sense

With the recent memorial tributes paid to Mr Chuck Cadman, the question arises Why is it these days that common decency and common sense make little more than cameo appearances in the halls of power? Like uninvited guests they show up agitating the status quo arguing for a simpler and more just society until old forces and the three-tongued mindsets of animated relics shoo them off, expelling their influence from the hallowed premises. Then its back to business as usual inventing more syllables for lawyer.speak to utterly confound and dazzle the masses.

I Elected him?

Many of us cringe in the knowing that we actually elected these slick gladhanders and were so foolish as to imagine that they might share our serious intent to get the important work done, work involving no less than the rescue of millions of people from starvation and the precarious ecological balance of our planet.
Pandemics are looming in the shadows of developing countries where issues of hygiene are eclipsed by the need to feed one’s family.

The messages of desperate scientists that we are all at risk of being exposed to drug resistant disease and more extreme weather from climate warming (and all the weird ramifications of that earth-battering phenomenon) are falling on deaf ears. These are major concerns which need real action and each country belonging to the civilized and more well-to-do columns (the G8 for example) must somehow be compelled to act. Clang. Clang. How loudly must we ring this bell?

What is missing from these elected bodies are enough people like Cadman with the will to take the bull by the horns.

Democracy, while clearly still the most representative means of constituting a government, has in its evolution become flawed. Corporate lobbyists find ways to circumvent the rules related to campaign financing; the candidates are progressively becoming puppets maneuvered into position by the old guard; and once elected, even if the individual is nobly intent on striking a humanistic chord among his new peers he is relegated to the backbenches where he proceeds to be educated as to the way things are done by the senior class, very similar to juniors arriving in private school university settings, and as juvenile.

Mr Smith was an invention of Hollywood's, after all.  

Losing the Spirit of the Righteous Enthusiast

Our hero, the iconic Mr Smith in Washington or Cadman in Parliament, is muzzled and must kowtow to the regime’s modus operandus. His enthusiasm and dedication to the concept of public service is eroded and too often does he (not including Cadman) don the bib of apologist, then the vacuous grin of the greasy gladhander finally to graduate to the Machiavellian backroom tactician seasoned in empty speechifying.

Nowhere in this process is the innocent intent of the righteous enthusiast supported.

The confusion of this individual’s scenario is compounded by the party system. To create a new party each country has in place is own set of rules and in the United States for example it is virtually impossible now to introduce a new party into the intransigent mix despite how desperately one might be required to advance the radical agenda obviously needed to keep pace with tumultuous world-wide events. Ross Perot, despite multi-millionaire status and his willingness to bankroll his own political drive, was barley able to make a significant dent and his original ideals very few could now recall.

Party System Prevents Independents like Ross Perot.  

In Canada, the Bloc Quebecois, rather than being designed to address the country’s concerns and fortify it as a nation to contend with the more tightly woven global affairs, is mandated to separate Quebec from the country. Quebeckers have been using the threat of separation for decades as its ruse to extort more money from the federal government for their province’s unique concerns. That the country’s lawmakers, leaders and thinkers have allowed this situation to have evolved thus shows a lack of political will and a total absence of common sense.

Only in a country of ditherers so preoccupied with their tactics would a party be allowed to exist in Parliament which has as its core interest the destruction of that country. This is tantamount to inviting the starving fox into the chicken coop and expecting tea to be served. This would all be quite hilarious and knock-down funny except that the 30 million people who live in this extraordinarily beautiful country of such vast natural (and much coveted) resources must all suffer for the lack of stable, hands-on good governance.

Vote for Atilla, (who'd know)?  

Fat Worms in the Woodwork

Running as an independent is becoming an attractive means for a man committed to raising the banner for revolutionizing corrupt governments and the people are beginning to consider this option as being entirely acceptable now that they’ve had decades (most of their adult lives) witnessing the unseemly business going on in their houses of legislation and Parliament. But how many independents are going to be able to sustain their drive over the years required to win their points, and ultimately strike down the old guard? Even opposing parties would work in tandem against these independents if they were ever to mount a significant threat against their establishments.

The other fat worm in the political woodwork is the lack of voter turnout. Aside from the issues of voters being propagandized by darkly contrived campaigns, slanderous advertising, gossipy innuendoes and mudslinging, the absence of the voter at the ballot box can undermine the whole democratic process and result in Hitlers or Attilas being voted into office as the young people, isolated in their i.poddled states, who do manage to show up don’t bother to take note who is on the slate or what their politics really signify. And the more isolated we allow our young people to become by not engaging them in the political dialogues the more we can expect a kind of loosely advocated anarchy from them.

The Leaders of the Free World, without their clown costumes.  

Circus Clowns in Halls of Power

And as they view the current shenanigans of the circus clowns in those halls of power who is to cast the first stone of blame at them for having become conveniently disillusioned?

So while the elder, burger-faced statesmen are acting like juvenile brats in their name-calling and catty remarks in the House (for which they get paid seriously well with many perks on the side) how can they expect their sons and daughters to abandon their own brattishness and queue up to the polling booth with a mature choice in mind? The appeal of partying all night in this age of techno-wizardry is far outweighing any thought of joining in the dry debate of creepy old fogies.

These are only a few of the flaws of democracy but inherent in these imperfections is the rationale of the last few inspired people to just not bother trying to topple the culture of corruption, barefaced in its distinctiveness and shameless in its tedious power-mongering.

Given the self-protective measures each successive government imposes, any overhaul of this ship of state is absurd to imagine. It is at our peril that we have allowed this entrenchment.

PUPPET MAN ACCOSTED BY FOUR POLICE FOR BUSKING

As a long time resident of the Commercial Drive Area, and a former member of the Local resident's association (GWAC) I wish to express my dismay at the actions I witnessed on Friday June 15th at approximately 6:30 PM.

A busker with disabilities (many of us on the Drive know him simply as the old man with the puppets) was accosted by no less than four police officers.

His crime? Busking near the liquor store under the "safe streets act".

When I asked one of the officers why? He said: "We had to come because they called us" (pointing to the Liquor Store).

In response, I called George Hayman - manager at the BC liquor store on the Drive. He did not care about the disabled man, didn't seem interested in my complaint and blamed the Commercial Drive Business Association's private security guards which now regularly patrol the Drive harassing panhandlers, buskers, and anyone who doesn't have that Kitsilano shopping and spending gaze.

The Drive has long been a tolerant community. Not any more, if you are poor, disabled, and doing your best to make ends meet through busking, the business community has a message for you: Get lost or we will sick the police on you. The Drive will be gentrified for the rich property owners and to hell with the marginalised.

Where is our so called "progressive" COPE City Hall members? And what about our so-called progressive MP and MLA?
We need action to stop the harassment of the marginalised and those who cannot afford $1500 + a month in rent.
Express your outrage, call and complain.

STOP THE SWEEPS
BC Liquour Store (DRIVE), George Hayman (Manager): 604-660-9088
Grandview Woodlands Community Policing Centre 604 717-2932
(The CPC supports sweeps of the Drive and is against poor people,
panhandlers and buskers)
COPE (your so called progressive City Hall members) 604-255-0400
-P Lyons

Copwatch mailing list Copwatch@lists.resist.ca
https://lists.resist.ca/mailman/listinfo/copwatch

Stranded in Space

-stories re space station derived from NASA site.

The two astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are eagerly anticipating the arrival of NASA’s space shuttle Discovery and their first human visitors in more than two months.

No Take-Off soon to bring relief to the men up there.  

ISS Expedition 11 commander Sergei Krikalev and flight engineer John Phillips said they look forward to nightly dinners with Discovery’s STS-114 astronauts, and are planning something special to welcome the shuttle crew aboard.

“If I told you now, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” Phillips told reporters Friday during a space-to-ground news conference. “But I do have a surprise for them.”

Discovery’s STS-114 mission, commanded by veteran astronaut Eileen Collins, is slated to launch on July 13 at 3:51 p.m. EDT (1951 GMT) and dock at the ISS two days later. In addition to testing out new orbital tools and procedures to inspect and repair space shuttles, Collins and her crewmates will deliver a cargo pod full of much-needed supplies, experiments and replacement parts to the ISS.

“I’m looking forward to seeing my colleagues up here, and seeing another seven faces,” Phillips said, adding that he has been collecting his supply of Mexican food for a theme dinner with the shuttle astronauts.

Krikalev and Phillips have lived aboard the ISS since mid-April, and are expected to be the last two-person crew to maintain the orbital facility. A third crew member, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter, is slated to join them during NASA’s STS-121 shuttle flight aboard Atlantis, which is currently set to launch no earlier than Sept. 9.

NASA Science Officer John Phillips and Commander Sergei Krikalev still up there.