Here’s a quick rundown of the latest website changes/updates, for those interested:

The horseman is gone! Preliminary IE6 support has been added. There are still some issues we are working on, but most of the website is fine in the browser now.

The broken RSS feed link has been fixed.

Lyrics to Hospital Music have been added.

An issue where the NES and excerpt/non-truncated settings were not being saved properly has been fixed. Keep in mind that these settings are anonymous and per browser. That means they’re not associated with your user account (if you have one) and will be persistent whether you’re logged in or logged out- but as such require you to set them for different browsers.

An issue where the ads on the home page were not displayed properly has been fixed.

An issue where the whole post area would disappear for some users has been fixed.

An issue where ‘My Favourites’ would not delete has been fixed.

Refresh Required

In some cases, simply refresh your browser’s cache of the website will solve some issues. Additionally, deleting any cookies associated with matthewgood.org can also fix some problems. Please try these things before contacting us, to be sure the problem isn’t on your end.

If you experience difficulties or problems while using the site after trying the above, or think you might have found a typo, broken link or bug, please let us know by mail. We appreciate all the feedback provided.

First, a video by the always-impeccable Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip…

Second, from North Carolina’s The News & Observer…

“Some conservative groups are urging parents to keep children home from school today if their fellow students will be taking part in the annual Day of Silence observation.
Thousands of middle- and high-school students across the nation, including some in the Triangle, plan to take a vow of silence today to bring attention to the bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students.

Participation and support for the event, now in its 12th year, varies by school. It has long proved controversial among those opposed to homosexuality.

But this year, a network of local and national conservative groups is calling for a boycott. They claim that allowing some students to be silent in class will not only promote homosexuality, it also will disrupt education.”

Take note of one particular passage - “will not only promote homosexuality”.

How does one ‘promote’ something that is, whether conservative morons like it or not, not the choice of an individual but rather something they are born to be?

This ridiculous position that gay people are somehow ‘morally corrupted’, that they consciously make the decision to be gay one day as if they were merely deciding between a pair of shoes at a store, has to be one of the most mind numbing fallacies of our time.

If you’re against the ‘homosexual lifestyle’, which is actually not a ‘lifestyle’ at all but simply an ordinary life not unlike any other, ask yourself a simple question – how many gay people do you know? How much time have you spent conversing with them, getting to know them, and in doing so approach it from the standpoint that you are speaking with a human being of equal worth and not someone that you have prejudged?

If anyone out there wants to speak for God on the matter, remember that, in the context of your faith, God is the judge, not you. And if there is truly some sort of judgment after this life, then you will certainly not be present at the judgment of others, and therefore have absolutely no right to conduct yourself in this life as if you will be. Nor, dare I say, do you have the right to corrupt your children, to limit their social scope to something so narrow as to deny them the right to freely, and in good faith, meet their fellow man without having their hearts and minds corrupted beforehand.

To be honest, this sort of thing doesn’t just apply to the gay community, but to all communities. Ignorance is represented in our species by the reality that even though we all share the same emotionality, its usurpation by small-minded individuals limits our ability to view one another as one in the same. Thus, if there is anything out there to be mindful of, it is those that would promote division for their own ends, and, having realized that, wonder why the alternative is such a scary proposition to them.

A reader, Kevin Mejlholm, recommended the following lecture (*See update below) by David Ray Griffin regarding 9/11. I am posting this not to promote the ideas presented by Griffin, but rather to simply present information that I think should be presented. Therefore, if you want to spend the time watching this lecture, which is one hour and thirty-eight minutes in length, I would be interested to hear your views in the comments as an exercise in open public debate.

The video is too large to post directly on this page, meaning that its frame width is large, so please visit the YouTube page directly.

In the past I have not truly delved into my own personal beliefs regarding the events of September 11th as they relate to the need for such a catastrophic event to occur to support the birth of an American hegemonic era. The roots of the Bush Doctrine, when objectively examined, provide insight into a much deeper American global agenda. That, in itself, could be taken as a ridiculous notion, but the reality remains that a post Cold War preemptive and unilateralist foreign policy platform was first outlined in 1992 by then members of the United States government, individuals that would, during the Clinton era, cultivate and refine their beliefs. After 9/11, some of the same individuals involved in the initial creation and subsequent refinement of that policy were, and are, members of government, among them Paul Wolfowitz, who, at the time, held the position of Deputy Secretary Of Defense. It was Wolfowitz’s Defense Planning Guidance, written at the instruction of then Secretary Of Defense Dick Cheney that initially outlined the initiatives required to exploit US global military and economic dominance in the post Cold War world.

By saying this I am not going to take the position that 9/11 was orchestrated, but I do firmly believe that it was used as a catalyst with which to indoctrinate the Western public and therefore allow for the implementation of a hegemonic reality that, since 9/11, has been proven by US operations and initiatives abroad.

I came across this story by way of Sean Orr at Beyond Robson. It is, as an individual that suffers from mental illness and is a born and bred Vancouverite, one of the most disgusting things about residents of this city that I have ever read…

“Neighbours opposed to the establishment of the Motivation, Power and Achievement Society’s mental health drop-in centre at West Seventh and Fir say they will help the city find a different location for the social services agency.

But they don’t want it in their community. “We will fight the MPA going in there right to the end,” said Cheryl Clausen, a disability award officer for WorkSafeBC who has lived a block from the site for four-and-a-half years.
Clausen and her neighbours want a café or other businesses established on the lower floors of the development that would provide 70 units of social housing. They believe a drop-in centre proposed for the site would concentrate too many mentally ill people in one place. She said city-sponsored meetings in the spring about the proposed development focused on housing for seniors, single mothers and poor families. But a November city report on the development of up to 1,200 units of social housing at 12 city-owned sites stated the MPA drop-in could be established on the first two floors of the development. About 70 studios, 320 to 350 square feet in size, would be built on the upper floors, with one-third to half of the units designated for low-income people with mental illness. The remainder would be reserved for low-income singles, with priority given to Fairview and Kitsilano residents.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s gets even more outrageous…

“Janet Dennis, a business manager for Telus who’s lived at Seventh and Pine for three years, often sees shopping carts lined up outside the MPA’s drop-in on West Fourth at Pine. “At Virtu [condominiums on Seventh between Fir and Pine], they’ve spent anywhere from $750,000 to a million plus for their suites, and if I’m one of those people looking out at the shopping carts I’m disgusted. I’m thinking I’ve just lost my investment here, I’m never going to be able to recoup it, and it’s the noise of these shopping carts and it’s being harassed by them,” she said. “It’s a privilege to live here and we pay extra money to live here… Why put these homeless people here when a cup of coffee at Starbucks or whatever is four bucks.”

Although a new café could be pricey for the low-income tenants, Clausen believes a business such as a coffee shop would provide a “buffer” between the low-income and established residents.”

As we’re all aware, many of Vancouver’s mentally ill, who have been, over the last several decades, summarily removed from mental welfare facilities that have been closed because people, just like those complaining in this article, didn’t want to pony up and pay taxes to ensure that they remained open and staffed, have been left to their own devices.

I’ll tell you this, thank God Janet Dennis doesn’t know what it’s like to have to deal with the demons of mental illness and, on top of that, attempt to scratch out an existence in abject poverty at the same time. God forbid any of the people complaining about this issue actually delve into the reality of the utterly despicable state of mental welfare in this Province and how we, as a society, have betrayed and abandoned those that need our help.

It would seem, according to the article, that they are mental healthcare professionals as well, being that they told the Courier that on their three block walk to its offices they were harassed by a man pushing a shopping cart. As we’re all aware, pushing a shopping cart down a public street is an indication of mental illness. I mean; you have to be crazy to do that, don’t you? I would imagine, in the minds of those that are complaining about the security of property values, everyone that’s on the streets are bipolar, schizophrenic, psychopathic, sociopathic, and so forth.

I have lived in the downtown core of Vancouver for sixteen years. In that time I have been a resident of the West End, Coal Harbour, and the Lower Eastside. And in all of those years, do you know how many times I have been ‘hassled’ by individuals pushing shopping carts to a degree that I feared for my safety?

Not once.

In fact, beyond asking for spare change, I can’t recall an instance in all that time that an aggressive posture was taken by any street person beyond them muttering profanities under their breath because I literally had no change in my pocket to give them.

On the other hand, I can say with absolute conviction that I have been threatened by what would be deemed ‘sane’ individuals flexing their proverbial muscles and acting as if all of Vancouver were some gangland paradise. Added to that are a host of other instances in which drunken club goers have been violent and endangered others, and, when approached about their behaviour, became more violent.

And then there is this…

“Residents are concerned about safety and security and fear drug dealers would follow members of the drop-in to the new centre. “The people that live in the building would probably be a little more controlled and taken care of,” Clausen said. “That drop-in centre shouldn’t be in anyone’s neighbourhood. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an East Side area–it should not be in a residential neighbourhood of any kind.”

I always find it interesting how drug use is pinned to the lapels of the homeless and forlorn when in countless bathrooms in posh Vancouver clubs and high-end residences enough Cocaine is shoved up noses on a weekly basis as to resemble a bad episode of Miami Vice. Drugs are absolutely everywhere in this city, it doesn’t matter if it’s on the streets down here on the Lower Eastside or in Yaletown, West Vancouver, or Kits. The difference, of course, is that those that are dispossessed and suffer from mental illness often turn to the use of drugs primarily because they can’t get the help that they need. Even though Ativan is not considered a standard street drug, I myself became an addict because of my condition early last year and it almost resulted in my death – not because I loved the feeling, but because when you’re confronted with the dark disparity of rolling bouts of mania and depression, anything that will make it stop, even for just a little while, is looked upon as a savior at the time. Of course, in my case, I was lucky, and am still lucky. I can afford the medication required to deal with my illness, which is by no means inexpensive. The reality is that that cannot be said about a considerable number of others that do.

Property prices? Investment? What ever happened to compassion? Is it represented by trying to find a location that’s conveniently tucked away in some industrial park where no one has to be confronted with this city’s problems? Is that how utterly low we have sunk? Is that how uncaring and rigid we have become?

We’re not talking about the affordability of Starbucks coffee, nor are we talking about real estate. We’re talking about human beings, many of which are in desperate need of help. If we, as a society, are not willing to act in a manner that is reflective of the values that we so casually like to claim we possess, then one of two things needs to happen.

Either we willingly admit that we’re hypocrites and liars, or we get off our high horses and become human beings ourselves.

It’s raining, dark; the streets empty and the doorways filled. On the streets you have to wait it out, try to stay dry, try to find somewhere sheltered from it so that maybe you can catch a few hours of sleep in the hopes that it will have stopped.

I needed laundry detergent yesterday. I went around corner to the store. In Blood Alley something was happening; three squad cars, two officers pulling shot guns out of their trunks. No idea what it was about, but there was a huge construction crane in the alley so maybe something had transpired between the alley’s usual inhabitants and the construction crew. Could have been a drug bust, there could have been an assault; it could have been about a few of the ill-tempered dogs that have been roaming around back there recently.

Things are obviously calmer down here in the winter. No summer tourists to be herded away from, to be pushed by security companies into back alleys so as to protect the illusion of old-world charm. It’s been unseasonably warm though, so at least that’s something. Even with the rain, it’s not as biting as it usually is this time of year. If there’s an upside to global warming in this neck of the woods it’s that if you live outdoors things aren’t as condemnable. At least that’s something.

Drugs and booze. Two steadfast allies of the dispossessed. They make you forget, time machines that offer unconscious passage into the future so that you can lose a day, or three, not having to deal with the reality of where you’ve ended up. Ten blocks uptown the city’s well-to-do scoff at it all while they hit the bars on the weekends and drink themselves silly, press lips to bongs, snort cocaine in the bathrooms of the city’s finer nightspots. The difference is that they have beds to break their falls at the end of the night. The difference is that they do it because it’s a socially accepted ritualistic endeavor. Escape is escape though, and ultimately everyone’s trying to escape something in the end. Admit it or not.

At the very least, if you’re waiting for the rain to stop, you’ve got something truly pressing to escape - the reality that when it does, very little will have changed besides the weather.

Irony For Friday, January 4th, 2008

Chinatown is two blocks over. It’s been there since the 1880’s. It’s filled with countless restaurants. None of them deliver.

I’m not kidding.

Toasters

When I was a kid we used to make toast on an electric heater in the basement. It was one of those long floor heaters, the sort with the metal grill on the front. We would put pieces of bread on it and wait a while, turn them over, and then butter them.

We used to not lock our doors at night as well though. Things change.

Covered In Blood

I was thinking last night on the career of William Tecumseh Sherman, his complexities and hypocrisies, his characterizations of warfare in its purest form, especially those penned during his campaign to take Atlanta and later his march to Savannah, and something that he wrote in his memoirs that I have always found extremely telling…

“I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

For some reason that always reminds me of the words of Vassilis Epaminondou…

“If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero.”

To be honest, I could probably go on for days about the betrayal of those in New Orleans that have been entirely screwed over by the government, be it local or federal, and the way in which they have been treated while simply attempting to enact their most basic of rights. But the truth is that it so sickens me that every time I attempt to address it I revert to employing expletives every other word. Thus, I will just quote Bill Quigley’s piece on Truthout from last Friday…

“In a remarkable symbol of the injustices of post-Katrina reconstruction, hundreds of people were locked out of a public New Orleans City Council meeting addressing demolition of 4,500 public housing apartments. Some were tasered, many pepper sprayed and a dozen arrested.

Outside the chambers, iron gates were chained and padlocked even before the scheduled start.

The scene looked like one of those countries on TV that is undergoing a people’s revolution - and the similarities were only beginning.

Dozens of uniformed police secured the gates and other entrances. Only developers and those with special permission from council members were allowed in - the rest were kept locked outside the gates. Despite dozens of open seats in the council chambers, pleas to be allowed in were ignored.

Chants of “Housing is a human right!” and “Let us in!” thundered through the concrete breezeway.

Public housing residents came and spoke out despite an intense campaign of intimidation. Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance. Residents opposed to the demolition had simple demands. If the authorities insisted on spending hundreds of millions to tear down hundreds of structurally sound buildings containing 4,500 public housing subsidized apartments, there should be a guarantee that every resident could return to a similarly subsidized apartment. Alternatively, the government should use the hundreds of millions to repair the apartments so people could come home. Neither alternative was acceptable to HUD. A plan of residents to partner with the AFL-CIO Housing Trust to save their homes was also ignored.

Outside, SWAT team members and police in riot gear and on horses began to arrive as rain started falling. Those locked out included public housing residents, a professor from Southern University, graduate students, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, ministers, lawyers, law students, homeless people who lived in tents across the street from City Hall, affordable housing allies from across the country and dozens of others.”

If that snippet wasn’t enough to enrage you, perhaps this will…

I don’t know about you, but the scenes in that video do not depict an event that one would attribute to a nation, or a portion thereof, that claims itself the foremost democracy on the planet. In fact, it looks more like the last ditch efforts of a few brave souls attempting to futilely counteract the beginnings of a neo-fascist trend that is becoming commonplace in the United States with regards to how the public is treated when it dares to represent itself in a dissenting fashion. And to think that the government of the United States feels it has the right to, by comparison to itself, condemn others.

December 5th, 2007. A small candlelight vigil is held for the victims at the corner of East Cordova and Columbia on Vancouver’s downtown Eastside.

The jury in the Pickton trial reached a verdict this morning. He was found guilty on six counts of second-degree murder. Pickton was, of course, originally charged with six counts of first-degree murder. In Canada, first-degree murder is defined as follows:

“First degree murder is a murder which is (1) planned and deliberate, (2) contracted, (3) where the victim is an identified peace officer (4) in the furtherance of another serious criminal offence (kidnapping, robbery, harassment, terrorist activity, or using explosives within criminal organizations, etc.).”

Therefore, having been found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder, the conviction finds Pickton innocent of premeditation. Given that he fed his victims to pigs, one has to ultimately wonder how that isn’t an act of premeditation when it was done repeatedly? Obviously, given the various unknowns that plagued the case, the jury was ultimately left with no other option than to find him guilty of a lesser charge.

In all, Pickton has been charged with the deaths of 26 women, to which he pleaded not guilty. Having been found guilty of these six murders, another trial will eventually take place regarding the remaining 19*.

The verdict reached this morning has to do with the deaths of:

Pickton has also been charged with murder in the first degree of:

Pickton has also been implicated, though not charged, in the murders of:

For those of you that don’t know, this is what an SKS looks like…

The SKS fires 7.62mm rounds, the standard round size for most combat weapons – the M16, AK-47, etc. It’s magazine has a 10 round integral box capacity. Firearm enthusiasts in the United States passionately argue that the SKS is not an ‘assault rifle’, as assault rifles have ‘selective fire’, meaning that they can be set to fully automatic or semi-automatic. The SKS, without being modified, is a semi-automatic weapon at the point of sale in the US.

Nevertheless, it was an SKS that 19-year-old Robert Hawkins from Bellevue, Nebraska, used to gun down eight innocent people in an Omaha shopping mall before taking his own life.

As is commonly the case, those who knew Hawkins claim that he was a quiet boy, one that loved animals, but one that was not without his problems. He was solitary, drank, and suffered bouts of depression. Prior to the shooting he had lost his job at McDonalds, broke up with his girlfriend, and was living with a friend’s family…

“His friend’s mother, Debora Maruca Kovac, told the Associated Press news agency that when he first came to live with them, “he was introverted, a troubled young man who was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted”.

She said he phoned her about 1300 on Wednesday, telling her that he had left a note for her in his bedroom. She tried to get him to explain.

“He said, ‘It’s too late’,” and then hung up, she told CNN.

In the note, she said, Hawkins had written that “he was sorry for everything, that he didn’t want to be a burden to anybody, he loved his family, he loved all of his friends”.

The note went on to say he wanted to be famous, she said.”

I am, by no means, excusing the actions of Robert Hawkins. What he did was reprehensible. In the end he took his own life, but not before robbing eight others of theirs, robbing eight families of loved ones, and forever shattering the lives of those wounded in the shooting, those who witnessed it, and everyone besides that it will impact. But the question has to be asked – what possesses a young man to go on a suicidal shooting rampage in hopes of securing fame, even if cloaked in infamy? In fact, what possesses any young person to go on a shooting rampage as a way to attain some sort of finality? Is it because they were shit on? Is it because they felt that no one cared? Was it because, at a crucial moment in their development, one, or more, people failed them when they shouldn’t have?

There are, of course, the standard excuses that are relied upon so that the actual roots of the problems that plague everything from inner cities to troubled youths in Middle America don’t have to be faced – video games, music, film, and so forth. But those are simply cop-outs, conveniences that are used to justify that which would actually take real effort to confront. While we swim in the perception of our own societal perfection, the fact that it is rotting away from beneath us remains not merely overlooked, but willfully ignored.

Youth today live in a world of fear, a world of lies, a world of engineered wars, false hopes, false beliefs, and view those that promote such nonsense for what they are – full of shit. What else, given that reality, is there to breed but apathy, exhaustion, and desperation? Contentment is something purchased, that is the reality that young people today have been bombarded with, and to find oneself in the position, even as a teenager, of believing that failure is more probable that success is something so utterly damaging that it’s no wonder that the suicide rate is what it is, that kids are being put on medication to combat depression on an unprecedented scale, and that acts of senseless violence have become more common.

It is impossible to tell a child that the future is theirs to shape when they are given a block of stone and no chisel. Even worse, no idea of even how to sculpt.

Those steeped in religion will claim that the problem lies in a lack of religion. Those steeped in the ideological will claim that the problem lies in a lack of tradition. But neither has much to offer besides one-sided placebos in a world that grows more diverse and interconnected by the second.

Ultimately, and though it might be a bitter pill to swallow because it’s easier to allow anger to rule our feelings in such instances, one has to ask what it would have taken to keep that rifle out of that boy’s hands? And by that I am not suggesting that gun regulation is my primary point, though it is certainly one that must not be discounted. Simply that if he were given a chisel and some direction, eight people might still be alive.

Over the last several years my family has become quite disenfranchised with Christmas. Last year we talked openly about it, how it seemed empty and self indulgent, which led to my mother and sister-in-law formulating a few ideas with regards to this year. The plan they’ve come up with is so good that I wanted to share it with everyone in hopes of maybe starting a minor trend.

Rather than buying gifts, everyone in the family is going to contribute what would have been spent on them into financing a care package for a family in need. Second, prior to Christmas day, we’re going to volunteer to serve dinner at a homeless shelter or at an outreach program in the community.

As my mother put it on the telephone this morning, our family gets by and that’s more than enough to celebrate. I agree with her completely. I have no time for the consumer frenzy of Christmas or its historically inaccurate religious significance. As a man that believes that the problems of this world must be solved by those that live in it rather than those that believe it is little more than a giant waiting room for the afterlife, it is a holiday that impassions a spirit that, in truth, should be ever present in our daily lives. That at our most fundamental level we are all the same, that we are only as strong as our weakest link, and that no amount of gifts or religious devotion can alter the fact our most basic commonalities supercede the fears and divisions that plague us. That, in the end, we are all members of a single family.

My thoughts today are with my best friend Rod, whose father, Ray, seems to have taken a turn for the worse last night. As I am updated as to what’s happening I will pass along information, but please feel free to contact Rod and send him and his family your best wishes. This year has been incredibly difficult for his family as not only is his father in a bad way, but his mother was also diagnosed with cancer several months ago.

Furthermore, our website’s chief executive, Dale Mugford, has also had a rather rough week. His mother recently underwent an operation to slow the spread of a cancerous tumor on her brain. I’d like to also urge readers to drop Dale a line of support as well.

Under such circumstances, you can’t imagine what kind words can mean to those watching family members suffer from life threatening illnesses. I know that the emails that Rod recently received meant not only a great deal to him, but to his father as well, who was made aware of them.

For those of you out there experiencing similar situations, everyone here at matthewgood.org passes along our best wishes to you and your families during such difficult times.