Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First off, I’ve got to recommend that everyone read “My Occupy LA Arrest by Patrick Meighan” (if you think you recognize the name, it’s because he’s one of the Family Guy writers). It’s disturbing to say the least to see the level to which the police are militarized and act as the standing army of the so-called 1%. It’s upsetting when you realize that their actions are specifically meant to terrorize, demoralize, and emotionally beat down any political unrest, and that their response to free speech that offends their masters is far harsher than reactions to actual rape-and-plunder type criminals. The part that really got to me was the destruction of property issues — after the police had everyone strung up in zip-tie restraints, they pulled out their combat knives and began slashing up all the tents, all the books, all the personal possessions — and then the complicit media had the gall to say that this was “30,000 pounds of garbage left by the protestors to be cleaned up at the taxpayer’s expense”.

Now, it doesn’t take a legal genius to realize that these police actions are completely illegal. That seems to have become their way. They’re not looking for convictions. They’re looking to hurt people so badly they won’t speak out again. Man, like I said recently I just finished reading Transmetropolitan, and it might as well be prophecy it’s so relevant to everything that’s happening. I’m sure that soon enough the police will be facing a multitude of lawsuits for the destruction of property and various rights violations. They don’t care — they’re happy to lose these lawsuits. Why? Because no one is going to lose their jobs. In fact, a whole bunch of the thugs are going to getting hefty overtime paychecks and bonuses. Yeah, they’ll have to pay out some hefty settlements. But who is “they”? It’s not like it’s coming out of the bastard’s wallets. It’s paid for by the taxpayers, the very people who are being violated in the first place.

The 1% are laughing all the way to the bank.

And of course my comments are not just about LA, or about the US (the pictures above are ones I took a decade ago in Toronto). This pattern of militarized police beating down anyone willing to speak out against the ruling class is a worldwide problem. The ruling elite has armed thugs in every country on the planet to protect their wealth and power, and frankly, I have no idea what it’s going to take to change it because they’ve made it abundantly clear that they care not for the rule of law, and the political process is a complete sham, not just by virtue of election fraud, but primarily because it’s so incredibly expensive to be a part of it. To be successful in politics you have to be either a part of the 1% yourself, or completely beholden to them. I have to wonder, with such an obviously hopeless landscape, and with constant abuses of any who dare to hope for a better world, when will we start seeing domestic terrorism becoming common? When you deny the people peaceful means to enact change, not all of them are going to back down and give up.

In lighter ground, for the second time this week I spent the morning at the hospital. When I got there, a fire alarm was going off and the building was pseudo-evacuated. “Pseudo” in that it just meant everyone had to be in the waiting room. When they’d finished their building sweep to ensure it was a false alarm and shut it down, there was a long line of junkies waiting for their morning prescriptions to stave off withdrawal (just to clarify I was not part of that group). In the middle of the group was, for lack of a better description, a stereotypical white trash user, getting the group all worked up as she ranted about the mythical Keith Richards treatment. She claimed that in the US (I guess in Canada the story uses the US, and in the US they use Switzerland), for a cost of $10,000 it was commonplace to have all of your blood replaced at the hospital over an eight hour period, and at the end of it, you were completely “cured” of heroin addiction without any withdrawal. She said that her doctor looked into it for her, and discovered that the reason they don’t do it in Canada is “because it works too well — it’s so easy to get off heroin that no one would learn their lesson.” As if the medical system has anything to gain by avoiding inexpensive (because you can bet that the cost of a multi-year detox program is higher than an eight hour magic bullet) treatments just because they want people to “suffer for their sins”.

She went on and on and on, getting people angry at the doctors they were there to see, and also building up false hope that they could cross the border for an easy solution to the hell they were caught up in. After listening to it for a while I went over and explained to her that she was promoting an urban legend and that you couldn’t really go to the US and have your drug addiction cured in eight hours. Come on. Outside of the medical impossibility, if you really could easily cure heroin addiction, it would be common knowledge and everyone would be doing it. She got extremely angry at me and claimed to have first hand knowledge, although thankfully the other addicts seemed to see reason and a couple others spoke out saying that it was a scam. Of course, then they went on to talk about how the doctors were also implanting chips in addicts, so maybe all I did was shift their interest from one conspiracy theory to another. Oh well.

Speaking of crazies, yesterday I spent twenty minutes trailing the guy in the picture. A bit taller than me, older guy with gray hair. The entire time he was loudly talking to himself — “I’m gonna kill every last soul. All of them are going to die tomorrow. I’m killing all of them. Every soul. All of them are going to die. I will kill every last soul.” On and on and on and on, repeating that general theme. So if there’s a mass murder in Toronto today, it’s him. But I doubt it. He ended up at the Coffee Time at Queen and Niagara, which I suspect is frequented by many other solo-dialogue murder junkies.

Today I have to spend most of the day making jewelry orders so I will update the store later today finally.