Well, and now I’m feeling pretty good about telling Rob Ford, FUCK YOU too.

In case you hadn’t heard, fatty Ford and his gang of five Yes Men voted, in a hasty meeting thrown together while the TTC chair was on vacation, to fire Gary Webster, the TTC’s General Manager. Webster’s crime? Cutting back costs exactly as the mayor asked. Oh yeah, and providing an honest, professional report to both the mayor and Council (as reported on Goldhawk Live, Tuesday, February 21, 2012), about why Light Rail Transit makes more sense than subways in this city.

The mayor repressed this report until it was leaked to The Star, then moved to have it made “irrelevant” (revealed in the same Goldhawk episode), when presented to Council. Council voted in favour LRTs based on this advice (though I thought I heard about some subways in there too), which was obviously way too democractic and balanced for his Rotundness (by the way, it’s not “fatophobic” to call jerks like this exactly what they are, deal with it).

Well heaven forbid we should have experienced public servants give us honest and professional opinions on which direction to go in!

The little mayoral weasel, along with all of his little greasy buddies (there are only five people, six if you count his presstitute, cowardly enough to suck on Ford’s unmentionables), under the weakest premise of “subways were Rob Ford’s mandate!“, decided then that they would just do the most slimy, underhanded, dictatorial, undemocratic thing they could, called together that meeting, and fired Webster.

Webster ended up with roughly two years’ salary after decades of service. I’m not too worried about him — even Rob Ford had to concede that Webster “has served Toronto and the TTC well in his years of service.  He was an important element in the organization’s many successes to date and can proudly point to a list of accomplishments.” So, yeah, thanks for all your hard work and dedication, Webster, now fuck off because we need “change” (even though we have no replacement, i.e. a plan). Your “pal”, Rob Ford.

Well, if Webster can get fired for doing his job, why not Rob Ford and his cadre of grovelling dogs? Thankfully, I’m not the only one with that idea. And by the way, Ford and his buddies are snorting some serious white stuff if they continue the claim that subways were even a small part of his mandate. Here’s RoFo’s entire platform, as mercifully preserved on the WayBack Machine (http://web.archive.org/web/20100830155611/http://www.robfordformayor.ca/issues/). See if you can find the word “subway” anywhere in here:

Rob Ford on the Issues

Stopping the Waste and Getting Spending Under Control

Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

The City of Toronto’s budget has ballooned from $5.9 billion in 2000 to $9.2 billion in 2010 – plus a $2.4 billion capital budget.  The City is addicted to spending and the most important job for the incoming Mayor will be to get the City’s finances in order.

Downsize Council from 44 to 22 Councillors.

Toronto has 22 MPs, 22 MPPs and 22 School Trustees.  It only needs 22 City Councilors. Reducing Toronto City Council would make meetings more productive and save taxpayers about $9 million in direct costs (salary, benefits, expense accounts and staffing budgets.) Additional savings from a reduced burden on City Hall staff would equal at least $6 million each year.  There are too many politicians and not enough accountability.

Reduce Politicians’ Expense Accounts.

In addition to their salary of about $100,000 each Councillor receives a budget of $205,000 to hire staff plus a tax-free allowance of $53,100 for “other expenses.”  This budget is what Kyle Rae famously used to throw himself a $12,000 party with your money.

When Rob Ford is Mayor, he will reduce the politicians’ expense accounts to $30,000 (saving over $1 million per year) so that tax dollars are spent only on legitimate purposes.

Limiting the Mayor’s Office Budget.

Leadership starts at the top.  When Rob Ford is Mayor, he will also limit the expense accounts for the Mayor’s Office.  Decreasing the staffing and expenses budget by 20 percent will save the taxpayers about $512,000 per year.

Making Toronto a Better Place to Live

City Hall has been too focused on the pet projects and perks of politicians and not on the fundamental services that people, families and businesses rely on every day.  These essential services are necessary to make Toronto a more livable city.  As Mayor, Rob Ford will take the following necessary steps to make Toronto a better place to live:

Protecting Our Children and Communities.

100 additional frontline police officers will be hired giving Toronto Police enough new officers to:

o    Protect Children in Schools.  30 additional School Resource Officers will double the number of schools protected by this successful program. By introducing police officers to youth in a positive environment, students are less likely to take a negative view of police and more likely to seek help for issues before they reach a violent stage.

o    Target Gangs, Guns & Violence in More Communities.  70 additional frontline officers will support an expansion of the successful Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) targeting gangs and violence in priority neighborhoods year-round.  This will more than double the number of officers currently available for TAVIS Rapid Response Teams.

Funding for this initiative ($15 million per year) will not be taken from within the existing TPS budget.  It represents additional funding in two phases.  From 2014 onwards, funding will be in addition to current TPS resources and come from savings accrued through the reduction of City Council from 44 to 22 Councillors.  Until Council is reduced in size, funding will be in addition to current TPS resources and come from a 0.1 per cent reduction in other (non-policing) city spending.

Making Garbage Collection Reliable.

Garbage and other solid wastes must be collected on schedule, without fail.  The strike during the summer of 2009 put the health of people and families in Toronto at risk.

The City must put in place solutions to make waste collection reliable and affordable.  Etobicoke, for example, uses contracted providers and saves the city $2 million each year.  By adopting the same approach for the whole city, taxpayers will save about $20 million each year and can have the confidence their garbage collectors won’t go on unnecessary strikes.

When Rob Ford is Mayor, the City will invite competitive tenders from private companies as well as current unions to provide collection services that are reliable, affordable and represent the best value for Toronto taxpayers.

Making the TTC an Essential Service.

People and businesses in Toronto depend on the TTC to get them from home to work, or school.  When the TTC isn’t running, the city grinds to a halt and commuters and businesses suffer.  TTC service is essential and it must be designated this way in order to prevent costly strikes.

When Rob Ford is Mayor, the City will work with the TTC and its unions to create a reliable, affordable, convenient, rapid and customer-focused transit service that Toronto can take pride in.

Improving Customer Service at City Hall.

Poor customer service frustrates city residents and businesses.  Too often, emails are ignored, telephone calls are not returned, staff are unable to answer questions or help solve issues.

Excellent customer service doesn’t cost a thing.  All it takes is leadership and accountability, and that starts at the top.

When Rob Ford is Mayor, excellent customer service will be the standard for all City Hall employees.

Eliminating Unncessary Taxes

Abolish the Vehicle Registration Tax.

Toronto residents should not have to pay $60 every year to register their vehicle.  It’s an unfair cash grab that hits families hard.  Rob Ford will push to eliminate the Vehicle Registration Tax at the first City Council meeting after becoming Mayor.

Eliminate the Land Transfer Tax.

People who buy and sell homes in Toronto must pay a new Land Transfer Tax to City Hall on top of all the other charges associated with buying or selling a home.  This punishes people and families who live in Toronto and makes the city less affordable for many people.  This tax is driving business, families, and people away from Toronto.  Rob Ford will move to abolish the Land Transfer Tax in his first year as Mayor.

Notes for an Address by Rob Ford 26 March 2010

Often people post long apologies on their blogs for their long absence, explaining how their cat infected them with some version of feline AIDS or some such other, and it always comes across as pandering and whiny.

Well not me. No sir. I’ve been busy, and I told myself at the outset that TCL will just have to wait. It’s not that I don’t love ranting about evil politicians or posting misty photos of a blah Toronto winter (anyone else noticed it’s been totally wimpy this year?), but as I’ve explained in earlier posts, I’m also a Flash developer and I’ve been creating a product that I really think will help to shake things up a bit (plus that day job thing).

It’s a live, social (peer to peer) broadcasting technology (not a social network!), called SocialCastr, and you can get more information here: http://www.SocialCastr.com/
Some people have reported trouble with seeing a blank front page, but since all it really has is a Google Docs presentation, you can go ahead and view that here: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d48tf93_8hfnctdgb
There’s also a blog that goes with the site: http://www.SocialCastr.com/blog/
And the downloads / installers are available here: http://www.SocialCastr.com/download.html

I realized that I kinda failed in my description of the software when my parents assumed you could use it to have a live, two-way chat like Skype. In fact, you can (both people run Broadcastr and Receivr at the same time) , but right now that conversation would be broadcast to the world which is really what SocialCastr is about: broadcasting content (audio and video are just the start), to the world.

But I happen to think it’s a bit more elegant than anything out there right now. For starters, you don’t broadcast through any central server as you would with any other video service. In the past this would’ve been prohibitive since anyone broadcasting would need a massively fast and powerful connection to the internet in order to broadcast to as few as 100 people — each one would need their own individual copy of the video/audio stream.

SocialCastr overcomes this by using peer to peer stream sharing; the broadcaster only sends audio / video streams to a few peers and they share with others. In this way, a simple broadcast from one person can be viewed by almost unlimited numbers of people worldwide, and at a fraction of the cost of most other technologies. I happen to think this has larger implications for business too — renting out Content Delivery Networks, high-bandwidth pipes, and servers are all costs that have made getting into video semi-professional broadcasting impossible for anyone without a wad of cash. Until now, that is.

I’ve been warning people that before version 1.0 it’s still a beta (i.e. test, unstable, etc.) product and there’s still work to be done to make the software more useful. However, even at this early stage it incorporates some features you won’t find anywhere else. So if you’re a citizen journalist, vlogger, podcaster, lecturer, teacher, trainer, or may otherwise find the software useful, I encourage you to drop by and try it out. More importantly, send me your feedback and feature requests!

My commitment to keep producing a free version of the software isn’t exclusively a product of generosity, it has very real and tangible business reasons behind it. That doesn’t mean there won’t be paid or “freemium” versions too, but the fully free option will always be available.

Thanks for hanging in there while I get this baby of the ground. Updates on TCL will probably still be slow, and I ain’t making any promises; I know better by now. But SocialCastr is really a proudly Toronto-based project so I see no reason why I can’t blog about it here, do you? Cuz I kind of already have ;)

News of Gary Webster’s potential demise as Chief General Manager of the TTC isn’t exactly hidden knowledge, nor is the fact that Rob Ford’s decision to suppress Webster’s report for a year (presumably because he didn’t like what was in it), but Torontoist does an excellent job of explaining not only why civil servants of Webster’s experience are so necessary, but why this whole thing is going down like a pile of rotten trash. I’d say this was another blemish on Rob Ford if he wasn’t already so covered over.

For you sycophant “taxpayers” out there, Webster’s departure is likely to cost you all a cool half a mill. And if Ford continues then Stintz is likely his next target, probably having had a change of heart since her stint on Undercover Boss where she interacted with real people — how much will that cost your cold pragmatic asses?

That’s it…I’ve had it. I’m calling a spade a spade and the federal Conservatives exactly what they are: criminal scumbags hell bent on destroying any vestige of what it means to be Canadian. For that we all owe Prime Minister Harper and his band of merry assholes a big old FUCK YOU!!

In case you haven’t been following our majority government’s shameful and downright criminal actions, or worse, if you voted for them, please pull your head out of your ass and educate yourself on why they are, and I’m not exagrating, trying to make Canada into something like a Stasi state or like something under Stalin. That goes double for Harper’s little pruned buddy Vic Toews and other Public Safety Ministers who have had an unwavering and constant record of dictatorial, freedom-quashing pronouncements under their belts. Here’s just a smattering:

Lawful Access – The charge for this bill, lead by non other than Toews, seeks to give police access to all your online records without warrant or justification. In other words, and quite literally, if there’s a cop who wants to snoop into what you’re doing, they can do it with absolutely no reason (not even a suspicion of a crime), directly in contravention of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Along with being given unrestricted access to your online activities, Lawful Access also allows police to install snooping devices on Internet Service Provider’s hardware so they can listen in on all your online conversations, completely against the highest law of the land, and against your very fundamental Canadian Rights. The Conservatives have shot down any debate on the subject, refused repeatedly to try to explain their asinine “but it’s for child porn” explanations in person which have been proven to not only be an outright lie, but have literally not a single police case to back up the claims. To add insult to injury, fuckwad Toews used a recent child porn ring bust involving hundreds of arrests as an example of how police aren’t able to do their jobs properly, and if you argue with that, you must be a pedophile too. Shit you not.

Torture – Canada used to be a place where you could come and be free of arbitrary government arrest, torture, and intimidation. Harper’s “Canadian values”, apparently, are contrary to this. Vic Toews recently popped his ugly head up and announced that the government is reversing its position on torture, ignoring even just the simple fact that it’s proven to not be effective in exacting accurate information, saying that not only is torture a-okay, we can even do it in Canada (but only against terrorists like environmental groups, so it’s okay). Of course, this once again goes against the Charter of Rights and Freedom, demonstrating that the Tories’ real targets aren’t pedophiles, terrorists, or online scammers — it’s you and your rights.

Mandatory sentences – The Conservative so-called Tackling Violent Crime which created mandatory sentences for a variety of crimes was, in a recent show of sanity, slapped down by a Toronto judge as “abhorrent” and completely unconstitutional in a case involving some guy goofing off in front of a webcam with a gun. He would’ve gotten three years in jail for that under Harper’s rule if the judge didn’t abide by the Constitution and Charter of Rights like she’s supposed to. Yet repeatedly and brazenly going against the highest law of Canada, apparently, doesn’t make the conservative government criminals for some reason. Only you and I are subject, it seems.

Unreported crime / super prisons – This was a project started in the days of Peter van Loan and Stockwell Day, Toews’ predecessors, showing how this is a long term plan by the Conservative government to destroy Canadians’ freedoms, once again without so much as a thread of real-world evidence to back up their claims. This particular gem centered around the government’s incessant push to build massive new prisons in order to prepare for all the “unreported” crime that’s happening out there. Mainstream presstitutes have tried to placate the public by pointing to the General Social Survey as being the likely source of this asinine argument, but failed entirely to ask why people didn’t report crimes; like, maybe, they didn’t think they were important enough. The Feds disagree and want you in prison, even if the “victim” doesn’t. It’s interesting to point out that the General Social Survey also includes many quality of life questions (how your life could be better), most of which go completely ignored by the federal government. No, they’re not in the business of making life better for citizens, they’re in the business of propping up mega-corporations against all opposition, all the while ensuring common, mostly law-abiding and generally innocuous citizens like you and me are made into abject criminals under their draconian laws. Let’s not forget the bullshit of the G20 (protesting in a designated protest zone? How dare they?!), which was operated under Harper’s auspices, which to this day is actively preventing and perverting the course of justice (but at least no one really innocent was affected, so it’s okay).

Human rights — Under the Conservative government, the concept of Human Rights is more or less a joke (see above), and the office of the federal Human Rights Tribunal which is bleeding staff like a stuck pig because of harassment and derision, the very ideals they’re supposed to be defending, is the very personification of the Conservative’s attitudes on the subject. And that is, fuck you, you have no rights, now cough up all your cash so we can toss your ass in jail for whatever damn reason we like.

ACTA — While the internet and public at large have expressed their seething disgust with acts like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Protect IP Act (PIPA), or Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), even managing to get the US federal government to back down, our own government signed up to ACTA months ago with glee and without discussion. In the United States, ACTA (created by the private, for-profit movie and record industries), was snuck in under the noses of the American people by making it top secret so that they wouldn’t be allowed to know what laws are being imposed on them. Sure sounds like it’s in the best interest of citizens, doesn’t it?

Anti-democracy — This is something that Toronto’s Rob Ford is learning all too well: you’re not the fucking king and you don’t get to just make pronouncements and have them carried out. Someone needs to step up and slap Harper upside the head and say the same thing. In fact, someone should place him under citizens arrest and have some charges placed against him (conspiring to deprive anyone of their constitutional rights is a direct crime!) Yet the federal government continues on their merry way, telling everyone there will be no discussion on anything, and fuck you, Stephen Harper has proclaimed it so. Say what you will about democracies, but there is absolutely no doubt that the Harper government is standing directly in opposition to their very concept.

And that, without doubt, makes Conservatives and their ilk supporters, directly and publicly, of dictatorship, tyranny, and oppression. This is the very same historical narrative that Hitler used to put Germany under his thumb, and the echoes of Mao and Stalin aren’t far behind. It’s not about left or right politics, it’s about simple Canadian freedoms which we all though we had inalienably enshrined in our Constitution and Charter of Rights, and which Harper is directly attacking over and over again, and with no basis in evidence, fact, law, or even common sense.

Note that on top of being just a few example of the outrageous, egregious, illegal, dictatorial, oppressive, and audacious bullshit that the Conservatives are pushing out these days, millions have been wasted to write these things up, pass them through the proper channels, and have them enacted. Not only are your rights being stripped away wholesale, you’re paying for it!

If you’re a staunch Conservative and still manage to support your scumbag government after reading some of these tidbits, I invite you to pick up a history book on something like the Nazis to see how people who support regimes like the Harper government end up. You can’t even say “but I was just following orders” at the end of it because you’re zealously behind it, and in that case, you’re no friend of mine.

Even if you’re ambivalent about all of this (meaning you don’t think it’ll affect you), ask yourself exactly how the Conservative government has made your life better. Are your taxes lower? Are you finding it easier to find a job? Is it easier to start or run a new business? Is your old age security safe?All of the programs and rhetoric being pushed by the feds are only helping to destroy all of these assistance programs.  I mean, it’s all happening so saying that the Conservatives are not directly responsible for this (with a majority and many years in power), is a very nasty type of self-delusion. No, they’re not helping you, they’re not even leaving you alone, they are directly and purposefully making your life more difficult and miserable even if you completely ignore everything else. Or maybe you’re of the belief that your children’s lives should be worse than yours?

And if any of this disturbs you, please spread the word and let’s start to put the screws on this government. They keep passing increasingly illegal laws but because they have a majority, they don’t give a shit. But as we all know, ignorance of the law is no excuse, and being out and out criminal assholes even less.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/mobile/#story.cfm?c=185195

Read, its sooo worth it.

#the Fords and their imaginary supporters in #Agincourt mall.

RoFo ran on this phoney Respecting the Taxpayer B.S..

NOW CHECK OUT THIS NEW BULL!

http://www.thestar.com/iphone/news/cityhallpolitics/article/1130206–new-city-fees-shock-baseball-players

I went back to school Wednesday!
good class!

Here are some of the ppl I met:

me and Patrick!

Jayne + me! (Sarah!)

Tom + Tony!

Tony + Andrew!

Me + Patrick!

My fave course, my fave man, my fave moments!

;-)

love,
SarahD!

http://www.newstalk1010.com/News/localnews/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10346879

http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.torontosun.com%2F2012%2F02%2F08%2Ftransit-decision-is-a-farce%23.TzNnwM92z2Y.facebook#!/story.php?story_fbid=108133295978277&id=134292179994443&__user=543225690

http://news.ontario.ca/mto/en/2012/02/statement-from-minister-bob-chiarelli-on-public-transit-in-toronto.html