Rob Ford's Toronto

[Videodrome]

If it wasn't for the cancer, I would put Rob Ford on the list. Even without it, he is a shadow of his former self.

 

[Jimmi T]

I finally watched All the President's Men--fascinating account of how Watergate was broken. It made me think how does the crack video scandal compare to other political scandals? I think as far as the public interest goes it might be further down the list but in terms of drama and excitement it's up there with the greats. It also must've been a rush to work on.

I think the fact that he made his name partly on being a tough on crime conservative with no sympathy for addicts made it even more dramatic.

I'm feeling inspired now. I want to break a scandal on my blog!

 

[adma]

And of course, when it comes to "karma hitting those who tempt it", the current Martin Shkreli bust/hoodie perp walk can lead one to hope that something similar awaits FoFam, Deco, etc etc etc. (And *that*, in true Al Capone fashion, "came from without", relative to the core of Shkreli's notoriety)

 

[Jimmi T]

And of course, when it comes to "karma hitting those who tempt it", the current Martin Shkreli bust/hoodie perp walk can lead one to hope that something similar awaits FoFam, Deco, etc etc etc. (And *that*, in true Al Capone fashion, "came from without", relative to the core of Shkreli's notoriety)

Perp walks are so fun. How great would a Robbie/Dougie perp walk be? Well, not now that he's sick but a couple of years ago.

 

[evvabeing]

Wonder if Rob & Doug will be visited by Krampus this year? (Krampus is a horned, anthropomorphic figure who, during the Christmas season, punishes children who have misbehaved.)

 

[evvabeing]

Somalis share lessons with refugees on transitioning to Canadian life

In recent weeks, many Somalis in Toronto have been looking to translate the often bitter, but occasionally hopeful lessons they learned as refugees into a virtual how-to manual for the Syrians just beginning to arrive via government airlift from the Middle East.

The two communities have much in common: both Muslim, both being survivors of war and both coming, or having come, to Canada en masse.

But for many Somalis, joining the aid effort is above all a chance to redeem their hardship in Canada by steering others away from the same fate.

“We’re really excited to help them,” said Ubah Farah, a Somali woman living in Toronto. “We want them to have a better experience than we experienced when we came 25 years ago.”
[...]
When Somalia was torn apart by clan uprisings in the late 1980s, an unlikely name began circulating in the refugee camps of East Africa: Diksan. It was spoken in a tone of longing and with an imperfect accent.

What the Somalis meant was Dixon, shorthand for a neighbourhood near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Dominated by six hulking condo towers, it was once populated by seniors and young professional couples. But Somalis begin arriving in the late 1980s, drawn in part by its proximity to the airport, and soon the area was a household name in Mogadishu and environs – the 2011 National Household Survey found about 45,000 Canadians of Somali origin, though unofficial population estimates run much higher.

“Dixon was the Somali refugee dream city,” Abdi Kusow and Stephanie Bjork wrote in their introduction to the book From Mogadishu to Dixon: The Somali Diaspora in a Global Context.

The dream soured quickly. In what would become a pattern, the community was obliquely wounded by a government body with no direct connection to refugee resettlement: In 1988, Transport Canada turned the airspace above the Dixon towers into a flight path for planes arriving at Pearson, which drove down condo values.

(In Dixon today, the sky still roars with jet engines and fills every few minutes with the dramatic rising bulk of commercial airliners.)

Between the noise and the flood of unfamiliar people with strange customs – many Canadians had never seen a hijab in the eighties – lots of white Dixon residents moved out.

“Maybe to the original owners that lived at Dixon Road, they would’ve said it was a disaster because they would have lost money and most of them, not all, but most of them did move out – and the actual condo buildings deteriorated,” said Holland Marshall, a condo blogger who has studied Dixon extensively.

Those who stayed were often hostile to the Somalis, resenting their habit of filling a single unit with eight or 10 people, and their boisterous outdoor celebrations.
[...]
By the early nineties, racial tension was spilling into the open. A Place Called Dixon, a CBC documentary that aired in 1993, revealed ugly attitudes among long-time residents.

“A tribal community should never have been dumped in a condominium corporation,” one elderly white condo owner said. “It’s like you can’t mix oil and water.”

Worse were the security guards hired to monitor the Somalis. One of them patrolled the buildings with two German shepherds that he had named Allah and Mohammed.

The guards, meanwhile, had their own grievances: They said they had been beaten with bats by gangs of Somali youth.

Over time, those gangs became formalized. Young men traumatized by war and lost to the school system began presiding over the high-rise towers of Little Mogadishu, as the area came to be known. A recent Globe and Mail investigation found that dozens of Somali-Canadian men had been killed from 2005 to 2012 in mostly drug trade-related incidents.

After festering for years, the problem of Somali crime burst onto the front pages of Toronto newspapers in 2013. The Toronto Star’s bombshell report on the tape of former mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine used the word “Somali” 11 times to describe the men who were peddling the video to reporters. (The Star’s managing editor later apologized for the gratuitous references.)

Less than a month later, Toronto Police descended on the Dixon towers in a massive gun and drug raid, arresting dozens of alleged gang members, most of them Somali.

The community’s reputation had hit a low.
[...]
Somalis think highly of Syria, where many of them settled after being driven from their homes in the 1990s, attracted by the Assad regime’s relatively open refugee policy for members of the Arab League.

But more than that, Somalis working on behalf of the Syrians seem fired by an urge to impart lessons they learned the hard way. “This community is not a rich community that can give them much. But there’s a lot of experience that I’m telling you that we can share with them,” Mr. Yusuf said.
[...]
The biggest challenges for Somalis in Toronto revolved around keeping families together and keeping children in school.

Teenage boys were an especially hard case. Shaken by war back home and unused to the drudgery of the classroom, many of them became restless and violent. Children and parents alike were stunned by the strictness of the official reaction to hallway scuffles.

Stir-crazy Somali children were also hastily diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and developmental delays, which offended their parents and stigmatized the students.

Meanwhile, Mr. Yusuf said, the way Somali students were assigned school grades caused many to drop out. Children were usually placed in the grade that corresponded with their age rather than their level of education.
[...]
Aside from battling with the school system to keep their children out of trouble, Mr. Yusuf said, Syrian parents should be ready to tailor their parenting style to Canadian norms or risk losing their kids to the children’s aid system.

Corporal punishment is considered perfectly acceptable in Somali culture, but that practice landed some refugee parents in hot water.

An even bigger source of discord was changing gender roles, which Mr. Yusuf said he expects Syrians to wrestle with.

The availability of welfare for women, strict laws around spousal violence and bad job prospects for men combined to undermine the traditional balance of domestic power.

“The role change, female and male, that caused lots of family separation,” he said. “In Canada, Somali women became the head of the family. … They were empowered.”

That was great for the women, Mr. Yusuf said, but also resulted in too many boys being raised without fathers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/refugees-helping-refugees/article27870128/

 

[Jimmi T]

Somalis share lessons with refugees on transitioning to Canadian life

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/refugees-helping-refugees/article27870128/

Yep, and many of them went to my school. I'd say about a third of students at Scarlett were Somali. Many white guys developed anti-Somali views. Things boiled over one time after a couple of Somalis jumped a white guy at Royal York Plaza and they planned a huge gang brawl--whites (many from Richview) vs Somalis.

Somehow word leaked to the cops and they formed a big wall in between the two groups after school. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if Sandro and Payman were in the mix.

Not proud but me and Sandro used to drive up and down Dixon and he'd pelt Somalis with eggs using his sling shot--he had pintpoint accuracy. Not out of racism but because they were often easy targets.

One time he jumped out of the car to get a better aim at these two woman in burqas--like the full face covering. Then the one picks up a tree branch and starts sprinting after him as he runs away. We were trouble makers for sure lol. Someone even fired a gun at him when he was on an egging mission.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Rob's wife is Polish...

 

[evvabeing]

 

[evvabeing]

The 3 Dumbest Public Transportation Projects Underway in North America
Infrastructure is fantastic -- except when it isn't.

Toronto’s Three Stop, $3 Billion Subway
[...]
The sunk costs on just one section of the light rail in the city’s west end, on which work had already begun, were at least $100 million. That seven-stop section of track is to be replaced with a three-stop subway, at a cost of $3 billion. And it actually gets worse — the $8 billion for the planned network of light rail had already been pledged in full by the provincial and federal governments. With that plan scrapped, the Toronto taxpayers will be on the hook for large chunks of new subway plan. Just for that three stop subway in the west [sic] end, the city will be expected to cover the tab for about $1 billion. Ouch.

https://www.inverse.com/article/942...sportation-projects-underway-in-north-america

 

[salsa]

The 3 Dumbest Public Transportation Projects Underway in North America
Infrastructure is fantastic -- except when it isn't.

https://www.inverse.com/article/942...sportation-projects-underway-in-north-america

4. The Gardiner hybrid stupidity

 

[adma]

Perp walks are so fun. How great would a Robbie/Dougie perp walk be? Well, not now that he's sick but a couple of years ago.

Well, I *did* say FoFam as opposed to just plain RoFo. (Wonder what kind of quick getaway Randy has up his sleeve this time...)

 

[JWBF]

4. The Gardiner hybrid stupidity

You have a point but it is still better than trying to fix a weeping wound with surgical mesh and gauze.

 

[Jimmi T]

Interesting doc. I guess that guy's now like the Canadian Dr. Drew? I was watching a doc about the downfall of John Belushi and he had someone similar to a sobriety coach. He hired this ex cop to keep him away from drugs no matter what. So this guy would constantly have to find spots where dealers would hide John's drugs, threaten them to leave him alone and he even had to scrap with John a few times to keep him away from drugs. He helped get him clean but then once he left John went back to using.

 

[evvabeing]

Interesting doc. I guess that guy's now like the Canadian Dr. Drew? I was watching a doc about the downfall of John Belushi and he had someone similar to a sobriety coach. He hired this ex cop to keep him away from drugs no matter what. So this guy would constantly have to find spots where dealers would hide John's drugs, threaten them to leave him alone and he even had to scrap with John a few times to keep him away from drugs. He helped get him clean but then once he left John went back to using.

i had always assumed that doug called the sober coach, but now i don't know. bob seems like the kind of guy rob would have picked himself.

in the opening of the doc, when bob gives a double bird while driving... is that dave haynes in the passenger seat?

and where did the '26er of grey goose before kimmel' part go?

also... bob says there's no formal training for being sober coach, yet...

http://www.startingpointacademy.com/

http://theaddictionscoach.com/therapy-services/certification/

http://theaddictionsacademy.com/the...certificate-programs/recovery-coach-training/

and what's with the 'making people do illegal driving moves to feel alive' bit? i think i'd agree that that's a bad sober coach.

i also love that his mom says she never noticed him having 'asshole face' (i.e. coke on your face)

eta: looks like his business has grown since we last checked...

http://www.hiredsobriety.com/#!team/cgrp