Judging the RCMP fairly.

According to William Elliot, the Commissioner of the RCMP, we should not judge the RCMP unfairly in the Robert Dziekanski affair. I agree with him fully. We should be 100% fair in our judgement. We should listen to the evidence impartially and then reach our conclusion. Only then should the RCMP be disbanded and replaced with a force that has civilian oversight of its operations.

The problem Mr. Elliot is having is that the fair facts are utterly damning of his organization. The more facts spill out in this inquiry, the more utterly damned the RCMP comes out. The force has lied, cheated and even attempted outright theft to keep these facts from coming out and, as a result, has lost any and all credibility it may once have had.

The latest (and last) of the four state-protected killers (I refuse at this point to call them "police officers" any longer) has finally given his version of events. This was the guy in charge of the goon squad that killed Robert Dziekanski and his testimony is the most risible of all, and the most inadvertantly revealing. One thing that I missed before (quite possibly because it wasn't reported) is that the four killer goons were sitting down to a meal when they got the call. I think this is an important thing to remember when reconstructing what likely really happened. He also claimed, in the most farcical portion of testimony so far (and when you consider the previous testimony about the threatening stapler position that's really saying something!), that in the ten minutes it took the goon squad to go from their meal to Dziekanski that they didn't exchange a single word. Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Let me piece together what likely happened to lead to Dziekanski's death.

1. Bureaucratic bungling beyond all reasonable (and most unreasonable) levels left Robert Dziekanski tired, confused, dehydrated and distraught stuck in a foreign country where nobody could or would speak with him.
2. He "acted up" as a result. (Anybody who feels this is not a 100% expected outcome should try it themself sometime: being confied in a tin can for twelve hours followed by ten hours of wandering around an increasingly hostile place with no food, no water and no communication.)
3. A call goes in and interrupts four hyper-macho thugs in uniform at their meal.
4. The four decide to get in, get the job done and get out in the quickest possible way. I submit the interruption of their meal predisposed them to using force and violence just out of raw anger.
5. They follow their plan (and yes, I believe they planned this).
6. Dziekanski didn't act the meek, docile sheep they wanted to see, so they tazed him multiple times as a show of power. A show of who's the sheepdog and who's the sheep, so to speak.
7. In a staggering display of callousness they don't take the time to monitor the person they've just electrocuted five times. (Were I a snide bastard I'd suggest they were planning how they were going to continue their meal.)
8. In a continuing display of said callousness they refuse to take the handcuffs off when an emergency treatment team requests it, convinced that the by-now-dead Dziekanski (who they probably thought was unconscious) posed a horrible threat to the four burly, armoured men around him.
9. Oops. He was dead already. Time for the cover-up to begin.
10. They consulted with each other to make their notes tell the same story.
11. Oops. Someone had video.
12. They confiscate the video for "the investigation".
13. The goons' superiors and the RCMP public relations weasels cook up a story that made the killers' actions sound reasonable. They increased the amount of screaming and violence from their victim from zero to a credible danger while reducing the number of officers involved from four to three.
    
14. Oops. The person with the camera isn't docile sheep and wants his video back.
15. Oops. The video makes it to the media.
16. Oops. The media does its job for a change and shows what really happened.

Now if William Elliot and the rest of the RCMP leadership were smart, they'd just 'fess up at this point and say "the officers in question screwed up, as did our training and leadership". But that's not what they do. Instead they circle the wagons and go in all out Massada mode. They pile lie on lie, prevarication on prevarication and build up a teetering, wobbly stack of shit that is now sliding down in a brown avalanche and staining the RCMP's reputation (along with the rest of the country's!) in the process.

And they're still too stupid to see that it's the end.

This is why I think it's time to disband the RCMP and replace them with a real police force with real oversight. I don't want people as stupid as the RCMP have shown themselves to be to be in charge of our national safety and security. If we're going to have criminals running things, at least, for God's sake, let them be smart criminals for a change!

...on the other hand...

I ended off my last blog post on Sunday with a chipper thing about surprises I like. Today's blog entry is a not-so-happy one.

It starts with happy news, of course. Today marks the third year since Joan, in a weird fit or something, decided that she'd actually spend the rest of her life with me. The fact that I've been blessed with this for three years makes the rest of my life worthwhile. Lucas' addition to the family over fourteen months ago amplifies this.

The event has been overshadowed, however, by some bad news. (Indeed the event almost passed me by unnoticed.) Yesterday Lucas was at the hospital to check into something that worried Joan and her mother. It turns out I should have been worried too.

Lucas' slow development in walking is not because of normal variance in children picking up the skill. He has been diagnosed as having something called "Central Coordination Disturbance". This seems, on my digging, to be a code phrase for "Cerebral Palsy". Specifically, it seems, that the version of CP in question is "Spastic Diplegia". Caught early enough there is treatment for it that can bring it under control and give him a semblance of a normal life in terms of walking, etc. He'll never be graceful or nimble (no world-famous athlete or dancer here), but if the treatment works he'll at least be able to look somewhat normal while walking or possibly even running.

Of course treatment is open-ended and expensive (and, naturally, not at all guaranteed to be effective). How expensive? Savings-account draining expensive. The minimum cost is 4000RMB for a twenty-day course of treatment. I make 4700RMB per month. Do the math and you see bank accounts draining to zero in no time at all. (Thankfully I married someone who is good at saving or there wouldn't be a savings account to even start draining!)

This is the final nail in the coffin of my teaching. I was getting tired of dealing with the spoiled brats of China's wealthy, self-proclaimed elites already. Now I have an added incentive to leave: teaching just doesn't pay enough. It's time to go back into software for real.

Anybody who knows a friend who knows a friend who knows someone who's looking for a seasoned software developer, please feel free to pass on my email address (ttmrichter@gmail.com), my GoogleTalk address (ttmrichter@gmail.com) or my YIM address (michael_richter_1966). I'm in the market again.

Surprises

The growth of a child kind of creeps up on you. You just all of a sudden notice, for example, that the kid you were once able to comfortably hold with one hand and your forearm is now so big that you can't hold him up high enough to keep his feet of your chest while playing on the bed. (You also find out that the kid you used to be able to toss around like a baseball now throws your crippled back when you try it. I learned that the hard way this week.)

It's the intellectual development, however, that sneaks up on you the most quietly, especially in the pre-vocal stage. Its difficult to spot what the child is learning because there's no quick feedback like you'd get if the child could talk.

We got some feedback from Lucas this week.

A long time ago we got this flashcard/book type of affair with pictures of animals in it. Patiently his grandmother, his mother and I would show him pictures and say the name of the animal. (In Chinese at this point. Starting next month he gets the same treatment in English.) At first Lucas was uninterested in them (except for wanting to eat them). After that he just wanted to play with the cards, fanning them out from the rivet that binds them all in one corner, bending them and generally being his destructive self on them. He also enjoyed touching the pictures and running his finger along the edges. There was, however, no sign that he understood the language at all. (That pre-vocal thing and all that.)

Then the hammer dropped this week. While playing with Lucas, Joan asked him (in Chinese) "Where's the dog?". She was, of course, referring to his favourite pal, the Snoopy-like stuffed dog. The cards, however, happened to be out and fanned open and the picture of the dog (a dalmatian) was exposed. Instead of pointing to his favourite pal, Lucas reached across and pointed at the picture of the dog. This sent a wave of excitement through the family and poor Lucas was pestered for the entire length of his attention span (roughly twenty seconds) with "where's the lion?" and "where's the tiger?" and "where's the elephant?" and such questions. He very ably identified the animals (even some of the more difficult ones). He'd confuse the lion and tiger quite often and sometimes got the chimpanzee mixed up with the monkey. But overall his comprehension of those words was better than my Sweathogs' would be given the same vocabulary.

These are the kinds of surprises I like in my life.

Delightful Chinglish

I had a fun week with the good students. The subject was idiom and translation—basically an introduction to not speaking Chinglish. Of course it's hard, typically, to find a good example of why learning proper idiomatic expression is important. Luckily I had a secret weapon at my disposal: the packaging of a lock Joan got with her new electric scooter. (I know I promised pictures when we next had good weather. We honestly haven't had any good weather recently. The closest we got was a half-overcast day on Friday and instead of going out for pictures we worried more about things like laundry.)

This lock package has what is probably the most delightful example of how not to do it that I've seen in China. It is absolutely breath-taking in its incomprehensibility. Let me give you a taste:

Quality is our fundamental
Ares locks on a "quality-oriented, good faith for the first" for the purpose of the constant pursuit of true wood products is expected, good looks, so that Every consumer to buy a Heart, and must feel at ease.

Maintenance:
In the course of use, such as the case of Ni Chen debris into the Keyhole, a key rotation or impeded access difficult situation, not to inject viscous – The lubricants, use a small gasoline into Suoxin, and then repeatedly inserted key cleansing, and afterwards in a few keys on the increase Qianfen(pencil Core Mo) can be lubricated.

(Note: all formatting and spelling errors above are verbatim from the package. I made sure there are no transcription errors.)

And so it goes on and on. Splendid, isn't it? It's like the god of bad English descended to make a perfect example for my lessons.

What I initially intended to do turned out to be too difficult, so I had to dumb down the exercise a bit. Originally my plan was to have them try and back-translate the Chinglish into the original Chinese and then translate it properly. It turns out that they couldn't recognize the relevant Chinese idioms and structures when expressed in another language. In the end I had to have someone in the class type out the Chinese on the screen so that they could just do the straightforward one-way translation.

The point of the lesson, of course, was to show that there's an awful lot more to language than mere grammar and vocabulary; that when (not if!) they found themselves having to do business in English with people from around the world they'd better learn idiom as well on top of everything else.

Of course their translations were better than what's on the package. (They'd have to be!) However the exercise highlighted other problems. Aside from the usual bunch of spelling and grammar errors (which aren't really important here since I'm not teaching English majors) there was a big difference in communication style. Their translations were circumlocutory and frustratingly vague with overuse of the passive voice. This is not the favoured language for business communication. Next week's lesson has practically written itself!

One of the questions I asked the classes was "Why is there any English on this package at all?" I got the usual suspects in terms of answers: maybe they want to sell abroad or to foreigners living in China, etc. I did get an interesting thought from one student however. He opined that the English was there to make the company look international to Chinese eyes. If he's right—and he well could be—then the quality of the translation doesn't matter at all. It's intended to wow the rubes, after all, not native speakers. That was food for thought, something I always like getting from my students.

Yeah, so, well, delays happen.

I know. Sunday update on the next Thursday. I got busy. Sue me.

Sunday I spent most of the day buying a replacement external DVD drive so I could finally get Joan's new laptop working the way I wanted it to work. (English Windows, Chinese Windows add-on, English Office, Chinese Office add-on.) That was two days total work. (I am not making this up!) Oh, and I installed Ubuntu on it, complete with Chinese language support so that when Windows died I'd have some way to recover the lost data. (This is why I use Ubuntu, after all, when I found that I could recover my data on my trashed system using Ubuntu, but there was no way I could do it with Windows.) Anyway, on top of all that I had some problems accessing Blogger and it was Thursday before I thought to try again, so here I am.

Other than the excuse above, this is going to be an all-Lucas post. If Lucas bores you, you might want to tune out and visit a site with interesting content.

Lucas is developing into quite the little handful. He's very demanding, very active and very assertive. Pretty much exactly what I expected which is why Joan and I were always hoping for a girl. He's also large. Very large. I don't have exact measurements right now, but he's probably around 75cm tall or more and definitely over 30 pounds by now.

He's developed a few idiosyncracies which can be cute or aggravating depending on circumstance and person. First, now, he's very clear on what he wants and when he wants it, he'll point demandingly and then stare at the person who's supposed to get it for him. This can sometimes lead to comical tears when he does things like points at the light fixture on the ceiling and gets crushed when nobody will go get it for him. (I find the tears in these situations funny. Joan, not so much. I'm just a bad man at heart.)

The second idiosyncracy he has is his fascination with faces. He loves to grab onto various parts (nose, lips, ears, etc.) and examine them closely. Or if he's in a more active mood he just loves to scratch over them. (I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to pull my head back quickly because he was about to claw my eyes out.) He also likes sticking his fingers into ears, nostrils or even mouths. Hell, sometimes he loves sticking his whole hand into people's mouths if they're stupid enough to let him.

A final idiosyncracy is his nomenclature. He knows I'm "ba-ba" and Joan is "ma-ma". He even usually gets Joan's mother somewhat right as "djia-djia" (it should be "jia-jia"). He has, however, identified personality traits with other things. Things that are comfortable and comforting are also "ma-ma". Things that give him food (outside of milk) are "djia-djia" and things that he finds fun and exciting (I'm the one most prone to throwing him in the air and swinging him around, after all) are often "ba-ba".

Development-wise, he's a bit of a slow one. Kind of like his old man. He's only just now learning how to walk, for example, and he's really, really bad at it. We have a little harness for him that we use to let him trundle around without him falling flat on his face or, I think, he'd never walk at all. Of course I know that normal child development has walking going on between 9 and 18 months, but Joan and her mother are positively convinced that he has some major problem and are constantly worrying. (This seems to be generally Chinese woman behaviour: worry over everything whether or not worrying accomplishes anything.) Lucas, of course, is oblivious to all of this as he screams and giggles while trundling forward at breakneck speeds. He's positively delighted at the mobility. And the accessibility of all those interesting things he could only see from a distance before.

The adventure continues. Next time I'll really post on Sunday instead of delaying so long.