Bruce Dowbiggin
Insecurity Detail: Is Anthing Safe From Mayhem Anymore?
It’s not like baseball hasn’t seen fans on the field before— sometimes thousands of them. Remember when Hank Aaron hit home run No. 715? He was chased around the base paths by fans in Atlanta who’d somehow gotten past security. One of whom, Craig Sager, went on to have a lengthy sports broadcasting career.
Yankee Stadium crowds often mobbed the field in the 1970s, forcing players like Reggie Jackson to fight their way to the clubhouse to save their skins and, maybe, their caps. MLB has managed to discover security in the years since then, the protective netting surrounding the field providing a barrier to overly refreshed fans from taking an idiotic lap around the field.
That’s why the sight of, not one, but two fans being allowed to get to Atlanta’s superstar Ronald Acuña Jr. in centre field in Denver was so shocking. The first fan had time to awkwardly hug Acuña before, belatedly, a few porky security dudes finally hustled out to help. In doing so, Acuña, the runaway favourite for NL MVP— was knocked to the ground.
As more Rockies security emerged, a second fan joined in the untidy melée. After a brief scuffle the fans were bodily carried from the field. Only at the very end of this did any of Acuña’s teammates come out to help. The pair of intruders were arrested and charged.
An unhurt Acuña played down the incident afterward, talking about the men just being fans, a little over-excited etc. Maybe. But in a time where security is breaking down in stores, government buildings and schools, laughing off the episode is folly. In that context, the invasion of the field represented a massive security fail on behalf of MLB, the Rockies and the game-day staff.
First, players are told that in these situations they are to head immediately to the dugout. Acuña did not, waiting for the intruders. Second, the security staff were critically slow. The fan had ample time to create a worse confrontation before the other staff— and the second intruder— arrived on scene. Third, Acuña’s teammates were strangely reticent to come to his aid. Fourth, the areas of entry to the field were not properly supervised. Fifth, the umpires should have cleared the field. Instead the Braves pitcher was allowed to continue his warmup on the mound.
Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.
Again these scenes have happened before, shrugged off as a lark by a drunk fan. Why the big fuss? The answer is context. In a time when MLB is trying to get fans as close their heroes as possible (see the Blue Jays new bullpens) the league has now shown it can’t control an emergency. Other leagues have had varying degrees of success. The NHL has very few intrusions on-ice anymore since high glass and netting made invasions nearly impossible.
But players in all sports still must pass through gauntlets of fans wanting a touch of the hand or a souvenir. In this regard golf and tennis are whistling past the graveyard as fans can stand in arm’s length of a golfer or interface with tennis stars at courtside. Just attend a PGA Tour event— most are like frat parties— and you’ll know how hard it would be to contain trouble if it got any momentum.
In the bigger picture, Canadians and Americans have come to accept that the people who are entrusted to keep the criminal element in their place are not doing their job. Like the Rockies staff they show up late— if they show up at all. And the perps are quickly back on the street due to new bail laws and hyper-liberal judges and crown attorneys. (Except if you’re a truck driver.)
Every major Canadian city— and a few secondary places as well— is now a squat zone for the homeless, the addicted and the politically insane. Here’s Ottawa: . Here’s Calgary: Here’s Toronto: They’re not exceptions. There are now no-go sections of these formerly safe places where unspeakable acts are performed on a sidewalk or in a park, menacing people in their everyday activities. Children must pass by the human detritus of needles and junk. Authority seems non-existent.
Large American cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York (among many) are also being preyed upon by organized gangs who swarm stores, gutting even high-end outlets like Nordstroms, Saks and Gucci in a blur of action, departing the scene in every direction. At times they use stolen cars to break through security. Many of these stores are closing their inner-city outlets.
Who are these thugs? Some are lifetime criminals, some are illegal immigrants, some are junkies, some are joyriders, out for a lark. Absent proper housing and mental healthcare they spill out in the streets knowing that laws about shoplifting have been forgotten (thanks to municipal councils replete with bleeding hearts). In the midst of this, the VPOTUS urged citizens to pay the bail of those who burned American cities for six months after George Floyd. That’s a deterrent, huh?
Knowing that the legal system is debased by Woke prosecutors and clown politicians such as AOC (“They’re just putting bread on the table”) they act with impunity. As often as not those protecting stores are charged for injuring the criminals. Managers tell staff to instead turn the other cheek to rampant theft.
For the most part the fanciful liberals who support ultra-permissive politicians have been immune from the impact of electing fools and revolutionaries. But now, the mayor of NYC is crying the blues because the illegals he thought should be kept in border states are now roaming his streets, flooding social services and jails. Ditto mayors in many other Democrat-run cities who see the migrant bussed to their streets.
In Canada, the current Liberal government has set a target of 40 million people in this country by 2026. Where are these new people to live? Where are they to work in cities with insane housing supply? Who will pay for their healthcare when personal physicians are as rare as Toronto Stanley Cup triumphs since 1967? Trudeau has no answers, just word salads blaming Stephen Harper.
It’s gotten so people now look at the attack on Ronald Acuña in a baseball park and say, “More of the same.” The breaking point is near. Should anyone choose not to do something about it.
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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
This past week has seen (some) Canadians celebrating their heritage— now that Mike Myers has officially reinterpreted Canadian culture as a hockey sweater and Mr. Dressup. This quick-change was so popular that Canadian voters even forgot an entire decade of Justin Trudeau.
In the United States, the people who elected Donald Trump– and not Andrew Coyne– to run their nation celebrated Independence Day with stirring renditions off The Star Spangled Banner, although few could surpass the brilliant performance of the song by the late Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl.
The CDN equivalent is some flavour of the month changing the words to O Canada at the Grey Cup game. Canada’s national anthem has always been open to interpretation by people who may or may not have Canada in their hearts. At the 2023 NBA All Star Game Canadian chanteuse Jully Black became the latest singer to attempt a manicure to the English lyrics of O Canada, penned for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony ( Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English lyrics have “evolved” over the years, just like the dress code for the CDN PM..)
Black amended the first line from “our home and native land” to our home ON native land”. Because something-something. But this creative license is nothing new. Unlike Chris Stapleton, Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston with the Star Spangled Banner, interpreters of O Canada have seen fit to amend the lyrics to their sensibilities. Roger Doucet, famed anthem singer of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970-80s, tried to add the words “we stand on guard for truth and liberty” in place of the first “we stand on guard for thee”.
In 1990, having nothing better to do, Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 in favour of recommending that the phrase “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. (The latter was officially adapted.)
While those attempts had mixed outcomes it appears it’s just a matter of time till Ms. Black’s class-conscious culling of the words is accepted. Being generous we here at IDLM thought we’d short-circuit piecemeal attempts to create a throughly Woke version of the anthem that would last till the latest fad come along. Herewith our 2023 definitive O Canada that even— maybe only— Justin Trudeau could love:
“O Canada” (Ignores the French fact in our culture) Change to “Eau Canada”
“Our home on native land” (ignores indigenous land claims) Change to “Get off our land, settlers”
“True patriot love in all of us commands” (Only true patriot love? There were officially 78 kinds of relationships in Trudeaupia. And commanding love?) Change to “Love the one you’re with”.
“With glowing hearts we see thee rise” (rise suggests triumph of white triumphalist dogma) Change to “Non judgementally we oppose the crushing impacts of Euro-based autocracy”
“The true north strong and free” (How can anyone be strong or free when we support America’s killing fields?) Change to “Heteronormative thinking must be stamped out at our borders. If we even have borders anymore.”
“From far and wide” (Body shaming) Change to “Obesity is a disease that is not helped by putting it in the national anthem.”
“O Canada” (biased against A, B, AB blood types) change to “Science Must Be Believed”
“We stand on guard for thee” (Spreads hate against the non ableist community) Change to “Please remain seated.”
“God keep our land” (God? God? What is this, the Reformation) “Change to “It’s your thing”
”Glorious and free” (Glorious harkens to the bourgeois subjugation of Indigenous thought processes by white Christian priests) Change to “A genocidal state if there ever was one”.
“O Canada we stand on guard for thee/
O Canada we stand on guard for thee” The denial of trans rights is used twice here to emphasize the intolerable burdens faced by people of the LGBTQ2R community as they seek respect and compensation for the evils of the founding oppressors.) Change to “Eau Canada, after 6.5 hours of intensive lectures on the gender, race and dissociative application of class war on your citizens you may someday come to understand that this song is a manifestation of your bigotry and exploitation of minorities— and why rhyming lines like “thee and free” is the work of the devil or J.K. Rowling, whomever comes to mind first.”
There. That wasn’t so tough, was it? Flows trippingly off the tongue like Mark Carney refusing a special inquiry into China buying the electoral process. Or perhaps we should simply accept a literal translation of the original French lyrics:
“O Canada!
Land of our ancestors
Glorious deeds circle your brow
For your arm knows how to wield the sword
Your arm knows how to carry the cross;
Your history is an epic
Of brilliant deeds
And your valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights.”
Yikes. That’s downright fascistic. But it’s Quebec, and we have to allow them their peccadilloes. So circle your brow with glorious deeds, grab a cross and a sword and valour steeped in faith. And remember we must be adaptable in the new era.
Unless it’s Alberta using the adapting to fuel its CO2-belching machines. In which case it’s man the battlements and follow Mike Myers into the fight.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.
Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.
In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.
Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”
The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.
Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.
In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.
As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.
There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.
And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.
Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.
Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.
And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.
The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.
It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.
The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.
It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.
These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.
As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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