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Firefox (under linux) automatically checks for updates every time it starts. This is not what I want. I'll update it when I damn well feel like it, when I update the system as a whole.

Try to stop it? This is what you see

Firefox Updates

Keep Firefox up to date for the best performance, stability, and security.

No checkbox to turn it off, unlike all the other options on the general preferences page.

I'll probably have to "fix" this by blackholing mozilla.

MONTREAL -- On the 30th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, Montreal police have announced that they have arrested an anti-feminist blogger who they allege glorifies the Polytechnique killer Marc Lepine.

Police say Jean-Claude Rochefort, 70, of Montreal, was arrested Thursday for inciting hatred against women, and has been behind bars since Friday. He will remain detained until his next court hearing on Monday, police said.

Publishing under several pseudonyms, Rochefort is accused of running blogs espousing anti-woman and anti-feminist views and advocating for "masculinism."

One blog has a series of posts counting down to "Marc Lepine Day," which is what Rochefort calls Dec. 6, the anniversary of the massacre.

Another recent post on a different blog referred to Lepine as an "incel lord," a reference to the online subculture of "involuntarily celibate" men whose online discussions are characterized by anti-feminism, misogyny and endorsing sexual violence against women. (Lepine has become an icon for incel communities.)

The Montreal police department say investigators from its cyber-crimes division identified Rochefort as the author of several posts and arrested him at his Montreal home, where police say several incriminating computer files and equipment were seized.

In 2009, Rochefort was arrested for making death threats against women on a blog he devoted to Lepine. Prosecutors also wanted to charge him with incitement and wilful promotion of hatred, but a judge refused to accept those charges.

On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lepine killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique because he believed they were feminists. He then killed himself.

On Friday, ceremonies were being held in Montreal and across the country to commemorate the victims of what has become known as the Montreal Massacre.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

Stupid is as stupid does. Making death threats against women is not going to get you laid - well, maybe inside prison, but not by women.

He might get community service again, in which case the question is with which community organization? And will they be informed of his crimes, so that they can arrange to protect their volunteer workers?

I was walking my dogs one Sunday morning a few weeks ago and one of the dogs kept dragging my attention back behind us. There was one police car, and 3 more were quietly pulling up.

Coming back, the next door parking lot had been taken over by 6 police supervisor vans. Other police vehicles were across the street, and in the parking lot of the strip mall at the corner.

Other eyewitnesses said police were in body armour, checking their rifles. About 18 vehicles in total were involved in the operation.

Some would leave and be replaced by others.

Long after sundown there was still a significant police presence.

Turns out that there was a threat against a community centre run by the [I'm omitting the religion] 200 feet down the street.

There still hasn't been word about what it was, the police are not answering questions.

I can sort of understand why - why give white supremists any attention. Why take the risk of protests and counter-protests that could add to the body count in any attack.

We'll probably only hear about it if someone is charged and refuses a plea deal.

His suicide note, written just before he started shooting, gives a scary insight into the warped world of misogenist hate.

Forgive the mistakes, I had 15 minutes to write this. See also Annex.

Please note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. For seven years life has brought me no joy and being totally blasé, I have decided to put an end to those viragos.

I tried in my youth to enter the Forces as an officer cadet, which would have allowed me possibly to get into the arsenal and precede Lortie in a raid. They refused me because asocial [sic]. I therefore had to wait until this day to execute my plans. In between, I continued my studies in a haphazard way for they never really interested me, knowing in advance my fate. Which did not prevent me from obtaining very good marks despite my theory of not handing in work and the lack of studying before exams.

Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts. For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government. Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.

Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games removed the Men-Women distinction, there would be Women only in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic they [do not][note 2] neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus, the other day, I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain [that since][note 3] women were not authorized to go to the frontline??? Will we hear of Caesar's female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed. A real Casus Belli.

Sorry for this too brief letter.

Marc Lépine

The letter is followed by the list of nineteen names, with a note at the bottom:

___ nearly died today. The lack of time (because I started too late) has allowed these radical feminists to survive.

Alea iacta est.

Lepine couldn't support himself, failed in school, was kicked out of preliminary military screening after a month for being unsuitable, and insisted on taking revenge for his failed life on female engineering students who were achieving what he was unable to.

The 2018 Toronto Van attack by a self-confessed incel software developer also targeted women.

I haven't heard of any female incels doing mass killings against men. Something is wrong, and it's not the women.

Men need to help each other deal with toxic masculinity, because women trying to help will leave them at risk of becoming another target.

Here's something in the judgment, as reported by Radio-Canada (the national French TV/radio network - yes I am bilingual, tabernac), that people in other countries, including my neighbours to the south, might want to consider (because countries, while not bound to rulings in other countries, sometimes use them to inform their judgments).

The court stated that police officers cannot blindly follow their training as a defence to liability. They must use reasonable judgment (aka common sense).

So, not only is "I was just following orders" not a defence, neither is "I was just following my training."

Given the ongoing problems with the Montreal police force, the refusal of leadership to admit to racism ("there's a systemic problem, not racism"), and the lack of trust in the police by the general population (even people who don't have a criminal record don't want to call them), at last here's a cudgel to beat them with to maybe force them to change.

Here's one recent example of police stupidity

A Montreal mom was left confused after an officer wrote her a $169 ticket for driving in the HOV lane with her daughter. The officer claimed the nine-year-old passenger needed a driver’s licence.

Stéphanie Émond was driving in the Sources Boulevard carpool lane last week when the officer pulled her over. The lane is reserved for buses, taxis and cars carrying two or more people, as the roadside sign indicated, so Émond was puzzled. Even more so when she received the pricey ticket.

The officer claimed that in order to drive in the high-occupancy vehicle lane, Émond’s daughter needed to have a driver’s licence herself. After all, carpool lanes are meant to keep more cars off the road. Since her daughter couldn’t drive herself yet, they’re not reducing emissions.

“She went on to say, ‘With your daughter not having a driver’s permit, we’re obviously not getting cars off the road this way.’ So she thought that I deserved a ticket,” Émond recalled on CTV News Channel Wednesday. “She seemed very sure of what she was telling me.”

Émond understands the eco-friendly purpose of a carpool lane, but says there’s no clear definition of who constitutes a “passenger” in a carpool lane so she shouldn’t have been ticketed.

“When there’s no definition, we cannot make one up. It has to be written somewhere and we can’t just issue (a ticket) based on interpretation of the law -- even if it made a lot of sense,” she said.

The Quebec website for the Canadian Automobile Association supports Émond’s position. There is no age requirement for carpooling, it says, quoting Transport Québec spokesperson Solène Lemay as saying “a parent taking a child to daycare is assumed to be carpooling.”

You really can't make this shit up.

The guy who destroyed his SUV by blocking a stolen car from hitting pedestrians a couple of weeks ago is lucky he didn't get a ticket for obstructing traffic and another one for causing an accident.

Anyone else got crazy stupid cop stories?

Today the Supreme Court of Canada ordered both the cop and his employer to each pay $10,000 to a woman who received a ticket for ignoring an escalator sign saying to hold onto the handrail in a subway escalator.

Montreal
Supreme Court awards $20K to woman fined for refusing to hold escalator handrail.

Court orders transit authority, police officer to each pay half of the cost

The Supreme Court of Canada has ordered that a woman who was arrested for refusing to hold an escalator handrail in a Metro station in Laval, Que., be awarded $20,000 in damages.

Bela Kosoian was at the Montmorency Metro station in 2009 when a police officer told her to respect a pictogram with the instruction "Hold the handrail."

The situation grew tense when she refused to comply and declined to identify herself when asked.

She was arrested, detained for 30 minutes and finally let go with two tickets: one for $100 for disobeying a pictogram and a $320 fine for obstructing the work of an inspector.

She was acquitted of the two infractions in Montreal municipal court in 2012 and subsequently filed a $45,000 lawsuit against Montreal's transit authority, the City of Laval and one of the officers, Fabio Camacho.

Her suit was rejected by Quebec court in 2015 and by the Quebec Court of Appeal in 2017, which said Kosoian was the "author of her own misfortune."

The Supreme Court has ordered $20,000 be paid to Kosoian in damages. The Société de transport de Montréal, which operates the Metro, and Camacho will each be liable for half the amount.

The judges wrote in their decision that Kosoian was "entitled to refuse to obey an unlawful order and therefore committed no fault" in the case.

"A well‑informed person whose rights are infringed must be able to respond — within reason — without being held civilly liable," the court concluded.

Hopefully more people will understand that you do not have to obey them if you think they are infringing your rights - as they did to me two weeks ago ordering me to use a sidewalk covered in ice (see a previous journal entry).

This now becomes the law not just in Montreal and the surrounding area, but all of Canada.

Hopefully this will open the floodgates and cops will stop wasting time bullying people and start doing their jobs.

After all, if they can issue fines to change people's behaviour, we should do the same.

Considering the aggravating circumstances in my case, I think I should ask for "moah monnay".

Friday marks the 182nd day of the 45-day deadline for the ombudsman to respond to my complaint about my ophthalmologist's behaviour, so I think I've waited long enough.

The excuses don't make sense, but then again, it's a problem that the hospital realizes can generate negative publicity in these times.

I've been dealing with the same retinal specialist for most of the decade, at the hospital clinic that handles the provinces' worst retinal disease cases. You can't get an appointment - they only take referrals that meet the criteria for severity.

When I first went, my eyes were filled with blood (proliferative diabetic retinopathy, the last stage of retinopathy, fun times unless your job requires sight), and I was told that if I had waited another year I'd be stone cold blind. So, lots of laser burns over the course of years to reduce the growth of blood vessels on the surface of the retina by reducing overall oxygen demand.

That meant destroying my peripheral vision, so no driving a car, which meant no more meeting up with friends (they all live in different cities).

Now blood vessels have intruded on the back of the iris, and the rim, and you can't laser those. The treatment is monthly exams and intra-ocular injections of anti-VEGF to tame the little buggers.

Everything was fine until May, when the doctor had a student with him - fine by me. But when he was describing my case, he continually misgendered me. Not so fine. I corrected him, he continued. I then explained to the student (a woman from a visible minority) that all my legal ID says I'm female, including my hospital card, and my birth certificate.

Did he stop? No. THAT just ruined any trust I had in him. I thought about it for the next couple of days, looked up the professional code of ethics, and found that not only did his current conduct violate both the code and provincial laws, but that his refusal to sign off on my having a chronic disability of at least one year was also a violation.

I would have been entitled to a disability allowance, retraining, and subsidies for any employer willing to hire me, as well as a work subsidy to make up for my lower earning capacity. A 6-figure loss, because he has a hereto-hidden antagonism to transsexual women.

The social workers who tried to help me adapt to my situation kept asking why the doctor wouldn't sign off for a disability allowance and job retraining, because someone who is rated low vision, has a broken back and neck, and can't just go work in a warehouse or other joe job, and now we know.

The ethics complaint process is independent of the profession's ethics board (which is a useless piece of shit, same as the police ethics commission and the other ethics boards). I've waited long enough; the deadline I set for a response is nigh, and it's time to post the details to (ugh) anti-social media and start the search for others who may have run into similar anti-lgbt bias in the hospital system.

And send links to the local conventional media, of course.

I'm allowed to split any legal action between the human rights commission and the regular courts - the financial losses are better handled in the regular court system, with it's higher damage limits, while the acts of discrimination are better handled in the human rights tribunal.

The sad parts

I still like the guy, and I really, really wish he hadn't turned out to be such a dick.

And the more than 6 months of non-treatment have caused a different type of shadow (not floaters from blood) to manifest in the vision of my better eye. Fortunately I was assigned a new ophthalmologist, who I see in a couple of weeks. I know him - he drained my left eye and peeled of the membranes growing in the retina, and while the vision is 20/300 to 20/400, it's a big improvement to "can't see anything at all."

He knows I'm trans; just hope he understands that the doctor's behaviour was say beyond the pale.

Summary

You don't out someone without their permission, and you don't put your student in a position where she's ethically compromised - she had to choose to either follow the law and report the incident and get a reputation for being difficult, or be quiet. Reporting is career suicide. Shitty choices to force on her.

His actions have shown her that guys in positions of authority don't have to follow the rules of the profession when it comes to minorities, and especially minority women. He should be supervised when interacting with patients and students.

So of course my fingerprint refused to register. Repeated attempts, different fingerprints, over a two-month period.

I suspect a lifetime of pricking my fingers 3 times a day to get blood samples may have something to do with it, because, while certain medications are also known to make fingerprints less distinct or even disappear altogether, I don't think insulin or HRT can do that.

So why the beef now?

My bank routinely locked me out because it would time out with a message "It's not you, it's us", and after 3 login fails, I'd have to go to the local branch and get a password reset. Which was really funny because the last time it happened, they couldn't reset the password because ... the server timed out.

So, all of a sudden, if I don't use the fingerprint reader required on their latest security upgrade, I can't log in.

Of course, I never registered (and won't register) a fingerprint and then end up locked out of my own phone.

The app is also an annoyance because it doesn't respond to requests from the OS for a larger font, nor for pivoting to horizontal to get a bigger font. And I'm sick and tired of being discriminated because I'm low vision, so I deleted it.

Also deleted Firefox for the same reason (I will NOT use the screen magnifier tool - scrolling the screen window left and right makes me seasick, one of the reasons I dumped Windows).

And Environment Canada's weather app. And Amazon (never used). And Kijiji (haven't used in years). And any other app that doesn't meet my needs.

Tried to delete Safari, because it has the same problem with refusing to resize text and reflow pages, plus it doesn't handle CSS properly to half the time text entry is off-screen, so I just moved it to the page where I stick all useless apps I can't delete.

I've been with the same bank for almost 20 years, but unless they come up with a way to access my account that doesn't use the internet, the local credit union will get my business.

But the arrogance of designers who don't take into account customers who can't see 20/20 and have perfect colour vision is just begging for a complaint to the local human rights commission for discrimination based on a physical handicap.

I'll put it in the queue, after the complaint against my ophthalmologist and the one against the cops and the city.

Hate to say it, but I need to find others in the same situation, so probably have to use Failbook as a point of contact. I figure I'll post my phone number there and tell people that I won't respond to anything but text, phone calls, email (preferably not through data harvesters like gmail), and in person.

We used to have everyone's name, phone, and address in a big free phone book, and I've posted it elsewhere with no negative consequences - people are smartening up to the fact that "tracing a phonecall" on TV is bullshit - the switches have all the caller data before you hear the first ring, and telcos routinely query their switches to locate crank callers IF THE COPS ASK (but most cops are too stupid to know this, and too lazy to ask, so you really have to push).

Since fingerprints don't work, what next, ask me for a DNA sample?

That won't work - people shed DNA all the time - but that probably won't stop them in 20 years when it can be built into a phone.

Turns out the cops don't have common sense. They told me to walk on the sidewalk, I refused, pointing out that they were clearly covered in ice.

So they told me to stop and produce photo ID, which I did. They asked for my drivers license, and I told them I no longer drive because I'm half blind, and produced a second ID, a hospital patient card with my address. I told them to give me the ticket and I'll see them in court. So, a ticket for "while being a pedestrian, walking on the street beside the sidewalk."

I had pointed out that the sidewalk was not safe, and that their demand that I get back on the sidewalk was contrary to the law (we actually have a constitutional guarantee of security of the person, which trumps all other laws), but they really wanted to "teach me a lesson."

"You probably wouldn't be getting this ticket if you had said you were sorry and agreed to walk on the sidewalk." "Give me the ticket. I'll see you in court." Why would I want to argue in the street,,or be coerced into doing something unsafe? I'm too old for that shit."

"I could arrest you for failure to obey an order." "I stopped and produced ID when you asked me to. Your order to use the sidewalk was illegal. I'll see you in court."

They're going to have problems proving the sidewalk was safe, especially for someone visually handicapped. I have pictures, they don't. They blocked me with their police car, and the sidewalk is clearly covered in ice. They were aware I have to exercise extra care because I told them I'm half blind (actually, more than half, official diagnosis which I will produce in court along with the pictures of the icy sidewalk and ice-free street beside the sidewalk.

They aren't qualified to give a professional assessment on sidewalk safety (they're not civil engineers or materials scientists), so it's a question of whose judgment is better based on ordinary experience, and I'm twice their ages.

Dirty tricks It was only when my sister questioned whether the ticket was for jaywalking instead of walking on the street instead of the sidewalk that I took a photo of the ticket, and looking at the address (easier to zoom in on the phone) that I saw they put a wrong address. An old trick - you want to really jam someone up and keep them from making you look stupid in court, make sure they never receive the summons. They will assume the matter was dropped, you get a default judgment against you, and the fine just grows and grows. By the time you find out the truth, you probably don't even have your copy of the ticket, and they will claim that was the address you gave them.

So I have to go to the city clerk, File my contestation, get the address corrected, and see them in court.

Everyone I showed the pictures to has the same reaction - "Don't they have anything better to do?"

This crap happens too often here. And the police ethics commission is corrupt - a woman tapped on a police car window, 4 cops jumped her and broke her arm, and the ethics commission refused to even hear the complaint. Right now the noon news is reporting on the latest report on police discrimination of minorities and how they are again refusing to accept any wrongdoing. We need mandatory body cam use for police interactions with civilians.

The university of Toronto has funded the world's first scholarship for anti-psychiatry. This isn't what it sounds - it's not a crunchy-granola crystals-and-faith thing, but a way to look at psychiatry from a different perspective, less reliant on the DSM, because modern psychiatry has been shown to do more damage than good.

One example is anti-depressants. Before their introduction, most cases of major depression resolved themselves within a year and the person rarely had a relapse.

Now, even placebos perform better than pills long-term, and relapses are the norm for antidepressant users. The latest published study shows that the evidence doesn't back up the use of antidepressants

Of course, the usual suspects are doing everything they can to try to connect anti-psychiatry with quacks such as scientology because it seriously threatens the established way of doing things, which is profitable and guarantees repeat business.

Still, even the UN has been saying that it's time to stop medicalizing moods. Don't take my word for it - look it up.