Now For Something Completely Insane

Originally Published April 6, 2011  Updated

Things are a little strange in Canada when it comes to killers, and it gets stranger when you turn to psychopathic killers who are practically bestial in their carnage only to walk away with barely a wink of an eye in the way of retribution. Pickton confessed on the sly to killing 50 but gets convicted of six, gets lots of encouragement to appeal, and why not? He's got nothing but time (you might wish).

The 12 year old Medicine Hat killer, now 14 goin' on 15, will be free when she's 18, mature enough to know better by then, we kind of hope.

Two devious and pestilent sadists who devastated the Proctor family have the privilege of applying for parole in 10 years from this week. They're counting the days that Kimberly Proctor has had erased.

Mark Twitchell took centre stage, finally, his dream had come true in Edmonton. He dazzled the world with the way he scripted, acted (fooled), savaged, and dispassionately disposed of another human being. The story got more compelling everyday because Mark Twitchell was re-writing it every day, and revealing the true nature of a stupid man who may have borderline psychopathic tendencies, and has tendencies enough to be dangerous more than once. We don't know how soon he gets to go back to Tim Horton's, but my opinion is, it won't be long. They will probably parole him on the grounds that he stay away from computers and other writing devices, including typewriters.

Out of atrocities that match any horrors concocted by the human imagination emerges Cocaine-shooting child killer Allan Schoenborn whose infanticide was appalling, senseless, drug addled, and done out of sheer psychopathic vengeance. Out he comes from incarceration three years after the piteous slaughter of a budding family. Oh, yes, in Canada, like Rwanda, some of these senseless slaughters are punishable by visits to Starbucks.

That's right, citizens of British Columbia, and visitors from abroad, this child killer was able to whine his way out of complete incarceration, and a panel of social justice warrior types on a board in or around B.C. have put out the welcome mat for Allan Dwayne Shoenborn to apply for escorted day trips into the community. I hope they put up lots of signs so nobody else has to go out while this is happening.

Reports say that Allan Dwayne Shoenborn has made appearances in front of a review panel, and that apparently he continues to display hostility to his ex-wife, and argumentative or unassailable anger toward the institution, nevertheless, to his way of thinking he's been cooped up long enough. It's time for Allan Dwayne Shoenborn to step out and stretch his legs and go for coffee, according to Allan Dwayne Shoenborn, who has managed to convince the review panel (if not the B.C. Crown Prosecutor) that trips out are probably just fine.

Whatever it was the confessed assailant said in those reviews was effective because on April 05, 2011, Bernd Walter, Chairperson, signed the disposition to let Allan Dwayne Shoenborn ascend over society. Some people might say killing the guy with coffee, slowly like that, seems more like an expense than a rehabilitation. So the question becomes, what are we dealing with here? He's a profoundly disturbed individual that nobody outside a panel in a mental hospital really wants to see, not up close, not in a window, and not in the street.

Honestly, this will not be good for the cafes when this guy comes in for a beverage. The review panel has determined that Allan Dwayne Shoenborn be permitted in public pools, like the rest of us who don't massacre our families. It's a peculiar mystification of justice, an unreal picture, frankly, that entertains the need of a multiple murderer to exercise a privilege, while the vast majority wishes him some form of justice, after the erasure of so much life that he, and he alone, somehow had the right to take.

In light of the recent sentencing of the two murderous psychopaths in Victoria, B.C., who need about 100 years of psychotherapy each (to get started) and who wait patiently hoping for ten years before their next parole hearing, and the fact that a 12-year-old psychopath killed her family and walks free in about two years or so, and in light of the fact that Starbucks is now a favorite haunt of mass murderers who actually get away with it, ya know, scot-free, in light of all this, it's time to take a look at the future, and whether or not the criminal justice system should sort out the priorities in order to actually protect society from facing atrocious killers when they are still panting from the rushes they felt in their killing sprees.

People who spill rampant amounts of human blood, reek havoc on all sorts of lives, take lives, torture lives to death, these people have taken a privileged place in society, not just in the minds of the members of society, but in the seats, in the malls, the tony coffee shops, the up-town cities like Montreal (where Karla savors memories of what she did to three teenage girls, did to death). It's the kinds of things these people do that earns them the privilege to be escorted on trips to gush over triple lattes at Starbucks, and swim in the pools with the taxpayers footing the bill, and swimming with the taxpayers! Now that's privilege. It permits people the likes of Willie Pickton to awaken each day to big dreams. Bigger dreams than a lot of us.

THE NEW RISING HEAT

 CANADA’S RISE IN HATE CRIME 

WHAT IT SIGNALS ABOUT A SOCIETY UNDER STRAIN 

You can tell a society is in trouble when the old, familiar forms of disorder stop being the problem. Petty theft, nuisance behaviour, the usual civic entropy — these are the background hum of any civilization. What should keep public safety officials awake at night is not the noise, but the tone of the noise. And in Canada, the tone has changed. It has sharpened. It has grown teeth.

Police‑reported hate crime in Canada has risen 145 percent since 2019, a number so large it reads like a typo until you realize it’s not a spike — it’s a trendline. A trendline that cuts across provinces, demographics, and political affiliations. A trendline that tells us something deeper is happening beneath the polite Canadian veneer. Something ancient, something tribal, something that predates Confederation by a few thousand years.

Hate crime is not merely crime with an adjective. It is a signal flare from the collective psyche. It tells you when a population is fraying, when institutions are losing their gravitational pull, when people begin sorting themselves into camps of grievance and suspicion. It is the modern expression of an old human instinct: the urge to blame, to target, to simplify the world by dividing it into “us” and “them.”

And Canada — the country that sells itself as a multicultural success story — is not immune. In fact, the rise suggests the opposite: the story is under strain.

The causes are not mysterious. They are the same forces that have destabilized societies since the Sumerians first scratched their grievances into clay tablets.

First: economic pressure.
When people feel squeezed, they look for culprits. Inflation, housing scarcity, stagnant wages — these are not just economic conditions; they are psychological accelerants. They create a population primed for resentment, ready to lash out at whoever appears “other,” “new,” or “responsible.”

Second: institutional fatigue.
Trust in government, police, courts, and media has eroded. When institutions lose legitimacy, people stop believing in the neutral referee. They start believing in their own narratives, their own suspicions, their own chosen enemies. Hate crime thrives in the vacuum where trust used to be.

Third: digital radicalization.
The internet has become the new ziggurat — a towering structure where grievances are amplified, identities hardened, and conspiracies traded like livestock. People no longer need a physical mob; they can join a digital one. And digital mobs are efficient. They don’t disperse when the weather turns.

Fourth: geopolitical contagion.
Conflicts abroad now spill instantly into Canadian streets. A war in one hemisphere becomes a protest in another. A political speech in a foreign capital becomes a threat assessment in Toronto. Hate crime rises when global tensions are imported wholesale into local neighbourhoods.

But the ramifications — that’s where the real public safety story begins.

A rise in hate crime is not just a rise in incidents. It is a rise in fear, and fear is the most corrosive substance in civic life. Fear changes how people move through their city. Fear changes how communities interact. Fear changes how police must respond, how schools must prepare, how governments must communicate. Fear is the invisible architecture of disorder.

And once fear settles in, it doesn’t leave quietly.

Communities retreat inward.
Public spaces lose their neutrality.
Minor disputes escalate faster.
Extremists find easier recruits.
Police face higher volatility.
Governments face lower credibility.

This is how a stable society becomes a brittle one — not through a single catastrophic event, but through a steady accumulation of targeted hostility.

Canada is not at the edge of collapse. But it is at the edge of something else: a reckoning with the myth of its own immunity. Hate crime is the canary in the civic coal mine, and the bird is not singing. It is coughing.

Public safety officials need to treat this rise not as a statistical anomaly but as a structural warning. The country is absorbing more stress than its social fabric was designed to handle. The seams are showing. The pressure is rising. And the old assumption — that Canada is somehow insulated from the darker impulses of human behaviour — is no longer credible.

The work ahead is not cosmetic. It is foundational. It requires rebuilding trust, reinforcing institutions, addressing economic precarity, and confronting digital radicalization with the seriousness of a national security threat.

Because hate crime is not about hate.
It is about instability.
And instability, once it takes root, does not politely recede.

McColl Magazine Public Safety

The Beast at the Urban Wall (You all know. . .)

 A civic meditation on second-hand smoke and first-hand smokers

“Tobacco isn’t recognized as the cause of social disorder — but it is the gravitational center around which a remarkable amount of mayhem orbits.”

There are many ways to measure the decline of a civilization. Some people count potholes. Some count overdoses. I count the number of grown adults who gather beneath my window to reenact a late‑Pleistocene tobacco ritual as if the Ice Age never ended.

It’s not their fault entirely. Tobacco is older than agriculture, older than pottery, older than the idea that one person’s air shouldn’t be another person’s problem. The behaviour predates the concept of “indoors.” It predates the concept of “neighbours.” It predates the concept of “don’t stand directly outside someone’s window and turn their living room into a smokehouse.”

So I try to be charitable.

But charity has limits, especially when the cinderblock wall outside my patio door functions as a natural chimney flue, channeling the exhaust of the modern nicotine nomad directly into my home. I didn’t ask to live inside a human‑powered burning chemical factory spewing more than a woodstove. I didn’t ask to become the unwilling custodian of a prehistoric ritual site. Yet here we are.

Now, I’m not above the fray. I smoke — discreetly, privately, with a kind of restraint that would make a Victorian butler nod approvingly. I’m not a saint. I’m not a zealot. I’m simply a man who believes that if you’re going to indulge a vice older than civilization, you should at least avoid churning your neighbour’s lungs into collateral damage.

But the group at the wall?  

They operate on a different calendar.  

A different century.  

Possibly a different epoch.

They gather like a migrating species, returning to the same spot with the same determination as salmon returning to spawn — except salmon don’t bring idling vehicles, territorial posturing, and the kind of unpredictable energy that makes a ground‑floor resident consider taking up falconry.

I watch them sometimes, the way an anthropologist might watch a troop of macaques discovering a discarded cigarette lighter. There’s a certain fascination in seeing ancient behaviour expressed through modern materials. The clustering. The muttering. The shared ritual. The territorial claim staked in smoke.

It’s almost poetic, if you’re not the one breathing it.

And so the building becomes a stage:  

• six suites stacked from ground to third floor, 
• each one a reluctant participant in a drama older than the written word. 
• The children upstairs get the matinee. 
• The COPD patients get the late show. 
• I get the full season pass, whether I want it or not.

Some people call this a nuisance.  Some call it inconsiderate.  I call it archaeology with consequences.

Because when a behaviour predates civilization, it tends not to respect the boundaries civilization invented. Doors. Windows. Airspace. The concept of “maybe don’t hotbox your neighbour’s living room.”

These are modern ideas.  The pack circling at the wall is not a modern institution. And yet, here we all are — sharing a building, sharing a wall, sharing the thin membrane between ancient instinct and modern expectation.

I cannot claim moral superiority. I claim only this:  

I keep the beast on a leash. Others let it run the block.

And if that sounds judgmental, consider the alternative:  

pretending the beast isn’t there is impractical if breathing is your thing. The more literary angle is, how I’ve lived long enough to know that most dangers don’t arrive with sirens. They drift in quietly, like weather. They settle into corners. They gather in doorways. They take the shape of ordinary people doing ordinary things until the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

This essay comes from that place — the place where lived experience meets the long memory of history. I’m seventy‑one, still writing, still watching, still paying attention to the small behaviours that reveal the larger truths. Tobacco is one of those truths. 

It's hard to imagine tobacco use is:

• older than agriculture,
• older than pottery,
• older than the idea of a city. 

And when it slips its leash, it behaves exactly as it did ten thousand years ago:

• clustering,
• muttering,
• claiming space through smoke.

I don’t write this as a puritan or a scold. I smoke. I understand the ritual. I understand the pull. But I also understand the boundary — the invisible line between private vice and public intrusion. Civilization depends on that line. Disorder begins when it’s ignored.

What I describe here is not grievance. It’s not complaint. It’s the simple act of naming a hazard that has settled too close to home — not just for me, but for neighbours with fragile lungs, for children in the vertical stack above me, for anyone who believes that breathable air should not be a contested resource.

This is a public‑safety story, yes.  

But it is also a human story — ancient, persistent, and still unfolding on the cinderblock walls of modern life.

It's fair to say smoking is a fire hazard as well, urban, rural, sylvan because it absolutely is — and not in the melodramatic, “old man yelling at clouds” way you’re worried about. Smoking is a fire vector, full stop. Urban, rural, sylvan — the ignition risk travels with the ember, not the postal code.

Here’s the clean, disciplined way to frame it for Public Safety minded, including police or RCMP:

THE FIRE HAZARD THROUGH THREE LANDSCAPES

Urban:
A lit cigarette is a mobile ignition source. In dense housing — wood-frame apartments, vinyl siding, shared balconies, mulch beds, garbage enclosures — a single ember can escalate into a structural fire in minutes. Fire departments across Canada routinely list discarded smoking materials as one of the top causes of residential fires. It’s not theoretical. It’s actuarial.

Rural:
Out where the wind has room to run, a cigarette butt is a fuse. Dry grass, fence lines, roadside ditches — all of them are tinderboxes in late spring and summer. Rural fire crews will tell you the same story every year: one careless flick, one gust, one spark, and suddenly you’re fighting a perimeter instead of a nuisance.

Sylvan / Wildland:
This is where the hazard becomes existential. A smouldering butt in a forested area is a match dropped into a cathedral. Pine needles, duff, deadfall — all of it is fuel. And once a fire crowns, it stops being a “fire” and becomes a force of nature. Smokers don’t intend this. But intention doesn’t extinguish flame.

THE THROUGH‑LINE

A cigarette is not just a health hazard. It is a combustion device. And combustion devices don’t care about context — they care about oxygen, fuel, and wind.

  “Smoking isn’t so much an act of rebellion as it is an act of aggression” — is a statement of clarity. It’s not moralizing. It’s physics. It’s risk. It’s simple fact that fire is older than law, and addiction doesn’t negotiate with weather.

LET US name something most people feel but never articulate: tobacco is treated as background noise, yet it drags a disproportionate amount of chaos behind it. And the reason it slips under the radar is structural: 

• not moral, 
• not aesthetic,

. . .  structural.

THE PARADOX OF TOBACCO: INVISIBLE CAUSE, VISIBLE MAYHEM

1. The behaviour is normalized, the consequences are not.
Smoking is socially coded as “ordinary,” “legal,” “personal choice.” But the behavioural ecosystem around it — the clustering, the territoriality, the noise, the confrontations, the litter, the fire risk — is anything but ordinary. People see the disorder but don’t connect it to the ignition source.

2. The public sees the symptoms, not the engine.

• A shouting match in a parking lot?
• A group blocking a doorway?
• A late‑night disturbance under someone’s window?
• A small fire in a planter box?
• A pile of butts in a children’s play area?

All of these are downstream of the same thing: a ritual that requires gathering, lingering, and disengaging from civic boundaries. But because the cigarette is small and familiar, the public doesn’t treat it as the prime mover.

3. Tobacco behaviour is low‑status, high‑impact.

• It’s not glamorous. 
• It’s not dramatic.
• It’s not the kind of vice that gets headlines.

So the mayhem it generates gets misattributed to “problem people,” “bad neighbours,” “late‑night noise,” “random incidents.”

But the pattern is consistent across cities: where unmanaged smoking clusters form, disorder follows.

4. The addiction masks the agency.
People don’t see the cigarette as the cause because the smoker doesn’t appear to be doing anything. They’re “just standing there.” But addiction is doing the doing. Addiction is what keeps them there long enough for the pack to form, the noise to escalate, the territoriality to harden, and the conflict to ignite.

That’s the truth of it.

Not moralizing. Not demonizing.
Just naming the physics of the behaviour.

Canadian Business Pulse: The Truth About Tobacco (is not exactly comforting):

Mack McColl,  McColl Magazine Daily  2026

The Governor General Who Brought a Fire Extinguisher to a Candlelight Job

Canada hands the Crown’s quietest office to a veteran of the world’s loudest crises

— and suddenly the curtains are rustling 

Canada likes to pretend the Governor General is a harmless ornament — a constitutional throw pillow with a motorcade. Schoolchildren are taught the GG “represents the Crown.” 

Yet, every few decades, the office emits heat, a little smoke, and a political classman remembers the GG is more than a mascot. A dormant volcano with impeccable diction begins to rumble. 

Enter Louise Ardour, incoming Governor General

Alberta: A Comedy of Manners on the Prairies

The Long Road from Dissociation to Détente 

Alberta’s latest plot twist reads like a national comedy of manners: a province long cast as the brooding outsider suddenly finds the spotlight turning warm, the thermostat fixed, and the country behaving as though it remembers who keeps the lights on. All in the past few days.

Whispers About the Nuclear World Order

For the noise in 2026 — the shouting, the slogans, the moral theatrics — the real question humming beneath the floorboards of every major capital is disarmingly simple. . .

Is the internal environment stable enough to guarantee command‑and‑control integrity?

That’s it.  You better believe that’s the whole show.  Everything else is commentary, press releases, fake media, and the usual diplomatic yoga by a lot of phoney, chicken-leg politicians.

The nuclear age was built on the assumption that states were stable, institutions were coherent, and the chain of command was something more than a polite suggestion. That assumption held for a while. It holds less strong now.

So we arrive at the four pressure points shaping the quiet realpolitik of the moment — the ones no one campaigns on, but everyone in the back rooms understands.

Number One:  Nuclear Stewardship Assumes Domestic Coherence

The Story of Maya Gebala Cannot be Written

 Unless It Leads With Her Incredible Will To Live

Fundraiser for Cia Edmonds by Krysta Hunt : Support For Maya In Her Road To Recovery

Do you know who I am talking about when I mention "Maya Gebala?" She is the 12‑year‑old girl who survived the Tumbler Ridge, B.C. mass shooting on February 10, 2026.

Taxoholics Anonymous: A New 12‑Step Recovery Program

 Revolutionary Program for People Addicted to OPM (Other Peoples Money)

 Chronic Public‑Office Spendthrifts 

Murder of Iryna Zarutska: Assailant won't stand trial

  Atrocity on a  train in North Carolina

A major development has emerged in the case of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee whose killing on a Charlotte light‑rail train in August 2025 shocked communities across North America. Court filings now state that the accused, DeCarlos Brown Jr., has been found “incapable to proceed” to trial under North Carolina law following a psychiatric evaluation. 

One Number That Runs the World 5,000 Years and Counting

A 5,000‑year‑old Sumerian system quietly underwrites every minute

The order, timing, and coordination of modern public safety depends on it