Justifying the killing of an innocent person is messy business. The man who heads the body that investigates police when someone is killed or injured by them put as much polish as he could Friday on the official report into the Winnipeg police shooting of Mark Dicesare. Zane Tessler, director of the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, said the five policemen who shot Dicesare to pieces at point blank range had no other choice. The evidence was clear, said Tessler, that the distraught 24-year-old had seen his world fall apart; he felt he had nothing to live for; and he intended to kill himself, eventually choosing to get police to do it for him by threatening them with a fake machinegun. If the story was so cut-and-dried, why did Tessler chose to smother it in spin? Was it to hide the clusterf*ck that immediately preceeded the fatal shooting? For the uninitiated, clusterf*ck means (to quote Wiktionary) "A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. ...
The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house. We of The Black Rod adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.