Beginnings, endings and inbetweens

Students are back and my neighbourhood is surprisingly quiet. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. What, did they all mature over the summer? I saw one guy walking up the street with a bong, and later a couple of guys carrying 12-packs of … water! Maybe they all gave up booze? I don't know. I am enjoying the peace, for however long it lasts.

The dry sunny weather continues on and on. I've never had to water my garden in September before. We have water restrictions right now so it is a good thing I have a rain barrel. The water restrictions are not due to lack of water but rather a broken part in the reservoir that needs to be replaced, but is caught up in supply chain issues with no ETA.

I started a Tai Chi class. I really am hoping this is a level of activity I can tolerate. My Fitbit tells me that the first class hardly raised my heartrate at all, a good sign. But the following two days I've been pretty much confined to home due to dizziness, not a good sign. The instructor of the class is really good, plus he has volunteer helpers—more experienced students—to help guide us. There's one woman in the class who I am pretty sure has dementia, she sticks pretty close to her husband and only vaguely follows the instructions. But nobody says anything about that, the class is very inclusive. I don't have to pay for the class until I've completed two sessions, to know whether it suits me or not. At this point the jury is out. I really enjoyed it, but spending two days after virtually bedridden is a little disconcerting.

Shortly after I got out of my Tai Chi class I saw the news that the Queen had died. It feels almost like a death in the family. I know that some people disapprove of the Monarchy but I for one do not. She has been a source of stability for a very long time. When I was three years old I went with all my extended family to see her when she visited Toronto back in the day. Since our house was closest to the parade route, the family gathered there afterward. I remember the gathering but not so much the Princess (she wasn't Queen yet), just that it was a momentous occasion.

I liked living in a country with a Queen, I like that Canada is part of a larger community, the British Commonwealth. I realize that the Commonwealth is just the old British Empire with a new name and that the British Empire was a great colonial power that did a lot of damage in many parts of the world including here, damage that people are still having to deal with. But being part of a larger whole, for better or for worse, and having a long history, also for better or for worse, seems to me a good thing in the long haul. And I'd rather be part of the British Commonwealth than the Russian Empire.

Anyway, I miss Queen Elizabeth II, the end of an era that lasted almost my whole life. I think she did a very good job of it. It will be strange to have a King rather than a Queen, but I hope he does well too. I read something about him, how he was in the habit of espousing weird ideas that people made fun of him for. You, know, organic food, the environment, that sort of thing. Now he looks a little prescient.

Rovelli, Zanny and Arkady

ebikes, big and small

I just wanted to make note of the book I am currently reading: There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, and other thoughts on physics, philosophy and the world, by Carlo Rovelli (2018, translated 2020). It's a book of short essays, accurately summarized by the title. A gem of a book, imminently readable no matter what your level of understanding of physics/philosophy/the world.

The last essay was written in Italy near the beginning of the pandemic (April 2020), in which he talks about his observations of what is happening, in Italy and elsewhere. The last paragraph is probably the best last paragraph of a book of essays that I have read so far:

"We are not the masters of the world, we are not immortal; we are, as we have always been, like leaves in the autumn wind. We are not waging a battle against death. That battle we must inevitably lose, as death prevails anyway. What we are doing is struggling, together, to buy one another more days on Earth. For this short life, despite everything, seems beautiful to us, now more than ever."

I recommend this book, no matter what your level of understanding of history, poetry, science, philosophy. The essays are short and easy to read, but you will need to allow yourself extra time to muse about them. 

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As a subscriber to The Economist, I get to listen or participate in their zoom calls on the War in Ukraine and its implications. Each episode is one hour long, with three or four Economist editors, including the chief editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, on a Friday afternoon. For one episode two of the editors, Zanny and Arkady Ostrokov, travelled to Kyiv to interview Volodomyr Zelensky. 

Another episode included Arkady in a vehicle somewhere in eastern Ukraine reporting first hand on the eastern front of the war. That was a somewhat tense episode since it was live and they were unable to connect with Arkady until the last 15 minutes of the hour, due to internet connectivity issues (but since he was in the middle of a war there was some speculation as to whether his lack of connectivity was due to more ominous problems). 

One can actually submit one's own questions which the Economist editors field and attempt to answer on air. I have not tried to do so, but I guess it's an option. One participant asked why Arkady was in a car without a seatbelt, which Arkady assured the world was because the car he was in was parked on the side of the road (on the eastern front). 

The Zelensky interview was very interesting to watch, Zelensky switched from English to Ukrainian to Russian randomly and without a hitch. The start of the interview was delayed somewhat due to the absence of the translator who was busy translating elsewhere, Zelensky commented that it says something when the President must wait on the availability of the President's translator (strictly speaking it was interpretation not translation; translation pertains to written language). 

During the interview we saw Arkady, Zanny and Volodomyr in the same shot; the look of awe on Zanny's face communicated very well her sense that she was in the presence of a great man. She commented later that as a journalist she would leap at the chance to interview Putin, but knew that going to Moscow to interview Putin would be far more risky and dangerous than going to Kyiv to interview Zelensky, her employer would never allow it. Still...

A special horror

Politics is like bad cinema—people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, 'Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.' ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 2019.

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I  crashed hard after last Friday's snowstorm, shovelling on Saturday triggered it. I am also in a cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) zoom program, at this stage we are restricted in how much time we can spend in bed. The combination of restricted sleep and post exertional malaise (PEM) did me in. My sleep time (we have to keep sleep diaries) plummeted from 6 hours to 3.5, and by Tuesday I was damn near suicidal. 

Had a major meltdown in the zoom meeting on Tuesday, in front of everyone. One of the participants suggested that the facilitator—a psychologist—and I deal with it after the meeting. I thanked her for saying that. Anyway, clearly I am not in good shape. 

The following morning was my weekly 'coffee date' with a neighbour and I told her about it. She has a chronic—ultimately fatal—illness and she recounted how it was for her when she realized that this was her life from now on; all her plans for her future were gone. I think that I am just coming to that realization; after almost two years of illness there is no firm diagnosis, no treatment and no hope of recovery (based on what I know of other people's experience). Not to mention a doctor who needs hard evidence in the way of medically approved tests before she'll say or do anything. She kind of twisted my arm to go into this CBT-I program and so far, more that halfway through, I feel worse rather than better. Probably one of the worst winters I have ever had.

I am mostly flat on my back except for necessary activities like grocery shopping and food prep; about all I can do flat on my back is read or use my iPad. And hey, have you been watching/reading/listening to the news lately? Enough said. Here in Nova Scotia we have the added pleasure of the Portapique Massacre enquiry going on. That's like reliving it all over again, only now you get to see/hear the gory details you didn't know about at the time. I have one image now stuck in my mind: four little kids from two different families hiding in one basement after both sets of parents have just been shot to death. It gets worse from there. 

This has been two years of unbelievableness, it's hard to imagine that things will get better. The major crises happening now are only obscuring the crises waiting in the wings, assuming the current crisis doesn't precipitate a nuclear world war. This isn't over, not by a long shot.

This morning I read a book review in the New York Times (they offered a great deal for a one year subscription so I took it) of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke, 2022. There were some good quotes from the book which I definitely relate to, and my local library has ordered the book so I've put a hold on it. Turns out I'm first in line.

"It felt as if my body were made of sand, and as if molasses had invaded my brain." 

Totally. This is the one quote I think does a really good job of describing what it's like. Symptoms change, effects are physical, mental, emotional. Not only am I losing my physical capacities but my mental ones as well. I feel like I can't speak properly anymore, a kind of aphasia. Better not to even try.

"My ability to accumulate information felt like the only control I still possessed." 

Absolutely. I've become obsessed with consulting PubMed and a couple of other websites I trust for the latest in research and information. The one tiny part of my remaining life I have any control over.

"...the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized — your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a pre-existing pattern." 

Yup. So far all lab work and other tests show that I am completely healthy, so maybe a malingering drug addict with mental health issues?

"The illness was severe but invisible. And that invisibility made all the difference — it made me invisible, which itself almost killed me." 

Before this illness I was very active, and I had a great social life built around that activity. Both have vanished. When I spoke with my neighbour yesterday she described what that felt like in her life. For me, I am afraid to appear in public anymore because I just don't want to deal with people's responses, and she said she used to lurk in forest trails around her small northern town rather than walk down the street in public. Where she lived there were wolves, her husband really didn't like her forest lurking at all.

"Your need, when you are sick, can squeeze up inside your chest, balling its way up and out of your throat. I pictured it as a thick, viscous, toxic gel that slid out of me at moments when nothing else could."  

Exactly how I felt when I just lost it on the zoom call: utterly toxic.

"The entanglement of self and sickness became a mirrored distortion, a fun house I feared I was never going to escape…" 

I hallucinated the other night, wide awake and enthralled in this fun house kaleidoscope of colourful sparkly weaving/slithering/flashing shapes, I could see my thoughts embedded in it, hopelessly entangled, like little birds in a mist net.

"There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. … I will not say the wisdom and growth mean I wouldn't have it any other way. I would have it the other way."  

If this is how one obtains wisdom and growth, then I'd just as soon be stupid and stuck, thank you very much.

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It's a good thing I have past experience of copy editing, otherwise this post would be utterly unreadable. Can't speak, can't even type. Took hours of retyping.

Election, election, election...

So, as I type, PM Trudeau is chatting with Gov-Gen Mary Simon about calling an election in the fall. Here in Nova Scotia we are set to vote on Tuesday, a provincial government election. Back-to-back elections just annoys me no end.

I was listening to a woman on the radio talking about the current promise of affordable childcare, which apparently is still in negotiation with the various provincial governments. This woman is tired of waiting (she has two daycare-age kids) and in any case finds daycare totally unaffordable. The waitlists for daycare spots were bad enough before the pandemic but now are so bad that it really doesn't matter how much it costs, she can't get it anyway. Which all reminded me of the promises made by politicians when my kids were preschoolers, and now they are in their 40s and 50s. I am so bloody tired of listening to it.

Childcare is important, so is climate change, affordable housing, social supports for the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the sick, the old, and of course how we manage the pandemic (fourth wave?!?). Then there's LGBTQ issues, policing problems, discrimination, indigenous issues, blah blah blah. Not to mention wars and earthquakes and all the rest of that 'End Times' stuff.

A short while ago I happened to run into an anti-vaxx anti-mask fanatic. We had a very polite friendly conversation about our positions on the Covid vaccine but I came away thinking O, M, G. And elections just accentuate all that, all the diverse opinions from compassionate and rational to the fanatical and insane are aired out and shouted out and I am so tired of it. I feel like it's useless to vote, it's useless to listen to all the promises being made because all it does is make me sad: a world we could have had but probably now never will.

On the radio Trudeau has emerged from his chat and is saying stuff about how we need to discuss all these issues and make up our minds. I didn't hear a date yet but I'm guessing middle to end of September.

O, M, G.

Today I was daydreaming about a good old fashioned tyrant, you know, kind of like what they have in China. Somebody who said, Enough talk, here's what's going to happen. I suppose I should keep quiet about that, be careful what you wish for you might just get it, and all that. But still...

Sigh.

Genocide

I listened to discussion of the mass burial of children at a Kamloops residential school on CBC Radio's The Current yesterday and it really hit home. The pivotal moment for me was when one speaker said that they weren't really schools they were detention centres; children were held there until they were broken in or had died in the process. The schooling they received did not do them any favours or prepare them for the world they were to be released into. They lost their parents, they lost their communities, their language, their native skills, their culture. And it goes without saying that their parents lost their kids and their own futures. I can't imagine the pain they felt.

The residential school system was started by our dear founding father, Sir John A, to "assimilate" the native peoples of our new country into colonial culture. It destroyed them. The Americans had the Indian Wars, we had the residential schools. It was a kind of genocide that we politely refer to as cultural genocide. The word "cultural" makes it seem less violent, less murderous than the real thing, but it's not. Nowadays we decry the separation of children from their parents at the southern American border, this was far more horrific in that it went on for generations. It started soon after Confederation (1867) and the last school was closed in 1996. Those children were really never released, the ones that made it back to their home communities were forever cut off from them by virtue of their lost abilities to communicate with their families or even support themselves. Not to mention the emotional trauma they survived but never resolved.

Until relatively recently we all approved of violence toward children in the name of education, I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school where the principal at the time was the first in Toronto to ban corporal punishment of pupils, just the year before I started there. So it would not have been unusual to use violence to "educate" the children of residential schools. But those kids did not get to go home at the end of the day, they lived day in and day out in the school with the perpetrators of the violence. When those children died, they simply disappeared from their family's lives, very few were even informed of the death of their child. CBC has published the names of all the children known to have died at those schools, but those names are many fewer than the number who actually died and were buried there.

The schools were run mostly by religious groups, predominantly Roman Catholic monks, priests and nuns, but some Protestant religious groups were involved also. The Roman Catholic Church has consistently refused to release the written records of those schools to anyone, not the families of the children, not the First Nations communities, not even the Canadian government. No one knows the true extent of the horror. First Nations are determined to use ground-penetrating radar at all residential school sites, whether publicly or privately owned, to find the bodies of their lost children.

My mind just boggles at the damage done in the name of Canadian civilization. This is a horror that First Nations have known all along but the rest of us have not taken seriously. The result of the residential school system decimation of First Nation culture is right up there with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, in  my opinion. Maybe worse. I remember that when I was a teenager a representative of the South African government told a group of us that we were in no position to criticize his government's treatment of the Black peoples of his country, after all apartheid was based on the Indian reservation system of Canada. And China has admonished our government for criticizing the Chinese government treatment of the Uighurs, after all we did the same to our First Nations.

Presently over a hundred First Nations are suing the Canadian government for reparations. This is an action that has been in the works for awhile, but in light of what was discovered in Kamloops has suddenly gained some traction. My grandson goes to a university named for the man who essentially designed the residential school system, my grandson and many of his peers now refer to that school as X University. Commemoration of the founders of our great nation and the enablers of "cultural" genocide is hard to stomach.

Conspiracy theory and other news

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I was scheduled to pick up the truck in the afternoon and I had to go to the bank in the morning to get the cash. My bank is not in my town, I had to go down the road, and since I was there anyway I did a bit of 'essential' shopping on the way.

Picking up the truck involved getting a ride with J to the truck owner's house and then hanging out for an hour or so just yakking. It was a nice sunny day so hanging out was not so bad except that I really had to go to the bathroom and was thirsty as all get out. J is diabetic and was overdue for his pills so we both had 'personal problems' being there, but I guess it was part of the deal. The truck owner loves the truck and is very reluctant to see it leave, but he needs the money. J told me that the only reason he sold it to me was because J assured him I would take care of it the same way he did. That could be just a line but I believe J, I felt the same way about my old S10.

When I got home J came by after taking care of his own issues and installed the radio in the truck. It never did get an oil change so I scheduled one for next week. I called around about insurance, I was thinking of going with CAA because they offer a cheaper price than my current insurance company, but I spent so much time on hold just trying to get a quote that I thought better of it. The extra cost is worth it to have a local broker who answers the phone without resorting to a complicated menu of options, not to mention lengthy on hold times.

So now I have two vehicles in the driveway and am thinking of keeping both, one for summer and one for winter. The underside of the truck is in pristine condition, it would be a shame to expose it to Nova Scotia road salt.

It stays light so late now that after supper there were still hours of daylight left in the day and I hadn't gotten much exercise so I went for a walk. I visited my Bubble buddies about a 20 minute walk away and sat in their backyard watching their new puppy at play. The puppy is much bolder now and her teeth are needle sharp. She definitely needs puppy training but nothing is open at the moment. The vet also recommends waiting until all her vaccinations are in effect before she socializes with other dogs. Same as people.

Then my friend said something surprising. He mentioned reading an article about how the SARS-Cov2 virus (aka Covid-19 virus) is more than likely to be lab-generated. Among all us anti-Trump types that is a positively heretical thing to say, and I asked him what the evidence was. He said he was not science-oriented so he couldn't really say but he thought if I looked it up I might be able to understand the argument since I have a science background. He couldn't remember off hand what the article was and I didn't want to go in his house to see his computer since I have spent the last few days hanging out with non-Bubble friends. So I went home to look it up.

Well, the jury is still out, but when Trump said the virus might have originated in a Chinese lab, he definitely had access to suggestive information. He just kind of shot his mouth off about that without naming sources or verifiable facts. Because, if true, then American military and scientific organizations are also implicated, not just Chinese. Also, the PCR test used to identify Covid infections came so fast after the pandemic started (like, about a month) and is so specific and was so quickly peer-reviewed and published, that the origins of the test are also in question.

Anyway, I found a couple of articles in two different places that have describe such a scenario. The sources are not rock-solid virtuous tellers of the truth, but they are interesting and suggestive. I provide links below, look them up, look up the authors and the websites and make your own decisions. These days that's about all you can do.

We are all mostly aware that 'the military-scientific complexes' of several (if not many) countries engage in biological terrorism research. With the ability to not only sequence genomes of many different organisms including viruses and the technology to modify such genomes, scientists now can and do create genetically modified organisms (GMO). All over the world there are labs for doing so, some benign and some not so benign. Depending on how dangerous the research is considered to be, biological labs have different levels of lab safety protocols in place, ranging from BSL1 to BSL4. BSL4 is the most restrictive and therefore the most protective; the chances of an accident happening in a lab certified at BSL4 are very small.

However.

Scientists are human, every last one of them. One of the things we humans do is cut corners. BSL4 is uncomfortable and slows your work down by a lot. It involves wearing spacesuit type coverings and going through elaborate cleaning rituals and being tethered by air tubes and wearing gloves that make handling things difficult and headgear that make seeing things difficult. Not to mention hot and sweaty and awkward. There have been accidental releases of pathogenic viruses from BSL4 labs ever since that kind of research started, including a smallpox release that resulted in a number of illnesses and deaths. For the most part these accidental releases have been covered up and the resulting damage contained.

There is a type of research called Gain of Function, which involves adding a pathogenic function to an otherwise relatively benign organism. This means that, say, a coronavirus that is incapable of infecting humans, or causes only mild illness, is genetically modified to be lethally infectious and contagious in humans. The virus is weaponized. Once the deadly virus has been created the scientists then work on a vaccine for it. President Obama banned such research in the US, however there is an escape clause in the ban that allows some research to continue to be funded, particularly by the Pentagon.

So, what if such Gain of Function research was being done in a lab far far away but partially funded by an American organization interested in such things, but due to the BSL4 protocols being so onerous, there were lapses. What if that lab was, as many of these labs are, located in a densely populated city at the centre of a highly active air transportation network?

On the other hand, what would it take to get a virus from a bat cave hundreds of kilometers away to the city where the illness first occurred in humans? Especially since so far no one has yet to isolate SARS-Cov2 in the wild? Yes, SARS-Cov2 is very similar to coronaviruses that infect those bats but are not infectious or contagious in humans. But the necessary evolution from a bat virus to a human virus is complicated, at least as complicated as creating a pathogenic virus in a lab and allowing it to escape into the local human population.

SARS-Cov2 contains a small structure called a furin cleavage site in the spike on its outer coat that is the means of breaking through human cell membranes. Without the furin cleavage site the virus would be harmless to humans. The furin cleavage site on the SARS-Cov2 virus is fairly unique in its genomic structure, it is not seen in any coronaviruses related to SARS-Cov2. However other forms of furin cleavage sites are seen in viruses that are contagious and infectious in humans. Scientists have the ability with CRISPR technology to create and insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. It could have evolved naturally, but so far there is no evidence of that.

China has sealed the lab records of the scientist at the head of such research in the BSL4 lab located in Wuhan, so we will never know for sure. Chinese scientists and officials have been cooperative to a certain extent, but vigourously deny culpability. Many other scientists and public figures have denied categorically that this happened, or could have happened. Because, if it were known to have happened, then public outrage would be pretty darn, well, outrageous.

Trump may not have understood the scientific or political details, let alone the need for secrecy, but he would have had access to this kind of information. He was inclined to say publicly whatever he thought played to his electoral base, and conspiracy theories definitely play to his base.

My sources are linked below. The author of the first link has a checkered past but is not altogether unreliable. I have not found any critical reviews of this particular article, but since it is relatively recent that may come. It is long and technical and far more specific and detailed than I have been, so read at your own risk:

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

The following link gets a middling review as reliable. Again, read at your own risk:

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/

Covid test

I had to get a Covid test last weekend. The results came back negative Tuesday morning, 36 hours after the test. It was relatively quick and easy to do, any discomfort was on a par with getting a needle: unpleasant but brief.

The local university required students returning after the Christmas break to quarantine for two weeks and get a Covid test around the 7th day of quarantine. Last September they were requiring quarantining students to get three tests at the beginning, middle and end of the quarantine period but this time only one test was required. So one student in residence did as required and the first day after his quarantine period he went grocery shopping. As it happened so did I, within the same time frame. A few days later the grocery store was declared an exposure site, I checked my grocery store receipt and booked the Covid test. I didn't have to self-isolate because they said it was a low risk exposure due to everyone being required to wear masks at the store and only a certain number of people allowed in at a time. I've never found it crowded.

At the Reservoir I told a couple of people and they all said they never shop at that grocery store, they go to an out-of-town farm market instead. Students generally don't go to farm markets. All well and good so long as you don't need something that only a grocery store carries. I guess I could have ordered stuff for delivery but it's a pain and you don't always get what you want. I try to keep a grocery list but that week I went to the grocery store three times because I kept forgetting to add stuff to the list.

With the kerfuffle over vaccine production happening in Europe, vaccination rates here have come almost to a halt. Canada stopped manufacturing its own vaccines back in the day when it was deemed not cost effective to make your own when you could just order it from another country. Ha. I see that my age group will now not get vaccinated before the summer, if then. Having everyone vaccinated by September is looking overly optimistic, probably only achievable if we all get it in August. Ha.

I am starting to have some sympathy for conspiracy theory believers, reading the official news about the vaccine is starting to sound more and more like double talk. I try to keep my head down and not think about it.

I've been skating regularly but because this is an uncommonly mild winter the ice quality is poor. I am very grateful I got out on the ice when it was fresh because it was near perfect then. The fact that Hapi is not afraid to walk on it is an indicator of how bad it is, not slippery at all. I debate taking up X-country skiing instead but frankly I barely have the energy for skating, I know for sure skiing would wipe me out altogether.

So tired

I am so tired. I feel like I could sleep for a couple of days and maybe that would fix things, but I can't sleep so I can't fix things. Lying awake at night is like torture, my eyes are too tired and sore to read so I just have to lie there, awake but unable to do anything.

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Two of my sons and I are using the Watch Party feature on Prime Video to watch a TV series we all enjoy. We usually watch it on Wednesday evenings, then talk about it and whatever else afterward on Zoom. This past Wednesday we all had to tear ourselves away from the news (The Washington Capitol riot) to watch. I was talking to a dog walking friend about how just when I was starting to wean myself off near constant watching of internet news, this happens. Apparently 2020 is not over yet, I think maybe it is going to last at least another 6 months if not more. A happier 2021 is a fading dream.

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The picture above is the corner of my living room that I spend a lot of time in. There's the comfy chair that opens into a lounging chair. On the footstool in front of the chair is a cushion I use when the chair turns into a lounge to put my legs on, since the chair itself is not well cushioned. The footstool also doubles as the place I sit when I am tending to the fire. On the left of the chair is my little greenhouse. I am growing arugula, romaine and cilantro there. The greenhouse LED lights also serve to provide bright light in the morning to ward off depression due to winter darkness: it seems to work. On the right side is a small table that is normally piled high with books and a computer, but at the time I took the photo I was using it to hold another planter near the window. That planter had the tail end of my arugula and romaine crop from the summer garden in it, but that's been harvested and eaten now.

In spite of being right in the front window, this chair provides a fair degree of privacy. The only drawback is that it puts me with my back to the birdfeeder outside the window. All day long there are blue jays, chickadees, finches and other bird visitors there. I should say there are two drawbacks to this chair: my inability to see the birdfeeder and my inability to get out of it. Well, I am physically capable of getting out of it, but when I am so tired and it is so comfortable, getting out of it is really hard.

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I haven't taken any photos of this but Hapi had a second grooming session. The groomer took all of her remaining fur this time, except for a little bit on her face and between her ears. She went from looking like a little white lion to looking like a goat with a husky face. I am so used to how she looks now that I have a hard time remembering her old look. Some people think this must be humiliating for her, one person actually said that to me, but I am pretty sure it is not. Her old matted fur was like shackles on her back legs, she has a lot more freedom of movement now. Plus, due to old age the muscles around her tail are weaker and the weight of the fur on her tail prevented her from being able to wag it. But now, fur-free, she raises and wags her tail much more than she used to.

I like that she is an indoor dog now, I like petting her and having her emerging from her new den—aka my bedroom—frequently just to check on me. She likes being petted, I like feeling the warmth of her body which was formerly well insulated under thick fur. Her coat is growing back, she is starting to show some "five o'clock shadow" where the darker hairs of her outer coat are growing in. So now she looks more like a dirty old goat than a snowy white goat.

There's a golden retriever at the Reservoir about the same age as Hapi who also has been shaved. That dog looks almost like a puppy now. The owner thinks his dog is much happier with her short haircut and he was congratulating me on doing the same for Hapi. Hapi's black and fuschia overcoat makes her much more visible in the woods now and we get a lot of compliments on our matching outfits. One guy said we were stylin'.

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My son out west has taken up stained glass as a hobby. This picture is of a Christmas gift he sent me, which only arrived a couple of days ago. He and his 10 year old daughter designed and put it together. For me it is a reminder that one day things will be better, and I will go kayaking again.

Another indigenous life lost to police action

The police continue to kill racialized folks and they continue to defend their actions as "necessary force". Here in Canada we get one police force to investigate another police force when that happens, no civilian oversight whatsoever. If an RCMP officer kills an indigenous person, then that person's community is expected to carry on as usual, sitting on the sidelines waiting for whatever verdict the investigating police force comes to. And since they all subscribe to the same philosophy of brutality against people of colour, the community knows what to expect, yet another justified homicide by a police officer.

When was the last time a police officer shot and killed a violent white supremacist? They generally get a get-out-of-jail-free card except for one crime, killing an officer of the law. Then all bets are off, they fall into the same category as the person of colour resisting arrest. In Atlanta a man of colour was dragged out of his car (he was sleeping) and in the kerfuffle he managed to grab an officer's taser and run away. At a certain point apparently he aimed the taser at an officer and was immediately shot and killed. I could understand that reaction if the man had grabbed a loaded gun, but a taser? Supposedly tasers are non-lethal, that is the whole point of using them. Having your taser grabbed and aimed at you is certainly no fun but it is not supposed to be life-threatening. Or if it is, then we in the community have been sold a bill of goods when the police justify using them because they are non-lethal. But in the eyes of the police a non-lethal weapon becomes lethal in the hands of coloured person.

Yet another indigenous person was killed by police in New Brunswick, only a week or two after the indigenous woman killed by police during a "wellness check". They shot him after a stun gun failed to bring him down, he was armed with a knife. A knife can be lethal, a stun gun is probably appropriate in the circumstances, but killing him? The incident is being investigated by another police force, which incidentally is not known for its pacifist responses to problems with indigenous folks. We can expect yet another whitewashing of police action.

You can lead a horse to water but we learn over and over that you just can't make it drink. You can shout out to the police about their brutal use of force against the community but apparently you can't get them to listen. Even when it is coming from the Prime Minister of the country himself.

Witness to a brutal war

This morning I watched a video of Alberta Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam being arrested in a casino parking lot. In the course of the arrest Chief Adam was beaten and choked by at least one RCMP officer. He is now facing charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer. The whole event was apparently due to an RCMP officer observing that Chief Adam's wife was driving a vehicle with an expired registration. The video was recorded by an RCMP dashcam.

In the video several uninvolved people are shown filming the event with their phones, at least one of them is seen discussing it with Chief Adam's wife. The attack on Chief Adam was sudden, by an officer suddenly appearing from 'stage left' and tackling the Chief, bringing him down to the ground out of view of the dashcam. Immediately a host of other RCMP officers come into view and several of them pile on. When next Chief Adam's face comes into view it is seriously bloodied. He is not a large man.

The lawyer for Chief Adam wanted to release the dashcam video to the public but the RCMP said no, it was evidence and could not be released publicly. The lawyer decided to do it anyway as he thought it displayed undue police violence in arresting an indigenous person. Senior RCMP officers have reviewed the video and determined that it "did not meet the threshold for an external investigation."

The alarming part of all this to me is that the senior RCMP officers did not see this as worthy of investigation and tried hard to suppress the video. That senior RCMP officers deem this kind of incident normal and acceptable behaviour in dealing with infractions of the law by indigenous people of this country is just chilling. Apparently the woman in charge of the RCMP is having a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that the RCMP might be fundamentally racist, but after viewing this video Prime Minister Trudeau is telling her that it is.

The brutality being made evident has been complained about often enough, but the widespread protests filling streets all over the world because one man was murdered in Minneapolis have been phenomenal. The number of videos documenting the brutality and racism involved are just flooding both social media and quality news sites. I am not on social media unless you count this blog, I saw this particular video and others like it on the CBC news website, which is a pretty middle-of-the-road news source. TV cop shows portray cops as benign forces for good, protecting the larger community. We accept that to do that they must carry guns and wear bulletproof vests, as if there is a war going on in the streets and they are the good guys. Too often the bad guys in these shows are brown or black-skinned, setting a norm of crime as a coloured problem. The percentage of people of colour filling our prisons is out of proportion, as if most crime is committed by black and brown people and it truly is a war out there. Thank goodness for the heavily armed white policemen protecting us white people! [I'm being sarcastic]

More and more the police are deemed the appropriate authorities to deal with mental health and social issues of poverty, homelessness and domestic violence. An indigenous woman shot and killed by a cop who was performing a "wellness check" on her at the request of her brother. A young black man with mental health issues shot and killed because he called the police for help (the officer who shot him has refused to submit his notes to police authorities and he has the right to do that). Sexual harrassment by cops of teenage women in the streets, harrassment of women and men in northern indigenous communities. Too many civilians shot and killed in the execution of policing duties. Near complete lack of accountability for their actions by the RCMP and other police forces. Anyone of colour is fair game, not deserving of the respect white people take for granted.

Sanity is kind of funny too

Contemplating sanity

Yesterday I watched a video of Justin Trudeau trying to answer a question put to him about the current situation in the USA. He was silent for a full 20 seconds. Long enough to look totally flummoxed by the question and to make you wonder if he was even going to respond at all. It was actually a rather slyly worded question that made almost any response a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't decision, so the 20 seconds of dead air was kind of understandable.

I felt sort of the same after my previous post about anger, how it somehow said absolutely the wrong thing for the time but wasn't what I intended at all. Who knew. Anyway, I didn't know what to say after that.

Today I started reading Trip by Tao Lin, which is the author's thinking about Terence McKenna, a fairly controversial proponent of the value of psychedelics. I started poking around on the internet for stuff by or about McKenna (he died in 2000 of a brain cancer) and among other things came across some stuff he wrote about a "world soul". He postulated that the world has a soul that is aware that one day our sun will die and the world with it, so it—the world soul—is looking for a way to move elsewhere, but all it has to work with is protoplasm. From a protoplasmic perspective there is still loads of time to figure it out, but from a world soul perspective, time is short. Anyway, McKenna's theory is that all of world history is about that, the world soul working toward moving somewhere else before the sun dies.

I have no ideas or personal experience to support or refute this theory so I'm not going to say anything about that. However, taking the long view on current crises (multiple at the moment), what I see is humanity struggling to figure it all out. How do we live together without destroying ourselves or all of life on this planet? How do we resolve conflict without doing irrevocable damage? How much suffering is necessary to get to the other side?

For some, the answers are simple and straight forward and the fact that we are not doing the simple and straight forward thing is evidence of our colossal stupidity. Or meanness, or short-sightedness, or whatever your favourite term for it is. But in the time scale of evolution we are a brand new species encountering dilemmas no other species has had to deal with and very little in the way of precedent experience or knowledge to draw on. We argue a lot.

I know what I would like this world to look like, what kind of world I think would be peaceful and livable. But I have no idea how to get there from here, without a whole lot of struggle and suffering that may not make the effort worthwhile. I suppose there could be a miracle, but the essence of a miracle is that it is unexpected and unconventional, not something to be relied on.

Another quote from McKenna was about sanity and the paradox of parenting. He said that sanity involves being well-adjusted to your environment and culture. But if your environment and culture are insane, do you really want to be well-adjusted? And if you are a parent, what kind of outcome do you want for your children? To be "insane" or to be well-adjusted to an insane culture?

Hapi in her happy place

I took Hapi for a long walk on the dyke this morning and then did a little shopping. I had a list, it would be too dangerous to just browse. Two stores were relatively safe, no other people around but the third was the grocery store and that can be a little hairy. But I stuck to my list and got out of there as fast as I could and went home, put everything away and washed my hands.

I thought I'd have a bath in the afternoon, the weather was supposed to get unpleasant anyway, so why not. I hardly got out of the bath when I got a text message from my former neighbour, E. She just moved out yesterday to another smaller place in town but we still text back and forth. Anyway, she sent me a pic of the announcement that our premier was opening all the municipal parks and trails, effective immediately. I was so excited. The Reservoir!

I didn't even wait for my hair to dry, I grabbed my raincoat and packed Hapi in the car and drove to the Reservoir. The parking lot was almost full, I guess everyone had the same thought as soon as they got the news. There was a family fishing, and lots of dogs. Hapi went into the pond, of course. The park maintenance people have been busy, there are a few changes, but otherwise it is our old park.

Tiny birdhouse

I met one older fellow, I didn't recognize him but I did recognize his dog; usually his wife walks the dog. But I know that he is responsible for all the Fairy Doors in the park and I thought he was also responsible for all the new miniature bird houses (too small for even a tiny bird). But he said No, they weren't his. His creations were more sturdy he told me. That's true, one of the tiny birdhouses had already fallen apart, but his Fairy Doors are still there.

Purple Fairy Door

It's good to have our park back, he said.

I went on a news website later where the premier made his announcement. He said that we had seen too much tragedy, we needed to get out in the fresh air for our mental health. But he said he'd be watching and if we misbehaved, well, there would be consequences. The number of positive diagnoses is still rising, and so is the death toll.

Malt Bread II

I baked the Malt Bread last night, had a toasted slice this morning. Needs a bit more sugar, as my brother's partner had written in the margin of the recipe.

Yesterday we got two (!!) Emergency Alerts from the RCMP, warning us of another shooting incident and then telling us it was over. As it turned out there were actually 4 incidents around Halifax that they had to investigate, 3 were false alarms and the 4th ended with a couple of arrests but no injuries or deaths. But at least they seemed to have learned something from last weekend. I'll definitely put up with Emergency Alerts even if they are false alarms. Hapi's afternoon walk got postponed as a result but that's okay, for me at any rate. Hapi wasn't so happy about it.

There was a virtual vigil last night, I listened to part of it. There's only so many speeches and so much sad music that I can deal with. When I did take Hapi for her walk around the neighbourhood I wore a red bandanna face mask in honour of mourning and saw many red hearts and flags hanging from or displayed in windows. Several people hung out Nova Scotia tartan scarves by their doors.

Last week I was so happy to be well again and able to get out of the house and enjoy the beginnings of Spring, this week it's been shock, anger and grief. I don't know what next week will bring.

I've been listening to a lot of John Prine lately, sad loss to Covid-19. Here's one of my favourites:

That's How Every Empire Falls

NovaScotiaStrong

So much for peace and quiet

Well this was a helluva weekend. I am not sure what to say about it, all of a sudden the pandemic takes a back seat. They say this was the largest 'mass shooting' event in Canadian history, not an historic event you really want to be part of.

All of the Atlantic provinces are small, none of them much larger in population than a small city. We are less than a million here, mostly rural or living in small towns. Also, this is probably one of the oldest European settlements in North America, being one of the more easterly locations and all. So old rural settlements being what they are, everybody knows everybody, one way or another. It's just one big small town.

I knew nothing about what was going on when I took Hapi for her morning walk. But in the middle of it I got a text from the young student living next door to me, E, who asked if I wanted some turnips. We carried on a text conversation from there, this that and the other thing. I went to buy eggs from a local farm. Just as I got home she texted that maybe I shouldn't take Hapi out again, but just stay home. She included a photo of the killer and his car, who was still on the loose and headed more or less in our direction.

As soon as I got home I turned on the radio. Gone was the non-stop Covid-19 reporting, even the Prime Minister's daily talk was off the local airwaves. Now it was the blow-by-blow police chase with warnings to stay home, go hide in the basement if necessary. E texted me that a cop get shot in front of her boyfriend's mom's house. Very shortly after that the radio reported that the man had been caught. There were multiple victims but the RCMP would not be talking about it until 6pm.

I went on the internet, and sure enough, there were already reports in the UK and the USA about what was happening in our little province, a lot of speculation and precious little hard facts. The CBC said they would only report what they could verify was actually true, but there was plenty of speculation swirling around.

So this morning they are reporting at least 17 dead, including one RCMP officer and the killer himself, in a broad swath over half the province. What a horrific tragedy!

As far as the pandemic is concerned, many provinces are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the numbers of positive tests and dead are starting to flatten or diminish. Our province is still peaking, although not as badly as some others. Like some other provinces, half or more of the dying are in nursing homes, pointing out the glaring need for reform in how we care for elders. A lot of holes in the fabric of our culture are coming to light in the glare of the pandemic.

But a mass shooting is unfathomable. Perhaps it points to yet another hole in the fabric, I don't know, too soon to tell. But it surely adds to the already big burden of shock and grief around here.