Now, if you've read this at all, you're probably aware that I'm of a mind to disarm the police. The Kevlar Vests, Guns, Armour-Plated Hum-V's, they all encourage a sensibility which I don't find in line with what I would consider our countries values.
So I do some research, or try and do some research - it turns out that Statistic Canada doesn't actually track shooting deaths by police. It's convenient to ignore those statistics that are going to reflect poorly on us.
What information I could find - that a minimum of 65 people died through interactions with the police in 2017, (mostly through firearms, I suspect), and in 2016 Calgary police shot and killed 10 people.
Calgary, a city of slightly more than a million people - 10 people shot by police. If you'd like some perspective on that, consider the UK - population well over 60 million people - how many do you think the police shot there in the same year? Make a guess. Look it up.
No police were ever charged, and all were acquitted by ASIRT - which is Alberta's rubber stamp for police state murder.
An estimated 90% of police shootings involved mentally ill or substance abuse issues. Under 15% involved shooting at people similarly armed with guns. Most "weapons" were things like - this past Xmas - an Automobile (officer was "pinned"?? WTF? Who trains these ass-holes?!), armed with a paring knife, armed with a hammer, or, simply, ran at the door...
If you'd argue that police need to protect themselves against "baddies with guns" read the above line again. Canada isn't the US, we have no gun culture. The people they're killing are people that counselors, mental health professionals, crisis intervention counselors, are trained to deal with every day. They don't go to work with guns. The chance of you getting murdered or shot on the job as a police officer are roughly the same as getting murdered in Saskatchewan, and 10 times better than living in Nunavut, the NWT or Yukon. We don't give them awards for heroism, and they LIVE there...
It's time to disarm the police.
A couple of websites for you to follow up with:
Link: https://solgps.alberta.ca/asirt/Statistics/Pages/statistics-charges.aspx - The ASIRT's investigative results made transparent. - Whoops - Nope, only charges and convictions are recorded. We employ these people, we have a right to demand transparency.
Link: https://killercopscanada.wordpress.com/ - Thankfully someone is keeping track.
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This is a Native American Myth common to the more Northern parts of Canada, in which a person might become possessed by a demon - The Wendigo - which was a cannibal spirit and would force one to eat ones neighbors/husband/children...
Given the nature of the long, cold and isolated Canadian Winters, it's easy to see how it arose - and for the tribes and cultures that believed in it, it was a very real thing. A great many stories and trials concerning The Wendigo appear in the early papers, news accounts and trials of Canada.
One particular version concerns the Inuit, or Eskimo, and it warned that if you met a friend while out hunting on the ice, be careful, they might be a Wendigo...
Now, dramatically, imagine: You're a hunter, working a trapline, or looking for Seals, in the long cold Northern Winter. Perpetual evening, the sun never breaking over the horizon, the brightest it gets, a late evenings twilight. The Northern Lights, the icepack, unending in all directions. Days, Weeks on the ice, filling your sled. Isolation.
And you run into a friend, and you're glad of the company, who wouldn't be after all this time here, alone, and you talk about the hunting, the fishing, and maybe you can start a fire, and sit and talk, and he's looking at you and you're a little uncertain, maybe his hunting wasn't as successful as he said, as successful as yours, and maybe, after all, he's not the same person you knew back in the camp or village...
It's got a certain resonance and appeal...the classic cautionary tale...
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Now, topics of the Supernatural that are of interest, and I wrote the headline before I gave it any thought, and because there are a lot of related things of interest I'll be brief...
Starting with Zombies, no explaining their popularity, or there is, it's Everyman's call to the Hero's journey, the realization of the mindless disorder of society that puts him at odds with it and allows him the liberty of war. That death here is more horrific than a natural death is because there's the realization that one could become one of them, the contagion of bad or diseased thought, another mindless shopper, consumer, citizen, and the death, the reanimation of the corpse, implies a loss of spirituality - that one has fallen into a deep and dire well of materialism. There is, surprisingly, a lot in common with this contemporary myth and virtually every major religion on earth, but those are thoughts I'll let you examine for yourself...
Vampires, the Undead come back to suck the blood of the living, are a curious thing as well, popular again across all cultures and times, and to explain the myth (I'll let go the reality for the moment) - I'd start with they are the memories of the deceased, come to haunt the living. Ghosts, a similar idea, are more fleeting, harmless; Vampires are by their nature malevolent and bent on corporeal harm. Vampires might be memories of the deceased that interfere with the survivors continuing on in the world, memories of violence or abuse, or a particularly gruesome disease or death, and the ceremonies designed to prevent the reanimation of the Vampires corpse, generally involving violence, might be a way to visit upon the corpse some portion of the abuse or violence they, in life, inflicted on the living. Consider Vlad the Impaler. The reality of Vampires - prematurely buried victims of disease or illness, that might through their rising infect others, might more pragmatically explain the pains taken to lay the Vampire more permanently to rest.
And finally there are Werewolves, or any of a number of their night-crawling and shape-shifting kin, on the surface, clearly rabies, underneath however a warning to beware the savagery of otherwise normal people in the evening. People who appear, by day, to be one thing, then by the evening turn into something completely different. The personification of Mans more bestial nature.
Now these are just a few fleeting thoughts to get you started, but the prevalence of the myths across cultures suggests that they carry a value or meaning, you might interpret them differently...
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Now this is an idea that intrigues me.
Geology, we think of it as "static", the earth is the earth and that's it, rocks, minerals, gems, they're all there, we (almost) know everything, it's just a matter of finding it.
But, imagine, after the Anthropocene, the post-holocene, how in hundreds of millions of years the geology will changed. We've combined minerals and elements in thousands of new and unexpected ways, and as the continents subduct and boil beneath the oceans those combinations will give rise to hundreds, if not thousands of new and unimagined minerals. Skyscrapers of concrete and steel and filled with glass will form pegmatites lined with giant shards of quartz, included with golden and silver phantoms and rutile needles, percolating toxic hydrocarbons and fluids melted from landfills will fill them with new minerals and gems, to be recognized, excavated and mined by creatures as far from our thinking as ours is from the dinosaurs.
Which kind of excites me, as an exercise of the imagination, but for the moment I'll have to content myself with finding those gems already here, which is proving troublesome enough. Only 4 or 5 months until Summer...
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