Do unmarked graves rest on D'Arcy Island?

Presently no one really knows. I remember reading in one article somewhere that you can spot a few burial mounds. This article mentions that coffins were among the supplies that would get dropped off every three months. So one would assume there are unmarked graves on the island, and that the exiles were not put out to sea or cremated.

That same Seattle Times article also mentions something completely new to me: "An American missionary who applied to move to D'Arcy Island to care for the dying inhabitants was denied permission."

That fact really rankles. Not only were there journalists and doctors decrying what was going on, but now we know an actual missionary - in persona Christi - wanted to go to live there to care for the inhabitants. How utterly Canadian, with that British Imperialist Colonialism, which still hangs over our 21st century, the revelation of its injustices testing us in our presumptions about polite Canadian culture (and big surprise, both the wagon-circlers and the white woke arsonists fail the test!): to not only exile the Chinese immigrants to their deaths and suffering, but to cloak their own racist decision-making by denying the freely offered care of a missionary, which they realized would show up their cold cruelty.

Most B.C. people - most Canadians in general - do not know about D'Arcy Island and its history. It's one of British Columbia's Gulf Islands. 83 hectares and about 16 kilometers from Victoria, D'Arcy Island is where you would get exiled if you were Chinese and had leprosy. Exiled is not a hyperbolic term in this case. You were sent there to die - and here's some supplies and a "doctor check-up" every three months. You were not sent there to be cared for.

But if you were white and had leprosy? Well, well, well, you would get sent to Tracadie Island in New Brunswick and get cared for by nurses in habits in a hospital with food prepared for you, in a place where the conditions were such that you weren't forced to eke out the rudiments of your own existence just to stay alive on top of having debilitating leprosy. You were cared for if you were white. Not if you were Chinese.

Here's just one hint of the harshness. We're talking about a little pacific island. There's a ton of them. This is rainforest country. But what many people don't realize about "rainforest" country is that summer means drought, essentially. This island, like so many of the other small islands, has no natural springs, no wells, no ground source of fresh water. They had to dig a pit on the island to collect rainwater during the winter months to supply themselves with water during summer. That's not fresh water. Just think about that. How often do you take a shower or a bath during hot weather without a thought? Now imagine you not only stink with natural body odour, but you have leprous wounds that want cleansing? You really think sea water would suit you well enough? Maybe if you were given enough opium?

Here's a good introductory article to D'Arcy Island: Island of Death: BC's Forgotten Racist Leper Colony

"And yet it was so mundane."

Here's an article reflecting on the history of D'Arcy Island in light of the Covid pandemic: Professor draws parallels between B.C.’s leprosy island, COVID-19 racism

"And yet it was so mundane."

 

I've always loved Sasquatch stories. Loved reading and hearing about them since I was a kid. Ogopogo and Nessie were alright. I liked UFO stories but there was always something distant about them. Sasquatch though - that was and is right in my backyard.

The fact that so many of the stories came from regions not far from where I live made them all the more exciting/scary. There are many stories of Sasquatch encounters from the Chilliwack/Harrison area that chill the blood. And there's also this about the Sasquatch stories: I rarely get the sense when hearing them that the person who claimed to have sighted it is making it up. We live in a mysterious world.

It's not summer until the lawns and fields of grass have gone bronze and tawny and glinting gold. That grass, those lawns, they should nearly reflect the sunlight, be burnished and wonderfully hurt your eyes! Come on, what's the matter with you, Pacific Northwest? Almost mid July now! But go ahead and be that way! Summer is cancelled. Fall is here! I get it! You win!

*

These so-called "fragrance free" hand sanitizers at the entrances to various places - they most definitely are not fragrance free. What is that smell? Three day stale baby vomit? Come on, put some fragrance in that shit! This is persecution!

*

Gotta love the stalwart crusaders who pontificate about not hiding your faith and how "I love the mass so much you cowards I am unafraid to tell the whole world" shaking in their boots and crying persecution over having to write their name and number on a piece of paper in the vestibule of the church. LOL.

And it's even worse, indeed, an absolute VIOLATION, if it's for confession! Like there's some stone cold commie agent pilfering parish lists and poring over them, saying, "Now I wonder what this one said in confession!"

Go to confession! they never tire of saying. You should go to confession! Don't be afraid! You need confession to be made clean! St. Damien of Molokai shouted his sins across the water and everybody heard! These are the same ones who are protesting over putting down some ink that a fellow parishioner (who also wrote down their name and number) can read (which they won't, because who the hell cares) and see that you went to confession? Like, huh? Methinks you need some fresh air.

Ooooo, "contact tracing" - that's so sinister sounding, isn't it? Well, I suppose it is, if you want to purposely remain ignorant about what it actually is and like an adolescent (as Pope Francis said) cling to your own stupid selfish paranoia instead.

Like, are you ready to be a martyr for your faith?! Are you ready to sacrifice?! Because the times are coming when...oh I have to write my name and number down? Oh but my right to privacy! My religion is my own private affair!

LOL. Not that contact tracing lists are any such thing. They are completely provisional, and after a few weeks or whatever and no one from the list came down with Covid, then you toss the lists. So scary, like the parish registry. But I guess the commies couldn't get access to the parish registries?

*

It's a twenty for your twenty. The year you got what you gave. Or something like that.

Ah, the dirty caravans seeking to get into the US - rapists and drug dealers! Many carry diseases! Close off the border! Build that wall! Keep them out!

Gotta take care of the Homeland! Like killing the pandemic response plan and letting Covid "wash over the country", making for a third of the world's death toll in three months (and rapidly escalating).

And here's the twenty to your twenty, president dipstick: both Mexico and Canada are adamantly and steadfastly keeping their borders closed to your country, refusing to hear the interests of US governors that seek to re-open them, and saying, look to your own disease petri dish backyard, because of your negligent homicidal criminal virulently destructive self-protective vile and scummy fake president cancelling every proper course of action letting the virus "wash over your country". Oh, and lots of other countries that don't share a physical border with you - yeah, they're closing their borders to you as well.

He didn't just ignore or "did nothing", in the sense of a negative. He actively jettisoned and obstructed any and all proper courses of action. You want to see cancel culture? Look no further than Don the Con.

Trump is one who dirties the waters. He is one who dirties the waters as his first step in every single circumstance, and it's a form of self-protection.

That's why the US has the numbers it has. But that is not why the other countries are closing their borders to the US. They are keeping their borders closed to the US simply for the protection of their own countries. Those countries cannot afford to have their effective courses of action (and they are effective) turned to nothing by infection from a country that, because its "president" carries a deadly moral virus, is in the worst state in all the countries of the world with regards to the pandemic.

It so happens that is the same country which could have, and ought to have been, with all that is available and at its disposal, a leader and trailblazer, in cancelling the Covid pandemic.

*

You know the champs who valiantly come to the defense of Capitalism, saying how it raised us out of poverty and disease, how we would all be dead at thirty and dropping dead from all the various diseases that Capitalism progressively cured us of and vaccinated us against, and so on in pioneering this cure, and so forth in developing that vaccine, bringing us general longevity and relative ease?

Yeah, those are the same people who are anti-vaxxers.

The Pineapple Express tonight. That's what I love in the winter in the PNW, when it comes in mild, sometimes even positively warm, and turns all the firs and cedars into dark, gusting, oceanic giants, like a translation of the sea. You can keep your snow.

It made the power at Precious Blood go out this evening just before Benediction and First Friday Mass. We made do with candles, electric lamps, and mobile phones.

Some people like to call it "Chinook", sort of like the way some are fond of saying "Ponderosa Pine."

Pineapple Express is just fine for now. Just fine, thanks.

Down with Feb and the Dark Ages!

Hooray March and the realization that your winter coat is getting a little too warm!

In the middle of January I stopped at the bottle depot with returns and there I saw a forsythia in bloom.

There it was, in the middle of January in yellow blooms, and I thought to myself, "Well now, that sure as hell doesn't look like Global Cooling to me!"

*

I am so happy Pope Francis is visiting Japan this year. The bulk of my youtube viewing over the past several months has been Japanology stuff, bonsai, carving up of various fishes, all the amazing art and craftwork, stuff they do so well it's just completely out of left field. Like one film I watched on how they make charcoal. The sound the charcoal made when they clinked it - it was like the sound of metal it was so pure.

It is unfortunate that the western experience of Japan was initiated by effeminate prints exported in the 19 century, which sort of dictated what the aesthetic of Japan was, which it isn't. And it is not perfectionism that defines them, but attention. With attention is life and virility.

Japan is also very Laudato Si. There's something about the fact that they are the one country to have been attacked with nuclear arms, and also the problem of Fukushima.

*

Oh look, the Fascists are here to claim Western Civilization and teach you about the Edenic Paradise that existed before the Fall that is the Enlightenment. Huh, imagine that.

*

Been listening to a series of lectures while driving and at one point the prof repeats that stale chestnut about how "Jesus wasn't nice." And I'm thinking to myself, "What in the hell are you actually saying? That Jesus was a jerk?"

I am so tired of these blasé half-baked Fascistic pyrite turds that get passed around in Catholic circles like the common cold.

Remember when Fr. Corapi would say that O.L. "wears army boots"?

Right.

And St. Lawrence said turn me over, I'm done on this side.

Yeah. Not likely.

And St. Paul was "knocked off his horse."

Wasn't on a horse. Nor was he metaphorically "knocked off his horse" - as in his "high horse". This gives very short shrift to Christ's powerful revelation, powerful in mercy, and to the full weight of Paul's conversion, Paul who said, "Who are you, Lord?"

That and the fact that he was standing on his feet and fell down has in it the true drama of that instantaneous conversion. He fell down. He fell down prostrate, or on his knees. He wasn't "slain in the spirit".

But good luck with all that I guess.

*

Speaking of February, the television networks were doing their due diligence to show Groundhog Day end to end as a repeating marathon the same day of that superstitious observation, so I watched it when visiting my sister and brother-in-law while dinner was being prepared.

The last time seeing the film was long ago, and I remember sort of disliking it, but not totally disliking it, when it first came out. But I was an adolescent then, and Groundhog Day is, for all its screwball lightheartedness, a film only adults can really appreciate. There are quite a number of nuances and nods I recognized in the most recent viewing that had me enjoying the film.

I'm sure thousands of sophomoric essays have been written about the film, and I have no interest in reading them. Murray's character Phil, certainly goes through the gamut of the seven deadly sins before trying to escape - that is, seek redemption. I was taken not so much with the enormous number of good deeds that Phil builds up to, but the keen level of attention and timing, down to the second, that this demands. I think the words of Ned the insurance salesman are key in this regard: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Ned is actually the key to Phil's redemption. He is the one character Phil dislikes the most and wants to get away from the most. So obviously Ned is there telling Phil the way out: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Exactly. Watch that first step - it's a doozy. It's the first step that Phil must realize. The first step is adventure.

But thinking about the film afterwards I realized that the premise cannot stand without all the characters in the film becoming in some way unreal. They become only objects for the aim of Phil to finally get it right. He can hit them, insult them, seduce them, steal from them, whatever, without any temporal consequences (beyond the one day), so even his seeking redemption is self-centered. Of course, the premise is just that - a premise, a screwball comedy: let's set it up and see where it goes. Still, it's certainly not a reflection of Christian redemption, or the Christian understanding of the eternal and temporal consequences of sin. For the film doesn't even have the temporal consequences.

Still, this very reduction of others, and oneself, to unreality, is the very picture of sin and what it does. Interesting that one of the selfless things that Phil comes to doing that makes for his redemption is the making of art.

What is perhaps an unintended hang-up of the premise of Groundhog Day is a deliberate and conscious point in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Our unrepentance makes us the center of the universe, which is a lie, and because of this, even our loved ones become merely our consciousness of them. We do not actually love. Our failures of attending to someone's reality becomes the "reality" we live, repetitiously - and this is hell. And we are doomed to the repetition in the very effort we make to expunge ourselves of it.

Groundhog Day makes that going back again and again an actual what-if reality scenario. It's a screwball comedy.

Solaris is much more truthful: you can't go back. Going back is precisely the doom of hellish repetition in which no one is real, including yourself, when you do not accept what you have done and what you have failed to do, and repent before your father. This is shown frankly, boldly, yet not preachingly, in the film's final shot, which is clearly reminiscent of Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son.

Yet to repent is to turn back, or turn around, or simply to turn. What is this paradox? Unless you turn back and be converted, you will be doomed to eternally revisit your sins and folly. Unless you turn back, you cannot go forward.

Another memorable film that belongs in the same arena as Groundhog Day and Solaris is Scorsese's After Hours. This is a dark comedy not as lighthearted in touch the way Groundhog Day is, but it is light in touch for a Scorcese film. Almost two decades now since viewing it, and I still remember the nightmarish slant Scorcese is able to give to certain mundane details, such as a set of keys dropping down from an apartment window like the approach of a train, and the equally unstoppable horror of an overrunning toilet.

Like Phil, Paul cannot escape from his own nightmare predicament, which is downtown New York late into the night, without any fare to get back, being pursued by a mob, and met at every turn with some new obstacle to prevent his ever getting back to his home and work, until he gives himself to the point of forgetting himself.

In his case, this means putting his last bit of money into a jukebox and slow dancing with a lonely woman in a seedy bar at something like 4 o'clock in the morning. Only when he has done this, giving up all his efforts to get out, does June, the woman he has danced with, encase him in a full body plaster cast, which hardens. He gets taken by the mob that has been searching for him, and ends up rolling out of the back of their van, whereupon the body cast shatters, and he stands up on the stairs of his workplace with the rising of the sun. A new day. A new man.

Three films that would make for an interesting marathon viewing.

*

Today's Communist denies Communism of the past.

Says it wasn't real Communism, or it wasn't Communist enough.

Today's Fascist appropriates Fascism of the past.

Gives a slight dismissive smirk and says I'm not that caricature of the past.

*

Each according to their kind.

Snowflake

"You're not made of sugar" - that's what my Mom would tell us kids in the face of having to bear the elements, as for instance, when I had to do my paper delivery route in the rain.

Imagine that.

I've been long acquainted with rain, with doing strenuous and unpleasant labour in it - in sleet, snow, hail, frozen and soaked to the bone, when your body core is still shivering even after a long hot shower.

And that sort of thing pales to what soldiers would have endured in the trenches.

So, uh, just from a PNW guy with moss in his veins: the POTUS is a snowflake.

And all the talk I've heard heretofore about how he's so tough and just too much for the PC snowflakes to handle and how he's a "bull in a china shop" who makes all the snowflakes melt - all that - yeah, it just melted.

'Eat earth! Dig deep!

Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!'

The best apple I have ever eaten

Or the best apple I ever ate.

Both sentences are legitimate and perfectly viable English grammar. The only arguable part is the word "ever". For it may not be "ever". We need to cut back on "ever". (Just like we need to cut back on "beyond".) Only if I died tomorrow would the sentence be true with "ever", for tomorrow - and tomorrow, and tomorrow - I could, and hope to, eat an apple yet that will take the title "best".

For there are many apples, and many apples I have not eaten or ate (I love how you southerners say ate instead of eaten - it's perfectly excellent grammar). I'm just a newbie when it comes to knowing the tastes and textures of the vast array of apples. And further, apples do not differ from each other in the way that - say, mangoes differ from each other. Certain apples can take on such a distinctive profile as to induce this commonly known phrase among pomologists: "If you were to eat this blindfolded, you would not know that it was an apple." For this reason you would not be far amiss to say that apples are the most universal fruit.

The two apples in the picture are not, and yet are, the apple I am referring to when I say, "The best apple I have ever eaten." For those are apples from the tree from which I had the best apple I ever ate, but neither of them are the apple. That picture was taken 2015. The best apple I ever ate was one from the same tree only last year, 2017.

I do not know the variety of this apple tree. It grows by a horse trail. The two apples in my hand were picked, and just under ripe. No matter. When they are not quite peaked in ripeness they are intense. Have one and your mouth goes raw. Have two and your stomach lining is in a questionable state. Of course I ate both, one after the other, for they are complex - intensely sweet and intensely...sour? I don't like using the word sour in this case, because sour too often refers to something that has spoiled, like sour milk. Anyways, the rawnesss of both mouth and stomach didn't last long - it's no matter to me. Many wimps today with overly domesticated palettes would not be able to get past one bite.

But when they ripen to full peak - now that is what I'm getting at here. The best apple I ever ate had fallen from the tree. It was lying by the trail in dusty grass, just a few feet away from a pile of horse dung. I wiped the dust off the best I could on my shirt and took a bite.

I wouldn't know how to describe it. Champagne? But I'm not a fan of champagne. I don't know. It was amazing. Just in case you might be thinking, "Ah, Paul, the apple was starting to ferment" - no, it wasn't. It was perfectly ripe, nowhere near overripe. The burst of sharp intensity, the warmth of it - not just the warmth of the apple basking in the sun, but the warmth of the flavour. It was a taste that completely filled the mouth, exuberant, superabundant.

The knowledge that we have of apples according to what we get from the supermarkets is impoverished, to say the least.

Just like our notion of heaven.

That was kind of the park ranger

Why, you're most welcome! Next time if you could just leave me a key for the lock so that I can come and go as I please, if you don't mind, that would be swell. A ham and swiss cheese sandwich would be nice too. Thanks!

I would like to state that I was tardy back to my vehicle because I was occupied - under a Canadian sky miraculously clear - with a woman, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. I would like to say so, because when you're in the sharp winter dusk (even though it's technically not winter yet) and the forest trees at the field's edge are strangely luminous in the dimming light and the geese are making their silly honking noises in the sky, that's exactly what you want to be doing - to be with a woman, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

I would like to say that, but alas, it is untrue. Woe! I was drawing! And all alone! I don't even have a girlfriend! How tragic! Drawing, drawing, drawing! The chickadees were dancing around - now this is true - saying to me that the after-light does not stay for long this time of year. Your fingers are numb! They can barely hold the pencil anymore! Your toes are numb! Frost is on the grass! Time for you to go, go, go! You still have a long walk!

But I did not obey.

Walkabout

Just look at all the lush skunk cabbages swamp lanterns and bracken fern!

Oregon grape. The low growing variety.

You can see the contrast between the new leaves I'm holding and the old leaves (darker). The old leaves are tough. The new leaves are very tender. Very good eating. Lemony-sour-tart-twang. And very good for you.

Good old vanilla leaf. The sight of them always sings to me of the PNW. You dry these leaves and the smell is glorious (hence its alternative name: sweet-after-death). Their white stamens also smell wonderful.

A long while since I laid down in the deep grass. That's an old apple tree. Its branches reach over the spot where I took the pic.

Misc.

While driving one day I saw a car with these words on the back of it: 100% Electric.

It was nice to see an ardent supporter of hydro dams. Hydro dams are where the bulk of the electricity comes from in British Columbia.

Of course, that is assuming the words were referring to what makes the car move and not the car itself, which required all sorts of chemical compounds and industrial processes making waste byproducts. In that sense the words 100% Electric would be entirely false; or if they were true in that sense then the driver would be an electrocuted mass of burning flesh.

*

Canada could practically supply the entire world with water and electricity while having its own citizens use electricity for free. That is an idea my friend had. I like the idea.

*

Did you know that free trade has destroyed the sovereignty of nations around the world? Basically the economy of each country is held hostage to the economies of all the other countries.

*

Did you know that when Canada was using debt-free money issued by the government, who controlled the quantity, that school tuition was free?

I suppose that's where Canada's engineers, scientists, doctors, inventors and so forth came from - schooling that was free, which in turn benefited the country. That is what you call honouring your citizens' potential and productions and studies by issuing to those things the bills that open them up to as many potential kinds of transactions as is humanly possible. Which becomes the basis for the economy that those citizens then build: real wealth and production and creativity.

Do you know what the politicians today will tell you in response to this as their reason for rejecting it? That other countries will not then invest in our currency. Seriously.

Do you have any idea what slaves we have all become?

*

In fact, it was while using debt-free government issued and controlled money that Canada came into itself, as they say. In the schools today they do not teach this. They teach that Canada came into its own because of World War II.

That is a lie.

*

Did you know that CN Rail, which my Granddad Stilwell had his career in, was sold off to another country? Did you know it was sold off only in order to make interest payments on the national debt, which is there because that's how the money is brought into existence?

Understand that: the company was sold in order to make payments not on the debt itself, but to make payments just on the compounding interest on the debt; and the debt with the compounding interest exists in the first place because that is how the country's money is brought into existence - as an interest-bearing debt.

Do you have any idea how freaking insane that is?

*

Once I bought a case of local craft beer that stated it was brewed using wind power. I bought it just to try it because I like trying local craft beers; in fact, local craft beers are pretty much the only kind of beer I buy. I like the skunk of Becks and a few others but really, imported beers are a shadow of what those beers are in their own countries. Imported beers really are not that great. I did not buy the wind power beer because it was brewed using wind power. Anyways, I won't be buying the beer again because the beer was so over-carbonated you could barely taste the beer.

*

I really appreciate beer when it is room temperature. Or just ever so slightly chilled. These beer and wine stores that advertise that they keep their beers super-chilled at zero are one of the many signs - along with unisex hair salons - of the demise of western society.

*

One day while driving I saw a car with its back entirely decked out in various stickers. Beside the sticker about Tolerance was one bearing a quote from Gandhi; the one about the supreme and all-seeing Gandhi liking your Christ but not liking your Christians.

I've always thought that quote from Gandhi alone was enough to show him for the hypocritical fraud that he was.

*

I'm friends with an East-Indian family who are quite Anglo in their ways, though if you were to ask them what their religion was, I suppose they would say Sikh. Anyways, they absolutely abhor Gandhi and consider him a fraud.

*

I won't use the term rad-trad anymore. I'll just say Pelagian instead.

*

It does make sense, doesn't it, that priests preach against usury as much as they preach against contraception.

Oh, they do indeed preach against love of money. That's a win-win. People love hearing homilies against the love of money - especially the rich.

Anything that introduces a dualism where one needs to devote more time to spiritual things and not the material...you see, suddenly the money thing is fine. It and the spirituality...never the twain shall meet. The rich love that.

But one squeak about usury, by which we mean making money from money - of which our entire economy is based - and not just credit cards and loan companies, and oh, you would get it in the ear. Just like with contraception.

But keep it quiet. You know, as our Holy Father Pope Francis has said, don't make a mess, don't cause upheaval, don't make a noise or stir things up.

B.C. Day

May I never cease to see the mountains freshly.

Hogweed

"Giant Hogweed is a phototoxic plant. Its sap can cause phytophotodermatitis (severe skin inflammations) when the skin is exposed to sunlight or to UV-rays. Initially the skin colours red and starts itching. Then blisters form as it burns within 48 hours. They form black or purplish scars that can last several years. Hospitalisation may be necessary. Presence of minute amounts of sap in the eyes can lead to temporary or even permanent blindness. These reactions are caused by the presence of linear derivatives of furocoumarin in its leaves, roots, stems, flowers and seeds. These chemicals can get into the nucleus of the epithelial cells, forming a bond with the DNA, causing the cells to die. The brown colour is caused by the production of melanin by furocoumarins. In Germany, where this plant has become a real nuisance, there were about 16,000 victims in 2003.

Children should be kept away from Giant Hogweed. Protective clothing, including eye protection, should be worn when handling or digging it. If skin is exposed, the affected area should be washed thoroughly with soap and water and the exposed skin protected from the sun for several days." --wikipedia

A news clip on giant hogweed in southern B.C.

Crocuses Wide Open

February 4th. here in southern British Columbia. There are reports of some cherry trees already in full blossom in Vancouver. I'm starting to take back my earlier complaints. This global warming is wonderful. All you states and provinces in the dregs of winter cold, it's too bad you don't have global warming right now.

Those invested emotionally and financially in the winter olympics are wishing that our winter was more like the one we had last year (record snow dump) when we didn't have this global warming. If I remember correctly, at that time England was the place that had global warming.

The other night I caught this commercial on T.V.:



What an utterly ridiculous commercial. It was obviously made by the same people who made that California commercial. Those blue screens behind the sort-of-famous people (laid-back, sophisticated, home) are almost believable. It doesn't make me proud of my province. It's a rancid sort of provincialism on the steroids of the financial elite.

It is a commercial of course. Not that I'm expecting it to show Vancouver's homeless people getting culled from the streets by the police (a police force not entirely clean) so we won't look bad to "the world", but come on; a little less, uhm, we-are-the-freaking-world-of-the-Na'vi horseshit would be nice.

The Handiwork of Vancouver Police

The only wrong thing he did was open his door to the police (Oh, we were supposed to go to the basement suite door instead - whoops). Watch the video of this man's injuries:

http://ca.yahoo.com/s/1128766

Bones around his eye broken; lacerations and bruising to the knees; back and sides thumped swollen and deep red.

You have to wonder about headlines that use words like, "alleged beating".

Or as John Taschereau writes in an e-mail concerning the release of the article he links to below:

"HERE WE HAVE THE VANCOUVER POLICE Chief desperately trying to fool the reader into thinking the police were “just doing their job” while they ARRESTED AND MERCILESSLY BEAT UP THE WRONG MAN.

And it’s worse than that…Turns out the guy was not even resisting arrest which begs the question: why the police beat the shit out of someone who was not resisting arrest?

And why did the police originally say the man was resisting arrest?

We have two crimes against a law abiding citizen by a corrupt police force.

The answer is because the LAW in this country no longer stands for anything other than the inside boys club of what they can get away with. BC citizens will have to take it to the face a bunch more before they decide the police and the RCMP need to be disbanded and a new, local force put in place.

Vancouver police chief says innocent man beaten by officers did not resist.

Regrettably, the police cannot be trusted. When this kind of thing happens, they are criminals."

Go to the link John provides for an article that gives some details of the case, which took place 2:20 a.m. Wednesday (Jan. 20).

Most of the articles so far, as well as the video linked to above, use words that try to focus one's attention on it being a "wrongful arrest" of "mistaken identity". Well yes, they got the wrong guy. But that doesn't mean beans in this case. One of the sources even uses the words that Yao Wei Wu was "roughed up" during the arrest.

No, actually; he was severely beaten the second he opened up his door.

Vancouver, which is going to host the winter Olympics this February, may have one of the most corrupt police forces around. In the past few years, story after story has come out about beatings - and drunk-driving (then fleeing the scene) - but especially the beatings, and the use of stupid, over-aggressive force, leading to death.

The most well-known to date is the case that took place, and which was caught on video, three years ago at Vancouver airport. Robert Dziekanski, fresh from Poland to be with his mother, after being held in some area of the airport, was shot with Tasers five times, only 25 seconds after police arrived. The first shot brought him to the ground where he started convulsing. The officers proceeded to shoot him with Tasers four more times, and Dziekanski died.

Confiscation and suppression of the video; a lot of testimonies made by the officers in court totally contradicted by evidence later brought out; corrupt investigation into the case; it can be gleaned in this wikipedia article.

Here's the video:



One of the officers involved in the Dziekanski case was later involved in a drunk-driving accident, where he fled the scene and went home where - so he testified - he drank some vodka to calm himself down, and then walked back to the scene whereupon he was given the breath-test.

Police corruption in Vancouver goes back some:

"The Vancouver Police was at the centre of one of the biggest scandals in the city's history in 1955. Feeling frustrated that blatant police corruption was being ignored by the local media, a reporter for the Vancouver Daily Province switched to a Toronto-based tabloid, Flash. He wrote a sensational article alleging corruption at the highest levels of the police department in Vancouver, specifically, that a pay-off system had been implemented whereby gambling operations that paid the police were left alone and those that did not were harassed. After the Flash article appeared in Vancouver, the allegations could no longer be ignored, and a Royal Commission, the Tupper Commission, was struck to hold a public inquiry. Chief Constable Walter Mulligan fled to the United States, another officer from the upper ranks committed suicide, and still another attempted suicide rather than face the inquiry.[5] Other scandals and public inquiries plagued the force before and since this one, dubbed "The Mulligan Affair," but none were so dramatic." --wikipedia

Cranberries

The importing/exporting, shipping and packaging of produce mystifies me.

These cranberries are a "product of USA".


This can mean one of two things. Either the berries were grown here in Canada,


and then shipped to the U.S. to be packaged and then sent back to us (Canada), or it can mean simply that the berries were grown in the U.S. and shipped to be packaged in Canada, Nova Scotia.

I know the former is what happens to a lot of the cranberries grown here in British Columbia. They are grown here and then sent to the Ocean Spray company in the U.S. and then shipped back to us as a "U.S. product".

I'm sure there's a name for this, but don't know what it is. Boomerang exports?

It's strange, but at least not as bad as having the wherewithal to grow some of the finest, tastiest garlic in your own province, and instead importing the blandest, most pathetic garlic from China. (I'm sure China is capable of growing good garlic but shipping that distance requires produce that can endure the travelling. The more like styrofoam the better.)

There's a name for that and I know it. It's called profit margin.

By the way, tomorrow, October 12th., is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

I'm grateful for a lot of things; things that, once I start counting, shed all their relation to numbers, for I see the things expanding out to eternity, and gaining a value that I cannot comprehend.

Saskatchewan

For as long as you were to stay in Saskatchewan, one thing would never, never, happen. You would never get vertigo.

That assurance has always been somewhat absent in the sheer, sheer, sheer, undulating chorus of primal rock and pine and fir that reaches to the floors of the clouds in British Columbia. The beauty of those mountains borders on the realm of nightmare. For myself, a B.C. native (not aboriginal), the awe of our mountains (when driving along them) has always gone with a modicum of unconscious vertigo.

This mild vertigo comes especially when you come at a curve, and it's not the actual sheerness or drop-off of the curve you are driving on so much as the sight of the neighbouring mountain on the other side of the valley: you are looking straight at its midway face (which is at such an odd distance as to be distant but not distant enough to render a full overview of the mountain), with its multitude of timber-spires, and you realize you yourself are on a "midway" face. Then the feeling comes. This sense of not fully knowing your grounding, that it could all come down, and you will only know falling and falling and falling. To look up at the naked summits does not help in this regard; it really does take your breath away.

While I would rank the beauty of British Columbia as my personal first love before any other province, Saskatchewan surprises me. She is a province of essences.

There is not one corner of the world that could forever refute the begging of the painter. Everywhere and any place, were it given the time, could be begged by the painter to beg him to paint it. This is a roundabout way of saying: there is no corner of the world that can for long withhold "inspiration" from the artist.

If the entire world is a "studio" for the artist/painter, then Saskatchewan is the artist's retreat center. It's too easy a temptation to say that it is boring and monotonous. (Canadian jokes abound in this matter)

No. This seeming blankness, to eyes that persist, will suddenly give huge glimpses of a hyper-light - the light that sustains things in every passing second. The landscape is pregnant with it. It suddenly blushes at high pitch way yonder at the last gentle curvature in the fields before the haziness beyond. There will be a bordered plain raised ever so subtly at an angle towards you, and all over it is the repetition of pristine hay bales that, accumulatively, have that slightly disturbing exactitude of Faerieland.

Indeed, Faerieland is everywhere in Saskatchewan. You know it when one robust round tree comes at you in early evening, and there are no other trees around. And the textures in the mere grasses and wildflowers and wayside shrubs. The way the varying kinds of flowers grow along the sides of the roads like a purposeful lining. The all-white but weathered, fungied look of some large bull, like monumental stone resting in the grass. O, all those desiccated little barn shacks or storage sheds and keeling leftovers of fences! A painter's haven.

An artist's electrical haven - for danger is here too, just when you think all that space would free you from it. That is, in point of fact, when it becomes most dangerous. A place of essences does not bide one's forgetfulness with a lot of patience.

I was cruising in the late sunny morning around a curve along those plains. And in the dipping, wide, grassy middle section between the two main roads that run east and west, there was a semi-truck, flipped fully on its side. The long box trailer was still attached and also flipped on its side. Around the truck at various points were three or so parked vehicles. As I came round the curve there was a man with a straw hat, who had mounted on to the side of the semi-truck, and he was opening the door like the hatch of a trunk, and looking down inside.