Berry Foraging, My Pemmican Project, and Ugly Fish

I have no shame in saying that the constant daily influx of being mindful of the presence of lockdowns, the masking up, the event postponements, the extra measures for social distancing, the death tolls on the news, concern for family and friends, the ineptitude of some leaders and governments, and some of the willful ignorance of the public in general, to deal with this matter responsibly and seriously, are all making it harder for me to avoid a depressed state. Today is Day 2 of a 4-Day weekend for me. There’s offerings and opportunities for overtime abound coming to me, but I am not tempted at all to take any right now. I poked into work to take OT during my last 4-day weekend, and it did me no good at all in retrospect. A four day weekend happening every six weeks is the only positive trade-off I have after my schedule had been jumbled around as it has since the Covid-19 measures took effect. It’s (allegedly) summer, and I should be using these days off wisely.

However, yesterday was a day that I felt I didn’t play out so well in being wise, at least in the beginning of it. I had absolutely no energy or motivation to do anything constructive for much of it, but I did force myself to move. I thought of going fishing, but the prospect of facing a stampede of ticks charging at me through the rushes and grass along the river shore near my favoured spots wasn’t anything I wanted to contend with right then. Mid-July is the beginning of canning season for me typically. I did brew up some Watermelon Rind Pickles, but there was no heart in that task: it felt more like a job of being stringent to stop household wastage rather than an act of pride of creating a homemade culinary pleasure. Something reduced to a menial cleaning duty, like mopping a floor, or scouring a toilet.

Mid-July here is also Saskatoon berry season, and, even though again my energies and instincts didn’t feel right, I forced myself to try a bit foraging around some spots where I correctly guessed that there would be an abundance of bushes - to at least feel a little more useful and productive. However, it wasn’t very fruitful - literally. I also correctly guessed that they would have also had been picked over already by other foragers, since shutdowns have made it more likely that some of those without work were more resourceful in using the extra time to snoop around for free seasonal food. Surprisingly, I managed not to invoke furious swarms of mosquitoes as I rustled through the bushes, being so close to the river, but an hour or so in the oppressive humidity was enough, and I tapped out. The few odd good berries that were left were sparse, some were already becoming desiccated, and amidst puny immature ones that only birds would take interest in. I combed the area, working along for at least a kilometre southward, to only get a yield of about 400 grams of berries of mediocre quality.

I tried not to allow all this effort to become another senseless waste of time. These saskatoons were not of any size or quality to be usable for dessert fare like pies; too miniscule of quantity to use for jam. I found the thought of working an hour to make what would amount to a couple of fruit smoothies ridiculous.

The thought of another possible use for them struck me as ridiculous: making pemmican. The ridiculous part being that I lived all my life here in this province, and I have never once sampled any sort of pemmican. It’s now considered to be an archaic foodstuff, heading down the road of dietary obsolescence, like many other food traditions that have become obscured and extinguished since the advent of modern refrigeration, and food preservation science. I can forgive myself, and I won’t be too self-critical about that kind of ignorance on my part. Very few people here, in fact, even amongst those who are of native ancestry or Métis, from which it originated, have ever sampled pemmican in this modern age. When I shared this idea with my girlfriend, she looked at me with the expression like she saw the needle on my weird-o-meter flip over into the red zone, that mirrored a conclusion that the Covid situation is turning her poor boyfriend into some sort of crazy, paranoid, doomsday prepper*. That seems to be the only isolated subculture remaining that is taking a serious interest in making pemmican; if not eating it, then storing it in some bunker somewhere, where it awaits them for Armageddon. That is really kind of a shame, because it’s something that would be an honestly true local Canadian/Saskatchewan food: a meat preservation technique that has been used to sustain the indigenous people here for centuries, if not millennia, but not readily adopted for our modern culture here in Western Canada. I’d like to see it be given some more due respect as a food with some historical significance and cultural identity for this province. I’m not saying that it has to be made popular again, but the technique for making it should be at least given some honour, and be preserved for posterity, like the rest of those so-called pioneer recipes that were collected for the sake of the history of the communities of our province. 

So, out of my own scientific and anthropological curiosity, I decided to commit to this project. It comes as a disappointment to my girlfriend, who I’m sure would have rather preferred that I try make her some scones with those few saskatoons I found.

Making pemmican merges techniques of preservation that intersect the making of sausage and jerky. It’s simply made of lean, dried meat; mixed with mashed, dried berries, maybe with salt if it was available; blended and coated with melted tallow. After that, it is then pressed, formed, wrapped, and when packed in an air-tight container, it’s one of these foods that can last nearly forever (if kept dry) without further need of resources to preserve it (hence why preppers really dig this stuff). It is a food that’s energy-dense (without any carbs/added sugar) and protein-rich, and also readily portable and easy to cache without refrigeration, or other sophisticated method of storage. That was the appeal of it to the indigenous peoples, and later to the traders, trappers, and frontiersmen in the early days of settling in this territory. It’s as perfect a food that can be made for the practical purpose of enduring the rigours of outdoor living and/or a hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle: be it grunting along portaging canoes, chasing down your next meal in the bush or on the plain, or just for plainly and simply surviving in an uninsulated, flimsy walled, collapsible, portable shelter during the worst of weather inclemency. As a diet food, you can’t get more Paleo than something that was actually crafted since the Stone Age.

I have actually tried to make pemmican once before in my lifetime. It was back when I was in the sixth grade in school. Making “pemmican” was part of our social studies class project when we were learning a bit of the aboriginal culture and history of our province. We used hamburger and saskatoon berries mashed together the “traditional way”, by using rocks, but the drying process failed completely. I remember afterward, as a result, we had containers full of horrible, maggot-festered, slimy, rotting mush; with a gag reflex-triggering stench. It was definitely a moment where that could have dissuaded me forever from ever being curious about it again.

Traditional forms of pemmican aren’t just restricted to bison and other wild meat - but can also made of something that required more of an acquired taste. I was made aware more recently of a sort of fish pemmican made by the northern Dene people of this province. The substance in question, if I remember right, is something called “losh”. When first told about this, I was uncertain if it referred to the fish used, or the recipe for its preparation. The Dene method of making this stuff involves taking the big, fatty liver from fish we call a mariah (pronounced the same as the first name of the singer Mariah Carrey). It’s also known by the other names, varying regionally, of burbot, or ling)**. I’ve always known it being called by the first name I mentioned. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a freshwater relative to cod, with a fat, flat, frog-like looking head with a lower barbel on it, and an eel-like tail. As far as native species of fish in this province go, this one isn’t likely ever going win any beauty contests. It’s an icky dull brownish colour, and it’s about as ugly looking as a pail full of smashed assholes. Anyway, this creature’s liver is mixed and mashed together with dried cranberries, and perhaps some parts of its pulverized flesh. The rest of the process and details of preparing it is of no interest or consequence to me because I’m quite sure that I would never fucking ever eat such a thing anyway. I won’t knock its possible nutritional benefits though. It’s probably a very potent and practical nutritional powerhouse, loaded with all the same vitamins that cod-liver oil supplements have. Sensible to eat in a Northern area where plant-based vitamins are lacking most of the year. The point is that its preparation/composition has the common elements as that of pemmican: basically some sort of mix of flesh, dried berries, and animal fat. Apart from that, I imagine and assume that the traditional way of adding some seasoning and flavouring to food in the pre-colonial times for the aboriginal people was pretty much limited to just using salt or wood smoke.

Getting back on track. I decided to start this project today. There was no set method amid any of the recipes and techniques I reviewed online, so I’m jury-rigging my own from the bits and pieces found that accord to the materials I have in my kitchen.

Meat, salt, and saskatoons

I originally thought I was going to make my first pemmican trial as authentic as possible and use bison meat. However, even a modest quantity of bison meat costs a mint, and it would be a shame to have a possible failure result with such a great expense. So, I opted for the leanest beef I could find: some trimmed eye of round, using about two kilograms worth, accounting for the fact that the weight will shrink to about half or more once I dry it. The melted tallow component is actually beef suet. If you are already feeling repulsed, and going “Ewww!”, and are of British ancestry, I remind you that there is such a thing as suet pudding in the English gastronomical circle. The butcher I visited told me that there is little difference between the two, and process of rendering it would probably be easier. I got myself a kilogram of that to render down (using my slow-cooker). That, plus my 400 grams of berries, mashed and muddled with about 2 tablespoons of salt were my total ingredients. I sliced the beef pieces to about a 5 millimetre thickness. I coated them with the mashed and salted saskatoon berries. I placed some on an even single layer on a mesh drying rack in the oven at 225 degrees F (107 degrees C) for several hours. The rest of the slices that would not fit on that rack were put in my food dehydrator. 

I dried the pieces until they were about half their original volume, and quite rigid and no longer sticking to the rack surface. Using my hand meat grinder, I then ground down that stuff and got a yield of about 750 grams of berry/meat component. I rendered off enough suet for about an equal weight of it to make a 1:1 mixture. I blended it together while the liquified suet was still warm. I got a consistency in the mixture that looked like a thick lumpy pudding. I lined rectangular containers with wax paper, poured it in these molds, and allowed the mix to set and cool. I used a paper towel to blot off some excess grease from the surface of my cooling pemmican bricks.

Suet added to the mix.
The bowl on the right is the
remaining cracklings from the
rendered suet. They won't be
wasted. I'll add them as filler for
my next sausage-making project.

Rectangular containers lined with
wax paper to form my "bricks".
It makes this operation look
somewhat illicit!

The finished product all set and wrapped up.
One innovation I used for forming (not exactly
traditional) was a homemade wooden press used
for making sushi.

If you are as crazy or adventurous to copy what I’ve been doing, know this. Beef fat hardens quickly and is more waxy than it is oily/greasy. Never dispose of hot beef fat down your sink! Unless you want a visit from your plumber. I haven’t done this myself, but I felt compelled to warn people who might be silly enough to try to do that. Wipe and scrape off as much of the splatters and excess residues from your surfaces, bowls, and utensils and dispose in the garbage before you wash them.

My Verdict: The process was a lot more labour intensive than just making straight up jerky or even making sausage. I found it to be a bit messier than those processes. The texture after it finished setting was kind of waxy, as could be expected. I have not actually tasted it yet; I’m waiting for a bit of biochemical magic to happen first. I stored most of the bars in my freezer except for one. That one is the smallest of them which I kept out in room temperature that will be used as sort of a sacrificial scientific assay, to see and monitor if, or when, any decomposition does occur. If so, how long will it take place? I’m also curious, given that there are sugars in the berries trapped in an anaerobic environment, if any sort of secondary fermentation process will happen, as like when dextrose is added to salamis that are hung to air dry and be preserved that way by sort of being pickled in the residual alcohol internally, which also gives them a signature flavour.

If I dare myself to make this stuff again, I think my next berry ingredient will be some further reduction of a blueberry jam that I made that did not set and was thence rebranded “blueberry syrup” to recover from my failure. I also have dried juniper berries which could be interesting. I saw a version with honey added, another forever food, which may help with its conservation.

I’m now curious as to how to use it culinarily, apart from just whittling away at a bar of it and eating it off the knife while camping in the bush somewhere, or while ice fishing, or keeping a bar of it packed in a winter roadside emergency kit in your car’s trunk. I imagine it could be used the same way as being set on a charcuterie platter, or the same way Ukrainians (from the old country) traditionally eat salo (smoked/salted raw pork lard), i.e. with bread, pickles, and vodka. Who knows? Avenues of further innovations could start from here.

*- Not so, I just need to pull myself out of my blue funk with something novel to do.

**-Taxonomical Name: Lota lota. That seems fitting for a fish that’s a whole lota ugly. Whatever you chose to call it, it is one of the more disgusting living things you could ever pull out of a lake in Saskatchewan aside from leeches. My problem with this fish isn’t really with some prejudice against its appearance, but rather after having caught a few these from several winters of ice fishing, I’ve too often seen many come up through the ice riddled with little gray-white parasitic worms that are clinging to their bodies. A consequence of its habit of occasionally burrowing in the silt and muck of a lake or river bottom. It certainly thus doesn’t make the thought of willingly eating one of these things any more appealing, although some who are bold enough to eat these things swear and claim that there is a bit of a lobster-like flavour to them.

Winter-ruption

Some people have the habit of immersing themselves into their Sunday morning with their coffee, and leisurely reading the weekend paper. I’m noticing that since the year began that I seem to be immersing myself into my Sunday morning with my coffee in hand, and pretending as if I were writing for a newspaper.

There were unwelcome strange things going on throughout the week since last entry, mostly confined to my personal life for me to deal with beginning the moments I came home after work on more than one occasion, but thankfully these tricky things didn’t mushroom into anything more wild or intensely serious. They included: my building almost catching on fire, another threat of infestation, and my poor little pooch getting injured. Of all those, my dog’s health was/is my greatest concern. She is healing: slower than I want, of course, but at least she’s not deteriorating for the worse. I’m happy that the week ended better with new interesting experiences, and overall soothing transitions. It has been a good weekend to shake off some of the mid-winter blues, which included crawling out of my hermit hovel for a change, and being a little more social. I got myself a ticket for sporting event, which I deemed to be a kosher purchase despite some new project ambitions, which I’ll cover more about sometime in my next entry.

I checked out my first lacrosse game on Friday evening. The Sasktel Centre arena was packed. The Saskatchewan Rush played the Buffalo Bandits. Unfortunately, the Bandits earned their team name too well, first stealing away what was an initially impressive and massive lead by the Rush, coming hard and overtaking them to come to a tie, and then stealing the game away in overtime, 16-15. An epic comeback for them (uncelebrated here, of course), and an embarrassing downturn for us. It was only the Rush’s first loss of the season though - small potatoes. It was still worth the effort to go, and I’d check out at least one more game for the season. Again, I write this next part for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. The game originated in this nation (actually long before we became a nation) centuries ago by the Iroquois tribal first nations out east. Anthropologically speaking, it was evidence that the development of such a game was an indication of less reliance on nomadic hunting and gathering, and the preference to adopt permanent settlement and the deployment of agriculture. Leisure time appears more with the fixation of working around seasons in one place, and acting out non-lethal ways to practice martial tactics through team sports also evolves*. However, despite it being our official national sport, it fell into obscurity in our cultural scene for a long while. It lost out somehow to hockey and to curling, in terms of popularity as a spectator team sport in these modern times, or at least there has never been a Lacrosse Night in Canada televised on CBC during our nation's formative sports media years. The more novel and esoteric team sport of broomball** (another rink sport invented here, because we have way too much fucking winter to deal with) even became a more popular community sport around here during my early years than Canada’s official national sport, lacrosse. Lacrosse still has been around, but it just hasn’t really been popular as a big-time league field sport until it had been recently re-hyped somehow, and has been making a grand resurgence, thankfully avoiding a sort of extinction from our identity.

I don’t know, or couldn’t guess, as to how or why lacrosse became so diminished in popularity, and a lesser meme of the field/arena/rink team sports played in this nation to begin with. Perhaps it lacked the display of brute strength of football, or the more extreme speed and sometimes pugilistic action that ice hockey has, or perhaps it wasn’t as cerebral, or loaded with enough focused and refined, single-pointed calculated target finesse that curling has in satisfying the other end of the spectrum of stimulation through spectatorship. Sadly, I believe that it wasn’t more strongly popularized throughout our history really because white guys originally from Britain or France didn’t come up with the idea first. It looks like something that Dr. Seuss may have invented. It sometimes gets tricky to follow the plays, as the ball isn’t out as much in the open as a hockey puck is, hidden in racket netting as players are trying to deek each other out, so it can be definitely harder to track. Maybe that's why it got harder to promote and sell through radio and then television, when these media forms were in their infancy: the technical issue of reporting and recording where this elusive ball was throughout a game. The extra dimensional axis along the field of play makes it as interesting, if not more so, than ice hockey. More hand-eye coordination is involved with it perhaps than hockey in that respect. Even if I were younger, I know that I’d have a real challenge playing it. I wish success not only for our team, but also to the league as a whole.

Another newly hyped outdoor game/sport for this winter-ruption season in the city that I’m checking out this weekend is Crokicurl. You can’t get much more Canadian in a game than this: taking a table game that originated in this country, something I’ve played a few times in some dingy, up-in-the-sticks barrooms (Crokinole); a game, as with darts, where one’s prowess is tested and tempered by making it even more challenging yet for one’s fine motor skills with heavy alcohol consumption, and then making an augmented version of it to play on a post-studded ice surface using curling stones for counters. What a concept! No doubt, some form of inebriation or intoxication had to be in progress as the heads came together to create this fusion of these two games. It’s so simple, and perfect! I also can’t really believe that we’ve been so stupid as to not come up with this idea a lot sooner for around these parts. Oh well, better late than never for this heroic flash of innovation. Sponsorship for this bar game come outdoor spectacle, especially from the local brewers and distilleries, i.e., those who could have some sway in allowing drinking in public, could really help it to take off in popularity during this most wretched of the yearly seasons. Hey, and why not just loosen up a bit more about drinking outside in public in the middle of bloody winter as well for special events like this? Especially considering that things are getting lax enough around here where weed is going to become legal by next summer. Hell, I bet the newly forming cannabis corporations here may also want a piece of this sponsorship action. It might be even more entertaining watching these “athletes” trying to play this while they are completely high***. It could potentially be the new stoner outdoor winter sport (not unlike snowboarding, which already holds such a distinction), that can get more involvement and appeal from the lesser-than athletic types. It will be interesting to see how this thing evolves as another one of our national wintertime leisure activities.

It's all hype folks: a sport doesn't become a sport nowadays without it. Pulling a new one out of obscurity and making it fly off the ground with popularity seems now to be impossible to do without commercial sponsorship. 

*- Non-lethal is not always the case. The Aztecs had fully adopted agriculture and civilization too, and consequently developed their own basketball-like team sport called ullamaliztli, a game that died out right along with them. Maybe it’s popularity didn’t take off so well because the losers of the game were offered as human sacrifices to their pantheon of gods. Hard to the develop teams if they are constantly being physically eliminated by getting their hearts torn out. Let's just say that their PR folks kind of didn't give this a serious think through for promotional purposes.

**- Broomball: an ice rink sport believed to have been invented right here in Saskatchewan (first official recording of it being played is in the community of Perdue). Played sort of like hockey, except with using an implement resembling a broom to whack a ball around (hence the name, like, duh!). Comparing it to hockey is like comparing (American/Canadian) football to rugby. There’s no special padding like hockey, and specially soled shoes are worn instead of skates. You need some sure footing as you run along the ice, but you may get the advantage of some added extra traction by occasionally trotting over someone's missing teeth. It can be even more pugilistic than hockey, as I’ve seen in some goonfest matches of it in the past. Maybe it's because there’s less a lot padding to punch around, and there is a decided advantage in being able to base and balance a striking posture more easily to scrap, drift, and coldcock a guy on ice while wearing shoes rather than skates. It's what makes one who is being a broomball goon even distinctively more of a lowdown dirty psycho bastard than as such in hockey in comparison. It would be great, if not miraculous, if this actually got recognized as a sport fit for the Winter Olympics, other than seen as the lowbrow hybrid spawn of hockey/rugby that it could be. 

***- I’m sure at this point of reading this composition of crazy ramblings, that some may think that I do marijuana myself. I honestly do not. My limited alcohol consumption (because of medical reasons) is enough of a vice as it is; I don’t need anything else beyond that. Personally, my life wouldn’t change when cannabis becomes legal here, except probably dealing with issues as a steward about the grey areas when it comes to interfering with work performance in others on the job. I would treat it as a medicine (one that I probably can’t take anyway due to contraindications with my other treatments), and nothing more than that. I am, however, pro-legalization; more so for the reasons that I believe a strengthened hemp-production economy and industry makes for an inroad toward more sustainable ways of environmental and ecological preservation, and will ultimately lead to less taxed and stressed healthcare, law-enforcement, and corrections systems.

Winter Solstice 2016

It's the day with the longest night of the remaining year, which has only 10 days left in it now. I still haven't made any significant effort to do any gift shopping yet for Christmas . . . shame on me. I thought I'd procrastinate yet some more with making another entry. I thought the previous one would be the final one for the year, but instead I'll make it the penultimate one. I sheepishly admit that I woke up right at sunrise (9:15 AM here) on what is already the shortest day of the year. Judging on that, I guess I'm already not too ambitious to do much with the rest of this day. After a copious volume of coffee just to open my eyes, I then finally finished the last stages of piecemeal piddling around with catching up on correspondence, and re-integrating the rest of my digital music library to cloud storage to play with all my Bluetooth devices (whoopy-doo). While doing that, I found some celebratory music for the day. The perfect sort of musical selection I picked out to make a uniquely sort of pagan-esque Canadian celebration of the coming of this solstice day is the progressive rock album 2112 by Rush  (21/12, today's date, get it?). The word "solar" is uttered a few times (in a voice that isn't in Geddy Lee's regular constricted-genitals sounding timbre) within the opening 20 minute overture. It seemed appropriate given that today marks a solar phenomenon.

It makes me wonder, how we (we, as in people like me who are of Northern/Central European heritage) would celebrate this time of year if Christianity, or any of the other two Abrahamic religions, didn't dominate or influence the ethno-cultures of this part of the hemisphere, and we remained true to more pagan beliefs*. The Celtic, or Germanic tribal holidays, like that of Yule (Jul) probably would take over. We've already incorporated so many of those pagan traditions into the Christian Christmas ethos. Like the author Jared Diamond**, I'm a believer in the theory that we are like any other animal: our biology and geography is our destiny. I believe that it would be just an automatically instinctual thing to build on traditions to make things look greener and brighter to counter the dullness, cold, and darkness of the year, to decorate such that it makes things look more alive and life-giving. We'd do what we could to get extra calories and fatten up for the colder season; we'd feast a lot. We'd drink more, play games, and do whatever it took to make more social merriment and fellowship, just like we tend to do now to stave off and slake away boredom and depression through the cold and darkness. I speculate that there would be very little difference in the appearance of the solstice holiday from what Christmas is now throughout these colder, darker latitudes of the Earth. If Christmas, or its precursors, never existed at all, given the environment we are in, we'd be doing a lot to make up some sort of winter festivities in lieu of it.

It also makes me wonder: if attempted European colonization was destined to occur on this continent in this alternate historical timeline, where Christianity wasn't an affixed part of Occidental culture,
would there have been other or better attempts to integrate solstice traditions with the Aboriginal cultures here, with the spirit of that we all live under the same sun, or would those native traditions be swept away like so many others with the rise of colonialism? It makes me wonder what that would look like. The Vikings*** who settled at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland around a millennium ago, probably were the closest historical precedent for this paradigm (in this country, if we indeed became a country) in which they were the primary holders of such traditions. However, that didn't go over so well, and no (accurate) written records exist about the process of the settlement. Their colony collapsed: either by famine, disease, or from conflict and hostilities with the indigenous people, who may have eradicated the entire Nordic settlement, or other maladaptive factors, before it could have a chance to thrive and evolve. This sounds like a theoretical element of the PC game Civilization VI to test, play out, and observe.

I explain it this way to my readers who aren't Canadians. Making this land we call Canada a more tolerable and habitable place to endure throughout the winter with festivities has been a natural and necessary thing to do to as a cultural meme for European colonization to have a foothold here throughout this nation's history: from the times when the Voyageurs and Coureurs du Bois established L'Ordre de Bon Temps (the order of good cheer), that is to make provisions for the means for social recreations a mandatory thing by the fur trading companies, to quell the rigours of winter. to hockey leagues and curling clubs, right up to general making a prolonged Christmas season compared to most other nations.

I didn't realize just how deeply Canadian I was, a true product of my environment, until I spent my first Christmas in a tropical country. It was just too weird and unnatural for me to process for that season. It made me feel quite homesick back then. I was getting strange looks and responses from people, who never experienced a day colder than 25 degrees Celsius, as I explained them how much I was missing my sub-zero temperatures, and the snow and frost covered vistas, as I sat on some beach or drank at some outdoor café. I couldn't find a way for it make sense to them, or to myself either for that matter. I really do need my cold and snow for the yuletide season. Winter, as much as I can hate it at times, is just engrained in me that much. It makes me think of the new immigrants, who are coming from mostly the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, from desert, tropical, or more equatorial latitudes who are having the same degree of challenge of adapting to this climate and holiday season.

So, for those who celebrate whatever cultural event or religious holiday amidst or surrounding the solstice season, like Christmas, Hanukah, Aboriginal/Wiccan Solstice Day, the release of another Star Wars movie****, etc., take care, have a blast with it, but also be responsible.

*- I should add that thoughts like these have been prompted by entertaining myself with more than one alternative history scenario with a.) playing the Wolfenstein: The New Order video game, with a storyline where the Nazis end up taking over the world, and b.) re-reading 1984, by George Orwell; though fictional, it's a sobering book everyone should read and to note the parallels that are occurring now with the manipulation of the truth in the media, the end of privacy, and the assertion of a military-industrial complex moving toward totalitarianism keeping us in a state of perpetual war and conflict. 
**- His book, Guns, Germs and Steel, is the best book ever written for a concise overview of cultural anthropology, and global human sociological development and evolution of civilizations: from our rise as homo sapiens, to our continental migrations and colonisations.
***- Watching tonight's episode of Vikings and the debate between King Egbert and Ragnar about Heaven and Valhalla was also a prompt for me to write these thought experiments with alternative histories that model/result in a non-Christian medieval Europe.
****- It's valid to include that. There are a lot out there who (sadly) are going to find a more spiritual experience for themselves watching this modern folklore than appreciating the other traditional holidays.

A Road Trip to 65 MYA

There should be no way that I should be disliking any of my vacation time; yet I have been. Four days passed into my stretch of time off, and I was finding it all pointless. The weather forecasts since Canada Day have been a 100% chance of cloudy/rainy suck-ass, as well as tornado watches in effect at times. Although I’ve been eating well, one can eat only eat so much, accounting for only a small fraction of a day. Medications disallow me from drinking the necessary volumes of booze that would actually put me in my happy place. I can only drink so much coffee at the coffeehouses that I feel very little need to frequent: just sitting there, watching other people brood about things has no entertainment value. I was becoming angered with getting interference from what are still work related calls over last weekend. I dipped into what is my all-too-massive personal syllabus of reading material (science and non-fiction mostly); I overdid it and consequently suffered too much eye strain from having my nose in too many books.

I spent most of the following Monday feeling wounded, the source of that being from having a dental appointment that morning. I didn’t have the sense to book a time outside of my vacation days. As per usual, the dental hygienist performing the cleaning service managed to poke at each and every special acupressure combination of nerve endings along my gingiva, which made me feel like I was being repeatedly struck in the face with a pick axe throughout the ordeal. A migraine ensued after and stayed with me for rest of the afternoon. More time wasted; not a good vacation day. I suppose it wasn’t enough to already feel like a luckless loser for the day. I went to the casino later in the evening to have it confirmed. I lost most of the small stakes that I thought acceptable to part with, and that time passed quickly. I realized then that I had to do something else with myself than handling kitchen knives, reading/screen-watching, or waving bye-bye to my hard-earned money at the slots and roulette table. I saw that another staycation was going to shove me into a pit of misery. Lunch with my friend on Tuesday gave me a little time to decompress as I examined my situation. I was made to see afterward that I have always been shirking travel off in the guise of being responsible. Another reason is that there isn’t much fun doing it alone anymore; or I’ve been hating my own company enough to the point where I am starting to bore myself: a symptom of something very wrong, I think. Whatever the case, I found myself really having to leave this town, badly.

I packed a few essentials; Ella happily joined me in the car. As I didn’t have any real plan, I chose to visit my folks first. If I got nothing else done, I would have at least spent some time with them. Wherever else I decided to go to, the Battlefords is not too far out of the way as a jump off point: a better one if going north was feasible, and an acceptable loss in highway time if I had to retrace any route back through and past home. I used Wednesday afternoon, watching the news and weather channels, formulating things. The process for narrowing down my destination decision was as such:

1.       The Weather Corridor – Forecasts for rain were for the north and east, and I was getting chased by funnel cloud warnings from the southeast. That left me with west or southwest if I wanted to find someplace without inclemency.

2.       Geographical Variation – the idea of a vacation is going to someplace that doesn’t look like home. Some people are content enough with walking into another room for a change of scenery. Other people, like me, need the entire landscape to change to feel like they’ve gotten away and escaped to someplace. That’s a tough deal when one has been an inhabitant in an area smack dab in the middle of the Canadian parkland/prairie . . . a region that’s so expansive. There is the Boreal forest, but as I said, weather wasn’t making going north an ideal choice, neither was my lack of camping gear. The next closest options for going southwest were: Cyprus Hills (with an elevation as high as that in Banff), or the Badlands. Next factor . . .

3.       My Six Hour Driving Radius – six hours in a crammed in a vehicle in a day seems to be my absolute limit. After that, I start having some adverse psychological effect from it, especially when I’m the one driving. If I have bad company with me as a follow passenger, then it’s triply worse. They risk being punched out and then abandoned in some ditch in the middle of nowhere if they exhibit too many marked signs of stupidity or impudent assholery for each and every minute approaching hour six, crammed in a vehicle with me. Life is short. I travel to see new places and experience new things; so sitting in a metal box (with toxic people), like a goddamned trapped rat, longer than necessary, is wasted time. The trip between Saskatoon and Calgary is an example of the longest one I can endure by car. If longer than that, then I fly; using only three hours or so to take me to places in this country much further away with less overall cost, hassle, and energy needed to attend to driving. I’ll happily spend more money to buy more time to stay off a road. The whole issue of me now being more prone to idiopathic thrombosis and blood-clotting makes the matter of prolonged periods sitting/immobility a more genuinely serious reason to avoid extra long of car rides. Cyprus and the Badlands fall within that six-hour radius from the Battlefords.

4.       An Act of Rebellion Against Ignorance – as I sat with my Dad, switching to the channel with Wheel of Fortune for him to watch (and Jeopardy for me after), I caught the last few minutes of the CBS nightly news which showed a story that disgusted me as a person who appreciates progress and education in science. I watched this story about some guy in Kentucky, who built a supposedly full scale replica of Noah’s Ark for an amusement site. It cost millions to get this thing made. The guy who founded this project is a self-proclaimed Creationist, who truly believes that the Earth is only 6000 years old or so, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed together. He actually has models of dinosaurs penned up along with other contemporary species in this excessively ridiculous display. He, as an employer, actively discriminates by making the workers there sign some sort of “statement of faith” to prove that they are “Christian” enough to work there. He goes so far as to say that evolution is a “junk science”, and this crazy tacky spectacle is the length he is willing to go to refute and take a stand against it. You may just say “pshaw . . . whatever, it’s just a goofy spectacle”. I would agree too if it weren’t for another crazy issue about this damn stupid boat. The most disturbing issue of it for me was that some of the millions that he used to build this wretched monstrosity actually came directly from the state government of Kentucky itself, i.e. the Kentucky taxpayers were pitching in a fortune to have this idiotic thing built. It’s bad enough seeing that Kentucky is regarded as being one of those have-not states in the USA and suffering for it, with fewer resources for better healthcare, and an adequate education system*. To see this kind of insane amount of money (in the high tens of millions) being squandered away by their state government to sponsor the creation of something that takes away from science education and promotes more ignorance to suit the whim of a lobby of biblical-literalist right wing nut jobs** goes far beyond obscene in my mind. How did this guy manage to con some government official to permit him access to this kind of money for such a moronic endeavour? I admit to having some moments of a fantasy after I saw that story - it was that of Neil Degrasse Tyson himself, going over there to pop a cap in the ass of this ignorant bastard perpetuating this nonsense. Thinking about Richard Dawkins storming over to this ark thing, and then beating seven shades of shit out of this fundamentalist huckster with one of the limbs torn off of the animatronic Noah mannequin was an entertaining visualization too. It helped, in a way, to settle the question as to where I was going to go then for my holiday for my narrowed down options. I chose to take a stand! I’d then make a pilgrimage to the Badlands to use my tourist dollars to support science. So, Drumheller ended up becoming my chosen destination.

I heeded my Mom’s advice. She told that I really needed to take some time for myself. It meant surrendering the dog to her care as I went on this trip: so I had one less thing to tend to, and fewer problems, like finding lodgings that take pets. My car stereo quit working, meaning that I had no tunes, or CBC radio to occupy my mind as I drove for so long. I was a sort of on a true pilgrimage: just me, without my dog, driving for a long time, no distractions, being alone with my own thoughts. Stray thoughts slipped into my mind about those of whom I’d love to have riding shotgun with me on such a venture. I thought about where I would go to in the US if I ever took a spontaneous turn to head to the border (that is, if I hadn’t procrastinated and gotten a valid passport). Given the current political mayhem going on down there, the current currency exchange rate, the obscene amount of (recent) gun violence, and the reflection about the types of mindsets I’d be dealing with, like those who would allow and support something like the bizarro Noah’s ark down in Kentucky, any curiosity about finding anything interesting to do in the states extinguished pretty quickly. Those same reasons I just gave for not heading over the border maybe are the same ones as to why I saw so many vehicles with American license plates around where I was touring.

I went to Drumheller a couple times before in my life: once as a kid who was awestruck with dinosaurs, and again as a twenty-something with university classes in zoology still fresh in my head to make me appreciate the experience even more. Now, with a little more life wisdom and knowledge at this stage of life, and some more conscientiousness of how to put big concepts in a whole new perspective, I thought it would do me well to see the place again before I become a fossil myself. Given the things I said before, what else can a nerd who is travelling alone with limited time really do?

I eventually made it there, and after touring the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and scrambling around the Hoo Doos for a while, I went to the first hotel I could find – more accurately, I went to the first hotel I spotted that didn’t look like it was slapped together with pieces of flotsam from a shipwreck. I passed by three other places that fit such a description. This place was a short walking distance from a place that sold cold off-sale beer - a nice bonus. I managed to claim the last of the vacant rooms there. I was given a whole room with two double queen beds. I guess, to the clerk, I looked like the sort that rolls around a lot. I discover that the day after was an event called the Passion Play of the Badlands, happening the next day: apparently, it is an affair that attracts more fundamentalist types from all over the continent, and such goers to this sort of thing snapped up most of the rooms. Aw Shit! Religious nuts to contend with?! I couldn’t help but to be bewildered by the irony of it all: a place with the richest bed of fossil evidence of dinosaurs in Canada, confirming their existence and extinction 65 million years ago, scientifically proving the workings of evolution; being swarmed by a clique of religious people, many of whom still believing in this myth of creationism, like that knob in Kentucky. They probably show this religious theatrical production here, just because out of all the places in Canada, this one perhaps has what looks most like the natural scenery of Golgotha of ancient Judea.

I couldn’t stay to be bothered by all this to witness how cheesy and tacky it would all be. I thought about proceeding to Calgary, but then realized that the Stampede starts the day after. I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of finding a hotel room. Just as well, because my time wasn’t going to be used mingling around in a place celebrating country music and cowboy/rodeo culture***. I spent what little time I had left wandering the hills in the early morning, contemplating and meditating: about the massive explosions of both life and death that occurred here, captured in the layers of sandstone throughout this valley that act as chapters of a book capturing the history of all life on Earth in this region for many aeons. I thought about how I wouldn’t even have been here to witness all this if it weren’t for an asteroid wiping out these monstrous creatures 65 million years ago. If that rock was even a small percentage larger, the likelihood of any life existing on this planet today would be zero. The intricacies of cause and effect being quite overwhelming, as I sat on those rocks, thinking about courses of natural selection and what comes about for each beings’ evolution. All this was pondered, plus a great myriad of other things involving the natural catastrophes involving extinction . . . that are a hell of a lot more interesting and rational than some story of a flood and an old dude on a big boat full of animals.

I returned back to the Battlefords after another long drive. I was happily greeted by my own little dinosaur who was missing me: attacked with eager kisses from the Ellabooboosaurus. I stayed long enough for a reprieve from driving, and helped to do some DIY electrical work installing new fixtures in my folks’ home. I returned to my own place later that evening, happy to use my own bed.

More holiday time is due to me in August, and I’m debating whether or not it will be worth booking a flight somewhere east (if there are any cheap enough); it would be a thing I genuinely would like company for though. The places I have in mind are walking and bike tour intensive.

*- I found an infographic recently on Mental Floss, which compared the education level of each state in the USA which similarly corresponded to the level of education with a world nation on the United Nations Development Index. Kentucky's education level was most similar to that of Honduras.

**- I’m not bashing all religious acts. Pray if you like to: if that, or meditation, really gives you a centred mindset for empowering yourself to do better for yourself and others, I’ll even encourage you to do such things. It all costs nothing to do, and it’s harmless while you are sitting there still and silent doing it. However, when huge sums of government money are being used for propagating mythology as fact, instead of fostering true science education, and being diverted away from more socially valuable “Christian” ways of helping people, like for instance, supporting and equipping care homes for the elderly, sick, and disabled, it obviously becomes an evident problem for everyone. I guess there is no such thing as separation of Church and state down in Kentucky.

***- Some people want to relive the bloody Wild West. I believe in living in a progressive, civilized, and educated one, if you haven’t figured that out already.

Canada Day 2016: Whiskey vs. Schnapps

My stretch of holiday time officially began at 4:05 PM yesterday. It was the kind of day yesterday when all I could do after coming back home, and briefly allowing my dog outside around the block, was to flop on my chesterfield and forbid myself any movement. The hour long nap I was hoping to get at the very least only lasted for about eight minutes after interference by the rudest and most obnoxious of nuisance alarm noise that came from someone’s car, and wouldn’t stop. As it is, I’m already convinced that it was Satan himself who invented the car alarm to begin with; and this one was malfunctioning. It kept switching itself on and off steadily for 20 minutes before I abandoned all hope that the neglectful idiot who owned this particular vehicle would show up to disable it, so I took off out of my place frustrated; trying to use my time a little more fruitfully without anymore annoyances and contention* for the rest of my day.

But today is Canada Day, and a time to reflect on the nation in comparison to the rest of the world. The morning greets me with a bit of a chilly breeze, and a sky full of dark clouds and possibility for rain later. A disagreeable state for this special day for sure. I started off making breakfast the most Canadian way I could: pancakes and bacon; only for the reason to have it serve as a platform to use maple syrup. I don’t really fancy pancakes all that much, but it’s only thing I could make with what I had around here right now. If I could have my patriotic breakfast of choice for the day, if such things were available, given my true appetite (for something less greasy), I would have been more content with some local homemade Saskatoon Jam on some Winnipeg rye toast, maybe poached eggs for protein, and some double-double coffee, perhaps about four cups of it if I want my brain to fly straight right now.

My mind drifts again to subjects of contention. In regards to our nationhood, I reflect on something that really took me totally by surprise. As a Canadian, I’m rather ashamed to admit that I’ve been ignorant about such a matter; it being unbeknownst to me until like just a week or so ago. Recently, I had read a post on Facebook from one of my Danish immigrant friends about how Canada and Denmark are currently, and have been for some while, involved in some sort of conflict. “What?! How so?”, I wondered. How, for shit’s sake, did all this come about? It sounds too crazy to even contemplate! Both Denmark and Canada rank highly as being two of the happiest nations on earth, I believe ranking first and second respectively according to one list. Both are reasonably progressive, I’m sure, in some other human development/social well-being indices. I always thought that there was a good political rapport between us as far as relations between nations go. How could one nation that does delightfully ingenious things like taking its power grid off of fossil fuels, making wonderful beer and cheese, and manufacturing Lego, the best toy ever, get into a snit with this other nation that initiated the idea of a peace-keeping force in the UN, sired Rush, the best power-trio progressive rock band ever, and perhaps even had a hand in helping to liberate the other nation in WWII?

Well . . . it turns out that Denmark and Canada are both trying to lay claim to some frozen rock up in the Arctic Ocean: a place called Hans Island, lying somewhere between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. This silly little island is probably no bigger in area than the schoolyard in my neighbourhood, except it has a lot less on it. It serves no apparent practical use whatsoever, unless for Canada, it may be a great observation point for tracking migrating narwhals and walruses, or else perhaps the Danes secretly found some sort of radioactive isotope on there that would permit them unlimited energy for manufacturing Lego blocks. Whatever the case, possession of this barren little speck on a map is somehow a big enough deal for both nations’ respective royal navies to send patrols up there to secure this place since 1973. The way this dispute is occurring between forces is weirder still. Canada’s navy plants our red and white flag there and leaves behind a bottle of whiskey to stake this place as our territory. Then the Royal Danish Navy comes along, takes down our flag and then props up their red and white banner, taking away the whiskey and leaving behind a bottle of Danish schnapps as a claim to the island, which the Canadian sailors clear away later, and the process is repeated. This place must be really remote and insignificant for Arctic dwellers, even for the Inuit, to bother visiting, because if they knew that there were bottles of booze just lying around on this island, and if it was more accessible, they would be invading the place for sure**. Both nations seem to be opting for the same strategy: of either somehow making the other opponent sailors too pleasantly pissed to want to fight, or just dulled into indifference to care about a stupid chunk of Arctic rock out in the middle of nowhere. As far as conflicts go involving military engagement between nations, it is a strange little affair, and I am l relieved to say that it is as such. It probably makes for the friendliest sort of “battle” for a patch of land that’s currently happening on this Earth right now. It makes one think that if this battle were to escalate or intensify, the resulting dead flesh amidst this conflict of nations would probably (hopefully) just amount to an exchange of Canadian bacon and Danish ham along with the spirits.

There sometimes is a perplexing vagueness involved in trying to find out what it is that gives us as Canadians our own unique national identity. As a natural born citizen here, I still struggle to find all-encompassing adjectives to describe what and who we precisely are. However, the paragraph above is fine example of how things are approached when it comes to conflict here compared to other nations: stand your ground when you must; try to settle things kindly when you are allowed to do so. I’m happy that my greatest nuisances are akin to the noises of car alarms blaring off accidently, or the fireworks bursting off later this evening that will terrify my dog, rather than the sounds of bombs going off around me. In viewing the news as of late, I’m glad that we are a lot luckier in this respect than a lot of other nations.

Tonight, as I view the fireworks from my balcony, hopefully without any rain, I’ll raise one of my glasses of whiskey to any Danes out there and wish a peaceful resolution between us, one way or another, and hope there’s some Dane out there raising their shot of schnapps on his or her national holiday wishing the same. Right now, no one is really hurting from this little conflict, and I hope it stays that way.

*- For the benefit of my friends who use English as their second language, a note about how stupid this language sometimes is. If you are content, it means you are pleased and satisfied; yet if you have contention, it is the complete opposite of that, meaning that one is involved in a dispute, or becoming upset by a disagreement.

**- Let's not kid ourselves: regardless of ethnicity of the people living up there, the higher rates of alcoholism and substance abuse, and fewer available resources for intervention, continue to be the worst of the social ills in the remote and isolated Northern and Arctic communities.

La Loche

I tried to have a good as a weekend as I could, given the horrible events in this province that happened recently. It’s not an incident I want to make a special effort to remember; yet it is one that simply can’t be ignored . . .

This province is a place that’s normally so obscure to most of the rest this globe: except to those who were part of the diaspora of leaving here for grander opportunities, or who still have family settled and rooted here. Lately, there has been a terrible light that has been shone upon us. For those of us who live in this province, which few people on this globe can pronounce, or would care to otherwise bother to find on a map, it’s a spotlight shining most unfavourably, on a remote place with little of anything redeeming to offset its reputation of being a rough spot to live in this province. We are (were) an ordinarily peaceful region in comparison to the rest of the world. Now however, we are no longer exempt from the list of places where violent shooting rampages can possibly occur. Now, a signal of further collapse towards the dark side of humanity in the northern communities and the first nations’ reserve lands is beckoning. This recent result: four dead, several others seriously injured. It’s a harsh glimpse into a community where society is already close-knit yet fragile, where families are already shattered with higher than average rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and suicides. Its isolation and lack of basic amenities and services don’t help either, nor does the clash of cultures, or having a provincial government who is largely dismissive of having mental healthcare, or even healthcare in general, accessible to its citizens; doing what it is doing to dissolve more of what little there is available already. It occurred at a time of year when the trough of wintertime depression is the deepest for most. There simply was less chance and resources for adequate intervention and prevention for things like what happened in La Loche recently. Most people are shocked, saddened, and angered about what happened there. As for me, after considering all the factors at play, it was no longer a question of if things like this could happen there, but a question of when and how severely the outcome would be.

Whether this all stemmed from long term recurring generational community strife and social problems, or simply is a punctuation of this script as a volatile short term mental derangement of one individual is debatable. There are not enough things yet released in the news suggesting how this storm of rampant untamed violence ultimately erupted. All we know for now is that it was a male young offender who did this, meaning under the Young Offenders Act of Canadian law, his name won’t be released to the public. The exact factors, precursors, and triggers of the events in this town will remain in question, as will the more detailed psychiatric profile of the perpetrator. There was some suggestion of bullying going on. As much as I can empathize with that young man given his age for struggling to deal with such an issue, I certainly don’t condone his chosen course of action to deal with it.

Mass shootings were once thought be limited mostly to the domain of that crazy nation downstairs*, with their psychotic fascination and promotion of gun culture, the ridiculous interpretations of their constitution’s second amendment, and the more relaxed regulations for firearm ownership and types of weapons one can own. Now, this insidious trend is appearing in other normally peaceful and civilized nations and societies, albeit (thankfully) in a less frequent degree. Norway, Sweden, Finland have suffered such tragedies in the past decade. Paris France, of course, is still a salient memory. Australia had the Port Arthur incident in the 90’s. Quebec (like École Polytechnique) and Alberta (Taber) are the other provinces in this nation to have had gunmen charging into schools and opening fire.

I can only imagine the sorrow and mood in such a community that has been unwillingly thrust by these circumstances into the view and focus of the whole nation, and to the rest of the world with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of the tragedy in such an international forum like Davos, Switzerland. It’s moment of infamy that won’t ever be erased from the hearts and memories of those who were families and neighbours to the slain and wounded victims. Two teachers were lost, in a place with already precious few positive engaging role models who could have benefited that community. I hope the survivors get the support they need somehow; no simple bandage of financial support is going to make this nightmare go away for them, or reform an already shattered community.

*- To date, the first 25 days of this year of 2016, at this moment, the United States alone has had 786 recorded deaths by guns. That already amounts to more than half of all the gun deaths that occur in Canada for an entire year (an average of roughly 1300 for the past 25 years, according to Statistics Canada). Statistically, you are more likely to be shot to death in the United States than you are to die in a car accident in Canada.

Eleven Weeks Plus A Day: Afterword

The federal election is finally over with for this country, so is the longest stretch of campaigning I have experienced in my lifetime. I’d like to say that it was an easy process for me, but I’ve taken the affair of casting a ballot a lot more seriously than I have in past elections. Social media has evolved such that information overload is everywhere and it becomes hard trying to decide which matters are the most critical to give weight to. It was shameful to see how much trivial crap was dumped into the mix to distract and obfuscate stuff of more importance. I’ve not taken a proactive stance on supporting a favourite. It has been a question of rising against, and not tolerating anything else more corruptive and insidious that has been already going on within the federal government over these past 10 years. The senate scandals, the slashing of services, the disrespect to our veterans, threats to our privacy and civil liberties, the attacks against Unions and organized labour, moves that cripple our Healthcare system, the unprofessional, tactless, and indelicate way aboriginal and other minority issues have been addressed; their being caught in the act of illegal activities in trying to rig the last few elections, are part of just a small sample of it. Our scientists have been basically given gag orders regarding any findings related to climate change under the Harper regime. We, as a public, have been deprived of critical decision making information from Statistics Canada. Harper cut the staff there and lied about the reasons for abandoning the long-form census. My opinion is that when you are in a position of power and become an opponent to data-gathering, objective analysis, and silencing progressive scientific reasoning and inquiry, you are then an enemy and a menace to everyone.

There was something very telling about Harper in some of his words of his final speech at the end of the election night, and the inevitable discord and chaos he could have led this country into with the mentality he had if he was in for four more years.  It is not an exact quote, but his words were in the tune of “. . . We wanted to handle the [government] money as well as Canadians do for themselves.” Those are scary words coming from a Conservative Albertan; I’ll show you why in a minute. He wants to portray that we are stable because there was budget surplus, but with savings shrinking and debt climbing on a personal level for the average Canadian, and climbing steadily during his watch for the past 10 years, that portrayal of economic stability is a total myth.

I don’t like it when people are criticizing governments for going into debt, and yet don’t shine that light on themselves for their own personal financial situation. Citizens and corporations carrying obscene amounts of debt are much of the reason why governments are in debt. Whether it is on a personal or corporate level, people go grovelling to the government, no matter what political stripes: for start-ups, or to bail them out when such ventures fail. It is a simple fact that we, in general as Canadians, have become just greedier, more covetous, and more fiscally irresponsible in the past few years on a personal level. Either that, or we have genuinely come to more dire straits with wages not keeping up with inflation, and then have to rely on incurring debt to bail us out of emergencies. There is validity in both reasons in varying degrees. We have been declining and losing our ethic and ability for saving money since the eighties. With a hint, or even the myth of prosperity, and with a promise or reality of a better income, people don’t save; people instead get more overconfident and reckless about personal spending, relying more on, and abusing buy-now-pay-later strategies. Alberta is supposedly the richest province in Canada; people are making good money there, and yet it is Albertans who hold the highest average household debt out of all the other provinces in comparison: almost double that of the national average from the graph of the 2014 numbers below.

Thus, it pisses me off when Conservatives, especially Albertan ones (like Harper is) are trying to sell the rest of us in this country as to what the economic plan should be. If Harper really wanted to show up at a rally for the interest of being some moral authority and demonstrating fiscal responsibility, he should have went back to his home province, and used his cheesy ‘cha-ching’ sound effects to show what happens every time an Albertan whips out a credit card. Therefore, I really don’t want a prime minister who says he wants to model government spending on that of what the average Canadian does now, because on a whole, the average Canadian is getting progressively worse at managing money . . . especially in Alberta*, where they seem to really suck at avoiding household debt! If he is that out of touch with that fact about what's going on with the average Canadian, a supposed economist no less, it is best that he is gone.

Even though trickle-down economics has been shown to be a complete myth, the Harper mandate endorsed it. Only a bigger wedge gets driven between the rich and the poor. CEO salaries are going up, while more working people are relying on soup kitchens and food banks. On a global level, the news just a few days ago announced officially that the richest 1% of the world’s population now owns more wealth than its remaining 99%, yet we have a Prime Minister that seems to want to support and perpetuate this trend by doing things like sealing the tax files of the wealthiest people in this country. The answer of is simple in regards to the question of “Do I want to see four more years of Harper leadership?” The simple answer is “NO”!

As to the question of who I want representing me for our riding, it was made it easy to eliminate at least one option too. The choices were between four people: the NDP candidate is a lawyer and a community activist, the Liberal has credentials including an award-winning distinguished career in mental health services, the Green Party representative is an actual scientist, who is a consultant for green building projects, and then there is the Conservative runner . . . a friggin’ sportscaster. Can you guess which one I didn’t vote for when considering the serious business of helping to run a country?

My duty is to vote and be wary of what happens after. I earn the benefits if it goes well, and the right to complain and fight for my rights and freedoms to do so if it doesn’t. All I can do is my best to deal with and adapt to the aftermath later. It’s still better than being apathetic and opting not to vote. To not be an active part of democracy is to surrender and be a willing pawn to the whim of a dictatorship. I vow never to let that happen.

I’m glad and proud to say that we as Canadians have collectively gained the sense to drive Harper out of power and bring an end to his tyranny. Harper is out, and Trudeau is in; and now Mulcair and the rest of the NDP have been shorted many seats in the commons. Instead of going on a rant and trying to drum up a witch hunt, or whine about the how the NDP will be more of a loyal opposition than the Conservatives** ever would, I will just say congratulations to the young mister Trudeau, I really do wish him the all best, and hope he and his team at least learned from his father’s, and other predecessors’, mistakes and use those lessons for better governance of the nation. Let's just do what we need to do to reconcile things, so we can move on and have the thing we wanted most when we voted . . . change.

*- I worked and lived in Alberta briefly, long enough to observe that there was definitely a more pronounced gearing towards affluence, and a keeping-up-to-the-Joneses attitude was more visibly and prevalent than what I witnessed at home. Sadly, that same attitude is contagious, and is appearing more and more here in Saskatchewan. So people there generally charge for stuff before earning and then spending. Now oil prices have fallen drastically and layoffs are happening, and now people there who were relying on the one trick pony of the oil-patch are feeling the hurt for their ridiculous over-spending. They really can’t blame their past/current provincial government for it, just themselves and their own greed on a consumer level, although the hard core Conservatives there will try to twist this into some story of villainy due to the action of either the federal Liberals, or provincial NDP governing them now. If Saskatchewan doesn’t smarten up, we’ll feel it too, if we aren’t already.

**- I intentionally dropped the word from their formal title, the “Progressive” Conservatives, because they never really did anything progressive for these last 10 years.     

Learning What Lagom Is

I've been enjoying what might be the last weekend of the year that is fair-weathered enough to partake in enjoying my Sunday morning coffee outside on my deck. I write with mixed emotions. I'm reflecting on an onslaught of information which has been knocking around in my skull since I acquired it from my last conference I attended. I'm saddened that organized labour is coming under such attack from all sides by corporation controlled conservative politicians. How has it come to be that the labour movement has been made to look like such an evil thing, when all the policies that unions are trying to fight for are in the interest of fairness, equality, and access to a better standard of living? I'm at least grateful that the recent transit union lockout in this city was deemed illegal, and that these workers can proceed with their jobs. The impact of it has been making life difficult for many of my co-workers.

I don't usually like to climb on top of soapboxes and start tossing around my opinions on political things. However, I'm stuck with dwelling on the subjects of politics and healthcare, and how both our provincial and federal governments seem to be doing all they can to ruin the whole system, and I feel I have some need to process it all through some writing. It really sickens me to know that here in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Universal Healthcare in this country, which has been noted through the polling of our population as one of our nation's greatest achievements, is now being threatened in various ways by the current provincial and federal governments in the very province from which it was born. Compounded with this is our governments' blatant attacks on the unionized workforces of this province and country. Here are some facts with regard to this province and nation as to the progression of their attempts to erode the healthcare and unionized labour. I could go on and on about the insidious activity of the Harper government: about how he slashed funding and staffing from Statistics Canada and put a gag order on the scientists of Environment Canada in regards to the reality of Global Warning, but I'd like to just remain focused on these things first*:

• Premier Brad Wall spent a ridiculous amount of our tax payers' money to pay a single American consultant to determine how to run the healthcare system instead of consulting directly and working collaboratively for needs assessment with those who actually operate and work in the hospitals and community clinics in this province. Why are we getting administration advice from someone in a nation that: doesn't have the same proportionality of organized labour in the healthcare system as ours does, has the most expensive healthcare costs in the world, no model of Universal healthcare to operate with, and a closer to failing grade in terms of a rating for health care services in a comparison on the international level? Compounded with the expiration of the healthcare expense sharing plan to the provinces set up by the Liberal government 10 years ago, and the Harper government's refusal to renew it, this provincial system will be deprived of several million dollars for our healthcare budget as of this year.
• What reason(s) do businesses and supposedly democratic governments have to really fear and condemn organized labour? Why don't we throw in another nation into the mix for comparison and contrast, someplace where the labour movement is highly present in a democratic country, and then see what kind of hardships are happening there with this extra presence of Unionized labour? So, I did just that. I found out that the nation with the highest percentage of unionized employees is Sweden: one of the countries on this earth that I really like besides my own. I'm using the percentage figure of unionized labour I was given at the conference (67.7%), but I have found other stats with the union membership there as high as 80%. Regardless, in either case,  either figure still makes Sweden the most highly unionized country in the world. I did a three way comparison with Sweden, Canada, and the place where Brad Wall foolishly spent our tax dollars for consultants: the good ol' USA.
  
   

Stat Category	Sweden	Canada	USA
Percentage of Workers affiliated with a Union (2011 -2012)	67.7% (highest in the world)	31.5% (Saskatchewan is province with the highest %age at 35.4%)	11.3%
Health care spending %age of GDP 2011	9.36%	11.81%	17.85% (incidentally, the highest medical expenses of all nations)
World Health Organization rating of Each nation's health system	23rd	30th (but declining)	37th (and declining even faster)
Universal Health Care system	Yes (even plans for coverage for illegal immigrants)	Yes (but being threatened) I learned that Canadians that were even born here and leave the country for a long time are subjected to denial of services	No
Human Development Index Score (Ranking) of 2006	0.949 (4th)	0.949 (4th) tied with Sweden	0.944 (10th)
Nation's rating in highest average longevity	8th	11th	34th
Percent population living below the poverty line	3.7%	9.4%	15%
Average Disposable Income after taxes (in USD, 2014)	$3,181.11	$2,773.50	$3,258.85
Corruption Perception Index (the higher the score the cleaner the government) Maximum good score is 100	89	81	73
Crime: Prison Population Rate (prisoners per 100,000 people)	57 (159th in the world)	118 (129th in the world)	707 (2nd in the world, also ranked number 1 nation for having the largest population of incarcerated people)
Paid Maternity Leave	420 days, 80% of wages paid	52 weeks (365 days), 55% of wages paid	No national program, but some benefits varying state to state. In 1993, a national provision of 12 weeks unpaid leave enacted
Free University	Yes	No	No

 
What can we learn from this?

• A country that makes it easier to people to access education seems to have less of a need to incarcerate them.
• More investment in starting a child off in life with receiving the proper care might have a lot to do with keeping this person out of jail as an adult
• A greater unionized population seems to have less, or tolerates less, corruption of its own government
• If you have a system that implements a fairer living wage in that country, you'll have less people under the poverty line
• Healthcare spending seems to be occurring a lot more efficiently the more the country is unionized, at least in this comparison
• Even though Sweden still ranks 23^rd on the WHO healthcare ranking, the average life expectancy there is dramatically higher than that of the USA which has no true Universal Healthcare system
• The USA may have the highest take home pay out of the three after taxes, but an accident without the proper insurance through one's HMO down there, or some denial of coverage through some bureaucratic loophole which private insurers often pull will dwindle that pay down really quickly.

So, the nation with the largest number of union affiliated employees has come around to developing a society with: less crime and therefore less tax money used to feed and shelter prisoners, free university to keep fewer people enslaved to paying off student debt, a better rated healthcare system; yet with less GDP used for healthcare spending, less social poverty, and more relief to parents for rearing children. Not included on my table is the fact that Sweden has universal daycare. So why then is Brad Wall consulting with a nation whose healthcare system is rated more poorly than that of Canada, where the average life expectancy is already lower than that of Canada, an inefficient one where your access to healthcare solely depends on your own ability to pay/insure yourself for it, a greater division between its rich and poor, has a more dystopian society that has brought them to having the degree of crime, and their policies to deal with it which results in exponential spending on militarized police forces and wars on drugs, and having one fifth of the entire world's prison population incarcerated in their country alone? Isn't that an indication that their society is breaking down? Is it not then a ridiculous notion to be consulting with them for some means of improving our healthcare system? The only reason Brad Wall went this course was to try to learn how skirt around the organized labour in our hospitals and clinics for the sake of making cutbacks, not giving a hoot in hell about patient and client care, or the needs of the people who tend to them.
    
To be fair, Sweden also has this thing going on in its society that can't be conveniently pasted onto a table or chart. They have this unique word in their language called "lagom"; it means not too much and not too little, but just enough. Exercising moderation is held as a high social standard of appropriateness there. It is a cultural concept they have that is applied to a wide range of things, from their diet, to their resource consumption. I also imagine that it can also be applied to things like a common sense of fairness, environmental issues, social justice, and weighing of consequences on a person at a social level. It probably has a lot to do with making people there not so motivated by greed, and more geared toward fairness and equality. It's one of the few places left in the world where the middle class isn't facing extinction as quickly, and a bigger divide isn't being widened so dramatically between the rich and the poor. Over-the-top displaying of affluence and material wealth is generally regarded in their culture as absurd, obnoxious, ridiculous, and even obscene.**I find this attitude deeply engrained in myself already, and am appreciative of it. It makes me want to visit Sweden all the more to give it more exploration. If given an opportunity to be sponsored to be part of making a social documentary in this country for Canadian television or for my own union, I'd jump all over the chance to do it. The social fitting of lagom somehow probably correlates into how and why there is such a notably high preponderance of unionized labour in Sweden, but because this is a correlation it doesn't indicate cause and effect or determine how which begat what, the unions or the social attitude of lagom itself. Whatever the case, the two ideas seem to work interdependently and function well enough together for the Swedes. Union or not, healthcare or not, we would all do better by learning this same ethic from them.

Sweden also has a higher number of their female population representing their constituents through their government offices than either Canada or the USA. Perhaps that's another reason why there is a greater social mindfulness to allow for a long maternity leave for proper childhood development. With less of an old boys club to deal with, and less influence of some other patriarchal or some other old school theocratic oligarchy ruling them, this has a chance to happen. I wonder what the reaction of the Swedes would be to the senate scandals that happened here since the Harper government took power.
 
*- Statistics Canada used to be the envy of the world with having a publically accessible information for civic leaders and developers, public institution planners, scientists, activists, and businesses to use alike, but through the reign of the Harper government, 20% of its staff were let go, $30 million of its operational funding was slashed, and now measures of privatization and deregulation no longer assure unbiased data processing. Along with the short-listed census, this makes this a war on science, and cripples the Canadian public to having the freedom to access information.
 
**- This social attitude even prevails with the richer capitalists from there like of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Despite being one of the richest people on the planet, he still flies economy class, drives a mid-90s model Volvo, recycles tea bags and encourages his employees to write on both sides of the paper.