Canicule

Holy mackerel it's hot. Tipped to reach 36° today, UV index of 5, so minutes of grace before you burn baby burn. Despite my best efforts, my arms are starting to look like the advert for Boots (I think) skin products that shows skin damage. Or a crocodile's skin, depending on your angle.

The UK have been suffering longer, my friend Ree in Illinois has been suffering longer, but the last couple of days, we have been up in the thirties too. So, Europe, the US and Canada, I think that constitutes global warming.

Yesterday my friend Yvonne and I went to visit our other friend Anne in hospital. Yvonne has air conditioning in her car, the hospital was also cool, so when we came back here and I asked her in for coffee, it was as though we were met by a wall of heat as we stepped into the house. And that was with all the windows open and the ceiling and floor standing fans going.

When we went to the Okanagan a few weeks ago, there was air conditioning in the rooms, so it was lovely to get out of the heat, but it made the most incredible noise all night, so it seems like you either get kept awake by the heat or the noise. Ah Nytol, the lightweight's drug of choice.

David Adam, the Guardian's environment correspondent, paints a scary picture for us about the implications of global warming for Britain. Still, marginally less awful than being stuck on a weird seacraft with Kevin Costner, but what can you do ? Well, I think the answer to that for Kevin and me is for us to move to Nanavut. Looks like the climate there will soon be like it is here now, perhaps a little less tropical.

In other news, and I realise what risk I take by mentioning this, but I always feel very saddened as I did in the UK whenever a police officer is killed in the line of duty. Two RCMP officers were shot recently when they went to check out a report of domestic violence. A man was assulting his own sister during the course of a fight they were having, the RCMP officers attempted to arrest him but he took off in his truck. When they finally cornered the guy, he shot them both. The female officer, Robin Cameron, was a single parent of an 11 year-old girl, the male officer, father of a nine-month old baby who will grow up without his dad.
Oddly, my take on this is NOT that we shouldn't have police officers, far from it, and I have no answer.
I have no idea whether tougher sentences for criminals has a deterrent effect. I am certainly not in favour of having the death penalty restored, hell, I have no idea whether they ever had it in Canada in the first place. I'm fairly sure that in the American States where it remains, there is no less risk to the lives of police officers.
There are severe restrictions here on the use of weapons by police officers and this, as in the UK where the boys and girls in blue are not armed at all, may have a very significant effect on overall numbers of police killed in the line of duty.
I think it may be interesting to have a comparison with heavily socialised countries like Scandinavia where taxes are high so that everyone in the country is well looked after.

Perhaps, as with everything, the answer lies in the way we educate people, maybe more personal education is needed, and at a much younger age. We are an advanced enough society to do that. Britain in the past few years has joined many of its mainland European partners in putting Citizenship on the school curriculum.

Whatever the answer is, we need to find ways of protecting those who protect us. Hell, even a conservative could appreciate that, a Mountie more than any other police officer I've ever heard of is a valuable commodity in the monetary sense. There is a lot of training and even the selection process is long and hard. Since I've been here I've met or heard of far more good people who haven't quite made it into the RCMP than those who have.
When the report says two good people down, they ain't kidding.