Author: Unknown

  I never expected Rolling Stone magazine to close out 2021 with an “end is nigh” message but these are curious times. The headline couldn’t be more dramatic: “The Fuse is Blown, and the Doomsday Glacier is Coming For Us All.”  A few weeks ago, scientists participating in the International

  Sammy “the Bull” Gravano openly admits he personally murdered the better part of a dozen guys and participated in many other killings. Did he get the chair? No. Is he rotting away in some supermax dungeon? No. He’s got a YouTube channel and book contracts and he’s doing just

  British Columbia’s medical officer of health, Dr. Bonnie Henry, thinks the Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus could transform the contagion from pandemic to endemic. “The way the virus is changing with Omicron — that is leading us to that place sooner,” she said. “The type of illness it’s

CNN analyst, Bill Carter, like many of his countrymen, sees his United States broken, perhaps irreparably. Carter has seen America bruised and battered from the Kennedy assassination to the Viet Nam war, Watergate, the decades of school shootings, to the 9/11 attacks. Nothing can diminish the staggering impact of these

  Let’s face it, from Tea Partiers to QAnon to fundamentalist faux-Christians to heavily armed thugs who see nothing wrong with storming their nation’s Capitol Building, a lot of our neighbours to the south are not right in the head.  I wonder if Canadians looking at the US in early

  What were they thinking? When the BBC was looking for an expert to provide a little colour commentary on the Gyslaine Maxwell trial, the very last name on their list ought to have been Alan Dershowitz. A long time acqaintance of sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, Dershowitz also stands accused

Leaders of the Middle East may be rewriting their region’s history and, in the process, busting the myths of the West as their benefactor. The decline of American influence in the region has the locals talking – to each other.  After years of looking abroad for answers, countries in the

  Readers of this blog will be familiar with my outsize focus on social cohesion and its role in societal collapse.  A friend recently posted a video of an irate American woman on a jetliner who struck and spat on a crew member, all of it captured by other passengers

  It’s been a tough year for British Columbians. Extremes of heat and cold, drought and floods. Heat so intense it killed off billions of sea creatures, the sort that anchor marine food chains. Heat so fierce it claimed hundreds of lives, killed off crops. Stuff that, in normal times

  It’s hard to imagine much good coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic but the CBC’s Aaron Wherry sees a distant glimmer of hope. What, asks Wherry, if the pandemic embedded itself in the consciousness of our political caste? What if the ordeal paved the way for a new awareness

  Nothing fuels skepticism about the climate emergency than cold snaps of the sort now affecting western Canada. In previous years it’s been the dreaded “polar vortex” that has plagued eastern Canada. One thing climate change has taught us is that, when it is unduly cold in one region, you

Unforeseen consequences.  

  Some day we might think of Omicron as the friendly Covid variant. English experts confirm that it is both milder and shorter-lived than its predecessors, the Alpha and Delta variants. Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the government’s life sciences adviser, said that although

Deutsche Welle has a recap of the global climate emergency in 2021.  The summary touches on what I would call the “big ticket” events, the ten most costly climate disasters. The problem with these year-enders is that they fail to capture the low to mid-grade changes underway, the really dangerous