Blue Skies, Nothing But Blueskies…
Enshittification is a delightful neologism coined by author Cory Doctrow in 2022 to describe how things decline in quality and service. While it initially meant to describe how vendors would…
Ian Chadwick
When I’m 64…
Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m sixty four… it seemed cutely remote to consider being that old when the Beatles sang “When I’m Sixty-Four”…
Normalizing Fascism: The Paradox of Tolerance
The Brexit campaign succeeded on a platform that cultivated anger, fear, conspiracies, and racism based on lies and disinformation. Donald Trump’s campaigns have succeeded twice on platforms that increasingly cultivated…
Enemy of the State
It was very clear from his first presidential campaign that Donald Trump was adversarial to the very notion of the USA, to its Constitution, to its judiciary, laws, courts, police,…
Why Are People Leaving Xitter En Masse?
The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over. That’s the headline for a piece in today’s Guardian newspaper. People and…
Class Struggle, Slavery, TV, and Trump
Long before Blandings, long before Downtown Abbey, long before Upstairs, Downstairs (both the 1971 original and the short-lived 2010 remake), even long before The Duchess of Duke Street, there was…
The Return of the World’s Filthiest Habit
Why are celebs glamorising smoking again? That question was part of the headline in a recent story on BBC.com about how some unthinking and selfish celebrities are once again promoting…
Atheists Beware: Trump Will Come For You, Too
While women and immigrants will initially be the main target of the Talibangelists in the upcoming Trump theocracy, they will not be the only victims of Trumpist repression. Among the…
America, what have you done?
America, what have you done? You chose fascism over democracy. You chose hate over hope, oligarchs over experts, patriarchy over equality. You chose repression, theocracy, violence. You chose anger, lies,…
Democracy or Fascism?
We are, today, watching the most momentous decision that Americans have had to make in the entirety of their — and my own — lifetimes. Compared to the choice between…
Imagine There’s No Heaven…
The title above is how Imagine, the iconic 1971 song by John Lennon, begins. It is still being played and sung, more than 50 years later. Wikipedia tells us it…
How Did Democracy Come To This Sorry State?
My wife and I are members of the Boomer generation. That means our parents, their families, and their friends, their neighbours and their communities were impacted by World War II.…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 2
Charles Darwin knew the score. In Chapter 11 of his famous and brilliant book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, he wrote, “We can clearly understand why a species…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 1
There’s one particular scene in the first Jurassic Park movie, about twenty minutes in, when Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler see the dinosaurs walking wild in the open…
Trump: America’s Mussolini
While Trump’s racist, misogynist running mate, JD “Shady” Vance, in 2016 called Donald Trump, “America’s Hitler,” (before he became a Trump sycophant) it was really a dictator too far. Trump,…
A Time for Political Optimism at Last
After many dreary months of the relentless, pounding negativity, insults, accusations, lies, deflections, racism, and rage-farming of a convicted felon, tax cheat, and serial liar Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, we…
Trump and the Trojans
Donald Trump — aging, obese convicted felon with more criminal trials pending, serial liar, serial adulterer, business fraud, con man, tax cheat, rapist who boasted about his sexual assaults, misogynist…
No Dog in That Fight, But I Still Care About the Results
As a Canadian, I can only watch US politics from afar, albeit with unease. My comments on events and issues there are those from an armchair observer who has no…
Trump, Ozymandias, and the Hubris of Ambition
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1817 poem, Ozymandias, the ancient king who called himself in the poem, the ” king of…