Work and Workaholism: Puritanism, and A Day Off
This morning when I got up, feeling exhausted again from the on-going 30-year stint of sleeplessness and insomnia, I thought, I should take a day off – considering I pretty…
authoritarianism
The Real Resistance: Lessons From History
It does not require a majority to defeat tyranny and defend liberty, but only a small and dedicated minority – as we saw in the American and French Revolutions,…
Glenn Gould On Orwell
Yo, listen up, blokes! (He says, in order to mash and mangle and generally have fun with various voices, inflections, accents and colloquilisms, as Gould was fond of doing himself,…
Crisis Point: Leadership Needed From…Anywhere, Now
Imagine if real leadership from the grassroots comes now from the moderate, democratic/republican right, and not the centre or the left. Considering that the centre and left, almost without…
Cognitive Dissonance, Mass Insanity & Covid Hysteria
Check the numbers. The disease is not ravaging us, is not unprecedented, but has killed 1/3rd the death toll of a typical year of the common flu. DOES ANYBODY FACT-CHECK…
The Decline, Decay, Death and Rebirth of Democracy and Freedom
The two greatest threats to democracy and freedom in the West, or to peace, justice, equality, or even a viable future for humanity, are without question, the currently reigning…
Welcome To The Brave New World
Speaking of censorious scrupulosity…. While censorship is rising rapidly, with Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as the major media, controlling and restricting what people can see or read, say…
Laying Waste To The Religious Right
A few brief thoughts for perspective: “Censorious scrupulosity” – Stephen Toulmin is as witty as he is brilliant. Make it viral (so to speak… Yikes, we will soon have to…
Waiting For The Crazed Clown Show To End – Or, Welcome To The Brave New World
I don’t know when I will be able to go to the gym or library again, or a park, or my favourite local bookstore or record store – or whether…
Coronavirus: Martial Law & The New Police State
An excellent live webstream discussion was given last night by Sayer Ji, the founder of GreenMedInfo – the best source I know of for science-based health information. His remarks offer…
Importing From China: A Virus? Or A Totalitarian Model Of Elite Control?
Someone prescient once said, “Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for a little security, deserve neither, and will lose both.” We would do well to remember those words now.…
Fantasy and Indoctrination: Rough notes on a few fantasy novels: part one
New Spring, The Novel: The Wheel Of Time: In The Beginning – Robert Jordan (so the cover says) (Lord of the Rings films and Terry Brookes Shannara novels got me…
Build a Wall? Canada’s Response to Trump
Donald Trump’s main export to Canada has been a sense of national smugness, that his outrages and absurdities could never find purchase here. But it would be an act of…
Toronto Star: Build a Wall? Canada’s Response to Trump
It would be an act of monumental self-deception for Canadians to believe that our country is an island set above the rage bubbling across the world.
Stalin’s ghostly influence today
I recently finished reading the second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s magisterial biography of Josef Stalin: About 1,700 pages so far, with another 400 or so in small-type notes. Brilliant stuff,…
Help, Barbarians at the Gate!!
I just realized that, from British Columbia’s eastern border, the barbarians are in control all the way to Quebec. Scheer and Kenney, Moe, Pallister and Ford. Two thousand miles of…
New column day
Here, on Scott Moe’s choice to pursue strongman politics indistinguishable from the Donald Trumps and Doug Fords of the world. For further reading…– D.C. Fraser reported on Moe’s willingness to…
What Then Must We Do? Canada’s Place Alongside the United States in Turbulent Times.
Do you ever wonder how close the United States may be to abandoning democracy? Do you ever wonder what that might mean for Canada? Are you familiar with the word,…
Imagine a World Where Every Leader Was a Variation of Donald Trump
Donald Trump likes to pretend he’s shaking everything up. In fact he’s tearing everything down and what he can’t tear down his instinct is to bog it down. You could…
Republican Senator’s speech against McCathyism could have been about Trump
In the eleven years since I started publishing this blog, I have almost entirely focused on Alberta politics. But while my writing focuses on provincial politics here at home, like…