New Normal Is A Continuation Of The Old War Machine – For The Common Good, Of Course
The Democrats face the same problem as the Republicans – they are corrupt, and owned by Wall St. That includes, of course, the big banks, Big Oil, Big Tech, the…
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Covid Journal, August 22, 2020
Nature, food and cures.
Plague Update: Fixation on Ventilators morphs into Ventilation
“There’s no perfectly ‘safe’ level of ventilation because we don’t actually know what ‘safe’ is, since we don’t know how much exposure leads to transmission,” Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University…
The Simpsons And Presidential Politics
They had Marge Simpson respond directly to a real political actor referring to the Democrat VP candidate’s voice as if it sounded like the cartoon character voice acted by Julie…
A Sea Change in Manufacturing
During this global pandemic we’ve seen some pretty stark changes and experienced things that we thought we might never experience. We’ve seen some things that were talked about in great…
Democratic Socialism
I would call myself a left libertarian democratic socialist, but with the emphasis on libertarian democrat. However, no one of reasonable intelligence, with any slight idea of what our history…
Adieu, Dr. Foth
In my checkered 40-plus year career in and out of the newspaper business, I’ve written hundreds of opinion columns. I started at the Fort Saskatchewan Record (sports, amazingly), spent many…
De-registering Dissent at Queen’s Park
For good reason much of our attention has been drawn to the political drama playing out in Ottawa, drama that still continues despite the resignation of Bill Morneau. The stories…
White Man, Listen. Modern Man, Listen and learn
Pioneer species that regenerate the entire local ecosystem – what a brilliant, wonderful discovery by biologists and ecologists. Except that, like many things, it is not a discovery, but a…
Talking the Cabinet Shuffle, Prorogation & the latest on the WE Scandal with Kristy Cameron
Yesterday I joined Kristy Cameron on CFRA’s “Ottawa Now” along with Katlyn Harrison & Gabriela Gonzalez on a rare Wednesday “Political Heat” panel. We talked about the fall out from…
Canada, Climate Emergency and Economic Cataclysm: A Proposed Response In Brief
Or, On Trolls and Concision, Sound-Bite Culture, and The Importance of Thinking For Yourself (Please see my recent essay, titled, Canada, eh?, for part one of this present meditation)…
Of Snake Oil & Presidential Approval
These past five months have just been so strange in so many ways and the further we go into this pandemic, the harder it is to remember how strange it…
Meanwhile Elsewhere in Democracy
For the last couple of days most Canadian political observers have had their eyes firmly fixed on the goings on in Ottawa, and rightfully so. It’s been a crazy 48…
Prorogation Overreach
Everyone, there are days when it feels like I can’t keep up. That feeling seems to happen to me more and more these days. Maybe it’s a function of getting…
The Day After: Morneau Resigns
The events from last night were sure to set off aftershocks of important events that would go a long way to determine what our politics look like. Aside from having…
Morneau Out, Uncertainty In
Tonight is the first night of the virtual Democratic nomination convention, a night when the eyes of the world were going to be turned towards US cable news channels and…
On Rescuing Our Language and Communication Skills From the Dustbin of History – And Our Standards of Basic Courtesy and Civility Along With Them
Texting, instant messaging, online chat, the mainstream media, and the general direction of our modern society and “culture”, are destroying the people’s capacity to communicate, to think, to feel, and…
Punting Responsibility
As Canada has faced COVID-19 and worked to deal with this pandemic, we’ve seen many institutions in our country face hard times responding to this unprecedented crisis. We’ve seen community…
An Unnecessary Election in New Brunswick?
We’re coming to the end of the Summer and in normal times there would be a usual ramping up of things to come. The return to school, the return of…
“Conspiracy Theory”
Remember what Chomsky said, summing it up perfectly: “The term “conspiracy theory” is used to poo-poo institutional analysis.” Exactly. And what does that mean? It means the phrase was coined…