Year: 2016

Two conferences and a show

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / Planning & Policies / Provincial Politics / WaterOne Comment

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I had the honour and the enjoyment of attending two municipal conferences last week. While no longer directly involved in politics, I am able to keep my finger in some of the political pies through my current work for an NGO. Plus, I like to remain informed and up-to-date about politics and governance, and am always looking for opportunities to increase my knowledge and understanding of pretty much any topic. The first event was the Ontario Water Conference, in Windsor. While predominantly a technical and operations event for facility managers and operators, it also has a good political component where utility board ……… click below for more ↓

Banning Phosphorus

Collingwood / Planning & Policies / Water3 Comments

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In 2014, Toledo experienced a water crisis that caused the city to issue a “do not use” warning for more than 500,000 residents. They had to rely on bottled water; boiling wasn’t safe because it further released toxins into the water. That crisis was caused by unsafe levels of the toxin Microcystin in the city’s treated water. The toxin came from the unprecedented algal bloom in Lake Erie; a huge swath of the west end of the lake blossomed with the algae. The algae were growing rapidly because of the increasingly high nutrient load in lakes and streams. In particular: ……… click below for more ↓

The stench of entitlement

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour3 Comments

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You’d think politicians would learn from the recent investigations into Senate spending and the Mike Duffy trial, that Canadians have no tolerance for the gimme, gimme, gimme of politicians. Canadians don’t like the smell of a sense of entitlement. A lesson lost, it seems, on our own Collingwood Council. The stench of entitlement is strong at the table these days. And much it emanates from Councillor “Senator” Jeffrey. Last year, Jeffrey cut the cheese when she decided to pursue personal political ambitions by getting onto the board of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Since the FCM board meets all over Canada – ……… click below for more ↓

Not quite seven signs of the apocalypse

Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

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A 2014 story on Salon, titled 7 things Americans think are more plausible than man-made global warming made its way around Facebook again, recently. It lists seven statistics about things Americans believe in more than they believe that human activity has caused climate change. It got a lot of shares and likes. Climate change is, of course, fact, and as Peter Schickele once said, “Fact is fact. You can’t argue with fact…” If you accept those facts, it seems a scary read: seven signs of the apocalypse… But before you start calling for a wall across our border to keep the crazies from migrating north, ……… click below for more ↓

O tempora, o mores!

Classics / Culture / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum. Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote those words in the short book about a Roman court case, Pro Lucio Murena (For Lucius Murena). They mean, in English, Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.” * In 63 BCE, Cicero successfully defended Lucius Licinius Murena on the charge of bribery or in Latin, crimina ambitus as a means to garner votes. The wealthy Murena had won his election as consul and the charge was filed by the losing candidate, Servius ……… click below for more ↓

On the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death

Culture / Literature / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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“Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Bad’ Shakespeare Play?” asks a recent article on the Smithsonian website. It adds, “Shakespeare, despite the efforts of notable dissenting critics and writers to forcibly eject him, has occupied the position of world’s greatest playwright since his star was re-affixed to the firmament in the late 18th century. No other playwright is as universally revered. No other playwright has had countless theses and courses and books and articles speculative novels and so many buckets and buckets of ink devoted to him. And while to works of other playwrights of the era are still ……… click below for more ↓

Killing gnats with grenades

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies2 Comments

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Collingwood Council has taken the equivalent approach of a grenade attack to swat at a little gnat. It has launched a full-frontal assault on people feeding wildlife in order to get a couple of people in town to stop feeding feral cats. And of course it was done without any public input. The sensible, socially active and responsible approach would have been a campaign of education, public meetings, and information. But no, that’s too damned open and transparent for this council. What this council wants – and got – is punitive legislation. Let’s punish people who think they’re being humane ……… click below for more ↓

The Bard’s Best? Nope…

Books & Reviews / Culture / Literature / Pop Culture / ShakespeareLeave a comment

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To help celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death (April 23) and 452nd of his birth (also April 23), the website Mashable has put together a “battle” for the “Best Shakespeare Play Ever.” It’s done up as a sort of sports playoff grid (a tournament bracket), broken into four categories. Four? That’s right. Even though the First Folio was only divided into three categories, Mashable added their own: The plays are organized into four quadrants based on the four genres of plays Shakespeare commonly wrote: comedies, histories, tragedies and weird magic stuff. (Okay, we may have made up that last ……… click below for more ↓

Amateur layout and bad ads. Again.

Collingwood / Ethics and behaviour / Fonts & Layout / Media / Publicity & Communications / Social Order & Disorder / TypographyOne Comment

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I see the Town of Collingwood is still letting the EB layout its full page of ads in the paper.  Tragic. Embarrassing. Cringe-worthy. The latest back page mashup has as its first ad the worst of the worst sort of ad layout, the sort only amateurs would create. It’s too wide for any human being to comfortably and efficiently read. Then there’s the second page with its fat partner in layout crime. It’s embarrassing for a municipality to be thus represented. The only saving grace is that no one reads the EB any more, so not very many people see how bad it ……… click below for more ↓

Muddle-headed editorial palaver

Media Issues / Municipal Politics / PoliticsLeave a comment

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There’s a muddle-headed editorial in this weekend’s Collingwood Connection titled “Citizens, not rich developers should drive political ship” (sic*) that shows (again) how little the chain’s editorial writers understand municipal politics and the laws that govern it. It opens: Money talks and, in the case of municipal elections, one could argue that all of those cheques, banknotes and e-transfers going toward funding the war chests of various candidates have the potential to speak very loudly. The writer clearly has never read the Ontario Municipal Elections Act which says in Section 71: A contributor shall not make contributions exceeding a total of $750 to ……… click below for more ↓

Nibiru nuttiness

Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

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I’ve written about the wingnuts and their mysterious planet Nibiru – the so-called Planet X – in the past. It’s one of the furthest wacky conspiracies on the fringe of wackiness, and fairly recent. It mostly sprang whole cloth from the brain (if I can call it that…) of uber-wingnut Nancy Lieder, whose website, ZetaTalk, has been spewing diaphanous piffle of the most banal sort since 1995. Lieder claims to be in psychic contact with aliens called the Zetas (stop laughing), and has conned a whole bunch of exceptionally gullible folks into believing her (although there have been some bitch-slap moments with ……… click below for more ↓

Spotting incompetence

Critical Thinking / Management & leadership / Philosophy / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Further to my earlier post, I wanted to provide some tips on how to spot incompetence in an employee or, especially, in managers and executives. I understand that incompetence may be a subjective view. What some view as incompetence others may see as cautionary, conservative or even adequate. But here’s what others have identified as incompetent or dysfunctional behaviour or personality traits in managers and leaders. Incompetence is not black-and-white. It comes in many shades. And incompetence doesn’t (always) mean stupid: intelligent people may get promoted above their competence level, according to the Peter Principle, discussed in my previous post. They ……… click below for more ↓

Peter, Parkinson and Adams

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Critical Thinking / Ethics and behaviour / Philosophy / PoliticsOne Comment

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C. Northcote Parkinson, Lawrence J. Peter, and Scott Adams are for me the ‘holy trinity’ of philosophers of modern bureaucracy, within both the public service and the corporate structure. As philosophers, they are all keen observers and witty commentators on the human condition, with emphasis on the nature of organizations, leadership and management. Not always in the lofty or strategically-focused terms of, say, Sun Tzu or Machiavelli; all three are more prosaic and more cynical. And funnier – an adjective seldom used with either classical writer. These three pundits are, of course, well-known today: every CEO, corporate leader and ambitious manager worth their ……… click below for more ↓

Demagogues and democracy

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Municipal Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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“I just wish, at some point in time, councillors would show a little more integrity or credibility on the floor of council… It’s like every time we try to do something, there’s criticism, no matter what we do. I’d like to see councillors do the right thing. And in my opinion, these people are not doing the right thing. They’re hypocrites. They’re not telling the truth.” No, that’s not Mayor Cooper speaking about our current council that continues to blindly clear cut its way through the town’s institutions and services, masticate our already battered reputation into spittle-and-chips, and bludgeon staff morale into pulpy submission. ……… click below for more ↓

Why? A few questions for councillors

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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Why? Councillor Madigan said he had written that on every page of the report about Collus, presented to council last week by lawyer Mark Rodger. After reading the report, I also have many questions why. It’s a good question. I too, wrote ‘why?” on many pages, albeit likely for rather different reasons. Why, I asked myself as I watched the meeting and listened to the comments from councillors last week, is our current council so intent on destroying its successful, accomplished utility – a superb, efficient business – while demoralizing and alienating the staff who have served this community so well for decades? Why is ……… click below for more ↓

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