Category: Social Order & Disorder

What is a councillor’s role?

Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Provincial Politics / Social Order & Disorder2 Comments

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A question was asked of me recently about the appropriateness of the Deputy Mayor being at a meeting last summer to discuss the possible purchase of the new recreational facility structures. From the question I inferred that the asker did not approve of a politician being there. I disagree, and made my point that it was appropriate. It was hardly a secret meeting – it included numerous staff, plus the acting CAO. And the DM was invited to attend by staff, not the other way around. First,  the DM is both chair of the budget process and council’s liaison with the ……… click below for more ↓

Why Quebec’s Proposed Headgear Law is Wrong

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Provincial Politics / Social Order & Disorder3 Comments

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The Province of Quebec is proposing to ban the wearing of any and all religious headgear (including hijabs, turbans and yarmulkes, as well as other religious symbols) from public facilities and public service – affecting teachers, hospital workers, daycare workers, nurses, civil servants and (we assume) politicians. The law would also cover “ostentatious” crucifixes, which has led to darkly humorous speculation about police stopping people to measure the size of their crucifix. What about a tattoo of a giant “Om” on someone’s back? Would the owner have to remove it? Cover it up? What about priests’ collars or nuns’ habits, ……… click below for more ↓

Creating an Age-Friendly Community

Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Provincial Politics / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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The most interesting and inspiring seminar I attended during the recent AMO (Association of Municipalities of Ontario) convention was “Synergies for Senior Friendly Communities.” It was about creating “age-friendly communities,” not simply for seniors, but heavily tilted in their direction.* Speakers included Mario Sergio, Minister responsible for seniors (Ontario Seniors’ Secretariat); Mayor Debbie Amaroso, of Sault Ste. Marie, Mayor Jim Watson, of Ottawa; and Dr. John Lewis, associate professor of planning for the University of Waterloo. I also benefitted by sitting beside Mayor Rick Hamilton, of Elliot Lake, who gave me commentary from his town’s perspective on many of the ……… click below for more ↓

Christmas Creep in August

Atheism & Spirituality / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Humour & Satire / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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On August 22, we got the Sears “Christmas Wish” catalogue delivered to our home. It was a sunny, hot day that almost reached 30C. The sprinkler was watering the garden while we enjoyed a cold beer on the porch, sitting in shorts and T-shirts. The last thing I wanted on my mind was winter. But there it was, two pounds of wildly-inappropriate seasonal shopping choices, refusing to be ignored. As welcome as a fart in a crowded elevator. It seems every year “Christmas Creep” advances down the calendar, earlier and earlier. Last year I heard Xmas music in stores on ……… click below for more ↓

Hell 2.0

Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Literary pretensions / Religion / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I left you last time after finishing the letter D, in Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell. I’m back in book form to take you through a few more entries in her exploration of the afterlife. But first a couple of additions to your reading material. First on the list is Alice Turner’s 275-page The History of Hell. It’s an illustrated guide to how Westerners have come to think of Hell, It starts with the ancient influences – Egypt, Greece, Rome and Judaism – but its main focus is on the evolving Christian imagination. She has a lot to say ……… click below for more ↓

Kill the Apostrophe? Rubbish! Keep it!

Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Language & Grammar / Memes; Internet & Social / My WritingLeave a comment

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A site has popped up with one of the stupidest ideas about English I’ve read in the past decade or two. It’s called Kill the Apostrophe. Subtle. At first, I thought it was a joke, a spoof. After all, how can one realistically get rid of perhaps the most significant element of punctuation based on the rantings of a website lunatic? And some of the counterpoint sites like Humbleapostrophe seemed created in a sense of camaraderie humour. But no, on further reading, it’s as real as any of the other wingnut sites, from chemtrails to “psychic” readings to UFOs. Most ……… click below for more ↓

Teddy’s Words of Wisdom

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsLeave a comment

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I’m not a great student of American history – my tastes run to other places and people: Napoleon, Casanova, Elizabeth I, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, China…. but I do read about it. Most recently Rick Perlstein’s history of the American Sixties, Nixonland. And in that book I came across a powerful, moving quotation from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt that I wanted to share because it still resonates today: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The ……… click below for more ↓

The sum of all knowledge

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / Psychology & Sociology / Uncategorized / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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In his 2004 book, The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs tells of his quest to become “the smartest person in the world” by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. Right away, you can see the fly in this intellectual ointment: knowledge doesn’t equal intelligence. Jared Diamond, in his introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel, credits the barely literate, ill-educated tribespeople of New Guinea as being the smartest people he ever met. Not because of their ability to discourse, as Jacobs says, on the intricacies of the Phoenician legal system, but rather because their daily life is such a struggle. ……… click below for more ↓

Believing is Seeing

Books & Reviews / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Faith / Municipal Politics / Psychology & Sociology / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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“He who permits himself to tell a lie once,” wrote Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, from Paris, France, 1785), “finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.” Anyone following the ups and downs of federal and provincial politics would have no trouble believing Jefferson’s words. We often believe – without any evidence to ……… click below for more ↓

Troilus and Cressida

Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / Provincial Politics / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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I’ve always found Troilus and Cressida a difficult play. The characters all seem jaded, cynical, opportunistic, stuffily sanctimonious, lecherous or simply underhanded. Some are merely unpleasant, others are despicable, reprehensible. All seem self-serving, more concerned with their own gains and goals than that of the greater war around them. It’s difficult to understand why it was listed as a “comedy” (although oddly placed in the folio, between the histories and tragedies). Even Harold Bloom calls it “difficult” and “elitist” (although he later qualifies it as Shakespeare’s “most sophisticated” and “intellectualized” play). And Joyce Carol Oates called it, “…that most vexing ……… click below for more ↓

Racism and the US Civil Rights movement retold

Conspiracy Theories / Media Issues / Personal Reminiscences / US Politics3 Comments

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As I read through Rick Perlstein’s book, Nixonland, about American politics and life in the 1950s and 60s, the Civil Rights movement and the reaction to it by white Americans, the narrative astounds me. Such anger, such violence. Such sadness. It seems like such an alien place, dystopian, almost fictional, like an Orwellian novel. I was, it seems from my reading, not really aware, not fully cognizant of just how bad it was. But then, it looks eerily familiar – some of the photos look just like those taken during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Am I merely juxtaposing my ……… click below for more ↓

Why are Pickup Trucks so Anti-Pedestrian?

Environment / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / Urban Design & Growth / US Politics2 Comments

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Take a look at the back of any of today’s pickup trucks. Notice the exhaust pipe, under the vehicle? It points to the right. The same side of the road that pedestrians and cyclists use.* Notice the bike lane in the photo – that’s where cyclists will be when this truck passes by them. No place to move to avoid the fumes. Yet I have seen vintage trucks with that design, as in the photo to the right (even here in town). Several, in fact in just the past week. I don’t know the date of the change from rear to ……… click below for more ↓

Reading, Writing and Memory

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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“Memory,” he read the headline as he settled into the armchair, resting his elbows on the wide arms to expand the National Post paper to its fullest, “declines much slower in people who read, write throughout life.” Ah. Interesting. He peered closer. “Reading books, writing letters and working on crossword puzzles throughout life may help preserve the brain’s memory faculties and fend off Alzheimer’s disease and early-onset dementia, according to a recent U.S. study published in the the journal Neurology.” Hmmm. Well, of course. We knew that, he chuffed to himself. Coming from a family of avid readers who lived ……… click below for more ↓

The Decline in Media Credibility and Profitability

Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Media Issues / My Writing / Social Order & Disorder6 Comments

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Last August the Pew research Center released the results of its latest study on how much the American public trusts the media. This has been part of an ongoing study since at least 2002, and ever since the first report, the amount of trust in media has fallen. This has been a hot topic of discussion online ever since, and the source of much hand-wringing at each new release. Perhaps the mounting number of scandals in journalism has soured an audience accustomed to believing the media is honorable, trustworthy and upright. Perhaps it’s the growing politicization of (some) media that ……… click below for more ↓

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Critical Thinking / Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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I was thinking of the lines from that Fairport Convention song this week as we walked through Toronto on our three-day mini-holiday. I can still hear Sandy Denny’s wonderful, haunting voice singing the chorus of that dreamy, sad song, as vibrantly as the day I first played the album, back in the late 1960s: For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes? That song has stuck with me all these years, an anthem of the era, but strangely prescient. Who would have thought it would resonate in an entirely different way, 45 years later? Denny ……… click below for more ↓

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