Uncategorized – Scripturient

A Call to Arms

2022-09-21 2022-09-21 UncategorizedOne Comment

A newly-formed group calling itself “Arms Around Collingwood” sent a questionnaire to candidates for this municipal election. And while I have never heard of them, they claim to have “a minimum 2,500 voting contacts in Collingwood.” Below you will read the questions they asked along with my answers. They requested that respondents “limit answers to 50 words or less.” Leadership Do you have any conflicts of interest that may influence your decision making at the Council table? Please answer either ‘Yes” or “No? No. Will … click below for more ↓

What is Council Doing to Our BIA?

Last week, the chair of our BIA (Business Improvement Area: our association of downtown merchants and businesses) resigned from the organization he has served on for the past seven years. In his letter (quoted in CollingwoodToday) of resignation, David Conning wrote (emphasis added): Following last evening’s council discussion, I continue to have no faith that the town councillors will support any major initiative of the BIA, even when presented with expert documentation recommending the project… I have neither the time nor the inclination to invest … click below for more ↓

Corrected post on chord wheel construction

2021-11-15 2021-11-15 UncategorizedLeave a comment

Revised Chord Wheel – Scripturient (ianchadwick.com) Fixed the broken links, added in the missing images, added a link to the chord-builder wheel as well. Apparently, when moving the old ukulele group files on the server, I must have deleted the source folder with the files. I will have to recover the original text from the backups, but here are the PDFs and you can make the wheels from them. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Jail the Unvaccinated

2021-08-14 2021-08-14 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Politics / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Social Order & Disorder / Uncategorized8 Comments

In a recent opinion piece in Macleans Magazine, Scott Gilmore wrote what I expect many vaccinated Canadians felt about those who still refuse to get vaccinated and help end this pandemic: We need to begin treating the vaccine holdouts as the fools they are. It is not fair that reasonable and responsible Canadians should pay the price for their deadly selfishness. No more soothing tones and patience. Time for the stick. The stick in question that Gilmore suggests is withholding services and access to the … click below for more ↓

Saunderson’s Job-Killing ICBL Continued

2021-04-27 2021-05-03 Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ethics and behaviour / Financial follies / Hospital / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Uncategorized6 Comments

James Madison, one of the US’s Founding Fathers said that a government “…without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a farce, or perhaps both.” Sure reads like someone describing our own council and their refusal to listen to the public during their discussion on the recent interim control bylaw (ICBL) that killed growth, development, and jobs in Collingwood: both a farce and a tragedy.* Thomas Vincent, developer of the Balmoral Estates adult lifestyle community in … click below for more ↓

Kellie Leitch’s politics of division

2016-11-12 2016-11-12 Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Politics / Uncategorized / US Politics5 Comments

They’re not like us. They’re not our religion. They’re not our colour. They don’t speak our language. They don’t dress like us. They don’t eat like us. They don’t drive like us, shop like us, read like us, walk like us. We need to control them. Deport them. Jail them. Make them convert. Make them speak English. Make them dress like us. Screen them before we let them in. Them versus us. The politics of division, of polarization and separation. Dog whistle politics that appeal … click below for more ↓

Type amen, click like and share…

2016-07-06 2016-07-06 Christianity / Culture / Faith / Memes; Internet & Social / Psychology & Sociology / Social media & cyberbullying / Social Order & Disorder / UncategorizedLeave a comment

I created what proved an interesting discussion on Facebook recently when I threatened to ‘unfriend’ anyone who continued to out those obnoxious ‘type amen and share’ posts on their timelines. Now if you’re a FB user, you have seen these things endless times. They’re as common as the “50% will get this math question wrong” and “you won’t believe what happened next!” or the “Nine out of ten can’t answer these questions” posts. Most of these are simply trolling posts that lead to pages replete with clickbait, … click below for more ↓

Bad Thinkers and the Unknown Knowns

2015-03-26 2015-03-26 Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Social Order & Disorder / UncategorizedLeave a comment

I came across an interesting piece on bad thinking online recently. In it, the author argues some of the points I’ve mentioned in the past about people who believe in conspiracy theories, gossip and other online codswallop: The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. In the piece, the … click below for more ↓

Collingwood council’s committee system is broken

2015-02-27 2015-02-27 Uncategorized3 Comments

Last term, council approved a recommendation from the CAO to dump its traditional structure of council and public committees, to an internal system of standing committees filled only with politicians. The structure is used in several other – mostly larger – communities. It sounded intriguing, bold and exciting, so council said yes, let’s try it. Let’s be innovative. But, despite recommendations to the contrary, it wasn’t implemented until this new council took office. And that implementation isn’t working. In fact, it’s created a worse-than-ever disconnect between … click below for more ↓

Re-reading Heraclitus

2014-08-14 2014-08-14 UncategorizedLeave a comment

I started to re-read Haxton’s 2001 translation of Heraclitus last night. I came across references to him when reading introductory material on Montaigne recently and I wanted to flesh out my knowledge and understanding. Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived during the transformational Axial Age, roughly contemporary with other philosophers like Gautama Buddha, Zarathustra, Confucius and Lao Tzu. He wrote a significant treatise (On Nature) consisting of three books, one on the cosmos, one on politics and the third on theology. It may have been, like … click below for more ↓

Swimming with Vivaldi

2013-09-20 2013-09-20 Arts / Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Uncategorized2 Comments

Today, for an hour, I swam with Vivaldi. Not the actual composer, of course. He died in 1741 at the age of 63. Would have made a mess of the pool to dig him up and toss him in. The “red priest,” as he was called (for his red hair), probably couldn’t even swim. Not a lot of people back then could. but he could write music, and play the violin beautifully. Almost 300 years later his music is still as powerful and moving as … click below for more ↓

What’s it all about, Alfie?

2013-09-01 2013-09-01 Atheism & Spirituality / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Faith / UncategorizedOne Comment

“What’s it all about, Alfie?” sings Cilla Black in the title song for the eponymous 1966 movie. But it could be the anthem for the human race, or at least those with a philosophical bent. “What’s it all about?” is certainly a question that springs to my mind daily as I listen to the news, read a paper or surf the internet.* What “it” is all about was raised this week when the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal granted that atheism is a “creed” that deserves … click below for more ↓

The sum of all knowledge

2013-07-16 2013-07-16 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / Psychology & Sociology / Uncategorized / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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 … click below for more ↓

Small glitch, please stay tuned

2013-07-14 2013-07-15 Theme & Coding / UncategorizedOne Comment

Oops. Seems there’s a coding glitch in the latest WordPress update. Comments are getting attached to a header image rather than to the post they’re supposed to be associated with. And it’s not a new glitch – the WP support forums have discussions on this that go back at least a year, albeit an earlier version of the software. So I suspect there will be a solution that involves changing one of the PHP modules. Just not sure which one yet. I’ve posted a request … click below for more ↓