Scripturient

Saunderson’s disrespectful performance

2017-03-02 2017-03-03 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Hospital2 Comments

“Your honour, I object,” shouted Perry Mason as he leapt from his chair and approached the bench. “This line of questioning is simply badgering my client.” “Sustained,” roared the judge, pounding his gavel. Didn’t you just wish someone would have done that Monday night? I certainly did, while watching the embarrassing, disrespectful way that Deputy Mayor Brian Saunderson grilled David Finbow, the volunteer delegate from the hospital board. Cross-examined Finbow as if he were a criminal. That is NOT the way we expect our elected representatives to treat delegates. It was embarrassing and, frankly, childish. As I read it, it’s ……… click below for more ↓

Ghostly claptrap

2017-02-27 2017-02-27 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Faith / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

Does the Large Hadron Collider Actually Disprove Ghosts? That’s the question asked in a recent article posted on Gizmodo. Well, of course it doesn’t. The LHC doesn’t disprove invisible pink unicorns, either. It can’t disprove what doesn’t exist. No matter how many wingnut websites promise to reunite you with your long lost loved ones (for a fee, of course), ghosts are all in your imagination. Along with goblins,orcs, vampires, werewolves, dragons, angels, fairies, demons, and, yes, invisible pink unicorns. Nothing the LHC does will change that. Sure, ghosts make for great stories and allegories, add spice to religion and make ……… click below for more ↓

Saunderson shirks his responsibility to taxpayers

2017-02-25 2017-02-26 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / TaxesLeave a comment

The town’s budget is by far the single most important thing elected officials have to manage. It’s complicated, affects everyone in town, reaches into every department, ranges through services, user fees, and ultimately determines the quality of life for everyone here. It is the one thing that demands the full attention, the full concentration, the fullest effort of our councillors. It demands active participation and open dialogue, full discussion from all of our elected members. So what does our deputy mayor do when others are struggling through the budget? Brian Saunderson leaves the room to go play on the ski ……… click below for more ↓

The onerous burden of responsibility

2017-02-24 2017-02-24 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies / Utilities: electricity and waterLeave a comment

Imagine you’re in high school one day around the end of the year. It’s warm outside, sunny, and you want out of the stuffy classroom. You’re not paying attention. You’re looking out the window, fidgeting. Daydreaming, miles away. The teacher drones on and on but you don’t hear a single word. Then, the bell rings. Just before the class leaves, you hear the teacher remind everyone that you are responsible for their safety, you are responsible for their wellbeing, for their health. For all the kids in the school. And their parents, too. And if you don’t do everything right, ……… click below for more ↓

The dystopian present

2017-02-23 2017-02-24 Books & Reviews / Council / Scifi and fantasy / Social Order & Disorder / US Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

If there is one good thing to come out of the election of Donald Trump, it has been the renewed interest in a certain genre of literature. Sales of dystopian novels have skyrocketed on Amazon, in particular what might be called “The Big Three” of dystopian tales: George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. From each of these novels, allegorical threads can be woven into some narrative aspect as a metaphor for the Trump administration: 1984’s newspeak, media manipulation and paranoid Big Brother; Brave New World’s elites-vs-savages mentality, exiled intellectuals and its psychological manipulation; ……… click below for more ↓

Hoax: Five-meter giant skeletons

2017-02-22 2017-02-23 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

Once again, the internet is being circulated with fake news that grabs the gullible by their grey matter. This time’s it’s a regurgitation of a 2014 hoax – then recycled in 2015- claiming the skeleton of a five-meter tall giant was unearthed in Australia. Accompanying the reports are risibly Photoshopped images that even a child could see are fakes. As a report on Hoax-Slayer noted: Supposedly, the skeleton was found near Uluru in central Australia and was 5.3 meters long. The report also claims that an ancient ‘megalithic civilisation’ has been discovered at the site. You have to shake your ……… click below for more ↓

Budget Bullshit

2017-02-21 2017-02-22 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Taxes2 Comments

The first question you have to ask after following Collingwood Council’s sloppy and inept budget process is “Where did the money go?” Then the second question you have to ask, “Are they really that dense?” Yes, but let’s start with the first question. Back when he promoted dismantling the water utility from its partnership with Collus-PowerStream (CPS) and taking the utility under town control – a process that has proven a disaster for the town – the interim CAO promised we’d see a savings of $750,000 a year. But now the town is trying to privatize those water services by ……… click below for more ↓

Empathy and The Dog Allusion

2017-02-16 2017-02-16 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Ethics and behaviour / Faith / Philosophy / Psychology & Sociology / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Empathy, writes Martin Rowson, is one of the things that make us human, make us civilized, allows us to interact without tearing one another’s throats out. Without it, we’d have no civilization; we’d be like the beasts of the fields. And we’d have no dogs or gods, either. Empathy is what makes us own pets and be religious. That’s one of the thought-provoking ideas Rowson tosses around in his book, The Dog Allusion (Vintage Books, London, 2008). The title, as I’m sure you are aware, is a pun on Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Rowson has a lot to ……… click below for more ↓

The EPCOR sales pitches

2017-02-09 2017-02-09 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

I’m told the interim CAO is distressed – apoplectic, really – that I am aware of his sales pitch information sessions in which he touts the wonders of EPCOR to town staff. Two sessions that I know of. At the most recent one he brought along EPCOR representatives to schmooze the staff. Apparently he is not winning them over. It might be because, as I have been led to believe, Mr. Brown has few fans. I’m told he is generally disliked by many staff. As he is, I’ve also been told, by our municipal partners, our neighbouring municipalities, the hospital ……… click below for more ↓

EPCOR’s rate hikes create unrest

2017-02-07 2017-02-07 Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Taxes / User fees and costs / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

It seems EPCOR isn’t the most beloved utility service out there, despite the glowing comments the interim CAO made to staff recently. I was given a recording of his hour-long talk (aka sales pitch) for EPCOR and I can only say I hope no one listening fell for it (I’ll review his talk in another post). Despite his stumbling blandishments, EPCOR’s management style isn’t all that popular. And if you do some searching for unflattering news stories about the corporation, you can find the following online: Global News had this one on Feb. 2, 2017: Tabor took back their water ……… click below for more ↓

Reading Moby Dick

2017-02-06 2017-02-06 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Language & Grammar / Literature / Political correctness gone wild / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Recently, coincidental to while I was reading Herman Melville’s classic novel, I read a story that some folks in Vancouver took offence to the name of a restaurant: Moby Dick’s Fish & Chips. Apparently the property overseers mistook the “Dick” in the name for a euphemism for penis, rather than reading the name of the famous novel in the whole title. A wholly puerile response, I’m sure you can agree. Perhaps many people in Vancouver haven’t even heard of the book, let alone read it, otherwise why would anyone protest? Which is a much sadder statement that the one about ……… click below for more ↓

Monetizing our public assets

2017-02-04 2017-02-04 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Publicity & Communications / User fees and costs / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

In the town’s disingenuous press release (really just a sales pitch for EPOCR) about its obsessive drive to privatize our utility services, it has this paragraph: The Town’s RFP process solicited proposals from a wide range of potentially interested parties that could maximize the value of the Town’s remaining investment in Collingwood PowerStream Utility Services Corp. Given the terms of the existing Shareholder’s Agreement with PowerStream entered into by the previous Council, the Town has very limited options regarding how it may monetize its remaining 50% investment in the local electricity distribution company. Monetize a public asset? Since when was ……… click below for more ↓

Committee system still broken, still in use

2017-02-03 2017-02-03 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications2 Comments

“A committee,” wrote Sir Barnett Cocks, former Clerk of the UK’s House of Commons, “is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” How very appropriate those words strike us as we gaze at Collingwood’s ineffective, severely broken standing committee system. The brainchild of the interim CAO, and the very model of his business style, it has been fervently embraced by The Block. Yet to outsiders, the committee system has been a bureaucratic quagmire of redundancy and ineptness since its inception. It was a mistake to continue it after the first meeting, when most observers realized it ……… click below for more ↓

The Block lied. Told you so.

2017-01-30 2017-01-30 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

If you read the media release published by the Town of Collingwood this afternoon you will realized just how much you have been lied to these past two years. It’s titled, “Council to pursue Hydro Share Sale discussions with Epcor.” This is the “unnamed company” whose name The Block and the administration tried – unsuccessfully – to hide from us. But like I warned you: The Block is privatizing our water and wastewater services, too. All without any input or consultation from the public: In addition to submitting an offer on Collingwood’s remaining interest in Collingwood PowerStream Utility Services Corp, ……… click below for more ↓

Will the Block’s hypocrisy never cease?

2017-01-29 2017-01-30 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Taxes / User fees and costsOne Comment

Last term, when they were raising their pitchforks to storm the bureaucratic castle, the members of today’s Collingwood Council – those we disparagingly refer to as The Block – were loudly castigating the former council for having once done a sole-source deal with the company that was the only Canadian supplier of a product in the whole country. Some said we should have gone further afield, to American sources. We were evil, they told their cadre of supporters, for not going to tender, or other process like an RFP. The Block’s leader and now Deputy Mayor, Brian Saunderson pledged his ……… click below for more ↓