Kellie Leitch’s politics of division

Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Politics / Uncategorized / US Politics5 Comments

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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 to the most vulnerable: the poor, the poorly educated, the illiterate, the disenfranchised, the unemployed, the ……… click below for more ↓

Dear USA: I’m sorry for your loss.

Canadian Politics / Politics / US Politics5 Comments

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Dear United States of America and my American friends: While I am sorry for your loss on election night, I’m afraid, however, I cannot agree to open the border and let you flood in. Canada is a country, not a convenience for Americans trying escape a self-made disaster. You made your own bed, now you must sleep in it. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic. It was devastating to see decency, integrity, honesty, fairness, equality and compassion all die in the same wreck. I cannot imagine the pain you are feeling. It must seem as if all the good has ……… click below for more ↓

The subtle art of Mark Manson

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Ethics & morality / Philosophy / Stoicism & classical philosophy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I have a healthy skepticism towards anything labelled a “self-help” book – especially those that aim at making your life happier or more fulfilled through some fad, superstition or pseudoscience. I am, as you know from this blog, cynical towards the unending volume of New Age woo hoo, fads and pseudoscience that pollutes bookstore shelves and the internet. I’m more of the “life’s a bitch and then you die” outlook kind-of-person than someone in search of a happy-platitude guru. I don’t post pictures of kittens, puppies or angels on my Facebook timeline. I’ve never been into that cosmic happiness-bucket list ……… click below for more ↓

Obstructionism killing 1,600+ jobs & growth

Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies3 Comments

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Just when you thought Collingwood Council couldn’t set the bar any lower, they go and move it down another notch. On Monday, Oct. 31, The Block had a chance to save face, rectify their blatant mismanagement of the Collingwood Regional Airport development and save the proposed, $300 million, 260-acre, industrial park that could bring 400 full-time and 1,300 part-time or temporary jobs to the area. They didn’t. No surprises, of course. Barry Burton, the deputy mayor of Clearview Township, made a presentation to our council, Monday*, reiterating his community’s commitment to the development and growth at the airport and asking ……… click below for more ↓

I missed my calling in quackery

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

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I missed my calling. I realize that, now I am semi-retired and counting my pennies. But I could have been like Deepak Chopra: rolling in dough, had I been astute enough to see the trends. Too late, I suppose, for me, but maybe not for you. All my life I have criticized and lampooned New Age notions as fuzzy-headed, pseudoscience codswallop. But I should have embraced them because, it seems, there’s money to be had in conning and conniving. Lots of it. Instead of debunking and deconstructing the diaphanous piffle that gets spewed from these folk, I should have been plagiarizing ……… click below for more ↓

Politically correct pronoun madness

Critical Thinking / Culture / Education & Learning / Language & Grammar / Media Issues / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / Style & usage7 Comments

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Ze, zim, zer, zher, zis, mer, hus, shkle, hum, herm, hann, ey, hu, je, xe, per, thon, yo, ghaH, co, e. Know what these words are? They are artificial constructs: neologisms cobbled together for abstruse political correctness to replace traditional pronouns that expose or define a gender in the subject or object of a sentence: the traditional he, him, she, her and so on. They’re sometimes called Spivak pronouns after an American mathematician who coined some of them, but there are many more than he coined. Gender-neutral pronouns (GNP) are today’s newspeak. Wiktionary has a long list of them. A ……… click below for more ↓

The meaning of dreams

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Behaviour & Psychology / Critical Thinking / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

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Jack Kerouac woke up most mornings in the 1950s and scribbled into a bedside notebook what he could remember of his dreams. Characters from his novels interacted with fantasies and real life events. The result was eventually published in 1961 as his Book of Dreams; 184 pages of mostly spontaneous or stream-of-consciousness writing, as this excerpt shows: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I’m stopped by smiling threesome of cats who’ve disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas-Unmistakably going to steal my bag-I struggled a little, gave up-Begin communicating with them ……… click below for more ↓

Does anyone still read books?

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Reading & LiteracyLeave a comment

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I came across an early version of this infographic on Facebook and it shook me to my core. You can see it here. The updated and corrected infographic is shown to the right. It is only marginally less distressing than the earlier one. Unfortunately, the early one, although inaccurate and misleading, is still being shared. That early graphic is based on some disputed statistics and unfounded claims, but it’s worth examining to understand my reaction. Reading is so central to my life that the notion that anyone would stop reading books simply gobsmacks me. I can barely go eight hours ……… click below for more ↓

Fulfilling a role? Who are you kidding?

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies / Publicity & CommunicationsLeave a comment

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The bite of irony is in the air when a flimsy piece of blatant Block propaganda masquerading as an official media release is published by the town. It has the misleading headline, “Town fulfilling role in hospital redevelopment process,” but only delusional sycophants won’t read it as a Block screed. When did town media releases shill for a group at the table, not represent the will of council as a whole? Did the mayor approve this dreck before it went out? I suspect not. * It’s ironic that last term’s council was criticized by some of the very people who ……… click below for more ↓

Tough Times for Print Media

Culture / Media / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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It’s not like the halcyon days when I first started writing for newspapers, back in late 1969. Today, print media is struggling to survive in a world dominated by digital media and mega-corps owners (although not so hard it can’t pay its CEOs and executives several million dollars while they slash real jobs).* Print media has long been losing its advertising share, a trend exacerbated by the internet. Newspapers now have about 11% share, compared to about 35% for the internet, according to a Globe and Mail story. A Pew Research study in 2015 showed newspaper advertising in the USA dropped 4% ……… click below for more ↓

Back to black

Fonts & Layout / Theme & Coding / TypographyLeave a comment

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I had noticed of late that several websites are more difficult to read, that they opted to use a lighter grey text instead of a more robust black. But it didn’t dawn on me that it wasn’t my aging eyes: this was a trend. That is, until I read an article on Backchannel called “How the Web Became Unreadable.” It’s a good read for anyone interested in typography, design and layout – and not just the Web, but print as well. It makes several good points about contrast including providing some important technical details about how contrast is measured. I’ve ……… click below for more ↓

The 10 Worst?

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryOne Comment

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Skeptoid just published its top-ten worst anti-science websites and I’m sure you won’t be surprised at the awardees, especially not the regulars like Mercola, Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra and Food Babe (aka the Worst Assault on Science on the Internet). Predatory quacks, crackpots and fakirs you will easily recognize. Surprisingly, the uber-wingnut David Wolfe was absent this year. Some of these sites sugar-coat their nonsense with pseudo-spirituality, usually some mashup of New Age codswallop and ancient mumbo-jumbo. Many ascribe their claptrap to traditional – non-medical, unproven and anti-science – practices like ayurveda or Chinese folk medicine, both of which can not ……… click below for more ↓

Horace and him. And maybe me, too.

Books & Reviews / Classics / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading Now5 Comments

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Horace and Me, subtitled Life lessons from an Ancient Poet, is a recent book by Harry Eyres (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013) about his efforts to connect the dots of his modern life to meaning via the ancient circuitry of a classical Latin poet. It attracted me because these past few years I have been reading such classics – albeit without the classical education or Latin learning of Eyres and other writers who have recently returned to the Latin and Greek authors. Any help I can get along the way is welcome. Horace – more properly Quintus Horatius Flaccus – was a Roman ……… click below for more ↓

552 kWh? We can do better

Collingwood / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Utilities: electricity and waterLeave a comment

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I received a report in the mail from Collus PowerStream giving me an overview of my electricity usage for the one-month period of August. A hot, humid August that no doubt had us running the air conditioner and ceiling fans more often than we normally do (we actually like it warm most of the time). I really appreciated getting the notice because we care about conservation. I always want to know more about our energy and water use, especially as the utility rates continue to escalate. Anything we can do to keep the bills low is something we examine carefully. ……… click below for more ↓

Leonard Cohen deserves the Nobel Prize, too

Arts / Culture / International politics / Literature / Music & Reviews / Politics4 Comments

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News that songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature shook the literati worldwide. Here was a pop icon sitting in the august company of Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling and many others. Novelists, essayists and poets. No songwriters, and especially no commercially successful, popular songwriters until the 75-year-old Dylan. And, we hope, that surely opens the door for similarly talented and poetic songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen; writers of great power, subtlety, ……… click below for more ↓

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