An essential chapter of the fascist playbook is to blame foreign actors for your troubles. Poland, Hungary, and China do it today as a matter of official policy, as did America under Donald Trump. But Alberta? In July 2019, just three months after Jason Kenney’s United Conservatives defeated Rachel Notley’s NDPs to become Alberta’s ruling […]
The Anti-Everything Inquiry Read More »
I’m tired of the phrases “award-winning” and “best-selling.” Tired because they signal puffery and bullshit over skill and achievement. Which is odd since they were born meaning the opposite. I don’t mean award-winning as in the Nobel Prize, though a friend once peevishly noted: “They’re giving them out every year now, right?” I also don’t
The “August Long Weekend” began as a bank holiday, which is the term to describe a day when the banks are closed in the United Kingdom and the Crown dependencies.” It’s not that banks get to willy-nilly declare a holiday like the one on Monday. It’s that all holidays, like Christmas and New Year’s, are
Happy Bank Holiday Weekend Read More »
America is such a rich well of strangeness that you can uncover almost any belief about anything and hold it up as proof of whatever strangeness you fancy. Like only brown cows produce chocolate milk, or dinosaurs and humans co-existed, or “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to
Fake News. Real Death. Read More »
I generally write one blog on a subject and then move on. This is because the world is a fascinating place for a hedgehog like me who likes to dart – oh, look, there’s a squirrel! – from one idea to the next. But mix in a pandemic, and the columnist’s lament of what to
The Vaccine-Hesitants — and Lunatics Read More »
Last weekend all across Ontario, the entire 15 million of us, poured into theatres, museums, gyms, hair-dressers and border crossings. Even though none of what was suddenly open could accommodate more than a half or even a quarter of us, we didn’t care. We were free at last! Meanwhile, back here on your screen, where
Pent-Up Demand Goes Panting Read More »
In April last year, as Donald Trump handed the pandemic over to the states to deal with, and then kept Democratic ones from receiving funding for masks and ventilators and PPE, I feared this was all part of a plot to kill Democratic voters. I didn’t tell anyone this because it was a ridiculous, paranoid
While Donald Trump is untethering from reality, which is a bad thing, you and I are being untethered from tradition, which is a good thing. The fog is barely rising on the pandemic, and already some brave new worlds are staring at us, oddly. One of them is the old idea, entrenched for hundreds of
We’re officially three weekends into freedom and what are you feeling? A bit like that old Ontario tourism campaign – “Friendly, Familiar, Foreign and Near?” Me too. Shaking hands, which I took to be a universal human gesture, feels odd and awkward. Clearing the deck of old habits, unfriendly friends, extra calories and streaming –
You’d think universities are where controversy could flex its delts. Isn’t controversy a purpose of a university? To test out new ideas by debating them and see which ones survive perpetual trial by enquiry? Not any more. Higher education isn’t in the truth business so much as in the virtue business. The world I want,
Cancelling Controversy Read More »
Global warming isn’t always about Heat Advisories in the High Arctic. It’s about our normally placid middle-of-the road weather going bi-polar. It’s about extremes. So while we’re baking this summer, compare that to what’s coming to a climate near you in January – and smile, and live for the day, if not the minute in
Hot Enough for You? Read More »
Last year, the tech giants made almost a trillion dollars in revenues. Put a different way: a thousand billion. It’s little wonder that governments starved by the pandemic are screaming “Share us the money!” Or that news organizations, whose fall is a direct function of social media’s rise, are looking to their captors to be
An iPhone for the Arts Read More »
