Bob Ramsay

Sixty years ago, a retired marine biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service wrote a book about how the pesticide DDT seemed to be upending the natural order of things. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was the first book to examine humankind’s impact on nature. and sparked the global environmental movement. Silent Spring is still in print today, and as one critic said: “Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world, but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder.” Here she is now with a timely reminder that our days could be short here, so let’s not make this the last of our springs.

Life’s a Venn Diagram these days. One crisis bleeds into another. Omicron mutates into BA.2. Gender collides with identity. Work and life become work/life. Facts and truth congeal. Liberals embrace the NDP.

Meanwhile, back here in our lane from which we never veer, here is your Omnium Gatherum.

..to bring you odd news from its edges, like the Queen’s State Dinner for Vladimir Putin.; the collapse of Russian oligarchs’ wealth in the past two weeks; Malcolm Muggeridge on how Stalin engineered a famine in Ukraine in 1932; plus how to be an instant-soldier; and finally, the original Nurnberg indictments against the Nazis now that the International Criminal Court is opening a war-crimes investigation against Russia.

Meanwhile, in the world outside Ukraine..……