Category: Omnium-Gatherum

“IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW…”

“…that gets you into trouble.” As Mark Twain said: “It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This can mean anything from “My drinking isn’t hurting anyone,” and “The pain in my chest will go away on its own,” to “In Springfield they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” and “America is run by childless cat ladies.”

But even denial and lies have fallen on hard times in this great age of untruth. Until now, lies needed at least a sideways glance to the reality that they aren’t true. The liar had to care, not so much about the truth of what they said, but about how their opponents felt about the lie.

But last month, even that went out the window.

First, in the U.S. vice-presidential debate, JD Vance chastised the moderator by saying: “The rules were, you weren’t going to fact-check and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”

In other words, fact-checking is cheating.

Read on…

Fuller Disclosure.

Years ago I had lunch with the clinical director of a global pharma. Earlier that day, the world learned that his company had been writing academic research articles for publication in medical journals and ‘inviting’ leading researchers to sign their names to them in return for a hefty fee. Of course, the articles promoted molecules that the pharma’s researchers were developing into drugs.

It would be impossible at lunch not to bring up this shocking scandal.

My lunch-mate took the long view, saying that all pharma scandals involve ‘cheating’ because the cost to get something approved was eye watering, and delays can cost billions. What’s more, the revenues to be earned were even vaster. So cheating was more a feature than a bug of the industry.

A result of this and many other pharma scandals is that whenever doctors now speak to a medical or public group, they must disclose what funding they received, what for and from whom, on the subject they’re speaking about. Not just their fees for speaking, but any money for anything to do with their area of expertise. And not just fees, but board and advisory positions on any company involved with their work.

I was reminded of this rule when I read last week about Economist Impact, the events and sponsored content division of The Economist Group. They run 136 events a year, including the World Cancer Conference in Brussels at the end of this month.

But that conference won’t happen because three of Economist Impact’s biggest sponsors are Philip Morris International (PMI), Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and British American Tobacco (BAT).

Economist Impact neglected to tell the dozens of expert speakers and hundreds of delegates that the companies making the cancer conference possible make a product whose normal use gives you cancer. The Economist Magazine (which calls itself a newspaper) quickly said: “Not us” the way you would when your six-fingered cousin is brought up on morals charges.

Read on…

CUTTING OFF YOUR NOSE.

My first experience with the politics of “Ready, fire, aim…” happened long ago at Queen’s Park in Toronto, the heartbeat of Ontario’s government.

The province’s farmers were protesting some new policy that would hurt the agricultural sector. So they drove hundreds of tractors up University Avenue and parked them in the middle of the circular road that rings the Provincial Legislature.

Chaos. Huge, instant traffic jams. Many thousands of people were inconvenienced by this. Thousands more were very annoyed. Politicians were enraged.

The farmers? They were positively righteous in their anger. “All Ontarians need to know just how badly they’re treating their farmers.”

I thought, “Why would you protest in a way that will get your allies and curious bystanders really mad at you?” One  answer of course was to force the other side, in this case, the province, to back down. That’s the purpose of all strikes everywhere.

But with Palestinian protesters against Israel, the collateral damage to Canada’s writing community is deadly.

Read on…

THE ENDURING RESILIENCE OF SEXUAL MONSTERS.

On October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Meg Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator in The New York Times. Just days later, Ronan Farrow (Woody Allen’s son) expanded that story in The New Yorker.

Those two pieces sparked a revolution in how men should behave with women
at the office and on the shop floor. It was just months before the #MeToo movement swept dozens of men from their jobs and rewrote the rules of engagement between men and women, especially men and women with vastly different degrees of power.

Here in Canada, soon after The Times pieces, The Globe and Mail tried to get the goods on our own business leaders who were thought to act like Weinstein. (All our media had been stung by the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, but he was fired eons before in 2014, and then found not guilty at trial two years later).

The Globe wasn’t able to turn up much.

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”

In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.

Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.

My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”

WOKE NEEDS AN AWAKENING.

It’s fun and easy to mock the dervishes of politically-correct language.

But the thinking behind it masks a righteousness that would hang anyone who says ‘lumberjack’ instead of ‘woodchopper’ for fear of offending millions of marginalized female lumberjacks.

This week I stumbled across the WIPO Guidelines on Inclusive Language, issued by the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Here I learned to say “faithful dog” instead of “man’s best friend”, a “person who has had a stroke” rather than a “stroke victim”; and “a person with a drug addiction” rather than “an addict.”

Read on…

SHOULD CEOs HAVE MENTAL COMPETENCY TESTS?

The CEO of the United States of America, the world’s largest organization, with $27 trillion in turnover and 333 million employees, is 81 years old.

His 4-year term is coming up in November and he hasn’t had a test to determine if he’s mentally competent, even though he’ll be 86 when he plans to walk out of his office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington for the last time.

But the 51 million Americans who watched Joe Biden’s performance against Donald Trump on June 27 didn’t need a doctor’s opinion to tell them their President was not up to the task on that day, let alone for the 1,461 days of his second term as U.S. President.

Given Mr. Biden’s mental frailty, there  are already calls for mental competency tests for politicians. Republican Nikki Haley, for one, has urged U.S. politicians over the age of 75 to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, the standard for assessing mental decline.

Three quarters of Americans support this idea.

“TOO MUCH OF A MUCHNESS.”

My mom used to say that to describe anything that spilled over the guardrails of usualness in 1960s Edmonton – like Pierre Trudeau, or exercise, or drinking gin while playing bridge.

She would die of shock if she were alive today.

Here are three examples. None of them is about the U.S. election, the Israel-Hamas conflict, or Pierre Trudeau’s son. All reveal how extreme life is in the world today, especially when it comes to freedom.

First, two North Korean table-tennis players who won the silver medal at the Paris Olympics, are being investigated by Kim Jong Un’s government  — not for posing for a selfie that went viral with the gold (from China) and bronze (from South Korea) medal winners, but for smiling when they were posing for that selfie. The smiles were deemed unpatriotic.

Read on…

DOES BEING LIKE YOU MEAN I LIKE YOU?

Politicians everywhere appeal to people who look, talk and act like them.

Given this universal truth, it’s revealing who Donald Trump appeals to because he’s like them.

So let’s look at how many votes could come Donald Trump’s way because of what we know is true about him.

First, he’s a man. 120 million American men are entitled to vote in the U.S. election.

Next, he’s white. 165 million U.S. voters are white.

At age 78, he’s also old. 650,000 Americans are 78 or older. But let’s loosen the definition of ‘old’ and say he’s “a senior citizen”. Over 72 million Americans fit into that group.

Trump is also a Christian. 150 million voters identify as Christian.

He plays golf, not well, but a lot. 10.4 million Americans play golf.

Trump is also a college graduate, like 125 million voters, and an Ivy League graduate, like 504,000 of them.

Read on…

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

On October 5, 2017, The New York Times published shocking allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Four months later I hosted a RamsayTalk with the co-author of that piece, Jodi Kantor. She noted that the pendulum had already swung from silence to zero tolerance.

She told a story of a notional office party where the CFO drank too much and made an unwelcome advance to a female colleague. She complained to HR. He was immediately fired, couldn’t get a job, lost his accountant’s license and left his family and life in ruins.

Some would say he deserved all that and more.

Jodi Kantor said, before #MeToo became a movement, and long before she co-wrote She Said, and won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Weinstein story: “Likely all the woman really wanted was an apology.”

Read on…

Mutts.

“[Kamala Harris] was always of Indian heritage and she was always promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know: is she Indian or is she Black?”

Donald Trump asked that last Thursday to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

His question then begs mine now: Is Donald Trump white?

He’s mixed nationality for sure, part Scottish and part German. And less than 100 years ago Germans viewed themselves as “The Master Race”.

Wikipedia’s history of the Trump family says they descended from an itinerant lawyer in Germany in 1608.

Read on…

Quiet, please, there’s a lady on stage.

I’ve always liked Celine Dion’s songs more than I’ve liked Celine Dion.

I’m not sure what it was: too slick, too produced, too perfect.

Then she started cancelling shows claiming she had a rare and mysterious disease. Since 2020 she’s been silent. No new songs, no new shows. Nothing. But…

Not.

Any.

More.

Her performance last Friday at the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, where she belted out Hymne à l’amour, was stunning in its own right.

But when you think how terribly sick she’s been, and still is, those four minutes singing in the rain became a global event.

It used to be that people asked: “Where were you when..?” and they would follow with some tragedy or assassination. The only good-news-version I’ve heard is: “Where were you when the astronauts landed on the moon?” But it’s not far-fetched, even when Ms. Dion’s 15-seconds of fame have already stretched to 40 years, for us to ask: “Where were you when Celine Dion sang in Paris?”

Read on…

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