Category: Omnium-Gatherum

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…

“No country for old men.”

Yeats was referring to Ireland when he began Sailing to Byzantium with that line in 1933, and the Coen Brothers used it as the title for their 2007 Western about an old sheriff trying to make sense of a brutal and ambiguous world.

Last week, of course, its meaning had changed again, to “Joe Biden.”

This week it means something else entirely, “Donald Trump.”

We blame old men with money and power for not handing them back when asked nicely. As a result, many don’t. Most don’t. So when an old man with more power than anyone else on earth decides his time has come, the speed and scope of change can be head-spinning.

In the space of two days, Donald Trump is now the halting old man. A convicted felon also found guilty of sexual assault in a separate case, he will now face an opponent who has put dozens of men like him in jail. A …younger…. Black…woman. Can there be a worse nightmare?

Read on…

“Adventure is not in the guidebook.”

Jean and I went on an adventure this week, kayaking off the coast of Maine, which meant my Saturday blog didn’t get done, but my brain got restored. I’ll be back in the satellite again next week, so you can expect your Omnium-Gatherum on Saturday as always, or nearly so. 

“I’m thankful to the people who made my life miserable”

Katalin Karikó said that when she won a Gairdner Award in 2022 for co-discovering the foundations of mRNA vaccines, which have saved millions and maybe even billions of us from dying of COVID.

On the bell curve of grit and redemption, it’s hard to find a more exemplary case than the Hungarian immigrant woman who was treated shabbily for years by her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, and last year ended up winning The Nobel Prize.

The search for new truths in science is possibly the hardest search of all, because the bar of evidence is so high.

Read on…

RamsayWrites

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