Tags: CIA

A MASTERCLASS GETS SOME MISTRESSES.

Until a few years ago, the chances of seeing a woman on the podium conducting an orchestra were approximately zero.

Today, they’re popping up everywhere. Keri-Lynn Wilson, a Canadian-American, guest-conducts all over the world, Barbara Hannigan, also a Canadian, guest-conducts and singsthe world over too. And the American, Marin Alsop, is the leading woman conductor on any podium.

But a Canadian woman conducting a Canadian orchestra on more than a drive-by basis?Fuhgeddaboudit.

But that too is changing.

Read on…

GOING OUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR GAME.

Last year, the world’s authority on decision-making ended his life in a clinic in Zurich.

How Daniel Kahneman decided to do that is instructive. True, the Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking Fast and Slow was 90, but he wasn’t actively dying. He didn’t have cancer, or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. But as he wrote in an email to his close friends: “I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds, but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something.”

Read on…

A Spade, A Spade

On October 7, George Achi, the CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards and Practices and Public Trust, e-mailed all CBC journalists, urging them not to refer to Hamas as ‘terrorists’.

“Do not refer to militants, soldiers or anyone else as ‘terrorists.’ The notion of terrorism is heavily politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as terrorists, we should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact. This includes statements from the Canadian government and Canadian politicians.”

Actually, calling someone a terrorist who blows people up, kidnaps civilians and threatens to behead them, and cuts babies’ throats out, is not opinion, it’s fact. We may quarrel whether one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. But to avoid the use of “terrorist” to describe Hamas, let alone to practically forbid it, perverts the English language in a way that would make George Orwell gag.

The CBC’s argument is that because terrorism is part of the story, the word “terrorist” is somehow off-limits. Really? How incredibly condescending our national broadcaster is to think that people can’t read or hear the word “terrorism” and not feel compromised, or worse, offended. I say if someone can endure the actual terror of being kidnapped, murdered, and much much worse, we can endure hearing about it.

And not some pablum-ed version of it, where a “terrorist” is now just a “participant,” but an actual person “who uses violent action in order to achieve political aims or to force a government to act.”

Long before their invasion of Israel, Hamas has been condemned as a terrorist organization by dozens of countries, including Canada.

So their commitment to terror is not a matter of debate or discussion. It’s a matter of legal fact.

Get a grip, CBC.

Meanwhile…

RamsayWrites

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