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TRUE PATRIOT LUST.

The opportunity for one of the most patriotism-shy nations on earth to gorge on that very thing begins the week of May 12. That’s when we learn which of Mark Carney’s Liberal MPs will be sworn in to what Cabinet posts.

The split second the Cabinet is announced, dozens of organizations who have been preparing their “Elbows Up” wish lists for federal funding will push “send” and shoot their proposals into the offices of the Ministers of Canadian Culture, of Sport, Innovation, Indigenous Relations, Foreign Affairs and more.

Read on…

May 9, 2025 May 10, 2025

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…

May 3, 2025 May 3, 2025

WAR BY OTHER MEANS.

Last weekend an ad appeared in The Globe and Mail announcing a campaign to raise $30 million “to bring the best scientific minds to Canada’s #1 hospital.”

The University Health Network, which runs Toronto General, Toronto Western, and Princess Margaret Hospitals, is not only Canada’s best hospital, Toronto General is ranked #3 in the world (next to the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in the US) and the #1 public hospital in the world.

So UHN is already on the podium and now sees a chance to own it.

Read on…

April 25, 2025 April 26, 2025

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…

March 29, 2025 May 3, 2025

ARE THE ANTI-TRUMP AMERICANS THE JEWS OF THE 1930s?

No one knows; it’s just too early to tell.

But the fact that it’s even possible to ask the question speaks to how fast and fully Donald Trump has grabbed and bent the levers of American executive, legislative, judicial and military power to his will. Not to mention how he’s already exercised his unquenchable revenge on his enemies.

So did Hitler, but he was slower.

Read on…

March 8, 2025 April 6, 2025

PEOPLE FORGET.

Last week Louise Penny pulled the plug on her appearance at The Kennedy Center to launch her new mystery, The Grey Wolf.

Said Penny: “I’m in DC, but in the wake of Trump taking over, I have pulled out. It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.”

“Trump taking over” means his self-elevation to the Chair of the previously bipartisan leadership of Washington’s leading concert hall, which he engineered earlier this month. Trump promised to “make the center GREAT AGAIN,” adding “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation.”

Since then, Trump has fired the board and its CEO, Deborah Rutter, and appointed a new board who then appointed him Chair – and ticket sales have dropped by 50%.

Read on…

March 1, 2025 April 6, 2025

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

February 8, 2025 March 28, 2025

BULKING UP.

The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.

This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.

It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?

Read on…

January 18, 2025 February 28, 2025

STAY IN SCHOOL.

It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

November 30, 2024 January 11, 2025

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…

October 5, 2024 November 15, 2024

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…

August 10, 2024 October 18, 2024

The Plague-Ground – What you must never tell an American

Thank god for the pandemic. Now, even we Canadians can speak truth to America’s lack of power. Yet until now, in the way we would

April 26, 2020 August 9, 2021

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Tags: USA

TRUE PATRIOT LUST.

A MASTERCLASS GETS SOME MISTRESSES.

WAR BY OTHER MEANS.

GOING OUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR GAME.

ARE THE ANTI-TRUMP AMERICANS THE JEWS OF THE 1930s?

PEOPLE FORGET.

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

BULKING UP.

STAY IN SCHOOL.

CUTTING OFF YOUR NOSE.

Mutts.

Subscribe to Bob's Free Weekly Omnium-Gatherum Blog:

Subscribe to Bob's Free Weekly Omnium-Gatherum Blog:

Benefits of being a subscriber:

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