People will die this summer on the Sunshine Coast. Not all of them will die peacefully in their beds or from any number of risky behaviours, but they will die of ultimately preventable outcomes from common garden variety Canadian activities like hiking and fishing. Nobody will point a gun [...]
We have to get out of this colonial, 'us or them', squander and pillage mindset. If we dismissed the idiot rantings of the quasi-actuaries infesting the halls of power in Victoria and the 'unthink tanks' such as the Eraser institute, we would come to realise that we have more [...]
The normalisation of the abnormal is well and truly here; and we have it in a wide spectrum of flavours. We no longer flinch when informed of some atrocious wrong-doing in government. Politicians lie shamelessly, reverse policies to suit the day's 'weltanschau', and blithely accept money from vested interests [...]
My political proclivities are not as easily expressed in a label or epithet, but it would be fair to say I don't like thieves, scallywags, and scoundrels purporting to represent me and my ilk in the political theatre. As an erstwhile member of the BCTF, I have spent my [...]
This might cause me to become unpopular in some circles but notoriety is better than no-notoriety. The thought that appears on the horizons of my perhaps limited cognitive processes is that many of the clowns I observe in the political news of the day are horribly uneducated. Then I [...]
Thoughts on arising. So much has been written and discussed about building a wall, about keeping out those who are somehow different than us. It has been put about that this wall will be immensely long and tall and thick, and that none of the undesirables will ever be [...]
At the risk of folks misunderstanding my carefully chosen words, I must share a few thoughts on how to avoid the loud and potentially dangerous pitbull that lives across the street; tethered for now, but with no guarantee on the tensile quality of the leash. In these days it [...]
I'm currently hooked on repeated re-listenings (is that redundant?) of Al Stewart's magnum opus 'Past, Present, & Future'. I drive friends crazy with this habit, but I have to beat an album to death until I've worn it out. One of the most haunting pieces is called 'Last Day [...]
Fresh on the heels of David Bowie's passing, it might be relevant to consider the need for a comprehensive arts education for all, and more intensive resources for what the New Statesman calls the "intellectually marginal". Without the post war investment in arts education, we would have no Bowie, [...]
Where do you wind up when you finally come to the conclusion you really know very little about very much. If you're like me you're sitting at the kitchen table, feet cooling on a stone floor because you're too lazy to hunt down your fluffy slippers, musing yourself. But [...]