After reading MrK’s epic tilting at the climate windmill in this article, I couldn’t help a responding with a bit of random data of my own. One of the assertions he made was that random, individual weather observations, or more importantly, selective regional weather reports, be excluded from any serious debate on climate. All this [...]
“Animals in the wild , in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations. In theory – that is, as a simple physical possibility – an animal could pick up and go, flaunting all the social conventions and boundaries proper to its species.” – Yann Martel, Life of Pi, excerpted [...]
Dr. J.’s recent musings concerning the selling of the souls, the pimping of history’s great philosophers by university departments desperate to attract students evoked some warm and wry recollections of my own distant years lugging worn texts around the humanities building at the University of Alberta. For I, myself, majored in philosophy, in a four-year [...]
From the editorial page of the Calgary Herald, November 18, 2007 (original, slightly longer version): How disunity among Canada’s left-leaning parties is helping Harper govern like he has a majority It was a portentous moment in Canadian politics. Basil Eldon “Buzz” Hargrove, the bombastic but influential president of the Canadian Auto Workers, was being kicked [...]
Ottawa has a certain lamp post quality to it. By that I mean that the lamp posts or utility poles of the city appear to be crucial in terms of public communication. Notices overlap, layer upon layer, either bound with masses of tape on metal poles or fixed in a nest of staples on the [...]
“(insert Slavic name here)… conseiller politique de Poutine” – Caption under RDI news report I thought I was dreaming the other day when I caught a news report on RDI. The footage showed Vladimir Putin and his coterie, but they spelled his name “Poutine” – i.e. like the characteristic local dish of greasy fries, [...]
I’d be surprised if any of our readers could resist being moved by the images and captions in this item by Michael Yon. Yon in my view is the world’s best living war correspondent, but he doesn’t work for any newspaper or mainstream broadcasting outlet. He’s a freelancer who publishes online. The current piece breaks the news of the [...]
To read an illustrated pdf of my article on global warming in the Fall 2007 issue of Ski Canada magazine, please click here.
The weeklong gathering storm in Ottawa should make it plain that the substantive wrongdoing of the chief target of opposition and news media ire can be entirely decoupled from the intensity of the scandal. C’est la vie politique, one must conclude, although it can be a harder life for the right-of-centre pol. What should bother people is that today’s chief [...]
Beats me how it happens, but somehow I was standing yesterday in front of a Grade 5/6 class talking about science. It actually started over a conversation with my 10-year-old over the pros and cons of buying bottled water. Their class had apparently decided to lobby for banning these environmental death bombs from the school. [...]