A friend and former client, and faithful reader of these missives, challenged me to write about fairness, of which there seems a paucity these days. Fairness is a funny thing. When little kids say, “Not fair!!!”, they really mean, “I’m not being treated the way I would like.” As we grow older, we begin to…
The likely reversal of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States tells us many things about the legal and political world south of our border. In fact, it tells us much about us, too. It tells us that the Common Law is always amenable to change, even reversal, with the tides…
It seems that Vlad’s “special operation” isn’t going so well. To be sure, he probably didn’t count on the formidable response of the West, and he certainly got it entirely wrong about the resolve of Ukrainians. But his version of Anschluss is crumbling mostly because of factors decades in the making, for which he has…
We live in a northern climate, and that means it gets bitterly cold in the winter. So cold that water pipes will freeze and crack and a cup of coffee would freeze solid if left on the counter overnight. In Canada, as in most northern countries, heating our homes is not just a matter of…
In my mind, Carl Docksteader was always larger than life. Oddly enough, or maybe because that’s the way great men are, he was always modest about himself and his accomplishments. Carl never went to university, and except for his last two years, he never lived outside the little rural township where he was born. Yet…
I knew that title would get your attention. We’re all suckers for sensational stories, and I’m just as guilty as the next guy. Is a Dirty Thirties replay in the cards? Not likely, but possible. So are nuclear war, the Big Asteroid, and the Next Big Pandemic. There are lots of horrifying “what ifs” out…
Sometimes I wonder how homo sapiens ever made it to the top of the food chain. In fact, if anyone but ourselves had been in charge of assigning Latin names to the species, would anyone else have called us “wise man”? Given that we are something less than a minute away from Armageddon Midnight on…
A fascinating new area of brain research suggests something that good communicators have intuitively known all along: the human brain interprets information based on predictions it has already made. In other words, your brain largely sees or hears or feels what it has expected to see, hear, or feel. Apparently what happens is that when…
It now must be abundantly obvious, even to the most naive right-winger, that Number 45 is and always was a lying, cheating, conniving, slippery, disreputable, self-absorbed, narcissistic megalomaniac. But will his fans suddenly rediscover their ethics and moral fibre? Don’t count on it. Think about it. Even the most pious or trusting among them knew…
We’re all addicts of one sort or another. Each of us is prone to some vice, large or small, which our logical mind tells us is not good for us, yet we go back again and again like a pig to the trough. It may be as socially innocent as staying up too late, or…