Category Politics

Weasel Words

I had CNN in the background while I was making dinner (I haven’t yet figured out how to change TV channels where I’m staying this week.) and was struck by the wording of one of the stories. The anchor referred to the paying of hush money by Donald Trump to a porn star with whom […]

Food For Thought

“But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then […]

November Is Coming

Yes, it is seven months away, but I have ben thinking about the American presidential election. Mostly I have been wondering what can be done to fix a broken system. Technically there is nothing wrong with the way Americans elect a president. The system has worked for more than 200 years, with a peaceful transition […]

Was It A Mistake?

Another unfinished post, this one from August 2021. I realize I have several pandemic-related posts that I didn’t finish, for one reason or another. COVID-19 dominated public consciousness like nothing else in my lifetime, It still shows up in the headlines fairly frequently. In many countries, the rate of people getting vaccinated against COVID-19 has […]

The Orphanage

It is Flashback Friday once more. Today we go back to March 22, 2015 and some reflections on a visit to Istanbul. I wrote about visiting one of the Princes Islands in Istanbul, and my interest in the abandoned building at the top of the hill. I recently discovered there is more to the story of that […]

The Deal

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. – Psalm 146:3 Somewhere I have a half-finished post from 2022 that I never got around to sharing here. In it I quoted Psalm 146, warning NDP leader Jagmeet Singh not to trust the Prime Minister, who had just made a deal with […]

Still True

Even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs.              – David Brooks, The New York Times, January 31, 2017. It is Flashback Friday, and this quote, which was the entire post from […]

Solving The Problem

I wrote the words in italics below more than a year ago, in mid-January 2023. For whatever reason, I never finished the post. Which, as it turns out may have been a good thing – I would probably have looked pretty silly to anyone reading the post today, as I will explain once you’ve read […]

Twitter and Free Speech

I found this post from January 2021 in my draft post file. No idea why it didn’t get posted back then. These days the name has changed, as Twitter is now X – but the issues remain the same. My 2024 reflections will be in italics at the end. I’m a big proponent of free […]

A Win For The Truckers

It is too late to make a difference, but it does set a precedent for the future. The federal government is appealing of course, not just because of the precedent but because the court ruling makes the Prime Minister and his Cabinet look bad. On Tuesday the Federal court ruled that the Trudeau government’s use […]