Category Society
Welcome To 1984
A friend in the U.K. wanted to know if I had seen the news article. Was I aware that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) had been tracking 33 million Canadian cell phones to monitor citizens’ movement during the pandemic? I hadn’t seen that specific article – but I knew it was going on. […]
A Matter of Choice
“I am an adult. I get to choose.” I found that quote when looking through my notes, trying to decide what I would write about today. I don’t remember everything about the conversation. I do remember the context. The speaker was a woman, a political refugee from a Middle Eastern country. Her crime was advocating […]
A Year Later…
I started a post for today, but have decided to abandon it. It was to be a reflection on Boxing Day shopping in this COVID world. Except I am not shopping today. Which has nothing to do with COVID. I haven’t even looked at any sale flyers to se what the temptations might be. There’s […]
Baby’s First Christmas
How do you feel about social media? About people living their lives, more or less, online? We can connect in so many ways that were science fiction not that many years ago. And with those connections has come a number of ethical issues that previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Much of what we […]
Seasonal Offering
You know we live in a weird world when people will pay $50 or $100 to hear someone recite a 400-year-old Bible translation set to music. On an unseasonably warm Ottawa night a couple of weeks ago two thousand people paid to attend something you wouldn’t expect to be popular in our post-Christian society: a […]
The Christmas Market
When I lived in Germany, I would take in a half dozen Christmas markets each year. I didn’t limit myself to only German ones – I also checked out markets in France and Austria. That of course was pre-pandemic. I’m not sure how many Christmas markets were permitted to operate this year. I know in […]
No School Today
Public schools in Ontario are closed for the Christmas break (which they probably call a winter break, I haven’t checked). When they will reopen is a matter of some conjecture. The Premier said on Friday that it was too early to say if schools would reopen in January, given the COVID case count. Too me […]
Reason For The Season
I was struck by this photo when I saw it online. It is a reminder at this time of year there is more to Christmas than a cultural festival featuring an old man in a red suit. The cross isn’t usually seen as a Christmas symbol. Yet it is the ultimate Christmas symbol. The birth of the […]
The Rule of Law
Back in my teens there was a television show that ran for several seasons that made fun of the law. Given the times in which we live, I’m surprised someone hasn’t revived it. Then again, it would probably be shut down by either the government or proponents of cancel culture. The governmnet doesn’t like people […]
Rethinking COVID
As we prepare to celebrate our second COVID Christmas, maybe it is time to stop kidding ourselves and accept the new reality. This isn’t going away anytime soon. Instead of trying to beat COVID-19, perhaps it is time we learned to live with it. There are precedents after all. In Canada about three thousand people […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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