Category World Affairs
The Costs of War
When we toured the First World War battlefields in the Ypres area of Belgium last summer, the enormity of the human toll was apparent. The numbers are staggering. Daily casualty figures were measured in hundreds or thousands as more than a half a million men died in combat on Flanders fields in four years of […]
Stuff Happens
Went to Canada’s National Arts Centre on Saturday night to take in the play Stuff Happens, which is a look at the players and their actions surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. You know the war – the United Nations decided Saddam Hussein could be given more time, so George W. Bush put together his […]
Lost Boys
There has been a lot of media coverage in my area about John Maguire, the young Canadian killed in action in Syria fighting for the Islamic State. There has been much written about his youth, asking how someone could grow up to renounce Canadian values and embrace such an extremist form of Islam. When I […]
Dead Terrorists
I saw the report about the death of a Canadian terrorist last week, first online then, the next morning, in my newspaper. I read the whole article instead of just skimming, noted some interesting details and that was about it. I thought about doing a blog post, but decided against it. Why give extra publicity […]
Panda Diplomacy
Having a monopoly on an endangered species has had certain advantages for Mainland China. I thought about that on a visit last year to the zoo in Toronto. The Toronto Zoo has a couple of giant pandas on loan. They will be there until 2018, when they will relocate to Calgary for a time in […]
What’s In A Name?
William Shakespeare has many memorable, oft quoted lines, including the one about the rose. You know the one, from Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The implication is that names are unimportant. I disagree. Names help define who we are and how we feel about ourselves. Parents spend […]
Memories of War
Like most Canadians, I think of war as rather a remote thing. It has been a long time since a war was fought on Canadian soil. Oh there has been the odd skirmish, rebellions in the Canadian west in 1870 and 1885 as well as in both Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) […]
Twitter and Pandora’s Box
Yesterday the Ottawa Senators hockey team fired their coach – and announced his departure via Twitter. Today seems like a good time to diverge from the travel dialogue we have been having and talk technology, starting with Twitter. I’m not used to seeing it used for important announcements like that. My wife was asking about […]
Black Friday
Today, if you didn’t already know, is the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday, which for the past 50 years or so has been referred to as Black Friday. It is an orgy of consumerism, a shopping frenzy with supposedly lower prices and longer store hours and chaos in shopping malls across the USA. It […]
Do They Know It’s Christmas?
I remember going to see The Concert For Bangladesh in early 1972at the Dorval Cinema in suburban Montreal. That movie (and the triple vinyl disc album of the same name) was my introduction to pop music as a fundraiser for a good cause, though there might have been earlier efforts I was unaware of. Yesterday […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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