Acclaiming what amounts to a ceasefire in Gaza as potentially (or definitively) worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize before it becomes a signed-by-all-sides peace agreement, is premature. It also threatens to subsume what the very suggestion makes clear should be awarded: an Ignoble Indifference-to-Peace Prize.… Read the rest
Sliding quietly along the shoreline of a lake created 12,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age retreated, brings the difference between change caused by natural process, and that wreaked by human folly, into baffling focus.… Read the rest
In this part of Canada, you don’t need a calendar to know autumn has officially arrived. Pretty much every conversational encounter with a local incudes an opinion or speculation on how colourful the leaves will be this year, and whether climate change will have an effect.… Read the rest
Railing against the idiocy and iniquities of pusillanimous media barons, shameless political opportunists and the perpetrators of the abomination of the war in Gaza having had little to no effect, it’s time to deploy what they fear most — mockery.… Read the rest
However they’re spun, the evidence to hand says the changes that are about to befall CBS News are not about truth, fairness and better serving the public. They’re about making the already rich, richer. News coverage, reputation and tradition will be the poor relations, at best.… Read the rest
It may seem presumptuous, if not contradictory to say on a website touting itself as “an atypical perspective”, that some things in this world demand nothing more than a straightforward view from the perspective of common sense.… Read the rest
Known to psychologists as “the illusion of truth”, the propaganda law “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is used so often, blatantly and cynically by Israeli spokespersons that anything they say must be taken with not a pinch, but the pillar of salt the Bible says Lot’s wife turned into for looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah.… Read the rest
When you’re typecast as terminally polite and stuck next to a family determined to revel in being the stereotypical “neighbours from Hell,” the courteous thing to do is offer them a copy of Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Louse”.… Read the rest
The killing of five journalists in a tent in Gaza this week is a cruel lesson for world leaders who have played along far too long with Israel’s “righteous victim” shield: what you do out of fear is what you become.… Read the rest
A few days ago I spent some time with the loon family I wrote about last week. The parents called out twice, to help the two chicks find them in the choppy waves, which prompted the thought that my exasperation with news coverage, and the world in general, is directly related to the excessive use of pointless words.… Read the rest