In the long ago late 1970s, when global warming was a gleam in some radical climatologist / doomsayer’s eye, when a jacked-up, tricked out 1973 Monte Carlo was high automotive art amongst my suburban Ontario pals, I read Bored of the Rings. Hilarious stuff, to a lover of the Tolkien trilogy…Dildo and Frito Bugger, high and mighty satire.… [Read more]
Readers of this space know that this Canuck is an admirer of President Obama. An easy call even if the President did not possess his many admirable qualities, given the sad state of his opposition, with knee-jerk abysmalism, and an always tried, never true policy of ‘well, shit, we’re not him’ its ragged, pathetic battle cry.… [Read more]
You can always count on Canada to provide black comedic relief when it comes to how terrorist threats ought to be blunted. We – unerringly – take an American legislative excess and give that delightful, north of the 49th insouciance to make it our own. Remember ‘extraordinary rendition’ in the wake of 9/11, a dark Rumsfledian Star Chamber vision administered by charming Syrian prison officials?… [Read more]
A few weeks ago, I offered a principled case for the Keystone XL pipeline project and its eventual approval by President Obama. I stand by those opinions – and as I explain here, recent Alberta political pronouncements elevate my views from so much environmentalist digital compost to pure gold. Realpolitik is rarely pretty. My bottom line suggestion that ‘hey, until America evolves beyond its fossil fuels fixation, oil’s gotta come from somewhere, so why not your friends?’ may at first seem an affront to any ‘principled case’ claims.… [Read more]
This past Sunday in Steubenville, Ohio, two adolescent males were convicted of a searingly self-defining crime, one that will mark these offenders, Cain-like…forever. They raped, by digital penetration, a 16-year-old female so drunk at the time of the offence that only through subsequent reconstruction – via the photos taken of the offenders by others and circulated among those present who did nothing to intervene, while she was repeatedly violated – did she actually understand the enormity of what had happened.… [Read more]
“Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” ~ Winston Churchill
“Those who expect real history from Hollywood should have a keeper.” ~ Davies
So it was last week in our land of perpetual mirth and sunshine. The latest cultural tempest in a thimble is the Oscar success enjoyed by Ben Affleck for his film Argo.… [Read more]
Tom Connors died March 6 – our nation is poorer for the loss.
National icon, straight shooter, his foot-pounding three chord poetry was driven by unabashed love of country – as only a Maritimer can do it. Commercial success was less important to Tom than his ability to connect with Canadians everywhere, simple, unaffected music and unsullied nationalism that was always pro-Canada, not ‘anti’ anyone else.… [Read more]
My digital pulpit north of Lake Ontario is no guarantee that brains or intellectual nuance drive every BNV offering forward, but there are elements of the ongoing Keystone XL debate that deserve fuller scrutiny, a discussion that ought to be advanced beyond shallow ‘dirty oil’ polemics.
Keystone is not divinely inspired environmentalism. It fails a number of smell tests – literally, if one passes close enough to Fort McMurray, the Alberta Oil Sands epicenter intended as the Keystone source our petro-industry holds dear.… [Read more]
“Senators are a never-ending source of amusement, amazement, and discouragement…” Will Rogers (1879-1935)
So nice to see in the land of the free and home of the brave the US Senate remains ever vigilant. Not content to convene a Secretary of Defence confirmation hearing reminiscent of Romper Room, the Republican minority brain trust has let slip their dogs of war and …..sanctioned the latest howler, a once-in-a-century filibuster to ensure that the self-styled Great Democracy® again lives down to its formidable reputation for utter stupidity.… [Read more]
“The once athletic sport has degenerated into a contest that for brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats in the arena in ancient Rome” Beaumont Express, 1904, when 18 US football players died on the playing field.
“I’m a big football fan but, I have to tell you, if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” President Barack Obama, January, 2013.… [Read more]
Looking across the border this week from my Johnny Canuck bully pulpit, I was reminded why the supposed democratic ‘holding to account’ cited as the US Senate confirmation hearings constitutional rationale is the ultimate political pant load. Thank God for our good old Canadian patronage appointments in similar circumstances – ones done mostly behind closed doors, pure as the driven slush, after you catch an eyeful of this Capitol Hill bozo brigade.… [Read more]
The chill January landscapes of the Great White North were briefly thawed this week by the forces of (human) nature. Sun Television Network, unrepentant capitalists and right wing apostles all, are screaming blue bloody murder. The CRTC, our national telecoms regulator, banished the Sun to the cable band nether regions when the network was founded a few years ago.… [Read more]
I like school teachers. I appreciate what teachers tend to contribute in making student communities more vital and engaged. Quality educators are a treasure, the catalyst for curiosity and a generous knowledge conduit. Civility and professional commitment are their personal bywords. Great teaching even welcomes its eccentrics that leaven the educational bread, the inspired oddball that shows the young there is more than one way to do something well.… [Read more]
Mark Twain, sage of the 19th century Mississippi that inspired his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, once suggested that when he was a teenager, his own father was so irredeemably stupid that the old man’s mere presence was unbearable ….and how amazing it was that the dumb bastard relic had got a lot smarter by the time Twain passed his 21st birthday.… [Read more]
Here across the 49th , and in all civilized democracies that abide by the rule of law, the presumption of innocence is our guarantee against the evils of arbitrary power. From Lord Edward Coke, the venerable English lawyer and advocate who first declared his King to be accountable to the law…and not the other way around: ‘Tis best to have 10 guilty men run free, than an innocent man convicted’.… [Read more]
Nothing drives a good, gripping Yankee scandal like the sex angle. Ken Lay and his Enron dweebs, or Bernie Madoff, King Ponzi fleecing zillions from his socialite pals? So what! The ever-obliging US justice system makes sure that they achieve the near-ultimate in criminal sentence deterrence nirvana, the somber judicial pronouncement that makes any true citizen burst with pride knowing their courts are on the job… “Sir, you will die in prison”, a result not to be confused with sentencing perfection for the most odious perps – execution.… [Read more]
H. L. Mencken died in 1956. Regular readers of the modest offerings distributed from this digital soapbox know my affection for this stirring, prescient Sage whose social commentary fastballs have lost none of their zip when thrown once more across the polarized and intellectually paralyzed American body politic. The acerbic, combative Mencken, whose peerless coverage of every national American political convention between 1920 and 1948 is eclipsed only by his elevation of Clarence Darrow to secular saint in the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’, stands apart.… [Read more]
So….America races to ‘High Noon’ today, and the world awaits the victorious gunslinger, their weapons of choice these past weeks less than compelling rhetoric and billion dollar PAC-driven smoke machines. Will it be honest, but utterly unfulfilled aspiration given a reluctant second chance, or does the apparent retrogression to ‘trickle down’ and a written off 47% carry the day?… [Read more]
Nothing fries the circuits of the proud, ostensibly principled American progressive psyche to the same degree of fricassee as the Right (Troglodyte Division) in its fullest and finest bellow. From my safe, snowball throwing perch on the Canadian south coast, I read, mark, and inwardly digest the US presidential campaign detritus flung northward. I am constantly amazed at how readily Democrats rise to the bait cast so effortlessly by the baying conservative sportsmen.… [Read more]
My esteemed departed father would have been 76 years old today. Born in London, on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805, where the immortal Admiral Nelson knocked down the French fleet. In our family lore my father was (almost) named Horatio Nelson Davies – a rate determining step on most 1940s schoolyards, one might think…but ‘Bryan’ eventually prevailed.… [Read more]
