Signing the proverbial deal with the devil
Much was made of Prime Minister Trudeau’s support, during the COP21 Paris accords, of setting a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius…
Evan Tremblay
David Bowie is dead: it was bound to happen eventually
If you have Facebook, you know that David Bowie is dead. News of his death spread quickly through that lowest common denominator of communication, and…
Brian Bowman: leader by default
Brian Bowman is 14 months into a job that he put himself forward as best candidate for. He was elected based not on demonstrated service to our city, but based on the kind of service he promised for the future. Simply put, Bowman was elected because he convinced the majority of voters that he was a leader.
The city does not need a mayor to continue functioning – it has a bloated bureaucracy and self-satisfied council for that. The streets will be cleared, the potholes filled, without any notable input from the mayors’ office. The mayor must be expected to do more than sign the paperwork by which the snow-clearers and pothole-fillers are paid. The mayor should be expected to provide leadership.
The lack of meaning in Christmas
What do yoga and Christmas have in common? Both are ancient, both are deeply spiritual, and both have been swallowed by the gaping wound that exists in place of our collective soul. Our consumer culture has rendered the most beautiful fruits of human endeavour, living spiritual traditions, into experiences engaged in for personal pleasure.
Things that were the epitome of the sacred – the mastery of the body by the soul, the celebration of the mercy of the divine – are profaned, and not innocently so. To innocently profane yoga would be to do it unmindfully. To innocently profane Christmas would be to ignore it. But instead, both these have been defiled by consumerism: emptied of their original meanings, they have been re-filled with the most disgusting aspect of our culture.
Darkness in the City of Light
Paris has loomed large in my mind the past few months. In Paris, on Nov. 30, the COP21 climate talks will convene. These talks must succeed. If they do not then we do not have a snowball’s hope in hell of avoiding the worst, most catastrophic effects of climate change.
‘World-class’ is going a bit far
In a full-page trumpeting of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) executive’s accomplishments, UMSU president Jeremiah Kopp refers to the renovations begun and planned to the hallway on the third floor of University Centre as a “marquee, $1.4-million, world-class capital project.”
That’s the kind of hyperbole (some might call it bullshit) that makes me blush, and then write an article about it.
Foraging for food
We all have to eat; we might as well eat well. Eating well can be more than a strict fixation on carbs, sugars, gluten, or…
Putting poutine in its place
You may have noticed that, for some time, there’s been a food truck parked on campus. A welcome relief from the unrelenting mediocrity of campus food services (though I’ve yet to actually see anyone buying poutine there), the Poutine King is inarguably an asset to life on campus.
The whole point of a food truck, however, is that you can park it anywhere; the specific spot the truck currently occupies is not only inappropriate, it is offensive. The truck should be moved – perhaps more importantly, whoever told it to park there should have known better in the first place.
The end is nigh
The world is burning. Over the summer, for days, the sun was veiled in smoke, a gibbous and hideous orange. At midday you could look directly at it. An old neighbour commented that he had not seen such a thing since the eruption of Mount St. Helens. That was the first time the sun was dimmed, when it was fires in Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.
Legalize it – and by ‘it,’ I mean ‘all of it’
Commanding a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, and with the already-established support of the courts, there is no reason the incoming Liberal government cannot make good on its promise to legalize, tax, and regulate the sale of marijuana. The ending of the prohibition on marijuana is the proper time to reconsider our society’s stance on other drugs as well.
Many drugs, like marijuana, are not illegal because they are inherently addictive or harmful – the arguments put forward as justification for the legalization of marijuana apply to them also. There is no reason (other than the weight of tradition and old attitudes) that a significant part of currently outlawed substances cannot be legalized, taxed, and sold.