Harry Shannon
Another letter to the Toronto Star which wasn't published. But they did print others that made the same point, and more.
Background: a few years ago, the Ontario's Liberal government enacted a ban on pit bulls. There's now a Conservative government, and one of their MPPs (MPP = Member of Provincial Parliament) has introduced …
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Questions for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney
Harry Shannon
My letter to the Toronto Star - which wasn't published.
Background: The Canadian federal election in late October left Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a minority government. They won no seats in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Alberta is much larger in population, and the recently elected premier Jason …
Canada’s election: Andrew Scheer’s big mistake and how votes and seats don’t necessarily match
Harry Shannon
If you believe the latest projections, the Liberals will get the most seats in the next Canadian Parliament. The excellent website 338Canada.com has the Conservatives slightly ahead in the popular vote, but getting only 123 seats compared with 137 for the Liberals. Still not the 170 needed for a majority, though. It seems th…
Utopia for Realists
Harry Shannon
One of the most interesting books I’ve read lately is Utopia for Realists by the Dutch writer
Rutger Bregman. I’m not going to give
you a long review or description; just enough, I hope, to get you to read it.
Depending on where you look, the subtitles are
different. The one that gives away the
big themes of the…
News Flash! Province to remove number ‘13’ from crossing countdowns.
Harry Shannon
Premier Doug Ford today announced what he called ‘a new
world-leading safety measure.’ In a
first, Ontario will in future not allow the number ‘13’ on traffic
signals. Currently, when traffic lights
show pedestrians how long they have before the lights will change, ‘13’ appears
if the countdown is longer th…
FAANGs or …?
Harry Shannon
A couple of weeks ago the Toronto Star had a story on the big tech companies Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The headline used an acronym to write: “Tech giants’ FAANGs sink teeth into our wallets.” (They also mentioned Microsoft, but I guess the acronym wouldn’t have worked.)
The story quoted a Univer…
Eton school, please stop what you’re doing.
Harry Shannon
I was born and raised in the UK, so I pay some attention to what's going on there.
A while ago I heard the headmaster of the British school Eton justifying its ultra-exclusivity and the fact that almost all its students are from very rich families. (Eton actually calls itself a ‘College’.) The headmaster claimed that ma…
Communing With the Dead – or the Living?
Harry Shannon
I had to renew my Ontario Driver’s Licence and my Health
Card. One of the forms sent to me was
for registering as an organ and tissue donor.
I was happy to fill it out, though I added a note that my
organs can’t be used to generate private profit.
But what caught my attention was the space to add my phone nu…
How fast is fastest?
Harry Shannon
I was listening to CBC radio last week, and heard someone
claim that cricket is the fastest-growing sport in Ontario. Maybe it was in Canada, but that’s not
relevant to my point here.
My point is that the term fastest-growing is really meaningless, or at best misleading. There are about a million registered soccer pla…
Whose fake news?
Harry Shannon
We’re hearing a lot about fake news. To hear Donald Trump call it, you’d think that it’s the mainstream media that are centrist or lean to the left who are guilty of misreporting or even making up stories. Of course he produces no evidence to back up his claim. Nor does he comment on the accuracy of reports on the rig…