I knew I was in for une semaine dans l’enfer when I heard the following hype on CBC with respect to their exhaustive coverage of last week’s Royal Tour/honeymoon/re-conquest of Canada: “See every handshake, see every wave!!!!” In light of this blatant absurdity, I must ask you: how fucking ridiculous is our obsession with the British monarchy? I know all the arguments both pro and con ( Pro: they generate lucrative tourism. Con: they represent a costly relic of the feudal era, etc.). I will not bore you with a rehash of that old, tiresome debate here. I would rather do a wholly unscientific…
Year: 2011
From Roswell to Will and Kate: What’s the real reason for dissolving NASA?
Will and Kate: Who cares? I’m not going to protest their visit. In fact, I kind of like the fact that they’ve picked Canada out of all the Commonwealth for their honeymoon. However, it seems lately that Will and Kate’s Royal visit has dominated the news channels coverage since their arrival in Canada. It’s been non-stop Will & Kate this, the Prince and his wife that! I have to get my actual news from the Internet!
Time for America to Pay Off its Credit Cards
For the past few months the two American political parties have been in talks on how to handle America’s growing debt problem, and the ceiling that was initially adopted almost a hundred years ago in order to limit government borrowing and spending. In 1980 the U.S. federal deficit ceiling was a little less than a trillion dollars, and then America was introduced to Reaganomics; In Reagan’s eight years in office the deficit almost tripled to three trillion. Unfortunately the next two Republican Presidents…
Another Bosnia?
When Ratko Mladic was arrested it was as a weak, pathetic and exhausted creature. At sixty-eight years old, if the accused war criminal is (rightfully) convicted of the atrocities committed at Srebrenica, it will be not as the figure of pure evil who oversaw the murders of some thousand Bosnian Muslims, but rather as a tired old man with far too few years left to begin paying for his crimes…
Our human right to public space: How the UN doesn’t go far enough on the Internet
Access to the Internet is a human right. At least that’s how the UN sees it. I see it that way, too, but I don’t think the UN goes far enough. The UN report, which deems cutting people off from the Internet to be a violation of their human rights and of international law, seems to be mostly concerned with stopping dictators from blacking out the Web in times of civil unrest (think Egypt and Syria) and preventing countries from…
The unlamented loss of separatism and our diminishing sovereignty…
Separatism is dead. Sovereignty is dying. I’m concerned about the latter; the former is still pointless. These terms have unfortunately come to be somewhat interchangeable in Canadian political discourse, particularly when it comes to the perennial ‘Québec Question’, though in my eye and in political/philosophical terms they are exceptionally different. I would like to devote the rest of life to ensuring each individual citizen comprehends the fundamental importance of the latter, and further ensuring that each individual living in our collective society understands the suicidal lunacy of the former…
Tales from the Fringe border, or Why can’t we all just work together?
The Infringement is a festival dedicated to using art to challenge oppressive structures, and having fun while doing it. It was designed to capture the spirit of the original Fringe, lost when the festival started charging artists several hundred dollars to perform and…
On the Homefront – FTB dives into the municipal (politics) pool…
Recently, I’ve had the privilege of becoming more involved in municipal actions and political activities here in the city of Montreal. I currently sit as the Sud-Ouest Borough representative for Citoyens Responsables de leurs Animaux de Compagnie, a group dedicated to changing and modernizing Montreal regulations concerning companion animals. This has required me to attend…
Bell Canada needs a spanking: Telecom giant caught with false advertising for the second time in a month
Despite being fined $10 Million by the federal Competition Bureau for false advertising at the end of June, Bell Canada seems not to have learned their lesson. An exclusive investigation by Forget the Box has revealed that while the false prices which led to the fine have been removed from their website, other misleading and false claims persist.
Grain drain: Corn ethanol and a visual tour of Canada’s biofuel industry
With the effects of climate change becoming more pronounced and more dangerous each year, the push for greener fuels is growing around the world. Developers of plant-based fuels called biofuels are doing their best to be the ones to replace gasoline, but not all biofuels are as green as they seem. Some can take nearly as much fossil fuel to produce as they are supposed to replace. Corn ethanol is what is called a first generation biofuel because it is produced from a food grain. This fact has placed it at the centre of the food vs. fuel debate that pits the nutritional needs of people around the world…