Blog
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Political choices in the produce isle
How do we decide what we eat? Do we know enough about the food production process to make an informed decision on the merit of eating organically? Is our decision to eat or not eat organic foods made for health reasons or political reasons?
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The Limitations of the Slow Food Movement
Slow Food is a lifestyle of eating wholesome, natural foods with an emphasis on getting involved in the preparation and production of the food so that when we eat, it is a shared communal experience and something to really enjoy. The idea is to go back to our roots so that we can all partake in the beauty of a nutritious lifestyle. Further research into the Slow Food movement reveals that it might not be as inclusive as we would hope.
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Canada Day Musings
Brian Latour decides to be the Canada Day grinch this year, with some short musings on capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, anglo-chauvinism, attacks on workers rights, patriarchy, and the Canadian state.
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Commentary on the TV Series Intelligence, Episode 2
There is a lot going on here, with the various characters and plots and locales springing up. I’m going to step back a bit, squint my eyes, and think about how all this might be seen on a larger canvas. There are levels upon levels appearing, making this series worth watching 2 and 3 times, and more. It’s like my copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is dog-eared and falling apart. I always go back to it when I have run out of other things to read, and the richness of it never palls. Like that novel, there are themes evident in Intelligence underneath what is going on between the individual characters and their organizations, which are both legal and illegal and often a mixture of both. In Proust, the themes are art, time, and society. In Intelligence, the absence of certain components are themselves ongoing motifs. These have “incredible negative capacity” as Annie Hall says in the movie of the same name.
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Queers Come Out Against Israeli Apartheid
A new group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, is marching in Toronto Pride this year - today they had the biggest contingent in the Dyke March, tomorrow they are expecting even more people.
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Bailouts and Tough Love - Surveying the Options .
The global financial meltdown is already affecting Canadians in many ways, from lost incomes to lost services at every level of government. Few politicians or pundits can define or solve the crisis in any satisfactory way, except to warn us that resolution may take a long, long time. Perhaps that is a positive sign—that politicians accept a horizon that extends beyond the next election.
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Intelligent Commentary
Episodes 1 & 2 hurl us with great velocity into the fast and dangerous world of high stakes drug smuggling and the legal counterpart that tries to control this – the Organized Crime Unit. One cannot help but see parallels in these 2 opposing worlds: intrigue, back stabbing, internecine organizational power struggles, and a hollowness in the emotional lives of the protagonists and their cohorts. Power and big money seem to provide the motivation for both sides, and perhaps an addiction to danger too, such as compulsive gamblers experience.
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Of Doer and Dexter
Last week, Darrell Dexter was elected as the first NDP premier of Nova Scotia with a majority government, to the excitement of many on the left. But is this excitement justified? And how will Dexter compare to the other NDP premier, Gary Doer? From Gary Doer’s personal fiefdom four provinces over, Brian Latour attempts to figure out what the future holds for Nova Scotia.
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The revolution will be tweeted or whatever. People’s power and technology.
Sunday evening I spent almost an entire train ride from Ottawa to Toronto glued to Twitter following the posts from #iranelections, which is a way to get all the posts about the elections in Iran and following a twitterer with the handle Change for Iran who was posting from his roof top every few minutes and then going down to join the protests and coming back. It was an amazing experience to directly follow what was happening on the streets of Tehran as it was happening. More important, though, Twitter became a major source of information for those opposed to Ahmadinejad’s government and protesting what they consider to be fraudelant election results.
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The perils of having God on your side: 1967 Israel and modern Sri Lanka compared
As Sri Lanka tries to move on from its 25-year civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), there are worrying signs of providence and messianic fervor behind the popular jubilation. It’s happened before, and the implications weren’t pretty.
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