On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Okay, I'm back.

Hosted by the Roddenberry people - yes, that Roddenberry family! - and they apologize up-front for the sound quality as it was recorded at Star Trek Las Vegas 2023. The panel title was inspired, of course, by Carl Sagan...

https://www.missionlogpodcast.com/the-demon-haunted-panel-live-at-stlv-2023/

I hope everyone involved got home safe from Las Vegas. Of course, I remain convinced that the Pandemic in Progress is not yet done with us. We need to do more work on multiple fronts, including resuming masking-up properly.

A theory about commodores c. 2401: Geordi, Beverly and Oh/Nedar are/were *regional* directors for their respective departments: History and Heritage (AKA the Fleet Museum), Medical Corps and Intelligence. They are *not* heads-of-department.

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or a bad one.

https://notbyai.fyi/

Throwing it open to discussion, though.

Content Warning: Pandemic safety stuff.
( Read more... )

I was inspired by this entry by autopope on his "home" weblog:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/04/behind-the-ukraine-war.html

As we were (rightly) advised to not centre western - including Canadian - political concerns in our comments on the Russian governance situation as Charlie understands it right now (his blog, his rules)...I'm going to post such comments here at my "home" blog where they belong:

I see Jason Kenney's government in the province of Alberta desperately trying to make sure Canada as a whole falls into the same governance trap as you describe Russia having fallen into. There's still a chance he might succeed with the help of a federal Conservative regime run by, say, Pierre Pollievre, Candice Bergen (not the American actor, the Canadian politician), Leslyn Lewis, or a few others I can think of. But the federal Conservatives first have to get a leader chosen this fall, and then that leader and whatever team they end up cobbling together has to have any hope of breaking up the confidence-and-supply agreement now in effect between the Liberals (led by Justin Trudeau) and the New Democrats (led by Jagmeet Singh).

I do worry that the Conservatives - or Maxime Bernier's "People's Party" or worse - will try to further "Putinize"/"Trumpify" Canadian society, worse than Harper already did despite his own personal antipathy to Putin.

Opinions from informed Albertans are definitely welcome here.

https://readpassage.com/canadian-media-is-erasing-essential-workers/

Insert needed Noam Chomsky/Marshall McLuhan reference here, right?

The earlier version of the bill died on the order paper thanks to the latest election call. However, anyone paying attention to the issue expects the bill to be re-introduced soon, however renumbered for House of Commons record-keeping purposes. I hope that the concerns of its critics get more serious consideration, respect and careful incorporation into the phrasing of the next version.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-online-harms-proposed-legislation-threatens-human-rights-1.6198800

And meanwhile, this crap's being sorted out, too. We hope. I just hope it doesn't get used as cover for making Canada a better client state of either the Xi Regime or Putin or whatever lunatic forces themselves into Biden's job over too many objections to count.

I really wish Ottawa would open talks re: full membership in the EU. Today, if possible.

The title and summary of his opinion is in the URL. I'm not convinced that Mr. Maher is correct, and unsure of how much progress we're making towards building a more just society, but he has a case to make here.

https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/canada-has-shifted-to-the-left/

Apparently, there's a bit of a kerfuffle: no award given for the Op-Ed cartooning category at the Pulitzers this year. And not for lack of award-worthy talent either.

https://twitter.com/JenSorensen/status/1403490514142334977
https://twitter.com/tomtomorrow/status/1403417033329500162

Continuing the job search this afternoon.

Also: revisiting the history of the Declaration of the Independence of the Mind via Ideas. If you're interested in the text of that original declaration from 1919, here's a link.

(I wonder if Leslie Charteris might have read that Declaration. Some of the stuff in those Saint stories of his gets me thinking now about the possibility. Certainly, if he had, he'd have put it aside for the needs of World War 2 and the battle against fascism as it presented itself to our world back then.)

On a related note: Ideas, the CBC Radio series, is devoting some time over this past broadcast season of 2020-'21 to the theme of The Common Good. Other instalments of that series of broadcasts may be accessed here.

More on other topics as today goes by...