Ayn Rand Revisited I went through a brief period in high school when I thought Ayn Rand was someone you had to read to be considered well read (I blame a Sydney Academy debater who used to quote her regularly) and since being considered well-read was pretty much my life’sRead...

  Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot   Part II: Four Ways to Change the Local World   Proposal #1: A CBRM Citizens’ Assembly on COVID-19 & Post-Pandemic Recovery “Watershed periods in history,” Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1992, “mayRead More

Last week I wrote, briefly, about calls from local merchants (as reported in the Cape Breton Post) for more surveillance cameras in downtown Sydney, noting that “literally every merchant interviewed” already had CCTV cameras on their premises and they didn’t prevent any of the incidents described. This week, I thoughtRead More

Pathways to Employment community organization based in Sydney, is probably best known for its wood shop, laundry services and other programs that attempt to reintegrate disenfranchised people with addictions or restrictions due to mental health issues into the community. Certainly, that’s the aspect of Pathways I was most familiar with;Read More

Over the last two years, Nova Scotians of all ages have been impacted by unprecedented grief and loss. The COVID-19 pandemic and public health restrictions have prevented people from coming together, supporting one another, or participating in many traditional rituals of mourning and celebration. Individuals have suffered physical, emotional, orRead More

Just say no The local CBC is running a multi-part series on “street drugs” and if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect it was being sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, because the stance it takes on drugs — they’re bad and people who do them die — seemsRead More

A few years ago, one of my colleagues told me a funny story. One of his students had said to him, “It’s a good thing that someone invented universities. Otherwise, there would be no place in the world for people like you to fit in.” I was thinking about thisRead More

A couple of weeks ago, I reconnected (via Zoom) with an old friend in Brooklyn, NYC, and in between catching up and sharing gluten-free cinnamon bun recipes, we talked about our respective lives under COVID. She told me that she’d recently gone for drinks in her neighborhood with a smallRead More

Well, we’ve discovered at least two things since the COVID-19 cloud descended upon us, one being that we won’t be telling our grandchildren about the pandemic since they’re living through it with us and will have their own stories to tell. Secondly, a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) is not onlyRead More

Daily briefing Dr. Robert Strang today announced an additional death at the Northwood long-term-care facility (LTCF) in Halifax, bringing total deaths there to 50. I haven’t done the math on this before but today I did and it is grim: the fatality rate among residents at Northwood has been roughlyRead More