Thoughtful Thursday: leading a meaningful life

Robby Robin's Journey

For most people in the northern hemisphere, Labour Day is the real mark of a new year. School begins, activities resume that have been in recess during the summer, and as summer starts to fade – and the glorious colours of fall make some initial overtures – we settle into a more scheduled pace of life, with great hopes for the new ‘year’ ahead. Well, of course, this year is a little different. Depending on where you live, kids may or may not be going back to the classroom. Favourite activities such as club meetings, recreational sports, and weekly card-playing may or may not be possible. I hope for your sake that some kind of return to normality is possible for you. Some vestige of normalcy at least … while you are staying safe.

We’re having a fair bit of luck that way in our neck of the woods. Earlier…

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Mother Nature doesn’t care if you believe in science or not

Excellent article mirroring my thoughts of Nature and it’s recuperative power without us!
Thanks Jane for a hard hitting, well written article.

Robby Robin's Journey

It seems to be fashionable these days for people to pick and choose among scientific theories and advice, depending on whether they like the implications of that scientific advice. They may treat one scientific theory like the gospel and another theory like a hoax, to be ignored at all costs. It’s called the post-truth world: whatever we want to believe to be true is true and whatever is troublesome to be taken seriously is not true. How is this working out for you?!

As convenient as this is for personal and political decision making, presumably students are still taught and tested on established scientific principles. And while I can identify with not knowing the answer to every question on a science test, it never crossed my mind to just dismiss the question as wrong if I couldn’t get the answer. Maybe too difficult to understand without having done enough studying…

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All My Decapitated Heroes

Ah here is the difficulty of History explained in an understandable way, for me at least.

Hypergraffiti

In the spring of 1979, when I was thirteen years old, I fell in love with two men.

It was an impossible romance from the start. Not only were they both inaccessible to me, but they were each other’s sworn enemies, standing for starkly different values — one doomed to die at the other’s hand. I couldn’t have either of them, and I certainly couldn’t have both.

Plus, they were older than I was. Like, a lot older. Like, dead-many-decades older.

I blame the CBC — for my ill-fated love affairs, not to mention my lifelong fascination with history. In the spring of 1979 they aired the TV movie Riel, about Louis Riel, the Red River and Northwest Rebellions, and his subsequent execution. I was glued to the screen (ok, I was a weird teenager), passionately on the side of and in love with Riel, but also deeply fascinated…

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Thoughtful Thursday: Choosing hope

Robby Robin's Journey

A rephrasing of a quote by Desmond Tutu

We can always learn from the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.

… and the wisdom of Leonard Cohen

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How to understand 2020 – the worst year in living memory

Valid thoughts and excellent questions requiring some thought.

Matthew Wright

It’s fair to say that 2020 has been the worst year in living memory. The world has, in the span of just a few months, been plunged into one of the most widespread and severe crises since the Second World War. Even the Cuba Crisis of 1962, with all its implication of nuclear armageddon, was over in – as it were – a flash. Right now, the world is months into a crisis that won’t abate for another year or more. And society is bending under the strain.

In a way it was predictable. Society was already in difficulty before the pandemic hit. The current neo-liberal version of capitalism has long since reached its use-by date; times change, attitudes change, society changes, technology has changed – and with that, the way economies work must also shift. That was made clear by the General Financial Crisis of the 2007-10 period, which…

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