Sickening story in the NY Times on hazardous waste disposal in the new millenium:

It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands.

This is getting to be a very complicated world.
Tags: NY times, hazardous waste, […]

Further to my Waging a Living post …

The incomes of the top 20% have grown much faster than earnings of those at the middle or bottom of the income distribution. The income of the top 1% and top 0.1% have grown particularly rapidly.
From 1992 to 2005, the pay of chief executive officers of major companies […]

In case you didn’t realize it, having to work two jobs in order to pay the rent is now referred to as “portfolio diversification:”

Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It […]

In Canada about 50% of our gas price is tax, a fact that Toronto Sun columnist Linda Leatherdale is not happy about.
Well, I’m not either. I hate tax - it pulls money out of my pocket and into the bottomless depths of governmental waste. But I don’t think we should reduce the gas tax.
Right […]

Tonight Teresa and I said goodnight to our two-year old son for the last time.
I sang the goodnight prayer with Aidan, and then I told him a “Jerry Ant” story - made up on the spur of the moment.
He read me his favorite book du jour, Buenos Noches, Gorila. And we talked, for a while, […]

I never read newspapers. Well, almost never.
But right now I’m on a flight to Dallas, Texas, on my way to a convention in San Antonio. And I happened to pick up the complimentary newspaper while boarding the flight.
It’s a great paper, by most measures - the Globe & Mail. One of Canada’s two national newspapers. […]

I think I read John Gatto’s Teacher of the Year acceptance speech about 3-4 years ago, but somehow I happened across it again today.
This is subversive, dangerous, powder-keg stuff! It’s also great thinking and writing.
I don’t know how true it is, but it feels true, smells true, and seems to answer a lot of questions […]

Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:

Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and […]

I watched Allan King’s documentary Memory last night with my daughter. What a heart-wrenching experience.
You are your memory. Lose your memory, and you lose your self. Memory reveals the agony of the dissolution of the identity in residents of a Toronto old age home. I can’t watch this sort of thing without thinking of my […]

Houston police chief Harold Hurrt wants to put surveillance cameras in all kinds of private spaces … including homes.

“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at […]

This BBC story says that “former senior Communist party officials” have written and published a public letter denouncing at least one form of government censorship in China.
The officials include:

. . . Chairman Mao’s former secretary, Li Rui; the former editor of the Communist party’s own mouthpiece, People’s Daily, Hu Jiwei; and ex-propaganda boss, Zhu […]

Why is Phillip K. Dick so hot in Hollywood?
Well, it’s not because he’s dead. Not just because he was a great writer. And not because he was even weirder than Hollywood.
But Robert Silverberg puts his finger on why Dick, whose stories are the basis for movies such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, […]

OK, I guess I have to be the millionth blogger to post on the Islamic cartoon fiasco.
First off, Mark Steyn is more right than wrong in pointing out that always worrying about other people’s sensibilities is a good way to lose all our freedoms. And my good friend Mike Skovgaard echoes his sentiments.
In a […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.
It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.
I personally, because […]

It’s New Year’s Eve, although it’s very early in the morning.
At the end of one year and the beginning of a new we often think of new year’s resolutions: things we will do better, things we will start, things we will stop. I’m thinking of something to start, and I’m going to call it “now-ness.”
I […]