Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 53

October 13, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

• Week of 13.10.2013 | “SEND IN THE CLOWNS”

Sam Hyde

Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane | Quebec physicians ordered to stop performing virginity tests | Vatican withdraws Pope Francis medals after spelling Jesus’ name wrong | Mike Duffy billed Senate $65,000 to pay friend for ‘no tangible work,’ RCMP alleges | Recommended Article: I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss | This Comedian Hijacks a TED Talk And Basically Makes A Fool Out of Every “Thought Leader” Ever | Daniel Noehl Calls Police After Being Stiffed In Drug Deal | Music: Paul McCartney “New” | Charges that Canada spied on Brazil unveil CSEC’s inner workings | Scarborough residents report receiving robocalls after Toronto municipal Councillor Ainslie steps down | Giorgio Mammoliti is Back on the Toronto Executive Committee

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

First Nations

Nipissing University’s Bold Educational Experiment in Listening

October 3, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

[Note: This article appears in the Fall 2013 issue of the Nipissing Review Magazine.]

THE WET APRIL snow arrives with the AFN National Chief, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, whose plane touched down in North Bay an hour ago. He sits in the restaurant, noting the wind over Delaney Bay and joking with his wife Nancy about the weather they’d left behind, in British Columbia. The pickerel arrives, and the conversation turns to a storm of another sort, occasioned a week earlier by a letter published in the Nanaimo Daily News.

Politics

Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America

September 30, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Ted Cruz

WHILE WRITING this I received an invitation to Washington. At the end of the message, this: “in case of a federal government shutdown, the event will be canceled.” All these years later, I was left thinking, could it be 1995? Only, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America, the intervening years providing sources of irony as well as of discouragement. Mostly however discouragement, as I notice that the Continuing Resolution is a continuous thing, alright, but more like an irresolution.

Personal Essay

Coming to the Defence of Science

September 24, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

science

I‘VE KNOWN since the age of eight that I would be a writer, but biology was the subject which came in at a close second. The first book I read in college was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, for a first-year university biology course. To many Dawkins is the leading advocate of “militant atheism,” and for this reason one may fail to notice that his campaign on behalf of science — necessarily a campaign against anti-science — is defensive in nature. But who would have thought even a decade ago that science would be in need of defence? These were my thoughts last week, as I participated in Stand Up for Science, an initiative of an agency called Evidence for Democracy.

Writers and Writing

Is the Comment Board Inevitably a Discussion Killer?

September 23, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

letter

I DON’T READ the comments placed on websites, and I’m here to tell you why. Long before there was an Internet, it was the habit of many newspapers (some of them well-respected) to publish unsigned editorials. This practice, which continues to this day, has always discouraged me. An opinion, when pushed into print, should always be signed by its author. Of course it is understood that a New York Times editorial, for instance, will have been composed by one or more of the staff publicly identified on the organization’s masthead. An argument appearing in the Op-Ed section of a major newspaper will never be quite beyond identification, yet it still seems to me unprofessional to advocate a public policy or initiative — a job which may include a call to war — and not to put one’s skin in the ring at least in this small measure.

Personal Essay

Reflections on the Random Mass Killing

September 18, 2013 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

navy-yard-shooting

WILLIAM MARSDEN observes today, in a Postmedia article “A touch of socialism might tame America’s killer psyche,” that

Murderous rampages have become so commonplace in America they have reached a level of banality that has earned them their own massive, militaristic and bureaucratic response system. The shooter opens fire. Police “active shooter” squads — on call 24/7 — are deployed. The shooter either commits suicide or is shot dead. The police are declared heroes. The victims are mourned and become “patriots.” Their family photos drift ghost-like across TV screens. Friends of the shooter struggle to comprehend why such a good-natured guy would do such a terrible thing. Blame inevitably falls on, as the Chicago Tribune ruled in an editorial Tuesday, “a lethal grudge and a gun.”

There is no repudiating that the mass killing of strangers in crowded public places is a template act, from beginning to end scripted and carried out along known and predictable lines. For years the question Why? has necessarily occurred, under the assumption that a coherent explanation is available.

Film, First Nations

Reflections on Jeff Barnaby’s “Rhymes for Young Ghouls”

September 11, 2013 Wayne K. Spear 2 Comments

Jeff Barnaby Rhymes for Young Ghouls

WE ARE INFORMED by the Oxford English Dictionary that the word “ghoul” derives from an Arabic root whose meaning is to seize. More specific, the term refers to an evil spirit said in Muslim countries to prey on human corpses exhumed from graves. In this case however the seizing and the devouring of human beings are crimes of a Christian character and constitute the explicit subjects of Jeff Barnaby’s first full-length feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which at eighty-eight minutes — short by today’s standard — is an economical and engaging story.

History

Kerry channels shame of Munich in bid for strike against Syria

September 8, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

1938 Munich Agreement

ONE DECADE AGO, the French distaste for war against Saddam Hussein inspired Freedom Fries, the conventional name for this ubiquitous side-dish having been removed from Congressional cafeteria menus at the direction of Republicans Bob Ney and Walter Jones. On US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent visit to Paris, to make the case for a limited strike against Syria, the reception was by contrast positive. Yet the forms of the arguments reveal a tension in the prevailing views of military engagements whose roots reach back to the First World War.

Personal Essay

What Use is An Education?

September 4, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Graz

For me, the year has always began in September. Though it’s been years since I was a student, every fall recalls the energy and optimism of the university campus at the launch of a new semester. These days however there is a note of pessimism arriving with the frosh, in newspaper articles which take as their point of departure a CIBC World Markets’ study entitled “Degrees of Success: The Payoff to Higher Education in Canada.” Rob Carrick reviews this study in the Globe and Mail (“Why some university students are doomed to below-average earnings”) as does Gary Marr of the Financial Post. At the CBC is an article and video titled “Many students asking if higher education is worth the debt,” and Robin Levinson asks at the Toronto Star “Is there any point to an arts degree?” All of these articles have drawn numerous comments, some of them thoughtful and some less so. A large, important and complex subject, “higher education” appears to be in a state of transition if not in crisis.

Personal Essay

The Return of the Fountain Pen

August 28, 2013 Wayne K. Spear 5 Comments

Above: a Wahl-Eversharp Doric in the colour “Kashmir,” c. 1931, after a restoration.

FOR YEARS I’ve been restoring old fountain pens. As I’ve written elsewhere, I enjoy writing with this now anachronistic instrument — and in fact I’ve used a fountain pen for so long that they may not yet have fallen out of favour when I bought my first (a Sheaffer No-Nonsense) in the late 1970s.

World

An Attack on Syria for Whose Benefit?

August 27, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Damascus

IN THE YEARS leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a commonplace indictment of Saddam Hussein was that he was guilty of using chemical weapons against “his own people.” The notion that Iraqis, to say nothing of Kurds or Kuwaitis, could be considered the people of the Ba’athist regime was not lost on the dictator. The Hussein family indeed treated all of Iraq as its personal property, inclusive even of the private lives of Iraq’s citizens, and revealed itself ever eager to extend these possessions beyond its own borders.

Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 50!

August 25, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

• Week of 18.08.2013

Califone

Egypt mulling Muslim Brotherhood ban as forces storm Islamist-held mosque | The U.S. government has finally confirmed the existence of Area 51 | Canada’s military forced to accept fatter, less educated recruits as demographics change, audit reveals | Senators are partisans, appointed for life. How could that not go wrong? | Recommended Article: 4 biggest myths about crack | Chinese zoo accused of trying to pass off dog as African lion | Meet the Mayoral Candidate Who Believes Russia Will Vanquish the Antichrist | Music: Califone “A Thin Skin of Bullfight Dust” (from the album Stitches, out September 3) | Police probe Mayor Rob Ford friends who sought crack video | Extensive Timelines Of Slang For Genitalia | H&M pulls headdresses from Canadian shelves after complaints | B.C. bedroom dentist was headed to Toronto, officials say

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

History, Politics, Wayne's Picks

Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to bankrupt the American political system

August 21, 2013 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

I‘LL FOREVER BE SURPRISED by current day apologists of Richard Nixon, who are able (much like admirers of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton) to side-step quite a bit of nastiness to put forward the triumphs — in this case concerning China and the Soviet Union and the often cited “détente.” And indeed this was the chief tactic of Nixon himself, who discounted the Watergate disclosures and who preferred to talk instead about his efforts “to build peace in the world.”

Interviews

An Interview with Chelsea Vowel

August 17, 2013 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

chelsea vowel

Note: this interview took place in October 2012 and was originally recorded for a proposed (but unrealized) Nation Talk Radio program.

Visit Chelsea Vowel’s website âpihtawikosisân here. Read “Burden of Proof: What a native blogger found out about her country, and herself, in the wake of the Attawapiskat scandal,” by Christine Fischer Guy (Eighteen Bridges Magazine).

Podcasts

The Roundtable Podcast 49

August 4, 2013 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

• Week of 04.08.2013

Brando

The T-shirt Turns 100 | John Baird encourages caution for Canadian travellers and diplomats after U.S. alert | Big tobacco seizure at Fort Erie bridge | Recommended Article: What religion has contributed to the world this month | Michael George Ansara: 1922-2013 | Senate reform | Texas faces possible shortage of execution drug | Gretzky’s childhood Koho stick fetches $38,838 in auction | Man who showed journalists alleged Rob Ford crack video arrested, offered tape to police for plea deal | NDP take two as PCs crack Toronto | Man tries to hide turtle in burger to sneak it past airport security

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.