Alex Dunae

Introduction

A blog post by Dan Cederholm last month struck a chord with me, though I didn’t realize it at the time.  In fact, it wasn’t until I met Lloyd Budd at WordCamp Victoria this morning that I understood the underlying though.

Dan wrote:

Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

I never had a blog back in those days, but I was sure reading them, and I do remember what it was like.  It was weird and it was good.

Continue reading…

Street Farmer

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

Street Farmer
– Elizabeth Royte, New York Times Magazine, July 5, 2009

Climate Wars

Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters – the United States, China and India – were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered – all of them controversial.

Climate Wars
– Gwynne Dyer, Ideas, January 18, January 26 and February 1, 2009

The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up

[Today, Israel’s] national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel’s political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania — “everyone’s out to get us” — no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt’s famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with Missiles,” describe Israel as “Serbia with nukes.”

The country that wouldn’t grow up
– Tony Judt, Haaretz, May 5, 2006

Humanitarian Intervention

In a world of failed and failing states, does the international community and Canada have a responsibility to intervene, including militarily, in the affairs of nations that grossly fail to protect their citizens’ human rights? Or, have we learned in recent years that the use of force against sovereign states necessarily creates more problems that it solves?

The Munk Debates: Humanitarian Intervention
December, 2008

Obama’s “Secretary of Food”

As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”

Obama’s “secretary of food”
– Nicholas D. Kristof, International Herald Tribune, December 11, 2008

Too Few Hilliers

Canada’s controversial mission in Afghanistan has sparked a public debate on what our role in the world should be. But bubbling just beneath the surface is a second, quite new, conversation: “Who makes defence and foreign policy in this country,” attentive observers have begun to ask, “the government or the military?” At the centre of this brewing storm is General Rick Hillier…

Too Few Hilliers
– Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Walrus, April, 2008