As it’s Halloween, I thought I’d share a (true!) story: The Creepiest Thing That Happened To Me This Year.
I was driving north of Toronto late on a Tuesday night, the cusp of spring. Tattered clouds, the ground still raw with patches of snow glowing in the moonlight. Due to my itinerant state at the time—crashing [...]

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PR Dept.:  Tune into The Nature of Things this evening on CBC at 8:00 pm, as it will be presenting the latest documentary by fellow traveller and The Tallest Man I Know, Andrew Gregg. It’s the first dispatch in a four part series for TNOT “about maverick explorers searching for vanishing populations, lost cultures and [...]

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File Under: Crisis, Which Crisis?
Summer was rife with reports of the global food crisis—rising prices were causing riots in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and the world’s stocks of basic grains and staples were at their lowest levels in decades.
There’s been nary a peep of food shortages, however, since the credit crisis began [...]

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As in Maverick! As in McCain!
I had forgotten to post a link to this article previously that goes into where the hell the word “maverick” comes from.
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known [...]

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The word ‘kleptocracy’ has been historically applied to a substrata of not-quite-failed states (Nigeria today, Indonesia under Suharto, Fujimori’s Peru) where rulers and elites have enriched themselves at the expense of raising people’s living standards. As more of the backstory around the current financial crisis comes to light, the United States is coming dubiously close [...]

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What a difference a few days makes. As the prospect of a majority government seemed to be slip ever further from Stephen Harper and the Conservatives’ grasp, the sweater-wearing one made some bold announcements in the yawning days of the campaign.
Now, a Stephen Harper government would intervene with cash at the first sign of the [...]

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It took long enough. I was wondering when the Canadian media would finally cast its glance back ten years ago, to a time when our banks were pleading not penury but that they were too petite to compete with American and global rivals. It was merger mania: Royal Bank coupling with Bank of Montreal, TD [...]

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One of the more annoying moments during the first U.S. presidential debate was when the subject of Russia and its recent skirmish with Georgia came up. Both McCain and Obama, without qualification, upbraided big bad Russia as the aggressor, saying NATO and the United States had to be ready to get tough. They allowed no [...]

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