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Non-Violence

This posting deals with my uncertainties, over many years, about pacifism. Pacifism was a pressing issue during the Vietnam-War era, for me and many of my friends (although I was a Canadian citizen, I was living in the US from 1964, and subject to the draft from 1968). If I could have demonstrated that I had a spiritual, religious commitment to non-violence, I might have been deferred from the draft. I wasn’t sure I could make that claim. As it happened, I was deferred for a different reason, a technicality really, so I never had to resolve the question. But the question has remained important to me, even after all these decades. This essay is an attempt to bring it to a conclusion. I should be clear what I think the pacifist position means. It does not mean passivity. I have seen articles claiming that pacifists simply refuse to engage in violence and are therefore willing to let evil, oppressive regimes dominate. Apparently they think that whatever evil those regimes would impose...
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Trade War

  In my last posting, on Friday, August 21 (my birthday, as it happened), I discussed the long history of American efforts to annex Canada. Those attempts served to unify Canada and create a sense of nationhood. They culminated in Donald Trump’s recent threats to incorporate Canada as the 51 st state. Little did I know when I sent you that essay how much the situation would escalate in just a couple of days. The US attacked Canada once again, not with armed forces this time, but in a trade war. In case we are in any doubt it is a trade war, that is exactly the term used by Prime Minister Mark Carney in an aggressive speech on Saturday, August 22. Trade wars can be devastating to a country’s production, its jobs and its people’s incomes. How did we get here? Last month, Trump announced a new tariff of 50% against a broad set of imports from Canada to the US, to go into effect on August 19. The tariffs violate the CUSMA trade pact between Canada, the US and Mexico. The US Suprem...
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Annexing Canada?

  Donald Trump has threatened to annex Canada. Not being interested in history, he is likely unaware that there has been a long line of Americans with similar ambitions, and that those threats have done more than anything to shape Canadians’ sense of our own nationality. Canadians don’t agree on much, but we are almost unanimous in the conviction that we don’t want our country to be a part of the US. Start with the decade and a half before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. British possessions stretched from New France (now Quebec) down the eastern coast as far as Georgia. New France had been a French colony, but the British had taken control of it and its 60,000 settlers in 1759. There were almost no English speakers in the territory, only British colonial administrators and military personnel. For 15 years the administrators tried to suppress French culture, French laws, French language and the Roman Catholic religion, hoping to transform the settlers into Englis...
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Prison Music

  Colin Asher, The Midnight Special, The Secret Prison History of American Music , W. W. Norton and Company, 2026 The US prison and jail population has exploded.   According to an estimate of The Sentencing Project , inmate numbers have grown by 500% over the last 40 years, reaching almost 2 million. The proportion of people in prison, over 0.5%, is far higher than in any other democratic country. Black adults are imprisoned at a rate nearly five times higher than white adults. These numbers, high though they are, understate the impact of incarceration. They do not account for the fact that people move in and out of prisons and jails, so the total number of people imprisoned over a period of time, say a year, is much greater. And they do not account for the family members of the prisoners, whose lives are often uprooted. The numbers reflect a grossly repressive society, a society bent on punishment of the poor and non-white, not on crime prevention and certainly not on reh...
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The Court and the Fed

  President Trump is attacking the Supreme Court for denying him the unilateral power to impose tariffs. He attacked the Federal Reserve System and its former chair, Jerome Powell, for refusing to lower interest rates. He threatened to have Powell criminally indicted. He tried to fire one member of the Fed’s Board, Lisa Cook (a Black woman, are you surprised?), but was stopped, at least temporarily, by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court on June 29. The tradition of both institutions is that, although their members are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, once in office they are to perform their duties independent of political pressure. The Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the law and the Constitution, while the Fed is supposed to keep unemployment and inflation low. They can listen to the opinions of elected politicians, but they are not to be bound by those opinions. The President is determined to violate that independence. The independence of the Cou...
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Evolution

Like anyone who believes in the validity of science, I am a Darwinian. I believe that all life forms, including human beings, evolved over long periods from simpler forms. I do not believe in Adam and Eve and I do not believe any of the other origin myths. I believe that for almost all species, the process of evolution by natural selection is continuing. I doubt, however, that the evolution of human beings by natural selection is continuing. Why does this matter? Because, as I will try to show, natural selection is a brutal, cruel process, and if we are free from it, our lives are immeasurably better. Charles Darwin’s seminal book of 1859 was entitled The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life . The reason for citing the full title is that his entire argument is summarized in those words. All life forms have origins; that is, they evolved from other forms. The process of evolution is natural; it is not divine o...
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Regime Change .2

  Regime Change Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump , Simon and Schuster, 2026 I posted this piece on July 11, but for some reason it was not distributed to everyone. The techies that Roz and I have consulted can’t figure it out. So I am posting it again. If you are getting this for the second time, I apologize. I hope you get it for the first time. New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have written an account of the first 13 months of Donald Trump’s second term, January 2025 to February 2026. The title, Regime Change , is ambiguous, and the authors don’t land on an exact definition. I think there are at least four possible meanings. The most straightforward is simply the change in presidential regime from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. They don’t spend a lot of time on that. They are more interested in a second meaning, the change from Trump’s first term, 2017-2021, to his second, beginning in 2...
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