George Case's Blog, page 3

Down and Out in Myth and Reality

My weekday walk to my job site in a large Canadian city takes me through a gauntlet of the urban underclass.  Here’s a noisy gaggle of ragged folks clustered around a bottle or two, there’s a man screaming obscenities at an invisible enemy, a woman sits and stares vacantly outside the bank, and over by […]

False (Freak) Flag Operation

There is an exclusive list of shocking events which subsequently become fodder for conspiracy theories. The bombing of Pearl Harbor. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The death of Princess Diana. 9/11. The Sandy Hook mass shooting. Each of those is claimed by the theorists to have been […]

Bone Spur of the Moment

At one time or another, you or someone you know has probably joked, “When I am dictator…,” and then invoked a totally capricious pet cause you would order your underlings to enforce: prohibit the farming and consumption of asparagus; have Prince Harry and Megan Markle publicly thrown into a vat of human waste; make “Whole […]

Unplugged, Solo & Live

Excuses, Excuses

The most dismaying thing about Donald Trump, when you think about it, is not the man himself but the popularity that has put him into high office. There have already been a lot of right-wing nutjobs (Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, David Icke), media provocateurs (Michael Moore, Bill Maher), and reality-TV stars you might […]

Fun With Phonics

[Those of us who work with words have a natural affinity for wordplay.  Just as a carpenter can see a piece of fine furniture lurking in a block of maple, or a mathematician can see an elegant equation in a random jumble of numbers, so can the literary see puns and allusion hidden within the […]

Weather Or Not

I’m no scientist, but the idea of man-made climate change has always seemed pretty plausible to me. Pollutants generated by modern industrial society have been pumped into the planetary environment at such a rate for over one hundred years that something has to give; rivers, lakes, oceans and skies are the elements which “make” our […]

Starr Wars

One of the most recurring themes in pop musicology – a myth which critics have long debunked yet which they seem forever bound to debunk again – is the dubious talent of the Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr.  From the quartet’s rise to fame and their spectacular career in the 1960s, and throughout their posthumous life […]

Progressive Regressions

Defending Liberal Values in Illiberal Times [60-minute read / Formerly a stand-alone page on this blog] An eternal movement:  critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by its former rebellion. Pascal Bruckner,  The Tyranny of Guilt:  An Essay on Western Masochism This essay will be […]

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

A prediction: before the end of this century, Christmas as we know it in 2024, and as we’ve known it for over one hundred years, will no longer be celebrated. Today Christmas is a national holiday in countries around the planet, observed by vast numbers of the earth’s people, and a central event of sacred […]