No person nor party can claim only it represents the true meaning of liberty and freedom, and anyone who is truly serious about the words needs to take time to read about democracy in history before entering into conversation about the concepts. Not a lot of time but at least a day of deep reading. Freedom is not what a teen...

Parliament began sitting again this Monday, facing its first full agenda since the late summer election.  Most committees will be meeting for the first time and we will see the first Private Member’s Bill debates.  I’d like to highlight some of those Private Member’s Bills in my upcoming columns, since some could produce...

Robert Frost began his poem “Mending Wall” with the line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He could have been speaking for wildlife. Walls and fences fragment their habitat, limit travel for food and mating, block migration routes and cause death. (As do roads.) A 2011 study found “the fence along the U.S.–Mexico...

When people do things they shouldn’t, they often try to distract attention from their actions. Guardian writer George Monbiot notes that many corporations fuelling the planet’s destruction spend significant resources to shift attention away from themselves and onto us. “The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture...

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;  The proper study of mankind is Man.     -- Alexander Pope “Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature. . . . Is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the...

As light slowly returns to the Northern Hemisphere, we anticipate brighter days ahead. It’s a good time to consider the wondrous combination of forces that make life on Earth possible. Above all is the sun — the ultimate source of all our energy. But we rely on plants, algae and some bacteria to obtain this energy through...

Part Three Cold War, classic form: geopolitics frozen The second Cold War of modern history was the one we all know, The Free World vs. The Communist [Sino-Soviet] Bloc from 1946 to 1989. It was a period of many wars but never one between the two nuclear superpowers, the US and Soviet Russia. The West won the Cold War when ...

Starting Nov. 1, world leaders — along with scientists, policy-makers, journalists and activists — are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland for the UN international climate conference COP26. Over the next 12 days, they’ll have an opportunity to make crucial decisions about tackling the climate emergency globally. With the most...

The Original cold war: radical democracy vs.reactionary monarchy in Europe The Anglo-French contest – most definitely not a cold war – grabbing for power all around the world, acquired a very different complexion when revolutionary France became the first modern democratic republic with radical Jacobin ideology it wished to...

If world representatives at the UN climate conference in Glasgow put talk into action, we could forestall the worst impacts of the rapidly accelerating climate crisis. But we have to look beyond the Conference of the Parties — COP26 this year. If agreements under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are undermined ...