Why?
The purpose of this newsletter is to give coverage to important stories that have been censored, suppressed or ignored by the mainstream news media.
Though I’ve ended up talking a lot about COVID issues and the war in Ukraine, that’s only because those are the areas currently most prone to censorship.
Be forewarned: If the mainstream media are not willing to talk about an important story on any topic, I reserve the right to talk about it.
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About Me:
In a poem, an ex-wife once described me as being ‘tormented by the possible.’
In 1972, at the age of 20, I became a Quaker and a pacifist. My next two summers were spent in Quaker work camps in Belfast, Northern Ireland, doing sports and crafts with slum kids in a war zone. (They were among the best summers of my life, if that makes any sense.)
In 1977, I completed a Bachelor of Independent Studies degree in the area of Counselling at the University of Waterloo. Integrated Studies was an amazing student-run program. Imagine a Summerhill for adults and you have a close approximation.
In 1984, I founded Work Well, an information centre on family-friendly work schedules in Victoria, BC. While Work Well’s Executive Director, I wrote Put Work In Its Place, a 256-page self-help guide for those wanting a better work/life balance.
In 1993, I wrote Working Harder Isn’t Working: A Detailed Plan for Implementing a Four-Day Workweek in Canada. For the next several years, I made a passable living promoting the four-day workweek as a conference keynote speaker.
In 2004, I wrote Enough Already: Breaking Free in the Second Half of Life. I then fulfilled a decades old dream to teach English in China. That was followed by stints teaching English in Cuenca, Ecuador, and in the Galapagos Islands.
In Cuenca, I met my wife, Catalina. Our son Daniel was born in 2007, Juan Diego in 2010. We lived for several years in Vilcabamba, Ecuador. I taught English part-time, and semantics at the University of Loja.
In 2016, we moved to Victoria, BC. Since then, I’ve had the great luxury to be a stay-at-home dad. So far, I have been able to slow the slow the aging process with dance aerobics, yoga, doing weights and playing squash at the local YMCA. I love to garden. We like to camp in our 1987 Econoline campervan.
My family is a delight. Victoria is a beautiful and dynamic city to live in. Though my friendship circle and my play life both suffered some diminishment during the COVID pandemic, I am making steady progress in reclaiming life’s pleasures.
It is the larger world that casts a long shadow over my life.
Month after month, we keep skating closer and closer to a war that could vaporize all the good in your life and mine in a matter of hours.
The COVID pandemic looked to me suspiciously liked a trial-run on how to use an ‘emergency’ to impose something close to totalitarian rule.
I see the uber-rich steadily getting richer while ordinary people’s expenses rise faster than their incomes.
Not only do billionaires, giant corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma exert an inordinate degree of control over Governments in North America, they also exert a frightening level of control over what can be talked about in the mainstream media.
None of that is okay with me.
I see that the truth has a certain power and potency in the world. Just let it out of whatever cage imprisons it, and it has an inexorable tendency to spread. If I can be a part of that process, it’s all I need.