kar0ling

The heat is on: no more frozen bus rides, province vows From the FreeP:  "After years of headlines about frigid rides to and from Winnipeg, heat on commercial buses will be mandatory this winter, the province announced Monday." "Bus operators must examine their heat systems daily and provincial bus inspectors will conduct random stops. They will have the authority to place any vehicle that doesn’t comply out of service." I've never sat on an unheated bus from Thompson, so maybe I'm wrong and it is in fact better to have no ride than a cold ride. Just threatening operators with random inspectors and grounded buses seems like punishing the passengers, though. How about just going straight to the fine (maybe don't bench the bus unless the bus company is a repeat offender?) and making it hurt: $10,000. "If a company is caught disobeying rules, it will be fined either $174, $298 or a combined total of $472, depending on the case." “The fine...

  I can't get through a news article without wanting to react so I'm here to exorcise my need to opine.  "The NDP government has retained former federal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy to lead an ambitious, two-year study into the relocation of rail lines and yards that currently occupy high-value property in Winnipeg’s core, the Free Press has learned. "Sources confirmed Premier Wab Kinew will announce Axworthy’s appointment on Tuesday." It's frustrating to see projects become political footballs and thus take 10 times as long to get done as need be. Do we need endless studies? Isn't it clear that this now secondary rail yard isn't needed in the centre of the city anymore and that its presence actually harms the city? I'm shocked and frustrated that all the handwringing about replacing the Arlington Bridge has not yet to my awareness raised the subject of rail relocation! Why are we planning to build a very expensive bridge with an extremely l...

After a period of growing dis-ease, I broke up with my church in spring. In my experience, we fete new members of the church coming in the door and pretend we don’t even notice when the door closes behind those who walk out. When needed, we perfunctorily rubberstamp the withdrawal of membership, but there is no process beyond that. This troubled me long before I was considering being the one to leave. When it became clear to me during a time away from home that all I had for my church – not only the denomination, for which I long had a list of critiques, but also my local congregation, which I used to cherish as an antidote to the other frustrations – was anger, I decided “stay and fight” was no longer useful; it was time to leave. But I did not want to fade away like so many before. It is not fitting that a group that formally promises to love care for each other should close our eyes when a member walks away. Firstly, on the basis of purported care for each other’s souls, should w...

Some headlines just make a person groan and reading the article makes it worse instead of better. That's how I felt after reading this article. So I wrote a letter to my politicians to let them know.  https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/09/04/province-eyes-gps-tracking-of-garbage-trucks There's several indications in the article that a fair bit of tracking is already happening. It wasn't lack of knowledge but lack of will that put such a long delay on searching the landfill. And how tragic that we should be concerned this situation might be repeated and our only steps are to make it easier to "catch the guy"! What kind of steps might be taken instead to help women avoid ending up in such vulnerable and dangerous positions in the first place? How about building a society where anyone who treats vulnerable women like garbage is made clearly aware that is not acceptable? And then there's the price tag: $200,000 just to engage a consultant t...

It's my favourite two weeks of summer and this folk dancing nerd is in her element. This year, I got to introduce some Toronto-relocated friends to the joy of the good-old hokey Winnipeg amateur-hour cultural spectacle that is Folklorama. There was a little bit of extra excitement this year. First of all, the usual at the Japanese pavilion. The feisty four-year old was inspired by the low-key armthrusts and choreographed fake fighting of the karate demonstration. (Sorry, folks, but Park's Tae kwon do academy puts on a much more impressive demonstration over at the Korean pavilion.) The eight-year-old was entranced by Hinedo Taiko's drumming, mirroring their movements on her lap. The game-store-manager young dad enthused over the connections to anim é and Pokemon. It was a successful first pavilion. It was enough culture for the littles, so we left them to go play in the park and headed off alone to the Punjabi pavilion with just enough time to catch the show. The opening so...

With apologies to CBC, I'm going to pull a John Longhurst here and link to my blog which links to the news article. If you didn't catch the leader's debate, please watch it here. Facebook's media ban is putting a serious crimp on our election, meaning that the vast majority of political messages you get are paid for campaign ads rather than journalistic reports on announcements, interviews with both leaders and laypeople, etc. Don't go into this election uninformed. And then take in the post-election debate analysis.

Apologies to CBC Ideas and Astra Taylor for my half-baked musings on and possibly poor recounting of her stimulating and inspiring presentation, in service of my need to exercise my writing and reflection muscles. Unlike the Greek myth of Prometheus which suggests human exceptionalism, the Roman story of Curia’s gift in equipping humans is that makes insecurity an inescapable part of the human condition. “We are fated to worry,” says Astra Taylor, at this year’s Massey lectures (2023). Security, by etymology, is the absence of care: sine curitas. Without worries. But we carry our creator Curia always with us, and so we live in a state of existential insecurity. It cuts both ways, says Astra Taylor. We are by nature dependent on others, for good and ill. We are by nature vulnerable to psychological wounding – again, for good or ill. Insecurity can inspire in us compassion, stemming from our own vulnerabilities, or contempt of them that leads to all sorts of compulsions to obviate o...