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Beware of suffocation

There’s a fuss in Britain and North America over plastic shopping bags. Compared to all the critical local and world issues it’s just silly. And it’s also an example of individual consumer “rights” being defended to the nth degree, trumping common goods and common sense. The news – stories are pervasive — is about efforts in England and Scotland to tax and reduce the plastic shopping bags that clog landfills and harm wildlife. This isn’t at all new: governments in many other places have tried this with bans or taxes. And most everywhere the opposition has been ferocious; this time it’s focused

Jail allegedly used drugs, shocks to control inmates

The story  of a year-long investigation by Ruth Hopkins of the Wits Justice Project is hard. It is, in fact, downright ugly. And to anyone at all familiar with human history, the allegations that prisoners were controlled by forced drug injections and electrical shocks are a must-read, if only because there’s truth in the motto: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Excerpt from the story in Dispatches: A South African prison, run by the beleaguered multinational private security company G4S, allegedly forcibly injected inmates with antipsychotic medication and used electroshocks to subdue and control prisoners. Prisoners, warders and health care workers

Fright night?

At Halloween this year, Jim McNiven’s thoughts turned to his grandson – and a tour he took with the nine-year-old boy at a museum in the American Southwest. The Titan Missile Museum – built during the Cold War to launch nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles at enemies of the United States – puts to shame the scary ghosts and goblins that prowl North America’s streets each October 31st. Log in to read McNiven’s account of their adventure, available to monthly subscribers or with a $1 day pass to Facts and Opinions.   

George Packer’s The Unwinding

American George Packer of The New Yorker was scorching in his take of the state of his union, talking in Vancouver at a writer’s festival. Writes Rod Mickleburgh: “He drew gasps from the nearly sold-out crowd at the university’s Frederic Wood Theatre, when he pointed out that Sam Walton’s six heirs will eventually have as much wealth as the bottom 42 per cent of Americans. Meanwhile, incomes for the country’s top one per cent have soared by 256 per cent over the past 30 years, while those of the middle class have nudged higher by a mere 21 per cent. “These

A prince, a prostitute, a ranch and a murder

The title of author and historian Brian Brennan’s latest Commentary piece is delectable – if you like your history with a frisson of salaciousness. He calls it The Prince and the Prostitute — or, “How a British Royal Hid Out in Canada While his Former Mistress Went on Trial for Murder in London.” An excerpt:  When the heir to the British throne paid his first official visit to Canada in 1919, it was expected he would follow the usual royal routine of shaking hands, making speeches and inspecting troops. What wasn’t anticipated was that Edward, Prince of Wales, would buy a ranch while he was abroad.

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