On Sunday, I posted a short iPhone video of an osprey nest next to an 800 kw wind turbine at River John, Nova Scotia, to make the tongue-in-cheek point that someone forgot to tell the osprey about the perils of infrasound and shadow flicker. The point was tongue-in-cheek in the sense that I have no way of knowing whether young birds successfully fledged from the nest, but serious in the sense that I think health arguments against wind turbines are largely spurious. Bruce Wark, former reporter, CBC radio producer, and King's journalism professor, thinks I overlooked the most obvious threat wind...

03 September, 2013

In response to my post on the Dexter government's obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes: When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986 as CBC Radio's National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized  during my years at Queen's Park that the Conservatives' decision to create a professional (and...

27 February, 2011

Bruce Wark, writing from an HRM neighborhood where the ban on overnight parking is not enforced, critiques my critique of the ban: [Y]ou use "reasonable accommodation" as though you have proved it. It is as though you are saying that your assertion in the first paragraph is sufficient to support what you're saying in the second. The rules of logic say that he who asserts must prove. Furthermore, your assertion that "traffic tsar" Ken Reashor "evinces no interest in reasonable accommodation" is a neat, but logically unconvincing way of first, labelling Reashor as a Russian dictator, then glossing over necessary proof...

24 January, 2011

Gone-fishin' CBC Radio host Costas Halavrezos muses about his ego-lite broadcasting style on the veteran's last Maritime Noon broadcast: [A]s listeners, you've noticed I play my personal cards close to my chest. I don't tell cute family anecdotes or talk about my favourite sports teams or what I had for breakfast, because I believe every second of broadcast time is precious, and well, the majority of you don't get to communicate with other Maritimers every day like I do, so it's best if I stay out of the way and free up the space. This is but a variant of E.B. White's...

19 September, 2010
Contrarian's submission to the National Consultation on Copyright focuses on an issue that has received little attention in the consultation, an area in which current Canadian law provides a striking lack of balance, an issue in which Canadian law is not decades but centuries out of date: the issue of Crown Copyright. To view the submission, please click the "read more" button.
13 September, 2009
After hectoring us for five days about Bill, a hurricane that was actually a tropical storm, the media took an only slightly more restrained approach to Danny, a weak tropical storm that actually appears to be a half-day rain shower. CBC still wrung its hands for much of the week, but didn't cancel regular programs. Many contrarian readers responded to the hype, starting after the jump with CW.
29 August, 2009