Erich's Site

Hacked By BALA SNIPER

Ate at a fancy new new downtown restaurant today.  Happened to be downtown around noon. Wanted to try the new place because of all the hullabaloo about it being opened by top chefs, using local ingredients made me think that we might want to have dinner there on a special occasion. Lunches are usually a […]

The draft of this article was written nearly five months ago.  A great deal has happened since then, not least, the firing of President Ilene Busch-Vishniak.   A recent comment on the TransformUs Facebook Page that suggested that she deserved to be treated with respect as a former leader persuades me to finally publish this clear […]

The following open letter was distributed to the participants in the University of  Saskatchewan General, Academic Assembly, in Convocation Hall, on Wednesday April 9th, 2014: Four Questions and a comment from a taxpayer             As a citizen of Canada and a twenty-year resident of this province of, I am alarmed by some recent actions unelected […]

Kiev is the important city through which much of what has become Russia flowed.   The brief Ukrainian Socialist Republic also marked a high point of Ukrainian tolerance before its independence was crushed its population decimated and its culture suppressed by the monstrosity Stalin engineered in contemptuous defiance of the promises and ideals of Russian Revolution […]

Reposted with permission.  The eloquent and amusing reaction to a “left” writer’s article supporting the interim government in Kiev by a dear friend in the struggle for a saner world, Vancouver’s Brian Waite. What an idiot. He should travel to Eastern Ukraine and carry a placard proclaiming the views of the pro-EU interim government in […]

Like the cynical Newspeak* titles of the Harper regime’s many schemes to plunder the public good and to “streamline government” by dismantling regulations and scientific and democratic checks, the very title of the University of Saskatchewan’s “Transform US” is a lie.  “Transformation” suggests a creative process, a renewal.  The awkward juxtaposition of the collective pronoun […]

In one of the endless and endlessly repeated discussions of whether bigger is better on the big Amazon-owned digital photography website DPreview: Corpy2 wrote: Well, I was very happy with the quality of the e-m5, especially with the 45 1.8 and the 75mm. But then I looked at the A7r [the Sony A7 in an […]

In The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies, Jared Diamond makes a startling statement which spoiled my relationship with a fellow student and the professor of  a university course I was auditing.  They were incredulous and indignant when I passed on his observation that the members of indigenous groups he interviewed […]