City
Saturday Brew: The Safe Cycling Debate Continues, Finally Summer, Plane Problems for Leafs, No Cigar for Halladay, Africentric School Starts Tuesday
Photo: "Windows / Fenêtres" by faramars1, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Cycling safety and the poor relationship between cyclists and motorists is still dominating the headlines. There are a plethora of theories as to why our roads are so dangerous and on how they might be fixed. One report cites the overregulation of traffic in North America as the key hazard and holds up the more loosely controlled European system as the model to follow. Another points to how few rules cyclists tend to follow as a critical issue. And, risking idealism but endorsing common sense, Marcus Gee of The Globe wonders "why can't we all just get along?"
I generally don't enjoy (small) talk about the weather, but after this 'summer,' I was positively ecstatic to read that meteorologists are calling not just for a perfect labour day long weekend, but a warm and dry autumn in general. This July was the coldest one we've had in 19 years based on the stubborn jet stream refusing to move north of the Great Lakes. Here's hoping these predictions are accurate and it cuts us all some slack for the next month or so.
In sports news, it looks like the Toronto Maple Leafs and other Canadian NHL teams are going to need new planes. Well, sort of. Quite the argument is brewing after the Obama administration decided to enforce a rule that stipulates that Canadian charter flights can't fly between U.S. cities (after arrival at a U.S. destination, they're supposed to return to Canada rather than continuing to fly in the States). NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly points out that this will be a nightmare for scheduling during the upcoming season, and Transport Minister John Baird is threatening to do the same to American charters flying in Canada. Messy stuff, but somehow I think they'll manage. Back in the 'old days,' teams used to have to take the train.
And, in much the same way that hitting a golf shot to about an inch from the cup can actually be more disappointing than satisfying, Roy Halladay pitched a one-hitter last night in helping the Jays to defeat the New York Yankees 6-0. It was the second of his career, and I feel for the guy. Though it might be mentioned in today's news, in the long run no one remembers the one-hittters now do they?
With the school year looming, a project that brought a great deal of controversy will finally see full-scale implementation. Toronto's first Africentric school is set to welcome its inaugural crop of students (85 total) on Tuesday. Personally, I'm excited to see how this pans out. Claims that this is a sort of reverse racism in action tend to gloss over the fact that Canadian pedagogy at grade schools has never been race-neutral. Despite their not not being explicitly named Eurocentric, the staggering majority of schools are just that. But, forgetting this, it'll be intriguing to see if the altered curriculum helps to achieve the goal of reducing the 40% drop out rate for black students in Toronto.
Discussion
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helllooooo, back in the old days there were 6 teams and all of them were on the east coast. Of course you can travel by train. Try doing it now going from Toronto to LA, then playing another game a few days later in Florida. Are you insane.
Please don't make such ridiculous comments.
Are you really that stupid?! You need a good smack up the side of your head from Richard Leakey.
I recall an interview about 10 years ago with the deputy Mayor of Cleveland (or perhaps Columbus), a rustbelt city that had recently revamped its waterfront and revitalized its downtown. The deputy Mayor, a middle aged black woman, went on to talk about the troubles black youth were experiencing in her city. Her opinion (and only SHE was allowed to speculate this, because she is a 'member' of that disenfranchised community) was that black youth needed to grow up and stop blaming the past for their problems. She went on to add that no group in history has been persecuted as much as the Jews, yet nobody hears them bellyaching about their past, wallowing around and blaming everyone else for their troubles while joining gangs and shooting each other. I was aghast when I heard the interview: at last, common sense! A woman who knows what she speaks of.
No, that is not the Canadian way. We will throw hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars into these touchy-feely programs, and I warrant that in 10 years this city will be a worse cesspool. Social engineers will still be wringing their hands and tsk tsking about how society has failed these youth, then we can be off to the next education fad.
But then we only have our very patchy Greek & Roman history thanks to the number and distribution of texts that enabled a minor fraction of what was written to survive. Socrates left nothing written and we only know him through Plato's work and attacks from popular comedies of the day. That's big dead white male mojo who we essentially know nothing of.
Far too many ignorant racists abuse Marxist techniques (or too many ignorant Marxists abuse race.. tomato - tomahto, you're all irredeemably evil) to prove things that just ain't so. Africentric schooling is a racist assault on some of our most vulnerable children, more chilling because it is perpetrated and enabled by their own parents.
The truly sad thing is that our school system teaches so little history. No real exploration of Greeks & Romans, no exploration of the mulplicity of governmental forms in Ancient Greece, why certain areas produce large tyrannies while others produce smaller and more diverse governments. No serious history of my ancestors, except for a short gloss in grade 13 politics and grade 11 law (for constitutional and common law origins), and I'm as white as they come (painfully so, especially on a beautiful weekend like this!)
You'll note that certain communities that strongly value education and tend to have intact families do well, even though their ancestors' histories are generally ignored (whether it's available as it is for Jews and East Asian countries, or rather patchy as it is for South Asian countries - again we see the value in vast numbers of widely distributed copies in escaping successors with malign intentions). Intact families, "protestant" work ethic (lol, since so many are hindu/buddhist...). and education being highly valued is what makes a community healthy, not race or whether people that look like you show up in class. Lots of generationally poor white communities lack these traits and are thus trapped in poverty - Newfoundland outports, Flint MI, Oshawa, British Chavs...
BlogTo needs to stop being ignorantly knee-jerk leftist. The love for idiotic government regulation, and the hatred towards freedom, shines through in your snarky dismissal of the travails of NHL charters. Not that Canada is all that much better - for idiotic reasons we don't have a free airline market letting any airline (with decent safety standards) fly point to point in our country. Free our people, free the markets, and get rid of the bureaucrats.