Rem­brandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633) 160 cm × 128 cm. The paint­ing was stolen from a gallery in 1990 and its where­abouts are unknown. It prob­a­bly sits on the bed­room wall of some gang­ster billionaire.

A fine, suc­cinct post on the cur­rent dys­func­tion­al state of democ­ra­cy in both Cana­da and the Unit­ed States.

sam­ple:

Indeed an even more impor­tant prin­ci­ple has been lost track of in just the last few years. That is the idea that the Prime Min­is­ter and his cab­i­net only hold office when they can com­mand the con­fi­dence of the House of Com­mons. Remem­ber when Steven Harp­er was held in con­tempt of Par­lia­ment by major­i­ty of the mem­bers? And the Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al let him get away with ignor­ing this and treat­ing it as mere­ly a par­ti­san stunt? One can have a cer­tain amount of sym­pa­thy for the Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al who prob­a­bly felt that if she fired Harp­er instead of let­ting him pro­rogue Par­lia­ment, she would enjoy no sup­port what­so­ev­er in the polit­i­cal class. She was right, but right here the Cana­di­an Con­sti­tu­tion broke down, and few peo­ple noticed or at least took it seriously.

When Rob Ford was elect­ed May­or of Toron­to in 2010, I felt no hes­i­ta­tion in pre­dict­ing that he would unleash a tidal wave of chaos, incom­pe­tence and cor­rup­tion on our fair city. His type of pho­ny-baloney “pop­ulism” was noth­ing new to me, and the results pre­dictable. My eval­u­a­tion has been con­firmed a thou­sand times over.

This evening, I was watch­ing Tim Bur­ton’s sec­ond Bat­man film, Bat­man Returns (1992), and was in stitch­es over the obvi­ous resem­blance between Ford’s cam­paign and per­son­al­i­ty, and the Pen­guin, as por­trayed by Dan­ny DeVi­to. The Pen­guin runs for may­or of Gotham City on pret­ty much the same plat­form, and his phys­i­cal resem­blance to Ford makes it all the more delight­ful. Think­ing I might find a good still from the film on the inter­net to illus­trate my point, I dis­cov­ered that many oth­er peo­ple had made the same con­nec­tion. The above image was all over the web. Kudos to the anony­mous humourist who cre­at­ed it.

His­toric ear­ly pho­to­graph of cow­boys, show­ing how lit­tle they resem­bled their rep­re­sen­ta­tion in movies and tele­vi­sion. Many cow­boys were Black. It was a low-wage, low-sta­tus pro­fes­sion. Authen­tic peri­od Cow­boy Bal­lads sing of lone­li­ness and their out­cast sta­tus: “My Church is the sky, where I wor­ship alone…My par­son­’s a wolf on his pul­pit of bones.”