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Happy blog-iversary to one of the originals

November 4, 2025 By Notes 2 Comments

Happy 23rd blog-iversary to Ton Zjjlstra’s blog. He is one of the originals, and a person I still read daily:

My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).

Mine too, although in the dark social media years, it became a bit dormant as I posted on Facebook and twitter, where the engagement was much higher and often more interesting. But not any more. The cost of those platforms was too high, because the speed of interaction eroded my attention too badly. I’m in recovery from those platforms, and part of that means taking back this space. The empty carbs of social media engagement have been replaced by the delicious savouring of much more infrequent but much more thoughtful connection.

Speaking of which, it seem that since June I’ve been in a pattern that has established itself as a practice. My posts generally fall into two types of categories now. There are the longer essays that relate in some way to my professional life. If you’ve subscribed by email to this blog, or follow me on LinkedIn those are the ones you will see. You might get a few a month.

The other kind of post is the old school blog post, like this one, very much in the vein of Ton’s quote above. These are things I have noticed that I think you might enjoy too (or not), and these notes become my little memory palace. They are literally about anything. In a way my blog has become my searchable “morning pages” for writing and getting things out of my head before my day starts. I’ m not sure every reader of this blog has an early-21st century idea of what these meandering thoughts are, but essentially they are annotated links. A “web log” if you will. If you subscribe to my blog through RSS, or stumble upon it through a search or a link posted to Mastodon or Bluesky, you get these ones as well. Enjoy the typos, poor grammar, half-thoughts, broken links and strange questions!

We can engage on those platforms, but I’m happy if you have something to contribute to the conversation here, where the whole world will see it and can engage instead of just those who are members of the various walled gardens and exclusive clubs that are the social media apps.

PS. I had my own 23rd blog-iversary of Parking Lot (the actual name of this blog) on September 6.

The dangerous seduction of AI in public policy

November 3, 2025 By Democracy No Comments

Some important and dire warnings about the way the current federal government is going about its business making policy on artificial intelligence. Or perhaps, more accurately, how it is letting AI make policy on artificial intelligence and other things.

One of the dangers of using AI for public policy can be seen in this article, published in Slugger O Toole, a blog on Northern Ireland issues. The author uses a context-free ChatGPT definition of reconciliation and then asks the question “how are we to practice the vague, abstract notion of reconciliation?” It sent alarm bells ringing in my head. Here is the response I wrote:

You’ve lost me at using a ChatGPT definition of reconciliation. Defining reconciliation is as much a part of reconciliation as enacting practices and structural reforms to sustain it. The context of reconciliation matters tremendously. In South Africa it was a crucial decision to take as a majority population finally assumed power once the state became democratic. The potential for terrible violence was present and the way the majority took power mattered, hence the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here in Canada reconciliation is a socio-historical imperative, to transcend centuries of colonial policy that have been called genocidal by the government’s own inquiries. But it is also a legal concept in which Aboriginal rights and title, which are recognized in Canadian law, need to be reconciled with the Crown’s rights and title and interest in lands. If you will excuse my directness, using a ChatGPT definition of reconciliation in the context of real, meaningful and very specific needs is not only lazy writing, but potentially dangerous and destabilizing public policy. Reconciliation is not a goal, it is a direction of travel and, perhaps, an evaluation criteria in which future generations can say: “they took actions which reconciled us.” It requires deep sensitivity to the dynamics of the present, and a commitment to that ongoing direction in the context of the unique affordances of time and opportunity which people might pursue together.

Seems to me that the essence of democratic deliberation is to work out what we can do together given the current state of play. I’m sure AI has it’s usefulness in deliberative practice in democracies, but our federal government’s blind pursuit of it as an engine for economic growth and Hughie Beag’s uncritical use of it to set a public policy agenda that ignores the reality of the society in which he is embedded show to of the dangers from succumbing to it’s seduction.

The Blue Jays discover that love is everything

November 2, 2025 By Being, Featured, Music, Poetry One Comment

Jane Siberry last night

There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.

I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.

When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.

And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.

Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.

I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”

She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.

maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we made

love is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leaving

maybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we made

love is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leaving

first he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too late

so take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leaving

love is everything…

Nostalghia, bad movies, and wandering through an Ottawa night

November 1, 2025 By Being No Comments

I am in Ottawa with Caitlin to do a little work and visit the place we lived from three years back in the early 1990s when we graduated and started our life together. This morning I find myself in a cafe on the edge of the Byward market, deeper into the historic French and Catholic neighbourhood boards the north end of Dalhousie Street. For all of it’s growth, Ottawa remains remarkably unchanged over the past 30+ years, especially in the downtown core which is partially protected by the work of the National Capital Commission and full of important and historical buildings. As a result even the neighbourhoods we lived in remain familiar and intact – the Golden Triangle and Sandy Hill. The apartment and duplex we lived in are still there, and in fact last night, out on a late walk home from a movie, we stopped in front of our old place on Frank Street and one of the residents asked what we were looking at. When we told him, he gave us a tour inside the building. Nothing had changed. Memories came flooding back.

I love that about visiting physical places in which I have lived. The same happened when I took my son to England in April and showed him the place where I lived as a pre-teen in the three years our family spent there. Things change, but also they don’t, and walking through places of forgotten memory wakes up deep FEELINGS, not just stories. I can tell you about the time we were introduced to chèvre at the Ritz on Elgin, or the nights we spent at the Bytown theatre, or the potato skins we ate at the Royal Oak, but visiting these places (or the locations of these places) evokes a feeling that is indescribable. It put me in mind of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, which, I discovered this morning, had its seminal scene filmed in the Bagno Vignoni, which I visited in May without making the connection. Funny what we miss.

It’s a thin time, All Souls Day. I can feel them here in the cold wind coming down the valley, the fall colours on the Gatineau Hills and the smell of leaf mold on the breeze. I love it.

Speaking of films, last night we ventured to Landsdowne Park, a place which HAS changed a lot since we lived here. It is the hoe of the TD Place stadium which hosts both of Ottawa’s professional soccer teams and its Canadian football team as well as the arena where the OHL Ottawa 67s play. A whole entertainment district has spring up around the stadia, and we headed there to watch Aziz Ansari’s new movie, Good Fortune, and then catch the end of game 6 of the World Series, which the Blue Jays lost 3-1 after a bizarre ninth inning in which Barger’s ground rule double due to a ball lodged perfectly in the left centre field wall prevented the Blue Jays from tying the game.

About that movie though. It’s not very good. Ansari plays a guy who supposedly makes documentaries, but who is working gig jobs in LA and living in his car. It’s a comedy, which is such a weird take for the struggle that lies just out of view of the film. Due to the errant actions of a guardian angel acting above his pay grade (Keanu Reeves), he ends up switching places with a tech bro (Seth Rogan). Ansari’s character gets comfortable and tries too steal that life. The angel says he can only switch back if he can find meaning and worth in his life as a poor homeless person. Ansari fakes memory loss after an accident and won’t give the tech bro his life back. Why would he?

Except, inexplicably, he does. I’m going to spoil it here, although you can see the ending coming a mile away, but Ansari eventually relents, the tech bro minimally atones for his experience by paying his gig drivers more, but the union drive at the hardware store fails again and everyone resolves to keep working to change the conditions over which they have no control. It’s actually pretty horrifying. The privileged white guy gets his fortune back, the brown guy ends up poor again but with a renewed sense of purpose and with his true love, a struggling colleague who tries unsuccessfully to organize her workplace, and the angel gets his wings back. A bunch of gig workers quite their jobs, but it’s not clear to me how they then make ends meet after walking out.

Tellingly at the end of the movie, Ansari’s character puts an ad on Craigslist asking for folks to take part in a documentary about the LA underclass and gig working. I walked out of the theatre wondering why Ansari chose to write a lighthearted comedy about these people rather than ACTUALLY MAKE THAT DOCUMENTARY. It smacked of a film made by people who heard about how bad stuff was from their delivery drivers and baristas, but no one involved has lived experience of this life and it shows.

Miss this one and go re-watch Tangerine instead.

Life elsewhere, difference, and SPORTS!

October 31, 2025 By Complexity, Football No Comments

Soon we will know if we are alone. A beautiful “Occasional Paper” from Doug Muir published at Crooked Timber about where we are in relation to the search for life on other planets. I love this description of the current moment:

What that means is that now, right now, we’re in a very special time.  It’s a time when we’re actively looking for life out there — The Search is underway — but the question is still open.  

For all of human history until the 1990s we couldn’t do anything but speculate.  And at some point in the future — I suspect around 2100, but it could be 2150 or 2200 or 1500, whatever — we’ll know, or anyway we’ll be pretty sure we know.   Right now is the only time in history when we’re able to actually Look, but we haven’t yet Found.  This brief period is epistemologically unique.  We are living through the short-lived Age Of The Search.  And when it’s over, one way or another, it will be over forever.

I’ve been reading through Jen Briselli’s work both as an inspiration and a fresh take on much that I already know about what we both seem to love about complexity. One of the pieces that I’d recommend to others is this one on Stases Theory, a classical rhetorical technique for working with difference. Jen explores how difference works in complexity and offers these thoughts before moving in to a method and then a grounding in many streams of thinking from communication theory to complexity.

…disagreements are less like rungs on a ladder to be climbed stasis by stasis, and more like landscapes of unresolved questions and conflicting perspectives, overlapping and interconnected.

Crucially, when people are operating at different stases it isn’t always marked by overt disagreement or interpersonal conflict. Often, we don’t even realize we’re making sense of an issue differently, working at different stases, until we’re prompted to consider it. So, the question really isn’t “Where are we in the sequence?” as much as “Where is the crux of meaning making for each of us right now?”

Sometimes we don’t need to agree on the facts first, as long as we can still coordinate action around shared policies. Other times, coherence and collaboration absolutely depend on established facts and shared definitions before implications can be explored or decisions can be made. Knowing the difference isn’t just a matter for rhetoricians and laywers, but also one of collective diagnosis for teams trying to make complex decisions and take action together. It helps groups locate the friction so they can orient toward and navigate through it. In some ways, a stasis is less a blockage than a beacon — a signal where attention and understanding are most needed, and will provide the most leverage.

Oh the sports. I’ve been so busy lately, and travelling and working odd hours, that I haven’t had time to watch too many games. Nevertheless, I’ve jumped on the Blue Jays bandwagon for this World Series and, like much of Canada, become entranced with these loveable underdogs who continue their quest to become the absolute archetype of what can be accomplished with friendship, commitment to one another, and support. If they win the World Series tonight, you will never shut me up about how the intangibles are as crucial to quality work as the tangibles are. You can’t shut me up about that anyway.

It seems like the opposite also proves the case with the other two teams I devote much of my winter’s attention too. Both Tottenham Hotspur and the Toronto Maple Leafs are mailing it in at the moment, suffering periods of perplexing performance. Spurs are at least inconsistent, with wins like last weekend’s 3-0 v Everton coming at the same time as they get bundled from the League Cup or drop points in an anemic game against Monaco in the Champions League. They are also suffering an injury crisis again. The fact that the Premier League is so weird this season means that we currently sit third on 17 points, but if we lose to Chelsea tomorrow and Brentford beat Palace, the 11th place team can overtake us in one afternoon.

As for the Leafs, “discombobulated” is the word of the moment. They must be happy that the Jays are doing so well, because the Toronto fan base is ruthless when their team is underperforming. Heads will not yet roll at the Scotiabank Arena, but they are being feverishly scratched.