A very old guy with snow-white hair and snow-white beard fishes the ocean for weeks without catching anything. Finally, he catches a mighty marlin, but sharks eat it before he can get it to shore.

Tough luck. Stuff happens. Move on to the next story.

That’s a likely Internet simplification of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea. A quick scan. No details. No context. No messages. No learning. The kind of thinned out, often inaccurate, stories we see on social media sites every day.If you went to a library and read the book you’d discover the full story and its valuable messages. The main message being that life is a struggle with an inevitable end, but perseverance and dignity can help us through it.

Sadly, many of us don’t go to libraries or get our information through print sources. We scan and skim smartphones, tablets and PCs for news and information on which we base our opinions and decisions. Brief, incomplete, often manipulated stuff presented as fact.

The majority of people living in the developed world now have fingertip online access to just about all factual information that exists. Yet we are moving farther away from consuming complete, balanced, factually-based information needed to help solve the many difficult issues facing today’s societies.

Research has found that individuals instructed to find specific information online found it faster than others using printed encyclopedias. However, the online searchers were less able to recall the information accurately.

A New Zealand university study concluded back in 2014 that online reading has a negative impact on people’s cognition. The study, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, found that concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates were much lower when people read text online.

Research shows that the digital age also is reducing our attention spans. Some experts say the attention span of a learner now averages 20 minutes.

So, when we skim and scan online we go through more material, but comprehend it less than if we had read it on paper. That’s not good news considering that we face major issues that demand action supported by thoughtful and accurate information.

The move away from reading printed newspapers, magazines and books has happened astonishingly fast and is increasing. U.S. newspaper and periodical revenue has fallen 40 to 50 per cent in the past decade, and Canadian figures are believed to be similar.

A Canadian Book Consumer Study says19 percent of Canadians borrowed a book from a public library in 2021. Also, The Canadian Pediatric Society has said that while 20 percent of adolescents never read a book, almost 50 percent frequently read blogs. 

Print has tried to fight back by offering their products digitally, with little success. Many newspapers, for instance, are offering skim and scan headlines that encourage one- or two-minute reads that don’t come close to giving readers a full sense of what is happening.

Nothing is gained in bemoaning this change in society. We are living through a Digital Revolution, also being called the Third Industrial Revolution. Digital life online is here to stay, shrinking the importance of print.

The goal now should be to build the benefits of online reading while restricting the detriments. Young people especially need to learn how to avoid the negatives of online reading and increase concentration and absorption.

How can that be done? Good question but few solid answers.

There are suggestions like doing more online reading on a large screen, rather than a cellphone. Taking pencil and paper notes during online research is another suggestion.

The Internet is only 30 years old and there simply has not been enough research on how time spent on computers affects cognitive development, especially in children. More research is needed to find practical ways to ameliorate the detrimental impacts.

Libraries perhaps hold part of the answer. They are places where print and digital share space, offering the advantages of book learning and online learning.

Libraries also are great equalizers. Many people who can’t afford books or a digital devices get access to information, print or digital, with a library card.

 There are signs that the animal kingdom is fed up with us and beginning to rebel. 

Two-ton killer whales are ramming yachts and fishing boats. A sea otter has been stealing surf boards from surfers on the California coast. Sharks are terrorizing people on the east coast and alligators are mauling people in Florida. 

Closer to home, coyotes are more visible and bolder, while groundhogs are devastating vegetable and flower gardens. Wire mesh fencing hasn’t stopped them from consuming my wife’s parsley patch.

News reports of animal rebellion now are so common that the shouts of the rebelling animals in George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm are echoing in my head.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell’s animals shout during a rousing speech by Old Major, a big old boar, calling for a revolution. 

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” Old Major says, urging the animals to take control of their lives back from humans.

Relating the current animal behaviour to Orwell’s Animal Farm is perhaps an overreaction. However, something definitely is going on with the world’s animals.

Since 2020 there have been 500 reports of killer whales ramming boats off the coasts of Portugal and Spain. Several have been so badly damaged that they sank.

Last month a whale attacked a yacht off the coast of Scotland. Pods of whales have appeared off the east and west coast of North America and there is concern the whales will start attacking boats there.

Alligator attacks in Florida have increased 66 per cent in recent years. And earlier this month a 69-year-old woman walking her dog in South Carolina was attacked and killed by a gator.

Shark attacks also have increased. 

Globally an estimated four dozen people have suffered shark attacks this year, six fatally. The number is on course to exceed last year’s total of 81 attacks. The annual high for attacks is 111 in 2015.

On the July 4th weekend a 15-year girl was attacked by a shark at a New York beach. She survived.

Coyote populations have grown, as have sightings in human populated areas. Researchers say coyote density in some parts of Canada has risen to as high as 2.3 coyotes per square kilometre. 

There have been two noteworthy coyote attacks in the last few weeks. A nine-year-old boy was mauled June 24 in the North Kildonan area of Winnipeg. One week later a four-year-old child was attacked in the same neighbourhood. Both children were treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries.

Some people believe that increasing wild animal-human interactions are caused by growing wild animal populations. Others say human populations spreading into animal territories is causing conflicts.

Climate change also is said to be a factor in increasing wildlife-human conflicts. Global warming is melting sea ice in the Arctic, causing polar bears to spend more time on land and creating more encounters with humans. Earlier this year a mother and small child were killed in Alaska by a polar bear.

Whatever the reasons, strange animal behaviour is another sign of Nature trying to tell us something.

Nature is a wise grandmother who can teach us much, if we are willing to listen. (The numbskulls who continue to toss Tim’s coffee cups and beer cans from car and truck windows obviously are not).

One of her important lessons is for us to abandon the human ego that makes us think of things in Nature as either useful to us or useless in general.

Everything in Nature has a purpose and is useful even if it doesn’t benefit we humans in some way.

As has been said many times by many writers: Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

We are Nature, albeit only one part of it. So when we spit on Nature, we spit on ourselves.

Perhaps our poor understanding of Nature and the way we mistreat it is the reason the animals appear to be rebelling.

To quote again the rebellious Old Major in Animal Farm:

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word– Man.”

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Thumbs up to my little sister. She can turn mud pies into chocolate cakes. Or, a bad experience into something helpful to others.

She was bike riding with her daughter recently in eastern Ontario when her bike’s front wheel hit a crumbled piece of pavement. She was thrown over the handlebars and landed hard, breaking her arm.

She was immobile on the road’s edge with her daughter trying to help when a car approached. It didn’t stop to help. It didn’t slow down and it narrowly missed hitting them.

When told the story I went into my “world gone crazy” outrage. It’s a sick, sick society when a driver races past an injured person lying on the edge of a road.

My sister had a different take. She told how some nice people came out to help from a nearby house, arranging for an ambulance, trying to make her comfortable etc.

Then came the hospital story, one much different from what we so often hear these days.

The emergency room was packed, as many are these days. But instead of taking my sister’s OHIP card and telling her to take a seat, a nurse immediately set her up with a comfortable sling, gave her pain medication, then had her take a seat.

She didn’t complain about having to wait to see a doctor because the sling and pills made it easier to bear.

My sister is a person who believes people who do their jobs thoughtfully and with kindness should be thanked and told how their work truly helped. So, she called the hospital communications department to have her appreciation passed on to ER staff and the one nurse in particular.

There she stepped into the madness of our computer-controlled world. She was told to go to her laptop, tap this, tap that and eventually end up at a screen displaying a form. Fill out the form, then tap some more to send the completed form into the miasma of hospital bureaucracy.

My sister believes there must be an easier way to pass along appreciation and thanks. 

I suppose one could still use the old-fashioned approach of writing a letter, searching for an address, addressing an envelope, inserting the letter, licking the envelope seal and paying $1 plus for a stamp then posting the letter and hoping it might find the right person.

We now live in the digital age surrounded by software engineers who work daily at changing the way we do things. Surely some of them can design a digital way to say thank you quickly and directly.

My sister wonders why there isn’t a system with which any company that deals with people – not just hospitals – has a simple-to-reach site just for compliments. It takes in messages of thanks and appreciation and directs them to the employee.

Something that bypasses the nests of bureaucracy and computer systems that complicate simple living. Something that you can do quickly on your cell phone while the experience is still fresh in your mind.

It’s an interesting thought. Perhaps someone will pick up on it and one day we’ll be able to send a kudo to a helpful person without the usual rigamarole.

Meanwhile my sister turned to social media to try to thank the nurse for her exceptional kindness. Her post included the following:

“You will never know the impact your kindness had on me that day. You could have just as easily taken my info when I came in and had me go back to a seat. Instead you gave me a new sling to comfort me while I waited and gave me medication to relieve the excruciating pain the fractures in my arm were causing. Thank you for making the rest of that day tolerable. I hope this message finds you somehow.”

I too hope it finds her.

It’s a harsh world out there where excellent and intelligent job performance mixed with kindness are not easy to find. When we do find it we should celebrate it and have better ways of passing along our thanks and appreciation.

 Our spring and summer of smoke is being called abnormal. It’s not. It’s a new normal that scientists predict will become an even more normal part of our lives.

“This is our potential future,” Morgan Crowley, a Canadian Forest Service fire scientist, said in an interview with the Vox media service recently. “It’s real. It’s really important that we prepare for our future and find ways to reduce the effects on our vulnerable populations.”

This year already is the worst forest fire season in Canadian and North American history. Canada has suffered more than 3,000 forest fires since the end of March, burning about 20 million acres. And, we are not quite halfway through the fire season.

It’s going to get worse. More forest fires and more smoke clouding our skies and affecting our health will be a fact of life. We need to listen to, and act on, Ms. Crowley’s warning to prepare for the future and work on finding ways to protect vulnerable populations.

Changing climate is creating conditions that increase wildfire potential. Higher temperatures and increased wind have been drying out our forests, turning them into tinder boxes.

A key factor in recent forest fire history is something that the public has heard little about. It’s called VPD – vapour pressure deficit and is the difference between the amount of moisture actually in the air and the amount of moisture the air could hold.

When the air has much more room for moisture it sucks it out of trees and other plant growth. The larger the moisture deficit, the drier our forests become.

Drier forests don’t necessarily mean there will be more fires, but they definitely mean much drier material for a fire to burn. That’s why recent fires have been larger than usual and creating more smoke.

There is increasing concern about how wildfire smoke is affecting our health. Breathing in the smoke causes running noses, scratchy throats, irritated sinuses, coughs and headaches. The smoke causes more serious problems for people who suffer asthma, bronchitis, and pulmonary disease.

Wildfire smoke can be seen and smelled but it contains tiny toxic particulates that are invisible to the human eye. These particulates can be comprised of acids, sulphites, nitrates, soot, metals and other things can travel deep into the lungs and the bloodstream.

Some medical researchers suspect that breathing wildfire smoke can increase cancer rates – notably lung and brain cancers. They don’t have much solid evidence of that yet and say more study is needed.

There also are suspicions that wildfire smoke is more harmful to infants and also can affect developing fetuses.

New research published in the June issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment says smoke particulates from wildfires could cause 4,000 to 9,200 premature deaths a year in the U.S.

What has not received much study yet are the effects of wildfire smoke on our mental health.

The constant talk about smokey grey days and waking up to discover you can’t see the far shore of your lake can be stressful and create anxiety. 

Some studies of general air pollution have found that bad air can cause unhappiness and depression. One study has said that air pollution is linked not just to depression and anxiety, but causes some functional changes in the brain.

Especially disturbing is a 2022 study that found wildfire smoke exposure during the school year lowered standardized test scores slightly. 

Older studies of people affected by wildfire smoke in British Columbia and California found no increase in mental-health-related doctor visits or hospitalizations.

Today, however, psychologists are increasingly reporting patients reacting to natural disasters with feelings of loss and grief.

Global warming, drying climate despite wild rain storms and the smoke are triggering worries about the future. How long will this last? What’s next and will it be worse? All questions many of us have and which are questions that disturb our mental well-being.

“Climate change is a mental health issue,” says Nancy Piotrowski, a licensed psychologist representative for the American Psychological Association’s Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology.

So wildfire smoke is not just getting into our throats and eyes. It’s getting into our heads.

 No matter what calamity the world suffers, the only really important news in the United States these days is Donald Trump.

News networks feverishly report his limo leaving Trump Tower for another court appearance in downtown New York. Or, his $100 million Boeing 757 taxiing for takeoff to a criminal arraignment in Florida.

Media packs follow him in and out of courtrooms, then to election campaign stops where he boasts of being a stable genius who will be president again next year.

The current odds favour him winning the Republican nomination and beating Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024. However, the odds also favour him being convicted of criminal offences related to hush money payments in New York, mishandling of secret documents in Florida or trying to fix election results in Georgia.

If he is convicted on one of those offences and imprisoned how could he continue to run for president?Easily. Nothing in U.S. law prevents him from becoming president while doing prison time. The law says that any natural born U.S. citizen who is 35 years or older and has lived in the country at least 14 years can be president.

If convicted and jailed, Trump will not be the first person to run for president while serving time. A guy named Eugene Debs did it back in 1920 and won three per cent of the popular vote. Nearly one million people voted for him.

Conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche ran for the White House in 1992 while doing a 15-year term for fraud. He won only 0.1 per cent of the popular vote.

There’s already one declared candidate running for the 2024 presidency from prison. Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also called Joe Exotic and star of the Netflix ‘Tiger King’ series, filed his candidacy papers in February as a Libertarian. He’s doing 21 years in Texas for animal trafficking and abuse offences and for attempting to arrange the murder of a rival zoo keeper.

If Trump does become president while in a prison – say Sing Sing in Ossining, New York – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will have to visit him there to discuss Canada-U.S. trade agreements. Trump will demand that Trudeau meet him to redo trade agreements that he says are great for Canada but are “horrible, horrible deals for our country.”

The prime minister will have to dress appropriately for the meeting, ensuring that he wears clothing and jewellery that meet prison visit rules. He’ll have to show valid photo ID.

Trump will be able to dress up a bit, although not in his standard blue suit and bright red tie. He’ll have to wear the green prison issue pants but Sing Sing inmates are allowed to wear personal tops and personal footwear that doesn’t cost more than $80.

If it is a luncheon meeting, the food could be hamburger, carrots, peas and boiled potatoes – one of the standard Sing Sing meals. 

That will make Trump happy because his favourite meal is a quarter pounder, fries and diet Coke. Trudeau likely won’t be impressed because he has more elegant tastes. 

The odds of getting the Republican presidential nomination or the odds of him winning the November 2024 presidential election could change dramatically. So could the odds of him being convicted of any of the offences and of serving any prison time.

The likelihood of a Florida conviction got a boost earlier this month when Trump’s former attorney general said the charges of wilfully holding onto secret documents appear solid.

“I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were . . . ,” said Bill Barr. “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.”

Trump had a quick and nasty response to that for the media. He said Barr was a weak and lazy attorney general and a “gutless pig.”

The odds will not change, however, on one aspect of the Trump drama. No matter what happens in the courts or political arenas you can bet Donald Trump will be a main item on the daily news for many months, and perhaps years to come.

It’s disturbing to see how intelligent people who get close to Justin Trudeau get burned.

The latest scorched victim is David Johnston, the former governor general who Trudeau appointed his special rapporteur on claims that China has interfered in our federal elections. He resigned that position recently citing “the highly partisan atmosphere” surrounding his appointment and his work.

Johnston is a prominent Canadian with an outstanding career in public service, particularly in the field of education. He has been the dean of the University of Western Ontario law school, principal of McGill University and has held other positions in other universities.

He was appointed governor general in 2010 on the recommendation of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and served until 2017.
He’s now another of the dedicated, intelligent people who joined the Trudeau team then found themselves cast aside or in untenable positions that left them little choice but to resign.

Jody Wilson-Raybould quit Trudeau’s cabinet in 2019 during a scandal involving SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec-based engineering firm. The firm was accused of using bribes to win contracts in Libya.

There were reports that Trudeau’s office pressured Ms. Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the case against SNC-Lavalin. She was justice minister and attorney-general at the time, but was demoted to veterans affairs minister before she quit.

Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s principal secretary and friend, resigned too, saying it was important for the prime minister’s office and its work for him to step away.

So did Jane Philpott, Trudeau’s Treasury Board president, saying she had lost confidence in the government’s handling of the Lavalin affair.

Then a year of so later Finance Minister Bill Morneau quit Trudeau during the scandal involving WE Charity, a youth empowerment movement.

Trudeau’s government gave WE a $43-million contract. Critics said Trudeau should have recused himself from the contract discussions because members of his family were close to the charity and had taken money from it for making appearances and speeches.

Moreau also was close to the family that operated WE and socialized with them.

That’s a basketful of people burned while working with Trudeau, who has a documented history of loose ethics and conflicts of interest.

Now there’s David Johnston, an honorable man who should have declined Trudeau’s request to investigate reports of Chinese political interference. He is a friend of the Trudeau family and has longstanding personal and professional connections in China.

The opposition parties were bound to jump all over his appointment. They did, saying that as Trudeau’s friend, Johnson had a conflict of interest in investigating Chinese interference and whether the Trudeau government did anything to stop it.

They also noted that a Chinese company donated $140,000 to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, a charity with which Johnston was associated. The foundation later gave the money back.

Two days before Johnston resigned, the House of Commons passed a New Democratic Party resolution calling on Trudeau to replace Johnston and urgently establish a public inquiry into Chinese political interference.

Johnston said he respected the right of MPs to express their opinion but refused to resign, then did so two days later.

You have to feel sorry for David Johnston, who did what he has always done: accepted a job in which he could fulfill a duty to serve his country. Wrong job. Wrong time. Wrong person to go to work for.

The affair has left Johnston’s sterling reputation badly tarnished. Recent polling shows that only one in four Canadians have faith in his credibility and impartiality.

Almost 70 per cent of Canadians polled said they are concerned about China’s meddling in their electoral affairs. Yet only 28 per cent of respondents said the Trudeau government’s handling of the issue has been good or very good.

Trudeau could have appointed any number of other qualified and independent individuals to report on China’s political interference and avoided what has turned into yet another Trudeau government mess. But Trudeau is an elitist who lives in a rarified world far outside the common world the rest of us occupy.

What is especially sad is the increasing number of smart, effective people who get burned when drawn into that Trudeau world.

 I don’t get out much, spending most of my time among the birds and squirrels who dance in the woods surrounding my place.

So my recent trip to the U.S., the first in several years, was a voyage into reality. A genuine eye-opening educational experience.

The main lesson learned, or perhaps just confirmed, is that America is a country of confounding contradictions. So many things are the opposite of what they are believed to be.

Shortly after arrival I find myself at a Catholic church in Orinda, California. I walk in, take a seat and see that I am surrounded by two dozen or more nuns in habits. I haven’t seen a nun in habit in decades.

A priest appears with an incense thurible and begins incensing the altar. Then he walks through the church swinging the thurible and incensing the congregation. Later he takes another pass through the church sprinkling holy water with a whisk.I haven’t seen any of this since I was a child. A church filled with praying people as a priest performs rituals not often witnessed today. It’s a trip back to the 1950s.

This is not the America I see on television and read about in newspapers and magazines. 

It is contrary to the gone crazy, violent America that likely will return an orange-haired misogynist buffoon to the presidency.  If not him, it could be a right-wing extremist who slags the legacies of Walt Disney. (I mean what kind of a person has bad things to say about good old Walt, rest his soul?)

After church I visit a bookstore in Oakland. It has thousands of books of all genres, used and new. It’s an incredible place where I could spend days soaking up the works of the world’s best writers.

The 2020 census reported there were 10,800 bookstores in the U.S. Their numbers, however, are declining, and so are the number of books that fill them.

PEN America, a writer’s organization promoting freedom of expression, reports that from July 2021 to June 2022 there were 2,532 book bannings in the U.S. affecting 1,648 separate titles.

A nation that loves bookstores, yet a nation that spends much time and effort banning books.

Wandering the streets of San Francisco I see dozens of interesting shops and eateries staffed by folks chatting in foreign languages mixed with English. 

Some Americans see these people as immigrants changing an America that needs no change. They want to choke off immigration to a country that had no immigration before 1492, then became a modern state and world power because of immigration.

There are many other contradictions here. 

The U.S. produces Nobel Prize scientists, but has more conspiracy theorists and science deniers than any other advanced nation.

It has some of the world’s best medical expertise and advanced medical facilities but people who can’t afford them get sick and die. The Commonwealth Fund, which promotes high-quality, equitable health care systems, reported in January that Americans have the worst health outcomes of any of the world’s high-income nations.

The greatest contradiction: 48 per cent of Americans see gun violence as a very big problem, while another 24 see it as a moderately big problem. So almost three-quarters of Americans see gun violence as a problem, but gun ownership and gun violence continue to increase with little efforts to control it.

These contradictions continue to exist because of widening divisions in the country’s politics. Pew Research Centre studies show that 77 per cent of Americans believe their country is more divided than it was just three years ago.

The political divide between the right and the left has become a chasm preventing bipartisan efforts to fix the country’s serious problems. The political divide now is not only just over political issues. It has generated deeper divides in culture and character.

The contradictions seen in my visit leave me with the impression of an extremely disturbed country, whose troubles could have a major impact on the rest of the world.

Americans have pulled off many comebacks from adversities. Hopefully they can pull off another. One that will restore the country as a nation of truly united states and people working together.