Driveway was ploughed this morning but is filling with the snow that continues to fall. Same with the paw prints left by a rabbit in the yard. Trees are looking wintry with their coating of fresh snow.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ends the use of a sans serif font that improved accessibility for low vision and dyslexic readers, calling it a "wasteful" diversity measure, but uses a visual aid himself... glasses.

Sans serif fonts, along with spacing and other elements, improve accessibility for low-vision and dyslexic readers, and replacing Calibri with a serif font is yet another ableist measure from an administration proud of its performative ableism.

Planning worship for the Third Sunday of Advent and I am proposing that we sing Joy to the World, which Isaac Watts wrote about Christ's Second Coming, not His birth at Christmas.

Meanwhile, my timeline is full of Republicans bowing down to Trump for bailing out American farmers. Hmmm, I wonder why they needed a bailout? Any clues as to who might be responsible for the tsunami hitting American agriculture? Anyone? Bueller?

Musk is now on about how American slavery was fairly benign, as so many slaves survived. The world's (likely) first trillionaire, ladies and gentlemen.

Trump is musing that he will impose a "very severe tariff" on Canadian potash, believing that this will spur US fertilizer production - but the US has very few potash mines and can't conjure it out of thin air. A high tariff will send US crop prices soaring, or require another farm bailout, or both.

The Very Rev. Robert F. Smith, Moderator of The United Church of Canada from 1984 to 1986, has died. He will be remembered for delivering the church's apology to Indigenous peoples. I am praying for his family, friends, colleagues, and all who loved him. united-church.ca/news/very-re...

Maple Leafs vs. Lightning hockey is on. It's Canadian Forces Appreciation Night in Toronto, and ceremonies have included 424 "Tiger" Squadron SAR techs, 8 Wing RCAF from Trenton ON, and Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada from Cambridge and Kitchener ON.

If anyone doubts that eugenics is surging, Elon Musk is taking a break from his vendetta against the EU to voice his opinion that poverty and crime are caused by "low intelligence and low self-control."

"I do worry that it’ll deter folks from coming to national parks." Canadians are already boycotting US destinations; charging fees this high seems like a good way to ensure that we don't come back, at least to US national parks. insideclimatenews.org/news/2611202...

I had not realized this, and am now also perturbed about it. Merci, @ryanrobinson.ca, and poorly done, Government of Canada.

Looking at today's weather map and there is one area of snow in all of Eastern Canada east of the shore of Lake Huron, and it's just west of here. Hmmm.

Elon Musk and his legion of fans are now in the second day of freaking out on X about the European Union. The EU is led by Nazi/Communist traitors, it's America vs. Europe for the future of civilization, Europeans hate truth and decency. Russian bot farms are only too happy to get in on this.

This morning a typographical error led to the lay reader using Matthew 13:1-12 as the Gospel passage, rather than 3:1-12, so I had to shift the sermon on the fly to the Parable of the Sower. Made lots of linkages between John the Baptist's preaching and seed sown in good soil.

IQ is completely fake, means nothing, and not based on science at all so of course the far right has adopted it as justification for insane beliefs, most recently anti-somalian rhetoric

As an alumnus, I am always pleased to see the Queen's University Bands in our local Santa Claus parade. The skirl of the pipes!

Finishing the Christmas tree decorations while the MLS Cup is on. Vancouver had a great season, but a Cup win would still have been awesome.

Dropped one of my parents' fragile Christmas ornaments. I'm sad to lose this little pinecone and also sad to clean up, as this thin 1950s glass shattered into many razor-sharp shards.

MAGA accounts on X are commenting on Trump's FIFA Peace Prize as if this is a legitimate honour and not FIFA excelling at toadying to a would-be authoritarian still whining that he did not receive the Nobel.

December 6 Vigil in Ottawa for National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. 6 - 7 pm, Minto Park. The flags at City of Ottawa sites lowered to half-mast, sunrise to sunset. 14 young women killed during the Polytechnique Montréal tragedy on Dec 6, 1989.

Facebook renamed itself Meta, then lost US$70 billion on its Metaverse virtual reality project (!), and now plans to spend $72 billion on AI.

Remember their names and honour their memory. #dec6

“On Dec. 6, 1989, a man motivated by a hatred of feminists shot and killed 14 women and injured 13 other people at the Montreal engineering school affiliated with Université de Montréal.” www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/5e0dd47...

It is not much different than "we had to erase any trace of the ship, which meant killing all the survivors clinging to debris," which was the defence of the U-boat officers in the 1945 Peleus trial (spoiler: The defendants were convicted and executed).

Frank Gehry, from Toronto, got his start as a boy playing with his grandmother, building little cities out of cardboard and discards from his grandfather's hardware store.

My father served on HMCS Huron twice: in the Canadian destroyer squadron based in Sasebo, Japan, operating off the Korean coast; and in the Mediterranean later in the 1950s, when they collided with a French ship and had to be repaired in Toulon.

I gave up watching the FIFA sportwashing event, but now have the World Cup draw results, courtesy of TSN. Particularly interested in Canada (Group B) and England (Group L), of course.

FIFA World Cup draw is on, with the spectacle of a "peace prize" being awarded to the US President who is threatening to annex the co-host of the World Cup.

Something to bear in mind when churches mark the Slaughter of the Innocents, Herod the Great's mass murder of the children of Bethlehem described in Matthew 2:13-23.

Also in the good news file, the church that I spoke to in the fall about disability justice has told me that they will be doing a book study of Amy Kenny's My Body is Not a Prayer Request, and will have a worship service in the spring focused on the image of the Disabled God.

In the good news file, my sermon last Sunday has prompted quite a few discussions among church folk about disability and accessibility. The board chair is even posting charts with stats of how many Canadians are disabled, etc.

The Trump Administration accuses allied countries of "trampling on basic principles of democracy." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Elon Musk and his ableist legion opining on how the r-slur does not, in fact, mean disabled people (which will only, of course, whip up hatred of disabled people), so this day is starting off well.

This sounds remarkably like the killing by a German submarine crew of the survivors of the Greek merchant ship Peleus, floating amid and clinging to wreckage in the water. Three U-boat officers were tried and executed in 1945 for the Peleus murders.

Fascinating commercials on local CTV news. Government of Taiwan! Orlando, Florida, likely really missing Canadian tourist spending, despite what the governor of the state says.

After a cold day of blowing snow, things are calm and we are looking at a beautiful, bright Cold Moon, the last supermoon of 2025.

Saw my first "Joseph, Mary and Jesus were not refugees, they were citizens following the law" post on X. Many more will follow in what has become an annual tradition.

Excellent thread. Eugenics was indeed a science, and supported by opinion makers across the political spectrum - there was a gasp when I said in Sunday's sermon that beloved Canadian icons Tommy Douglas and Nellie McClung had been eugenicists (Douglas turned away from it later in life).

Watching Shazam: Fury of the Gods and wondering if anyone has written a PhD thesis on the disability tropes involved in the Freddy Freeman character, who is a disabled teenager/abled demi-god.

I am reading a post that "America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally." Well, the mass freak out about disability accommodations and benefits is going to swing the pendulum back to "severe stigmatization."

Grateful that @uccanfoundation.bsky.social quoted me in their International Day of Persons with Disabilities story on Instagram! Such wonderful, faith-filled colleagues!

Read my first "tell the spastics to go pound sand" post over on X as abled people become even more unhinged about disability accommodations.

X has numerous threads with Americans freaking out about "disability fraud." But - and no one acknowledges this - means testing to weed out those who are not "genuinely disabled" results in excluding a large number of disabled people from the accommodations or benefits that are theirs.

So here’s the thing: I, a certified Disabled™️ Person, do not actually care if anyone fakes for an extra 20 minutes on the test. I care deeply about how the fear of that very thing puts up flaming hoops disabled people have to jump through. Maybe listen to disabled folk on this one.

The International Day of Persons with Disabilities is truly international, as it is being marked by full-on panics in the UK (Gasp! Disabled people need accessible cars that they don't deserve!) and the US (Gasp! Students are getting accommodations for their disabilities that they don't deserve!).

"Students who require disability accommodations should receive a lower grade than those who do not" is absolutely disgusting ableism, yet there are teachers on X saying this.

Absolutely. Progressives are always happy to make common cause with their supposed opponents to throw disabled people under the bus.

A thought about the latest ableist panic that "fake" disabled people may be "getting something they don't deserve," so let's take it away from all disabled people. Happy International Day of Persons with Disabilities!

Vegas Golden Knights game broadcast talking about defenceman Ben Hutton, who is from the city I live in, played for Kemptville and Nepean. He has a Stanley Cup ring and a IIHF World Championship gold medal for Canada, so I would say he has had a successful hockey career.