Note our glittering Facebook groups: Mensa Calgary and Mensa Calgary Under 30’s. Also, is there a volunteer or two somewhere to read a few puzzles and see if the answers make sense? I’m not good at puzzles this year for some reason. Just a few, contact the editor. AND…without further dithering, this month’s MensaMag features Austria and women. The question is whether violence lies beneath the Teutonic gender gap, or – more generally – whether secretive cults such as the American polygamist sects are breeding grounds for authoritarian lifestyles. Some might ask whether Canada doesn’t have similar groups, and indeed Alberta has closed rural communities, but we lack a robust investigative press at the moment. Ownership of the media by corporate empires plays no small role in our faded journalistic spirit. Whatever the truth about our researchers, however, it’s fair to say that we don’t know the pressures that govern individuals within Canada’s closed communities. In this issue of MensaMag, we - as always – sally abroad. Apart from Austria, we enjoy the spectacle of Japanese nationalists chanting for a free Tibet, using a liberal policy to achieve their ends and demonstrating – as though we required proof – that political programs can be tailored to suit any philosophy.
We revisit the mass slaughters of the American civil war, of which WW1 seems the inevitable sequel. We look behind the media canonization of Barack Obama, and the heroism of Irena Senlerowa. Speaking of Irena Senlerowa, we wonder what to think of Holocaust relics. And to preserve our sanity, or is it balance, there’s a ghost story in this issue and a note explaining the free electricity available in Ontario. A short piece reminds us that the Olympic torch relay is a ghastly relic of Nazi days. And we return to earth with Jeff Pugh’s eminently sane report from the Science Café.
Newsflash: Words Worth Books, that remarkable, ramshackle nest of second hand volumes at 928-6th Ave SW is moving at the end of June. Rather, the shop hopes to relocate. If it remains open, it will reduce stock, which we find presently on sale. Worth checking out.
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