Banished from Facebook I have been banned from Facebook, and told by the social-media platform the exile is forever. My account was “permanently disabled” in mid-May for breaches of Facebook’s Community Standards on “account integrity,” broadly defined as anything “harmful to the community.”   That’s as specific as the violations got. This must be what terrorists feel like. (Wrongly accused ones, of course.) For me, the brave new social-media/networking world is over, and it’s back to old-school reality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.   To this point, a few weeks post banishment, my take-away is that Facebook can do whatever it wants: Meta, the parent company, is master of its online world, and can dictate who lives there/on what terms.   Facebook is not an online extension of the community we live in, but a business often mistaken for it. I made the mistake myself, until 2023, when Facebook took away the right in Canada to share news links on its platform. It only dawn...

The following article was published in an August, 2001 edition of The Telegram. Chuck Furey, left, was a cabinet minister in the government of former Premier Brian Tobin, right.  Out of the limelight Life after politics: Chuck Furey enjoys “every second of every minute of every day” “If you walk along the side of the road and see a starving dog and feed it, it will never bite you. That’s the principle difference between and dog and a man.” — A Mark Twain quote in a letter from John Crosbie to Chuck Furey after Fury’s loss in the federal election of 2000. By Ryan Cleary The Telegram (August, 2001)  Chuck Furey rises from his bed every morning and heads to the bathroom to do his math. He stares into the mirror, settling on the reflection of a man who’s impressed with whom he greets. Nice teeth, thick hair, clear complexion — a politician’s prerequisites. For character, a cleft chin. His is a photograph that could come with the store-bought frame. A host fro...