A week ago, Canada’s premiers ended a meeting in Halifax agreeing that they shouldn’t poach health care workers from one another. Nova Scotia Conservative Premier Tim Houston (Photo: Screenshot of CPAC video). There’s a shortage all round, they seemed to be saying, let’s poach from poor countries instead of each
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Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Bryan Harris, Steve Bernard and Chris Campbell discuss the danger that a drying Amazon rain forest will accelerate the climate breakdown. – Jordan Omstead reports on Canada’s place of shame as one of the countries looking to increas carbon pollution in the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Newsflash: Covid Should Be Avoided
Studies make if very clear that Covid is really bad for us, yet we’re going to do nothing to prevent the spread. In case you didn’t know, if you have almost $20,000 to spend each year, per kid, on a private school, that many of them have excellent pandemic plans still in place.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ajit Niranjan reports on the Copernicus Climate Change Service’s findings that 2023 is on pace to be the hottest year on record, with October’s temperatures at 1.7 degrees above the pre-industrial level. – Damian Carrington highlights a UN report warning of the destructive insistence of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Back to the future: UCP set to announce plan to bust up AHS, add reams of red tape, and politicize health care decisions
Health care in Alberta is moving confidently into the 1990s! Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr). The United Conservative Party Government led by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is about to bring the province’s health care system back to the future with a massive infusion of new red tape, just
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Larry Patriquin reviews Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism, with a focus on explaining how we’ve been pushed into a system based on squeezing people and the planet alike in the name of greed. And Cory Doctorow discusses the six categories of corporate bullshit used to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – William Ripple et al. offer a new and alarming state of the climate report. And Damian Carrington delves into their findings as to the precarious state of the Earth’s living environment, while Becky Ferreira highlights their warning of societal collapse within the next century
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Sonia Sodha discusses how children will bear the brunt of COVID’s effects for years due to decision-makers have prioritized short-term profits and frivolities over their futures. And Clare Wilson reports on new research showing how investing in air filtration can limit the ongoing
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Big Lie of Covid Herd Immunity
Why do some healthcare professionals still insist that herd immunity will work despite visual evidence to the contrary? A nicely explainer came out in Journal of Infectious Diseases March 2022: “As commonly understood, herd immunity thresholds are reached when a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated or has recovered from
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Somasetty Suresh examines the symptoms associated with long COVID, while Elizabeth Cooney reports on new research hinting at the depletion of peripheral serotonin as one of its causes. And Jamie Ducharme points out that the CDC (and other public health authorities) still has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Damian Carrington reports on new research showing that the cost of damage caused by extreme weather is already upwards of $16 million per hour (and escalating). And Peter Kalmus writes about the need to wind down the fossil fuel industry rather than
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Courage to Admit our Mistakes
Translation from Maarten De Cock “Many people know, from unfortunate experience, and doctors recognize that most contagious diseases are communicated by breathing the air that comes out of the chest of individuals already suffering from these kinds of illnesses. ~ M. Rouland, 1784.” We’ve known about airborne pathogens for literally
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Chris Hedges discusses how the end of empire-based colonialism has only given way to an even more exploitative corporate version. And Cory Doctorow points out how surveillance capitalism inevitably turns its resources toward defrauding the people being monitored and manipulated. – Matthew Rosza
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Teaching Public Health
Organizations have done such a bad job of explaining Covid to the public over the last almost four years, that it will be difficult to ever get mitigations back in place. Research director with a PhD in education, Dr. Sean Mullen said incredulously, “They said herd immunity would work. Then hybrid
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Staying Healthy Takes Work
If social media is any barometer of this, anti-mask abuse appears to be skyrocketing. Fixed it for ya! There are tons of comments by the Covid cautious about about being accosted at stores and in the street, followed by others suggesting that’s just not happening. I wrote about being harassed
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Children Risk More Illnesses after Covid
What every pediatrician in the world needs to read – from tern: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a really bad thing, isn’t it? I wonder what the percentage is after the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12th infection? Here’s a really really interesting point in the study: Only
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Peter Borg discusses how the climate breakdown is compressing planetary changes which would normally take millions of years into individual lifetimes – even as petropoliticians seek to increase the damage we’re doing to our living environment. And Edna Mohamed writes that climate
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Stages of Genocide
We like to think we are way beyond barbarity and that the outrageously cruel acts of the past (many not in the too distant past) will never be anything we consider again. But neoliberal capitalism feeds an addiction to profits, and addicts will do anything to get a fix. We
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Mary Van Beusekom discusses new research showing that a quarter of COVID-19 survivors are still facing impaired lung function (among other health problems) a year after infection. And Prakash Nagarkatti and Mitzi Nagarkatti write about the CDC’s approval of new vaccines better targeted toward
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Fraud Fest in Waterloo Region
Catherine Fife and Debbie Chapman speaking to protesters. It feels like we turned a dark corner in Ontario. In my hometown in particular. Doug Ford came to K-W to be greeted by tons of protesters including overt representation from ETFO, OSSTF, OECTA, CUPE, OBSCU, Liberals, Greens, and, of course, the
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