Governments around the world have discussed solutions to climate change, but not enough are seriously acting to reduce this threat. From environmentalist Stephen Barlow: I’d far rather not have to spell out uncomfortable truths, and I have no agenda, other than to stop humanity committing global suicide by ignoring the seriousness
Continue readingTag: too stupid to live
A Puff of Absurdity: Covid is Finally a Concern!
Maria Van Kerkhove, of the World Health Organization, is worried about Covid. If she’s worried, then the shit has really hit the fan. Van Kerkhove is well known to have said, over and over, that Covid-19 is not airborne so masks aren’t necessary despite it being known to be airborne by January 2020.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Living in a Nightmare
“Many describe living in a sort of waking, powerless nightmare where an obvious catastrophe is unfolding but society just blithely ignores it.” That’s from this Guardian article from May 2022 that could have been written today, and possibly needs to be written every day to wake us up: “People have
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Inaccessible Accessibility
Why is remote learning suddenly so difficult to access when we have all the tech we need to pull it off? When I was in grade 12, I started to just show up to classes I needed to go to. I had high 90s, so I just went for clarification when
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Trapped by our Insouciance
George Monbiot’s article today is the perfect rant for our times. It’s pretty much what I’ve been screaming into the void for the past while, but, thankfully, he has a large audience. Monboit shames us with this, “When we forget the virus, we forget clinically vulnerable people trapped by our
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On a New Path
Is this year different, or is this the new trajectory we’re on to the very end? The Climate Brink collected a series of unnerving graphs showing what an outlier this year is. Some pollyanna types are hoping just this year will be different, and then we’ll somehow get back within our
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Difficulty of Knowing
The main character from Camus’ The Plague, a medical doctor spending his days and nights helping the sick, said, “A man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.” This hit me as particularly poignant as we’re
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: NRPI – No Real Person Involved
In Ontario right now, “Hospital backlogs in pediatric care could affect children’s health for the rest of their lives. Two-thirds of pediatric patients in need of surgery at two of Ontario’s largest children’s hospitals are being forced to wait beyond the recommended window as a result of backlogs and inadequate
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Quiet Comprehending
A pretty song for our times form Bo Burnham: Female Colonel Sanders, easy answer, civil warThe whole world is at your fingertips, the ocean at your doorThe live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime ShowTwenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go . . . That unapparent summer air in early fallThe
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: At What Point is Inaction a Form of Eugenics??
This impressive and prescient thread worthy of saving is from Miles W. Griffis. He interweaves a speech from Vito Russo, AIDS activist, back and forth with current headlines on Covid-19 to show how easily we write-off a group of people when they become inconvenient: Vito Russo’s 1988 ACT UP speech
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Liquid Life and the Myth of Government Protection
Liquid life is a concept some Buddhist cultures had of the young and old, typically those under 6 and over 70, whose lives weren’t seen as quite solid due to the greater likelihood of death at either end compared to the middle. This book discusses, among other things, some of the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Next Steps: Violence? Policy? Adaptation? Acceptance?
Ezra Klein wrote a compelling piece about Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. We’re not doing enough to stop the trainwreck we’re driving, but is violence the answer? “Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: MacKinnon’s Call to Stop Shopping
J.B. MacKinnon co-wrote the 100-Mile Diet years ago, which was a good read. It didn’t have much effect on my eating because it was a bit too extreme for even me, but it DID affect my awareness of where I get produce from. For his most recent book, he compiled
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Fogginess of These Times
I had laser surgery over a decade ago and love not wearing glasses, but I’ve started wearing my sunglasses regularly, even on my walk to work just as the sun’s coming up. It makes no sense to have a barrier to our nose and mouth but leave the most defenceless
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Oh–What’s a Teacher to Do?
Starting next Friday, secondary students in my board will be forced to be in a room with about 15 other students they might not know, many of whom will take off their masks for a 45 minute mid-morning snack deemed necessary to get them through to lunchtime dismissal. They’re not
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Risk Assessment for September
I have two weeks left before going back to school in person. I’ve been writing on social media and sending emails and signing petitions because this plan in Ontario doesn’t feel remotely safe. I’ve even jumped queue and wrote to the upper echelon of my school board in an attempt
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Laws and Common Sense
I’m thankful that my city council decided to make masks mandatory starting July 13th, even though I know a few, like the Regional Chair herself, were hoping that people could be persuaded to do the right thing without the law getting involved. Three weeks ago, our region launched a #FaceMaskFriday
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Age of Oblivion: Another End of Decade Rant
Of course calendars are a construct and don’t mean anything, but the end of the year and, even more so, the end of the decade are useful times to take stock. In pop culture, we have the Ecco Homo moment as a cultural foreboding – the chutzpah to insist on a fix that pretends
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Seven Shades of Green
I’m trying to sort out all the solutions to the current and ongoing climate catastrophe. This is all getting very complicated, and I’m not sure I completely have my head around who’s who and which organization is promoting what, so this is just a partially completed overview of current ideology
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Like Rats Jumping a Sinking Ship
My class had a great conversation the other day about discrimination and W.E.B. DuBois’s “double consciousness.” I discussed the theory and solicited for comments, but there were none, as I expected. This kind of thing needs to sit a little and gel before we can really address it. So I
Continue reading