Age of Absurdity
We’re skipping gleefully into the most absurd period in history. The philosophical notion of the absurd came from Camus. It grew legs with existentialists after WWII when the youngest and…
Marie Snyder
Looking for the Enlightened
The season finale of The Last of Us sets up a great deontological v. teleological conundrum with the big question (tiny spoiler), which ends up being an episode-long trolley problem:…
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…
Where We’re At: It’s Still Here!
Several people have been screaming into the void about how Covid works, how bad it is, and what we need to do to stop it now that we’re dealing with…
Step By Step: Engulfed by a Lack of Sensitivity
Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and Polish historian, made a ten minute speech in December 2021 that has become a more and more timely reminder to pay attention to how we…
Being Athletic as a Pre-existing Condition of Long Covid
Novelist Alisa Lynn Valdés connected the dots between her personal observation that athletes are getting Long Covid (LC) more often than sedentary people and capillarization. The number of small blood…
International Long Covid Awareness Day
Now we have a delegated day, today, to remind the world of the number of people who have lost their lives or livelihoods to this ever-mutating virus. Worldwide, about 1…
Where is My Mind? On Freud and Neuropsychology
Freud got some things right, and this isn’t a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It’s a lot like Aristotle’s science,…
In the News…
A couple unnerving things happened recently that I’m just catching up with. First, the CDC quietly added an update for guidance around certifying death from Covid last February. The controversial…
Understanding Long Covid
A couple days ago, Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish biostatistician, was at a White House roundtable discussing Covid when he said, “We knew about since 430 BC, since the Athenian plague…
The Whale and Love
I used to write about films a lot, and then I just stopped. But for the first time in a long time, I’m compelled to say something about a film,…
Marooned in Anomie
Jon Mooallem wrote a poignant piece in the New York Times yesterday about a project that’s been recording people’s experience with the pandemic since March 2020 over individual Zoom calls.…
World Health Network’s Safe Schools Initiative
The World Health Network has a 30 minute video out about Safe Schools with a small panel of people looking at how to make schools DavosSafe! Michael Bailey, co-founder of…
Dating for Dogs
Lots of people discredit the Myers-Briggs as just a horoscope, but it’s significantly different and can be useful in recognizing that we’re all innately different kinds of people. This awareness…
The Times They are A-Changin’
Doing another degree has been eye opening to see how much university has changed over the past 20 years since my last Masters. TL;DR: It’s a lot more like high…
What Went Wrong? Hubris.
Mario Possamai, senior advisor for the SARS commission, was interviewed in an hour-long video from ISPR Respiratory Protection back in July 2022. Here’s a summary of his talk with some…
It’s a Social Problem, not a Medical Problem
Carol Dumaine wrote about the Davos safety measures, and how the rest of us are playing Covid roulette. It’s a solid read, but I got totally sidetracked by one of…
OPSBA Conference in the Time of Covid
I’m missing my first trustee conference this weekend because there are no Covid mitigations in effect. I called to ask about it, and they’re following the Ontario protocol, which is…
On Argumentation and Straddling the Middle
At the school board meeting Monday night (video here, starting at 1:23:50 for over an hour), an open letter the board recently sent out was discussed. I said nothing because…
Leading by Example or What’s Good for the Goose…
This is about the Davos World Economic Forum, ending tomorrow. Social media is all atwitter with the incredible precautions they pulled off. Check out their rules here. It’s three pages…