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.…
Marie Snyder
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…
Unmasked People, Unmasked in Their Own Way
I think masks separate us like the families in Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina. You know the one: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy…
We Need to Talk about Kraken (XBB.1.5)
I watched this livestream tonight: an interview and Q&A with Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (EFD), an U.S. epidemiologist who broke the news that the CDC knew XBB.1.5. was a variant of…
Debunking Sheer’s Carbon Tax "Myth"
Max Fawcett, columnist for the National Observer, wrote a thread debunking Andrew Scheer’s 6 minute video on the “myth” of the carbon tax. First, a few caveats/concessions. He complains about…
A Buddhist Perspective on Addiction: Nothing is Vital.
Now that the hangover from New Year’s Eve is abating for many, and we might be freshly open to some self-improvement, consider a Buddhist view of using meditation to tackle…
The Kraken Wakes: We Need to Stop Hosting Monsters!!
I don’t read much fiction, but I loved John Wyndham as a teen, and I realize I didn’t love English class because there was almost never any sci-fi on offer…
Films of 2022: Quick Single Line Comments
Some quick one-liners (synopsis and/or reviews) on the films and shows memorable enough to remember seeing this year. These are in no particular order, and I’m missing many of them:…
Year in Review
I don’t normally do a year in review, but his was my most tumultuous year in decades. It’s right up there with the year I dropped out of high school…
It’s Time to Clear the Air
A recent New Yorker article warns about a “ragtag coalition of public-health activists” who want us to wear masks forever! And then the New York Times published an article about…
Politics of Hopelessness
I started posting other people’s twitter threads in part because twitter was (is) threatening to self-destruct, but also because there are some incredible gems that could disappear into the ether…
SARS #1 and Collective Amnesia
SARS #1 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was a deadly coronavirus that hit Canada in February of 2003. It started in China in November 2002 then entered Toronto in a traveller…
Hiding a Pandemic in Plain Sight
This excellent thread is from Barry Hunt: Canada only reports a handful of cases even though cases are 10 times to 100 times higher this year than last year. We…