Saturday, April 25, 2020

Saving lives

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Saturday, April 18, 2020

Laugh and the world laughs with you


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Friday, April 17, 2020

Stages of Grief

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
These are the stages of grief and I've been through them all since the COVID19 lockdown began. I think everyone else has going through them too.
Denial - how can this be happening? WTF is this? Isn't there some easier way?
Anger - don't they realize what they are doing to us and to the economy? Its so terrible for so many people.
Bargaining - well, maybe it won't last too long if everybody acts the right way.
Depression - how awful this is, and its going on FOREVER!!!
Acceptance - it is what it is. Nothing we can do except to get through it.
Though I must admit, I still feel anger:

The economic hit from this is going to be so hard, and last so long, and hurt so many innocent blameless people.
But every time I start to feel sorry for myself and for all of us, I remember that whatever I am going through, it is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what others are dealing with.
I don't think our society will ever be able to repay doctors and nurses for what they are doing for all of us, risking death every day to save as many as they can.
There was one tweet in particular, from a pediatric surgical fellow and single mother in New York, that made me just cry.

I hope she will be OK.
I hope someday her children will be able to honour her for what she is doing.
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Friday, April 10, 2020

How I spent my summer vacation

Here's the tweet of the week month:

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Saturday, April 04, 2020

Strange Days Indeed







I wonder if John Lennon ever realized how prophetic his words would be:

Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed.
I never understood how a pandemic would destroy the world economy.  
Millions of people out of work. Millions with no paycheques, no income, and no prospect of getting any except for a few hundred dollars from the government. Millions who have no money, who cannot buy food, or medicines, or clothes, or pay their utilities bills or their rent. It is an economic disaster of a scale which the world has never seen before.
I used to live in a modern society. And I never wanted to live anywhere else.  But I just didn't understand how fragile that society really was.  
Now I find myself suddenly living in some kind of an alternate universe, one with no schools, no clothing stores, no book stores, no coffee shops. No health care, no dental care, no physiotherapy, no surgeries. No weddings, no funerals, no parties, no graduations, no concerts, no events. No bars, no restaurants. No sports. 
The idea I am seeing floating around now -- that this worldwide economic shutdown will just have to last for years, until we get a vaccine or a cure -- well, sorry, but that just ain't gonna happen. 
Not if all this pain is just for the sake of avoiding a virus which is, for most people, most of the time, a mild illness. 
And yes, of course I understand that our heedless and careless way of living wasn't sustainable because we don't know who will get COVID-19 next, and we don't know who will die, and if we are dying, its an awful death, and the problem is that caring for the people who are really sick is going to destroy our health care system unless some of us can postpone getting really sick until later.
But our situation right now isn't sustainable either. 
We need to figure out how we are going to get out of this.
I wrote a comment recently on Montreal Simon's excellent blog, to the effect that I am proud to be a Canadian during this crisis, because our leaders stepped up to the plate.  Someday I hope to understand better how Trudeau did it, how he put the right people into the right place to get us through this.
And now, they have to step up again, to lay out a plan of how we are going to get out of this.
And I think maybe it will start with a national testing program -- we have to know who has already had COVID-19 and who has not, so we can figure out who needs to continue to to isolate.
And then, gradually, our strange days might end.
UPDATE:  I'm starting to see stuff along the lines of: Social Distancing cannot fail, it can only BE failed!  In other words, we just have to keep doing it more and more and more, and Trudeau has to make it illegal for anybody to ever leave their house ever, and then, easy peasy, THEN it will TOTALLY WORK!
Hmmm.....
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Friday, April 03, 2020

Friday Funfest

The COVID-19 news is so depressing, beaten only by the economic news, which is absolutely awful. So here's something a little more lighter-hearted, on a cold Friday. 
And this thread wins the award for the funniest tweet of the week:
So maybe next week will be better -- well, we can always hope!
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Tuesday, March 24, 2020

#DieForTheDow is trending

Image result for picture of throwing baby to the wolves
Age-wise, I am on the wrong side of the "let's save the economy by throwing grandma to the wolves" argument. So I have to say, I disagree with it!
And with COVID-19, it won't work anyway. 
Because it isn't only the grandmas who get sick and die. Its the doctors, the nurses, the teachers, the stock brokers, the policemen, the bartenders, the teenagers on a beach. 

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Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Courage is found in unlikely places

Things are awful and they're going to get worse - the economy is going to tank, maybe worse than it did in 2008, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. 
To understand why the world economy is in grave peril because of the spread of coronavirus, it helps to grasp one idea that is at once blindingly obvious and sneakily profound.
One person’s spending is another person’s income. That, in a single sentence, is what the $87 trillion global economy is.That relationship, between spending and income, consumption and production, is at the core of how a capitalist economy works. It is the basis of a perpetual motion machine. We buy the things we want and need, and in exchange give money to the people who produced those things, who in turn use that money to buy the things they want and need, and so on, forever.
What is so deeply worrying about the potential economic ripple effects of the virus is that it requires this perpetual motion machine to come to a near-complete stop across large chunks of the economy, for an indeterminate period of time.
In spite of the billions that governments will spend to prop up the economy, our standard of living is going to decline. Or at least it will FEEL like it is declining -- we won't have the restaurants around anymore that we used to love, we won't be getting the variety and quality of food we are used to seeing in grocery stores because the agricultural and shipping industries are going to be in such disarray, we won't have sports or new TV shows or new movies or touring theatre companies or concerts or community events. For many of us, our retirement savings are taking a hit that we won't be able to recover. 
Not to mention, of course, the hundreds of thousands around the world who will get sick, and the tens of thousands who will die in the next 18 months to two years, before a COVID vaccine can be developed and put into production and reach the market.
Goodbye yellow brick road, yes indeed.
Someday maybe we will say "I remember when you could walk into a store and buy bananas any time of the year".
So in the meantime, I can only keep my spirits up by searching out some "good news" stories. Because once again, in a crisis, people have a remarkable way of pulling together, pushing though, helping themselves and each other to cope and to manage and to survive.
“But where shall I find courage?” asked Frodo.
“That is what I chiefly need.”“Courage is found in unlikely places,” said Gildor.
“Be of good hope! Sleep now!”


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Saturday, March 14, 2020

COVID Shakespeare



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Friday, March 13, 2020

COVID tweet-fest

I keep saving COVID-19 tweets and then before I can post anything, it all gets worse.  
So here's a few, but with the warning that they might be completely out of date by the time anyone reads this.


Palate cleanser

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Saturday, March 07, 2020

The sweetest thing

My sister is presently training one of our dogs in Rally Obedience, so I am trying to flag any tweets, etc about this sport. 
And here is one that I found, which isn't exactly about the sport, but more about how people in this sport act:

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Friday, February 28, 2020

Tweet of the Day

Here's a Friday palate cleanser for ya:



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Saturday, February 22, 2020

Wet'suwet'en update

He waited as long as he could, too long in the opinion of many.
He was obviously hoping that peaceful negotiation could bring down the rail barricades, in the best Canadian tradition.
But at last Justin Trudeau's patience was exhausted.The negotiations were going nowhere, because there were none.
"We can’t have dialogue when only one party is coming to the table. For this reason, we have no choice but to stop making the same overtures."
And for that the blame must go to these old men, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs.
Like Montreal Simon, I could not believe how lackadaisical and disrespectful the hereditary chiefs were being in refusing to respond to Trudeau's obvious respect.
They didn't seem to realize that the time to make progress was NOW, this week, when they had Canada's attention and a great deal of support across the country. 
What they cannot do is keep raising the ante.
While the story earlier this week was that the Wet'suwet'en had worked out a deal for RCMP to move back to Houston BC, the story today was that they wanted both the RCMP AND the pipeline company to leave, and then "nation-to-nation discussions with Canada and BC" should start.
And the tactic of leisurely visiting Mohawk reserves in Eastern Canada and holding news conferences instead of talking to the prime minister doesn't make any sense.
"We are waiting for Indigenous leadership to show that it understands," [Trudeau] said in a news conference. "The onus is on them."
Injunctions to clear tracks must be obeyed and the law must be upheld, he said, adding that it is pointless to continue making overtures to Indigenous leaders if they aren't accepted.
"Let us be clear: all Canadians are paying the price. Some people can't get to work, others have lost their jobs," Trudeau said. "Essential goods … cannot get where they need to go."
The situation "is unacceptable and untenable," he said.
Canadian support has started to evaporate when the chiefs could not seem to articulate what they wanted to achieve - no pipeline at all? a pipeline but on a different route? more negotiations for the existing route?  -- and when thousands of Canadians were being increasingly affected, losing jobs and fearing for their heating oil supplies. 
Also as predicted earlier this week, Canadian support for Trudeau's whole reconciliation agenda was disintegrating as the railway disruptions continued with no end in sight.
Trudeau appeared to realize this too, after talking to the Premiers on Thursday and to Cabinet today.
On Twitter, the usual suspects were berating Trudeau for not acting first and thinking later. But Trudeau tried to resolve the blockades with dialogue instead of immediately turning the dispute into a dick-measuring contest like Scheer and McKay wanted.
At least the Mohawks are clear about what they want -- the Mohawks have an agreement with Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller that the Ontario trains will run as soon as RCMP have withdrawn to Houston from Wet’suwet’en territory. 
As Manitoba Premier Palliser said today, no individual or group has an absolute veto on natural resource projects.
“Public opinion matters on these things,” he said. “This federal Liberal government has said that reconciliation is a priority. But if you want real reconciliation, then you have to do the real work of achieving it. And you have to establish some parameters. You have to put a fence around the discussion to some degree. And you don't do that if you don't make it clear that everyone does not have a veto.”
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Sunday, February 16, 2020

Wetsuweten protests- we don't get to choose the battle; we can only choose our side

Once again, I think we have reached the point in Canada where we don't get to choose the battle. We can only choose our side.
I can't say I understand the #Wetsuweten protests, but I am coming to realize that if Canada's usual suspects are against them, then the side I must choose is to support them.
I cannot yet see what the resolution will be acceptable to this impasse -- no pipeline at all? a pipeline in a different place? some kind of a joint economic development consortium between Wetsuweten and the government and the gas companies? I just don't know.
But I do know that I simply cannot support this kind of attitude:
Or this kind of frightening, provocative and unacceptable behaviour:
At least there is still a little humour to be found, too:
Montreal Simon is concerned that the blockade protests risk annoying and inconveniencing so many people in Eastern Canada who have no voice or choice in the matter, that support for reconciliation will be threatened -- and this is not an unlikely concern. Susan Delacourt also writes about how complicated the reconciliation issues have now become:
This is where Trudeau’s “most important relationship” gets complicated, maybe hopelessly so. It is not just about historic reconciliation. It’s also about economic circumstances, resource development versus the environment, and the populism arising from economic inequality — some of the most vexing, conflict-laden issues facing the federal government. Throw in contempt for the law and it’s easy to see why what looked important in 2015 can look impossible in 2020.
Here are some good tweet threads with more info:

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Thursday, February 13, 2020

Great tweets: politics or animals or maybe both

Here's some tweets I enjoyed this week.
And doesn't it always seem that January DRAGGGGS while February goes so FAST?
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