A Puff of Absurdity

On Heroes and Role Models

2026-04-09T12:37:00.002-04:00

Simone Weil

A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push ourselves to do a little more, and it doesn’t make the people who do the incredibly courageous things any less laudable.

We have heroes for a reason. The people who put themselves in danger when they stand up to injustice often present ideals of action. They’re never perfect embodiments of living, nor should we expect them to be. After all, they’re still human. But people who are noted for their courage, persistence, strength, generosity, etc. help remind us what it looks like, giving us a direction to move towards.

This recognition came to light in reading Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. In his chapter on injustice, he explores the life and work of Simone Weil.

I might have a soft spot for Weil because she was born in Alsace, which is where my great-grandfather lived until crossing the ocean to Canada. It was also home to Albert Schweitzer, another flawed hero who put on concerts in order to make money to build a hospital in Gabon, Africa, but decades later was called racist for arrogantly pronouncing to the sick and dying people he treated, “I am your brother, it is true, but I am your elder brother.” As a person, maybe he’s not entirely to be celebrated, but we can still look to his noblest actions to provoke us to help others. Expecting heroes to be flawless is a ridiculous bar to set, but even worse is tossing them aside once we find out they have a flaw.

Weil was the rare philosopher who lived by her ideals. She believed in worker’s rights enough to share her sugar and chocolate rations with them and eventually get a job in a factory to work alongside them. She’s someone who moves towards danger and, in 1936, joined the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War despite teaching school in Paris at the time, far from the chaos of the conflict. She wrote, “I don’t like war; but I found the position of those outside the war far more horrifying.” After coming home with an injury (from stepping in hot oil), she changed her mind about the righteousness of the fighting. In a letter to the writer Georges Bernanos, she wrote a prescient warning:

“I no longer felt the inner necessity to participate in a war that was no longer what it had appeared to be in the beginning, a war of starving peasants against landholders and a clergy in cahoots with them, but rather a war between Russia, Germany, and Italy. … I almost witnessed the execution of a priest; during the minutes spent waiting, I asked myself if I was just going to watch, or get myself shot by trying to intervene; I still don’t know what I would have done if a lucky chance had not prevented the execution. … I acquired the feeling that, whenever the temporal and spiritual authorities have placed a category of human beings outside of those whose life has a value, there is nothing more natural to a man than to kill. When one knows it is possible to kill without risking either punishment or blame, one kills; or at least one surrounds those who kill with encouraging smiles. If perchance one feels a little disgust, one keeps quiet about it, and before long one extinguishes it, for fear of seeming to lack manliness. One is swept up; it is an intoxication impossible to resist without a strength of soul I am obliged to consider exceptional, since I have never encountered it anywhere.”

We don’t always know what we’ll do in difficult moral situations, but our environment can tip the balance of the scales to one side if we’re not careful. And it can be very hard to be careful.

She left France for the US in 1942 only because her parents wouldn’t leave without her. From there, she moved to England to work on the Free France movement. She often went without food in solidarity with the poor and hungry, and her malnutrition, coupled with tuberculosis (or perhaps a lack of appetite was exacerbated by TB), caused her death the following year. She was fiery and motivated by living up to her own ideals. Despite having weak eyesight and a tiny frame that couldn’t manage munitions, she was willing to risk her own life to help others.

Today, we might pathologize her, and we might even admonish her for not practicing enough self-care. Most of us don’t really stand for things anymore. It’s weird. But surely she can be admired, at least, for her integrity in the face of injustice.

When looking for how best to approach injustices, we need to steady our moral compass. It can help to have a few role models we admire to guide us along the way. My heroes include Weil and Schweitzer among many other fallible humans, like MLK and Chomsky. Some suggest that Weil’s a failed hero because nothing she did worked; she wasn’t good at military service. I’d counter that she demonstrated bravery and undeniable other-centeredness in her attempts to help to make a difference. She has moral character, even though her body wasn’t always up to the task.

Setiya has a different criticism:

“If there are models of what it would be to take injustice and human suffering seriously, to make no excuse for oneself, there is none better than Simone Weil. The problem is that her model is terrifying. Inspiring, yes, but terrifying, too. I couldn’t do with my life what Weil did with hers; who among us could? If that is what it means to care about injustice, maybe I don’t care, after all” (125).

She’s too good at being good, which makes her a bad role model for developing fortitude.

I wonder if this idea, that a role model must behave in a way that’s attainable to be a good guide, comes from a capitalist notion of acquisition. That sounds ridiculous, but here’s what I mean. We once had ideals that helped us find a direction: ideals of honour, courage, strength, beauty, etc. We held people up as a standard for comparison, but we never really expected to get to their level. They were held up in part because they were so out of reach by most of us. At some point, though, some of these ideals became more commonly reachable without needing to be innate or an extraordinary effort, particularly those last two. Suddenly, we could be strong or beautiful, or both, with help from modern medicine. Once more people could reach the ideal, then it no longer was an ideal, but instead became a target. People saved up for plastic surgery to get a perfect nose or took steroids to buff up their biceps. And maybe that’s affected how we look at role models of justice as well. People who are not within reach are rejected instead of honoured because we’ve forgotten what it is to look up to a higher, unachievable standard of being: as a direction, not a destination.

Something like that.

Unfortunately, the alternative is more comfortable. We can find heroes who don’t make us feel like crap by comparison. Instead of suffering cognitive dissonance by noticing the difference between ourselves and our heroes, which might make us feel a bit inferior as it spurs us on to change for the better, we can find someone a little less daunting. But that’s as if to suggest that claiming a moral marker with a similar level of debauchery means we’re moral.

Give me convenience or give me death!

Later Setiya makes a weak argument that life can’t just be about being good; we also have to enjoy things like “telling funny stories, amateur painting, swimming or sailing.” It feels oddly placed in a chapter on overcoming injustice and at a time in which the global injustices include committing unbearable atrocities. Weil was capable of self-sacrifice, but he doesn’t hold her up as a good model of justice because she didn’t have enough fun in her life; she didn’t nurture “the little human thing.” She did, however, write extensively and was considered an excellent teacher, and she had many close friendships. The weakness with his argument is seen in a parallel example: our exemplar of courage might be someone who fought valiantly but died in war, but I can’t imagine remarking that they don’t really count as a great role model because they took war too seriously and didn’t enjoy a good game of golf as well. I kind of get it when I consider Chomsky who, way back in Manufacturing Consent, remarked something to the effect that the average American is brilliant but wastes their memorizing football stats. Instead, they clearly could understand the global political situation and thus alter the world for the better. We can argue that most of us don’t want to. We’d rather enjoy a game of football than a political debate. But that misses the point that, if we’re looking for extraordinary people to use as the direction to go in, Chomsky is certainly an intellect of note (even if we don’t agree with all his arguments or question his involvement with Epstein).

We might feel better to believe that this level of self-sacrifice or knowledge shouldn’t be expected of us, except it isn’t expected of us at all. You’re not in trouble. However, if we care to be seen as, or to see ourselves as, learned, courageous, generous, benevolent, or just, looking to extraordinary people provides a path to follow towards the peak, despite that we’re likely to only get part of the way up that particular mountain.

At the end of this chapter, Setiya describes Weil’s (20) meeting with Simone de Beauvoir (21) at the École Normale Supérieure. Here’s the scene straight from de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (p.239):

“I managed to get near [Weil] one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world today: the Revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,’ she snapped. Our relationship did not go any further. I realized that she had classified me as ‘a high-minded little bourgeois,’ and this annoyed me.”

Setiya’s reaction:

“Though Weil had the final word, Beauvoir was right. When I think about the horrors of climate change, part of what disturbs me is the suffering of millions in storms and floods, droughts and famines, but part is the prospect of cultural devastation. I think of the history that will drown, the traditions that will starve, the impoverishment of art and science and philosophy. That is not a world in which we can be at home. If we cannot see our way to a better future, what meaning can we find in life today?” (146)

This response is ironic for a few reasons. First, he agrees with Beauvoir’s desire for meaning over making men “happy” by working on feeding the poor and fighting for a more equitable system of distribution. However, when we look at many answers to the question of our meaning, we often find service to others right up there. The Dalai Lama calls the feeling of joy we get from helping others “positive selfishness,” and one way to find meaning is looking at what we’re willing to sacrifice for. Both of these ideas are emblematic of Weil’s actual life, so by serving others, she is finding meaning. Secondly, without working on the serious political aspects of climate, we won’t have any culture. If we have to choose one (which we don’t, but that’s how he’s setting it up), then it’s more important to have an earth to live on where culture can exist, than to have a thriving culture without a habitable planet to host our garden parties. Of course, we can also praise scientists and activists fighting to slow the destruction while we paint and write or play games. And thirdly, relative to Weil, Beauvoir is a crappy role model. There’s just no comparison. I love some of her writing, particularly The Second Sex and Ethics of Ambiguity, but Beauvoir comes across as self-absorbed in her wartime diaries, like any average person might. While France was under occupation, she discussed her outfits and lamented the dearth of lovers available to her. About the time Weil was hiding TB from her family, Beauvoir wrote, “I have such an ugly pimple on my cheek that I decided to put a plaster on it. It’s horrible and gives me sleepless nights.” She got friends to ask men if they think she’s pretty, and she lost her teaching license for “inciting a minor to debauchery.”

Beauvoir certainly lived a passionate life, and an entertaining life, but, beyond her groundbreaking work on gender equity, it’s by no means a life driven by the fight to help rid the world of social ills. Not that that’s a problem; not that it’s not enough to write, and Beauvoir’s writing was clearly a game-changer, but in a chapter titled “Injustice,”in a book about using philosophy to help us find our way, she doesn’t hold a candle to Weil. How can it be right or more just to have philosophical debates about our meaning than to feed the poor? Of course art and culture are important, but we also need to get involved in the very unsexy work of reducing our use of fossil fuels, and that likely means a small, commendable group of people will take a stand in very public and possibly dangerous ways. For some people, they are serious and singularly focused, and that’s praiseworthy even if it’s too hard for us to do.

To fight injustice, writing is vital; ideas and truthful coverage are absolutely necessary (like Beauvoir’s Djamila Boupacha), but writing is not sufficient. Justice requires many small acts of conscience and also large acts from heroes with a profound ability to be other-centered and a willingness to make sacrifices for their cause. It likely won’t be me on the front lines; I certainly don’t have what it takes, but I admire the people who do have that level of courage and persistence. They spur me on to be a better version of myself.

The Atlas Junk Tank

2026-03-15T08:49:00.001-04:00

I've been so immersed in American news these days, it's a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it's just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

"If you've been wondering why Canada's right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus.

Immigration is the most portable script in the playbook. The facts may differ country to country, but the structure stays identical: blame newcomers for housing, wages, and safety, then sell hardline policy as common sense realism. Watch how online harms panic gets used as a deregulatory weapon. Child safety becomes the hook, then the real target becomes any guardrail on harassment or hate speech. Free speech ends up protecting platforms and operators, not citizens. Climate messaging follows the same pattern. Not denial, just delay and inversion: net zero is a scam, regulation is tyranny, oil is the victim, NGOs are the threat. It protects extraction while sounding like neutral common sense.The tell is asset reuse. When the same tight set of organizations and spokespeople cycle through immigration, healthcare, climate, and free speech, that is not pluralism. That is a coordinated influence network running message discipline.This is not a censorship argument. It is a provenance argument. If a broadcast segment is driven by a funded advocacy pipeline, audiences deserve to know: affiliations, donors, conflicts. Label advocacy as advocacy. Stop laundering it as journalism. Atlas Network is the backbone: it connects and resources hundreds of partner think tanks, trains messengers, and turns donor-funded agendas into “common sense” via research, spokespeople, and media amplification [Intercept article]."

The Tyee article (Feb. 2026) calls the Atlas Network a "U.S. dark-money coalition of billionaire libertarian ideologues," and lists some of the Canadian groups that are directly linked: the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Second Street, the Montreal Economic Institute, and the Fraser Institute. They're heavily influenced by oil and gas lobbies, or they are oil and gas lobbies. The Intercept article (Aug. 2017) outlines how the Atlas Network built up institutions across Latin America. It explains the path from Hayek to Reagan to now, and how to convince the public to agree:

"Think tanks are traditionally associated with independent institutes formed to develop unconventional solutions. But the Atlas model focuses less on developing genuinely new policy proposals, and more on establishing political organizations that carry the credibility of academic institutions, making them an effective organ for winning hearts and minds. Free-market ideas — such as slashing taxes on the wealthy; whittling down the public sector and placing it under the control of private operators; and liberalized trade rules and restrictions on labor unions — have always struggled with a perception problem. Proponents of this vision have found that voters tend to view such ideas as a vehicle for serving society’s upper crust. Rebranding economic libertarianism as a public interest ideology has required elaborate strategies for mass persuasion. But the Atlas model now spreading rapidly through Latin America is based on a method perfected by decades of struggle in the U.S. and the U.K., as libertarians worked to stem the tide of the surging post-war welfare state."

I wrote about the Atlas Network back in December 2023, after reading this De Smog article, then again later that month quoting George Monbiot. Monbiot called the group "this overarching meta junk tank set up by Antony Fisher ... whose purpose is to coordinate the activities of these dark money neoliberal networks." Environmental groups have been aware of this cabal for a while. Now we need everyone to recognize what's happening to have any hope for democracy's survival.

On Useful Anger: Cohen's All the Rage

2026-03-10T08:26:00.004-04:00

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us.

He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage.

DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher:

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. … Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.

Instinct is biological knowledge that ensures attainment of vital needs, e.g. a newborn’s hunger is satisfied by rooting.

Drives are more complex. Freud defined them as “a source of stimulus from within the organism” (xxi). Because it’s internal, the source is constant and inescapable: “It is in the nature of the drive, Freud says, never to achieve full satisfaction” (xxxv). Drives provoke us to want to do something beyond what’s necessary for basic survival and animate humans and only humans, but they fail to satisfy. For example, aggression and libido.

Emotions are how we instinctively, unconsciously seek to ensure our preservation. They’re reflexive (e.g. disgust at maggoty meat provokes us to turn away), and are outwardly directed and public in nature. All animals have emotions.

Feelings map our reactions by producing images and ideas about them. They enable us to create novel responses to stimuli (e.g. disgust at maggoty meat, but then use it in an art project), and are inwardly directed and private. We have to be conscious in order to have feelings. “Feeling comes after drives, not before” (xv), and “action never exhausts feelings” (xxxv).

Aggression is the action of a drive, an automatic response to a stimulus in an attempt to meet our needs for survival through an “effort to exert dominance” (xi). It includes self-assertiveness and acquisitive actions and competitive efforts. It’s a goal-oriented drive to overcome an obstacle or achieve control, directed at a narrow aim, often urgent: We have to win this race, make dinner, get this raise, right now. Frustrated or blocked aggression can turn inward to become anger. Aggression is necessarily unsatisfiable: the drive gets recharged over and over.

Anger is a feeling that’s self-reflective. Its internal nature means it “can be concealed from the world, and even from oneself” (xi). It’s the aggression that returns back inside either because it couldn’t be used effectively, or because we intentionally stopped it. “Our persistent failures to remedy the insistent dissatisfactions of daily life give rise to that state of agitated enervation we call anger” (xx).

Rage is an emotion that’s made visible at the threshold of action. It’s at the mid-point between anger and aggression, but there’s not always a neat division between rage and anger. Cohen says,

“Rage is for me the kernel of anger. When you get to rage, you’ve realize something truthful about anger, which is that it’s given to excess, to feed off itself like a rolling stone, gathering more momentum as it goes.”

How we deal with our feelings of anger makes a difference in our demonstrations of aggression, and it appears they don’t get resolved through mere discharge. The four types of rage Cohen explores illustrate why we have problems personally and politically, and he offers strategies to change course. I’ll focus primarily on how we’re personally affected by our own anger to try to ground the ideas. This is just the gist of each; the book has many more examples to illustrate each layer.

1. Righteous Rage

Righteous rage comes from the unshakable conviction that we’re right! That’s likely a familiar feeling to most of us, and yet, “How reasonable is it to think of other people’s rage as rabid delusionality and one’s own as entirely consistent and justified?” (17). Aggression is narrow focusing, urgent, and energizing, so it can provoke us to double down on our position and become blind and deaf to alternative perspectives. It makes us feel certain, which can feel really good, like we’ve stumbled on a Truth that must be fought for. This certainty insulates us from the vulnerabilities of doubt, but it’s often short-lived. I think we can likely all think of times we’ve experienced times of obstinance and later had to acknowledge our error.

He uses examples of the Hulk and Othello, but also Trevelyan, the husband in Anthony Trollope’s 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right, whose jealousy destroyed his marriage. Trevelyan punished his wife with acts of aggression for his own unfounded suspicions, but it just makes him more angry:

“The problem with knowing one is right is that it requires precisely what does not happen: that the parties in the wrong realize this and say so. In the absence of such real-world satisfaction, Trevelyan has to fall back on increasingly vivid fantasies of an act that will finally consummate his anger” (25).

In real life we have incels who believe their crimes are justified because of what they’ve suffered from being rejected by women. Cohen quotes Hannah Arendt on this: “Suffering whose strength and virtue lie in endurance, explodes into rage when it can no longer endure” (34). However, this category also includes people who are trying valiantly to solve a problem against all odds, unable to see why so many people oppose them, such as revolutionaries singularly focused on the wrong path.

Another interesting thread throughout is the Freudian idea that psychic illness is the “repudiation of femininity” (39), of any openness or receptivity. “Rightness coats a place in a masculine armour…sealing it off from encounter or change. … The integrity of armour, however illusory, is a matter of literal survival” (40). We need to get better at recognizing that this righteousness, which gives us such intense focus and energy, might be sending us down a wayward path. From Lao Tzu: “When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide” (ch. 65).

2. Failed Rage

Failed rage is the most common form of rage, which we can see in positive thinkers and people who actively try to “manage” their anger. “Most of us are liable to swallow anger more often than we act on it” (45), but suppression can become cruel: “Anger is never so ugly as when it’s denied an outlet” (46). Undischarged rage can present in another guise, like exaggerated politeness or moroseness, or induce a state of repression where we become unaware of the anger (52). More than just annoying to deal with in others, this pent-up anger can also become vulnerable to emotional and political manipulation.

When our drives fail to be satisfied, they turn into feelings, and it’s painful to carry feelings without release. Anger only exists in animals with reason and temporal awareness because it’s from being required to live “at a distance from our aggression.” To be civilized, we try to refrain from having fights or humping in the street the way other animals might do. Shoved underground in attempts to manage feelings instead of feeling them, they show up as shame. He uses an example from non-fiction books, The Managed Heart (1983) by Arlie Russell Hochschild, which explores the effect of flight attendants being forced into false pleasantness, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Smile or Die (2009), on the problem with positivity in self-help movements and the injunction to get rid of any negative people. We can also see this frustrated rage through the rise of misunderstood versions of Stoicism and Buddhism.

Failed rage is the result of forced calm in our culture. An interesting side effect of this is seen online where “eruptions of public rage are a new kind of pornography” (65). But any vicarious satisfaction we might get from watching a random fight in a grocery store is ineffective. He draws on Peter Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time, and quotes him in part here:

“Revolutionary action is that optimal moment when affect and drive, or feeling and action, unfold in perfect harmony …. For this to occur, dispersed local currents of anger must be ‘banked’, deposited in a single ‘bank of rage’ that ‘draws its force from an excess of energy that longs for release’ (85).

For rage to be useful, we need to be able to hold and bank it instead of dispersing it in actions as “impotent rage without harmony.” Instead we calm it, rationalizing it away:

“If I’m not as angry as I ‘should’ be about the climate emergency, it’s because somewhere I’ve intuited how insupportable my anger and grief might be if I gave myself over to it fully, if I really let myself know about the precariousness of our own and our children’s future” (94).

I think Sartre’s “classic intellectual” might fit here: the petition-signers who don’t want to get their hands dirty. We’re bothered by the world and denounce atrocities, while part of us knows we benefit from maintaining them. We’re conscious of this contradiction, but not yet ready to truly revolt.

3. Cynical Rage

Rage that’s cynical in nature comes from charlatans, emotional predators, and demagogues. It can also happen in transference in therapy when patients redirect old feelings of anger onto the therapist, or in relationships when we project older relationship dynamics onto a current situation and get unreasonably enraged. Anger can be “wildly promiscuous” (97), always looking for a landing spot. We play hot potato with it, giving to others as fast as we can, but we can also hold it:

“The capacity to stay with anger as a purely internal state is what prevents the rush into blind action. We lash out in hot verbal or physical aggression when we can no longer represent our anger to ourselves, when we can no longer bear the pressure it is exerting on our minds.” (97).

If we can get enough mental distance from anger to be curious, then it can promote self-reflection, when our behaviours can collaborate with the mind instead of overriding it.

Corrupt politicians know many injustices against us are impossible for us to get redressed, leaving us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, which can morph into aggression, like on January 6th. It’s there in the MRA slogan “f*ck your feelings,” a demonstration of their rejection of any feminine tendency towards care. “The mirth has a paradoxical effect of at once amplifying the rage and calling it into doubt” (128). We see it in passive aggression and jokes that license aggression that’s not typically permitted. It’s seen in the obsession with reversing any equity gained by the women’s movements. A great example might be Nick Fuentes’ comment earlier this month:

“Our number political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned. They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people.”

Cynical rage is a political resource that’s used by providing disgruntled people with an illusion of certainty. He uses the example of Steve Bannon drawing in incel and MRA groups. Cohen writes:

“The incel shooter excitedly imagines he’ll terrorize women into submission to male authority, but his actions produce only grief and horror. The utopia of straight white male supremacy he and his online cheerleaders hope for is never achieved. The cynic’s promises are revealed in all their craven emptiness” (132).

With his clients, removing the certainty of a guaranteed outcome can prevent cynicism, and avoiding setting goals for someone more fully helps them find their own internal compass. Acknowledging and not demonizing anger allows it to be present without causing harm.

“To tell someone in the grip of a tormenting fury that you’re willing to receive and listen to [their anger] and think with him about it for as long as necessary … creates a world for him which didn’t previously exist, in which someone else recognizes and is curious about his inner life and wants to help reflect it back to him, to give it shape and meaning” (135).

Just being willing to listen to someone’s rage creates a new world for people as anger can slowly turn to grief for the relationship or past they couldn’t have. If we can listen to the rage, then we can speak truth to power. In a world in which the EPA “repealed” the scientific finding that GHGs threaten human life, it’s Greta Thunberg who has a “proper reaction” to the political process around climate, and is able to speak the truth that others have calmed or distorted their rage.

4. Usable Rage

We can use the energy that rage brings us by creatively fostering love and justice.

“If anger could be a means of fostering love and justice rather than closing it down, it would need to start from an embrace rather than a denial of one’s own vulnerability and self-doubt, along with a real curiosity about the other, not excluding what might be making them angry. Only at this point, I suggest, will rage become usable” (xli).

The story associated with this category is an ancient tale, One Thousand and One Nights in which a clever bride, Scheherazade, uses the power of a good cliffhanger to avoid being killed by her jealous husband, who previously slaughtered a succession of virginal wives after their wedding night. The storytelling provides a space that pulls her husband “out of his claustrophobic certainty and into new regions of strangeness and curiosity. … If anger is to serve as more than the emotional prelude to aggressive action then it must be disarmed of the self-certainty that propels it” (141). Confronted with their own vulnerability, the angry characters in the stories from previous chapters “chose destructive consequences of false certainty rather than bear the inevitable pain of not knowing” (151). They’d rather believe an enraging lie than sit in that uncomfortable limbo of precarious control. Transitioning to feeling means that the emotion finds a footing in ideas and words, not reactions.

Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter (2006) is also explored here to show an honest expression of buried feeling. “Once you make that blind passage from feeling to action, you’ve given up on the use of the anger because you’ve given up on bearing the load.” Ferrante’s protagonist can bear the load. “They do this by recognizing the relationship between the rage that they lean into and the neighbouring emotions around it.” The positivity movement tries to distract or soothe anger, and corrupt politicians try to tap into the aggression, but instead we can delay the anger, to let it exhaust itself, in order to listen to what it wants and find other emotions tagging along.

“Anger becomes less rigidly defensive at the point it makes contact with neighbouring emotions like sadness and anxiety. … Simply put, it is the difference between insulting the other person and telling them honestly why you feel hurt and angered by them” (168).

Anger is a felt sense of care or love; we don’t get mad at things we don’t care about. James Baldwin points the way to anger that “breaks out of the sterile rage of the unhearing monologue or rant, placing anger instead on the plane of love” (173). Cohen’s discussion of the burden of shame inherent to the role of a colonial police officer evokes an image of an ICE agent: “blind action dissociated from desire or intent or from any feeling at all beyond a compulsive pressure to kill the other” (175). Baldwin explains the dissociated rage is dissociated from “the force and anguish and terror of love” (176). It’s a fleeing from reality, not just from the reality of the situation and the history behind it, and our cultural dependence on our history of violence and exclusion, but also how it feels to partake in atrocities. It’s an action that’s divorced from personal responsibility from a rationalization that they are compelled by people in command or by the victim or by the aggression itself. Cohen brings it home by illustrating with an example of yelling at a fellow motorist from the safety of his own moving vehicle:

“If I didn’t default so quickly to yelling, I might be forced to feel something more than a reflexive anger. Lurking beneath that reflex would be, perhaps, feelings of impotence and anxiety, some resentment, and even envy. … There is a rich but disavowed personal history of feeling that is concealed even beneath the trivial, unseen event of my yelling at a person who can’t hear me” (179–80).

We have to be willing to give up the “deafness of the dictator” that might say: I, alone, have developed a certainty from my necessarily limited knowledge and experience. Knowing we can have anger and express it in harmless ways can prevent it from being used to manipulate us. With more acceptance of receptive femininity to embrace vulnerability and acknowledge our interdependence, we can disarm the certainty that is creating blinders that keep us disconnected to ourselves and others. With enough distance from rage to be curious about what lies beneath, we can hold and bank our anger to put it to good use.

Choosing Bits from the Bible

2026-02-20T17:43:00.003-05:00

This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here).

If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time:

Abortion: There are passages on how much "the fruit of the womb is a reward" (Psalm 127:3), but Exodus 21:22-25, which provides rules for when a fight breaks out and a pregnant woman gets accidentally hit and miscarries (they thought of everything!), is sometimes used as proof that the mother's life supersedes the life of the fetus. Also in that passage are rules about what to do if you poke out your slave's eye and how to sell your daughter appropriately. And in Numbers 5:11-31 it tells us how priests should treat any woman suspected of adultery by putting a curse on them with "bitter water" that causes a miscarriage (aka gives them an abortion).

Protecting our borders: There's lots on marking out territories, the right to stop invaders, and God "destroying the nation whose land he is giving you" (Deuteronomy 19), but also the corollary: respecting other nations' borders. "Do not move an ancient boundary stone" (Proverbs 23:10), so invading Iran to stop them from accessing uranium for medical isotopes, which they're using to make cancer treatments, is an abomination. God can grant territory by causing floods or pestilence or what-have-you, and then we can take it, but not before. And you only get that land if you follow all the holy laws. Deuteronomy also lays out that a man who accidentally kills someone should be allowed to flee to another place in order to save his life from avengers, and should only be rejected by that new city if he intentionally killed someone with malice. That's it. That's the only reason to reject a refugee. Furthermore, one witness to the murder isn't enough, the city needs the testimony of at least two or three witnesses in order to kick him out. AND if any witness proves to be a liar (coughBondiNoemToomanytonamecough) then "do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to that other party." They can be first in line in the horrific detention centres they're building all over their country.

Trafficking women and children is all over the Bible in the worst way. Selling women and children is fine as long as you don't sell them to enemy foreigners. Giving your daughter and maid to satiate an angry mob is the righteous thing to do when they're after your friend. Taking the "spoils of war" is also expected behaviour: "Kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man" (Numbers 31:17-18). So, sometimes it's better to look to our current legislation now that we have almost come to terms with women being equal human beings. Widows and fatherless children of your own nation get some extra protection, though, or else "My wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless" (Exodus 22:22-24). He was vindictive and jealous in the OT. Having a son softened him.

But then comes that fourth one about sexual perversions. Who can forget that parable of boys and girls sharing a locker room at the gym and suddenly they're all speaking different languages, amiright?! The Bible speaks glowingly of Lot's daughters getting him hammered and having it off with him (Genesis 19:30-38). It's portrays as good because they're preserving the family line, but it's all sorts of fucked up. There are many rules around sexual propriety around adultery that he's ignoring: "Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-78). And, yup, Deuteronomy 22 says, "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment," but it also says, "Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with diverse seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be defiled." If we're following these precepts, written almost 4,000 years ago, then I don't want any of these assholes allowed to eat food that came from seeds that have been "defiled" by cross-pollination or, God forbid, GMOs. So, basically, nothing in our current grocery stores. Other passages around sexual impropriety involve women being slaughtered or sold, like if your new bride can't prove her virginity on your wedding night: "Bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die." I'm very afraid that those are the bits these wingnuts like.

Protecting the culture from pagan religions is a joke, right? Because the early Christians absorbed pagan rituals in order to make their new religion more popular. We don't know JC's date of birth, but we peg it to December 25th because it fit with the Feast of Saturnalia already happening to celebrate the end of the shortest day, and the birth of the sun. And we don't know when he died, but pagan spring festivals felt like a good fit for a resurrection, and that still moves around the calendar depending on the moon (the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox or first day of spring).

What's being ignored in Hegseth's rant? "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (1 Timothy 6:10).

He left out the very Biblical concepts of usury and jubilee. "If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him" (Exodus 22:25). "If people are too poor to support themselves, help them and don't take any interest from them" (Leviticus 25:35-37). "You shall not change interest to your brother" (Deuteronomy 23:19), and aren't we all brothers and sisters?? Ezekiel 18:13 says, "Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken increase: shall he then live? he shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him."

An interesting shift happened with the word "usury." It used to mean any interest on a loan, and was considered really bad to do. According to this History of Usury, in the Gettysburg Economic Review, in ancient Greece, lending money for profit was seen as unnatural and dishonourable, and the negative association lasted through the spread of Christianity and Islam into the Middle Ages, making usury a crime. It was the expansion of trade and rise of capitalism that shifted the definition of usury to mean excessive interest, like with current credit card companies. According to this History of Finance, usury was put into law in the English Usury Act of 1545, which ended the prohibition of usury, and set the maximum rate at 12% for commercial loans, which gradually fell over the next 150 years down to 5% in 1714. During the Enlightenment, Adam Smith wanted strict regulations on interest, but Jeremy Bentham was opposed on the grounds of restrictions being a violation of liberties. Bentham's view held out, and restrictions were scrapped in 1854. Now you can get a Mastercard with a 36% interest rate!

Adam Smith also advocated for LIMITED profit, and famously said, "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." And here we are, with a handful of people stealing literally billions from their citizens, and somehow they can't be arrested for it. That's the truly anti-Christian part of it all.

It's All a Charade

2026-02-10T18:23:00.002-05:00

File this under, "Things we already know or ought to know."

The BMJ just published a feature called, "Why Covid-19 is 'A Vascular Disease Masquerading as a Respiratory One.'" The quotation inside the title comes from Andy Benest, vascular biologist at the University of Nottingham. He further explains, "The virus enters through the airways but exerts its systemic effects through the vasculature. The common denominator in the lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain." (h/t Chantzy)

This personification of a virus, a non-living entity, removes our responsibility as if there's no way we could have known because it's so stealthy. Except we did know.

Back in August 2020, five and a half years ago, the Journal of Neuroimaging published a study titled, "Covid-19 as a Blood Clotting Disorder Masquerading as a Respiratory Illness: A Cerebrovascular Perspective and Therapeutic Implications for Stroke Thrombectomy." They said,

"Several reports have been published of patients with ischemic strokes in the setting of coronavirus disease 2019. The mechanisms of how SARS-CoV-2 results in blood clots and large vessel strokes need to be defined as it has therapeutic implications. ... Once SARS-CoV-2 enters the blood stream, a cascade of events unfolds including ... formation of cross-linked fibrin blood clots, leading to pulmonary emboli (PE) and large vessel strokes seen on angiographic imaging studies. There is emerging evidence for Covid-19 being a blood clotting disorder and SARS-CoV-2 using the respiratory route to enter the blood stream. As the blood-air barrier is breached, varying degrees of collateral damage occur. Although antivira and immune therapies are studied, the role of blood thinners in the prevention and management of blood clots in Covid-19 needs evaluation. ... Understanding the mechanisms of blood clotting can potentially help prevent or mitigate end organ damage beyond the respiratory illness in Covid-19."

It took ten years, from 1971 to 1981, for enough people to understand how latently deadly HIV is, and then another five years more to get public health on board on massive education campaigns to prevent the spread. Every bit of educating before the mid-80s was from ad hoc communities of people who were on the front lines, watching friends and family die of the disease, and distributing pamphlets of information by hand. Covid affects all the major organs, including brain functioning. Even mild Covid. I'm curious and a bit terrified at what we'll see in 2030 if we still can't remember that we've known it's a vascular disease since the first year!

The Perfidious Lust for Unbridled Power

2026-02-04T14:19:00.003-05:00

Saving this here. It's the beautifully penned order, in full, from Fred Biery, U.S. District Judge, a federal judge who ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Arias and his father. This photo of Liam was attached to the order, with Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35 written below it. Respectively, "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." and "Jesus wept."

Opinion and Order of the Court

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conego Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.

Apparent also is this government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

1. "He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People."
2. "He has excited domestic Insurrection among us."
3. "For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us."
4. "He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures."

"We the people" are hearing echos of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized. ~ U.S. Const. amend. IV.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration's detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.

Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: "Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?" "A republic, if you can keep it."

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.

Honouring Our Capacity

2026-01-29T09:05:00.001-05:00

I've had several conversations this week about how to be in a time like this when the U.S. government is so overtly corrupted. I'm just the upstairs neighbour in Canada, but we're high on the list of countries to be overthrown. Even without being in that position, it's hard to be aware of the world today and not be in a constant state of rage. I mean even more than before. I want to fast forward to the end when all the bad guys go to prison, but that will only happen with ongoing action from as many people as possible. However, that type of action doesn't necessarily have to be heroic or extraordinary. This is just my two cents from a distance that's looming closer.

INACTION AS COMPLICITY: What's Enough?

Viewing newly accepted levels of violence in the U.S. is overwhelming and frightening. A few people have posted lists of things we can do to help, but I wonder if, for many people, it's asking too much. This might be a controversial view at a time when it feels like we all need to get on board to shift the world back to a less selfish and violent place, but the perspective that we all are complicit if we don't act might do more harm than good.

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the sentiment in Stride Toward Freedom: "He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." However, the paragraph before gives that statement context: fighting evil includes "withdrawing our coöperation from an evil system" in the bus boycott. They didn't just stop riding the bus, but people organized carpools, and cab drivers charged the price of bus fare to Black passengers, and others collected money. He also said: "Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest." The type of work we do to help has to suit our capacity.

If we follow Peter Singer's argument for action: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it," it allows us some wiggle room. It's not just about the courage to be on the front-line, but about our prediction of our own effectiveness in the situation (if it's in our power). Will protesting actually work? It also allows for self-preservation, and we've seen what happens to people just trying to drive away from a protest site or trying to protect others. But Singer doesn't let us duck out of doing something from a safe distance. The context of his argument persuades us to donate to charity, which is safe and easy. Is that enough when danger is at the door? And how do we predict our level of effectiveness and sacrifice?

I've been to relatively safe environmental protests over the years, but this is different. I'd like to be a person who stands in the way, but I don't think I am. My sense of self-preservation overrides any impetus to protect others (except for my kids), and that feels decidedly selfish. Except it feels less of a choice than just what is. To get some temporal distance from it all, if Anne Frank knocked on the door, and we said "No" for fear of our family's safety, would we be complicit in her death? Letting a family move into the attic is incredibly courageous and noble, but Singer appears to allow the defense of protecting ourselves from harm if we can't manage in the face of potential danger. I'd like to think I'd open the door wide, but I'm pretty sure I'd meekly apologize from a crack at the threshold. Even so, the people complicit in her death were the soldiers who took her, those who ran the camps rife with disease, and those who gave the orders all down the chain of command. Those people deserve the internal suffering that comes with causing harm. This gets complicated by the reality that some soldiers following orders possibly also did it to save their own lives. When danger was further away, I might have argued that closing the door to a family in need is immoral. Maybe it's just my own rationalization, but now I'm less convinced that acting for preservation of self and family over others, acting cowardly, is necessarily immoral despite the lack of virtue. Something like that.

Putting that can of worms aside, I worry that we're hoping to rouse people to action by provoking guilt, which can backfire. Guilt for not doing enough can be motivating, but it can also turn dark and provoke people to double down on their behaviour despite their original stance. That can sometimes lead to rationalizations to excuse what we've done. A child might argue that, "Sure I broke his window, but his house was already falling apart, so what does it matter?" An adult might argue, "They should have complied" or "They shouldn't be here anyway." If someone in a state of overwhelm feels the need to justify their inaction, any stance that suggests the victims deserved the abuse can help them relieve that inner turmoil. It may not be useful to provoke guilt when it's on top of fear and overwhelm.

The alternative is acknowledging that it's really scary to intervene. It can be terrifying to protest or even just show allegiance to a side. And it can be painful to find out we don't have the kind of courage we thought we might have, I think especially for men conditioned to believe masculinity requires unlimited courage. Luckily, we can help with courage or with the generosity of our time and energy.

We don't need everybody to do all the things. The people in Minneapolis came out in full force with 30-50,000 people out on January 23rd. That's 2-3 times the suggested 3.5% of a population to make a difference. These protests are next level both with individuals and businesses. Author Margaret Killjoy wrote,

"I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. … It's genuinely a leaderless (or leaderful) movement, decentralized in a way that the state is absolutely unequipped to handle. … Another friend put it to me like this: 'ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter.' I don't want to paint a rosy picture, because it's a city under siege. People are being abducted all the time. One person told me about watching 1-2 abductions a day, just in her own work following ICE. But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes. What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one. … I've never seen a population more united."

Avoiding the fray doesn't determine complicity. That's not to say be complacent, but neither should we feel ashamed if we can't bear to be on the front lines. We have to find our own capacity to act.

"Fear is a very contagious emotion. It cripples societies. When societies live in fear, nobody does anything because everybody's too frightened to do something. But courage is contagious. Very contagious." ~ Betty Williams

GENEROSITY AND COURAGE

Aristotle's golden mean illustrated by Austin Kleon

I typically appreciate videos and articles from Robert Reich, but most of the things in his list of things to do to prevent being complicit require an unacknowledged level of courage and effort to pressure heads of corporations, universities, and organizations to act. A New Hampshire bishop recently urged his clergy to draw up their wills for "a new era of martyrdom." These are laudable sentiments, but jeez!! People can't always just shake off their fear and start behaving in ways completely unfamiliar to them. I'm good at generosity, but I suck at courage, so I've ranked potentially helpful actions by the level of time and energy commitment they might take and the level of safety, more or less, they might afford. I mainly land in that second camp below, but there is no shame in the fourth category, either. Choose your adventure!

1. Difficult and Higher Risk → Boots on the ground protest, observe, and document: go to where ICE is kidnapping people and get between the predator and target; go towards the danger to film; write/create controversial things from within the US; mark the names of people where they were taken or murdered like an ad hoc Stolperstein; mobilize your employers, organization, university, or congregation; take an EMT course to learn how to treat tear gas and gunshot wounds on site; fight to maintain voters' rights…

2. Difficult but Safer → Protest in states where ICE hasn't yet infiltrated; refuse to shop from complicit corporations (it's hard because there are so many); create in safer spaces by writing, painting, performing*… Art matters in times of upheaval: Rene Magritte, who lost his mother to suicide and lived through both world wars, called painting "a counter-offensive."

3. Easier but Higher Risk → Refuse to answer questions about who lives in your neighbourhood; share the news with neighbours and colleagues who still see some merit to this faux immigration sweep…

4. Easier and Safer → If you're outside the US, shop locally; boycott the World Cup and Olympics; stay aware; write to your representative or sign a petition; post on social media to raise awareness and solidarity (clicktivism can help); re-post event times and locations; donate what you can to candidates who can flip their seat or to families in need; hang a poster of Norman Rockwell's "Spirit of America" or put it on a shirt; smile at your neighbour or offer tiny acts of kindness and compassion to help each other; vote the monsters out when the time comes; wear a button, hat, shirt, or nails to show solidarity…

It's really hard to admit that it was too hard for us to help in the ways we thought were necessary so we did nothing. All of these tactics are necessary, but they're not necessary for each of us to do.

It's also vital to replenish. If we're tired or hungry, all the terrifying news reports hit harder. Feeling like part of the solution reduces a sense of powerlessness, but it's also necessary to sleep and eat. It doesn't help the cause to stay up late to watch every angle of every video. We don't all have the "power of facing unpleasant facts," something George Orwell recognized made him different and well-suited to writing. For many, if not most people, it's too hard to face the calamity directly. We don't need to see the videos to know this needs to be stopped. Look for good news as well. "Find the helpers" is not a message to lean back, but that this is a good vs evil fight, and there is still a lot of good in the world. It's also reenergizing to find joy to remind us what we're working towards. It's okay to enjoy our lives while suffering is in the world. Suffering will always be there, and avoiding pleasures doesn't make other people's lives better. Finally, if you're aware of the problem but surrounded by people who seem oblivious or in collusion, seek out support groups.

"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say 'yes' to life." ~ Joseph Campbell

BE A FORCE FOR GOOD

Up against a force of evil this powerful, quieter actions can feel like throwing a cup of water at a forest fire. But if we all do it and keep doing it, we can be the light that conquers the darkness.

Years ago I watched a documentary about Bernice Johnson Reagon, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, in which she was asked about what to do with anti-Black song lyrics out there. Her response was not to censor them, but to make sure to put something else out there in the airwaves. It reminded me of Tolstoy's story "The Godson" about a boy who encounters evil and learns he can't stop it with violence or outrun it or hide from it. All he can do is to add more love to the world to help to balance things out a little. Evil never leaves, so we always have to be there to counter it. Many of us have lived a very long time without having to face it so closely.

An interesting 2004 study on airline accidents requiring evacuation found that people in danger tend to have one of three reactions: flight, flight, and freeze. 10-15% calmly escape; 10-15% flip out with counterproductive behaviours that adds to the danger, and 70-80% are stunned, bewildered, and have such impaired reasoning that they're unable to follow simple instructions. "Shock is so disorienting, it doesn't allow us to think clearly." In light of this, we need to mentally prepare our response, not just to provoke some action, but to avoid acting rashly. That could include Epictetus' negative meditations: Take a moment daily to imagine the best action you're likely able to take when observing or confronted with a threat. We have to thaw out the 70-80% who are too petrified to at least be able to better care for themselves and their families. "Don't succumb to fear," as Reich suggests, isn't enough; it takes practice to be ready when people knock at the door.

Put something good out there and highlight others who do the same, and don't add to the evil. In other words, don't take the bait.

Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote,

"The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

According to The King Center,

"Dr. King believed that the age-old tradition of hating one’s opponents was not only immoral, but bad strategy, which perpetuated the cycle of revenge and retaliation. Only nonviolence, he believed, had the power to break the cycle of retributive violence and create lasting peace through reconciliation."

After a bomb was thrown into his house in 1956, MLK said,

"If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. … We must meet hate with love."

A few years ago, Judith Butler was on Philosophy Talk to argue in favour of non-violent resistance. They discussed how Angela Davis changed her more militant views after Ferguson and said we need to lay down guns and think of the world we want to build. Loosely paraphrased, Butler says that if we want a less violent, exploitative world, we have to enact principles we hope to realize. Non-violent tactics include protests, blocking transportation, strikes, and disrupting the economy. It's an enormous inconvenience and a way of saying this is NOT business as usual. There are disruptive consequences, but they're not violent. We need to work with hate in such a way as to not replicate the enemy we're resisting, otherwise we lose the battle.

"It's most beautiful when police lay down their arms. That's when everyone cries. When solidarity happens between police and the populace, that's the beginning of a different order when we see that systems we thought were closed are really open."

I won't hold my breath on that last bit, but absolutely we need to reconfigure the policies of the oppressor. Helpless in the face of this much violence, but that can be reduced with small, everyday actions. Let's see what we can do.

________

*Lyrics to Sasha Allen's song:

Tell me what terrorism looks like
Does it have color, a creed, or a name?
I think terrorism is the anger that it takes to kill a stranger
for the simple act of trying to drive away.
And I'll tell you what terrorism looks like
It's a sickness we cannot seem to outgrow
It's shooting point blank range into someone's face
when you don't even have the guts to show your own.
And I do not say it to be shocking. It is simple; it is true,
that where good once stood, a red river now runs through,
and they will take and take and take until there's nothing left to give.
And if that's not terrorism then what is?
And terrorism loves to repeat history
Terrorism says go door to door
And terrorism bets on you and me and all the people
acting like we've never heard that phrase before
Cause terrorists call human being animals
They kidnap, kill, and sit above the law
And terrorism feeds off of your own indoctrination
And not caring which side of history you're on
And I do not say it to be shocking It should simply be said,
that where good once stood, a river now runs red
and "What is done cannot be undone,
But one can prevent it from happening again."

That final quote is from Anne Frank. It once seemed so obvious to most of the world that this should never happen again. It's a reminder how easily our rights and democracy can slip away if we're not standing on guard for thee.

Covid Study References

2026-01-07T09:12:00.005-05:00

I sometimes write without linking to studies because I've posted all the studies so many times already, but here's a bunch of useful ones when evidence is necessary.

THE PROBLEM:

Covid isn't a cold at all; it's a vascular disease (affecting the circulatory system) that produces microclots, which can lead to blood vessel damage, strokes, and loss of brain tissue (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021, Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 2022, Cardiovascular Diabetology, 2022). Heart disease risk soars after even a mild case (Nature 2022), as well as the risk for heart attacks (Journal of Medical Virology, 2022). Dr. Funmi Okunola explained how Covid causes hypercoagulability, which damages the endothelium, increases strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and deep vein thrombosis, and Professor Danny Altmann explained how clearly mild Covid can be seen to affect the brain in a 2024 video. After an acute case, it hibernates in the body (like chicken pox and HIV), then can cause worse effects years later: the "SARS-CoV-2 spike protein accumulates and persists in the body for years, especially in the skull-meniges-brain axis" (Cell Host & Microbe, 2024). We still know relatively little about Covid, how long it can last, and all the things it can do to the body. HIV started out looking like a bad flu lasting a few weeks, then ten years later, people started dying of AIDS. Nobody knows for sure what the 2030s will look like. It currently still kills more people than car accidents, even as it adds to the number of collisions (Neurology, 2024). It might be wise to continue to take precautions.

59% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is from people who don't have any symptoms: 35% from people who are presymptomatic and 24% from people who are carrying it without developing symptoms, like Typhoid Mary (JAMA, 2021), so only masking when around people who are visibly sick, like my doctor does, avoids less than half of the potential transmission in the room, especially in primary health care.

Viruses spread over many feet and hang in the air (think of it like cigar smoke - you can smell it from across a room, and you can tell is someone was smoking in the room before you got there): "Transmission was also found to occur from particles remaining suspended in the air and travelling longer distances, hence the benefit of wearing masks" (Health Canada, 2025). It means someone could be coughing up a lung in a store, then leave, and then you show up to an almost empty shop that feels very safe, yet the air is chock full of the virus. A general rule of thumb of always masking in public buildings means no longer having to think about risk calculations or wonder who was there beforehand.

There's no limit to how many times you can get Covid, and each infection increases risk of serious illness. Anyone can get Long Covid, even young, healthy people who eat well and exercise (Durham County Public Health, 2025). It can cause long-lasting cognitive dysfunction in your adults at least two years after infection affecting verbal working memory and cognitive reaction time (Life, 2025). Cognitive disabilities spiked since 2020, and there's no other plausible explanation for the scale and timing of this trend. In Olympic athletes, 64% of those infected had ongoing limitations in their sport (Journal of Exercise and Sport Research, 2025).

It's decimating healthcare workers, adding to the healthcare burden from both ends. In the UK, 18% of healthcare workers were off work due to Covid. Some claim their lives have never been the same since this first infection (Medscape, 2025). In BC, over 18% of people have Long Covid symptoms causing work productivity issues compared to the burden associated with multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritic, despite that Covid is preventable (CIDRAP, 2025).

Kids definitely get it too. One study estimates 15% of kids have Long Covid, but doctors are missing the signs (Rutgers, 2025). Another huge study pegged it at 14-20% (Journal of the AMA, 2024). A newer study found that blood samples may find biomarkers that can better diagnose Long Covid which might help diagnosis (CROI, 2025). In one study on children, they found inflammatory markers three months after an acute infection, which suggests damage to the immune system (CROI, 2025). Long Covid surpassed asthma as the most common chronic condition in American kids (JAMA Pediatrics, 2025).

It causes a lot of problems in the brain. I've compiled many studies on Covid's effect on the brain and continue to add to them there.

THE SOLUTIONS:

Nothing works perfectly, so we have to follow that Swiss cheese model of doing several things at once to get to zero risk. I tend to trust my N95 and not look into any of the others things in public buildings, but I have a CR box in my house.

Masks work (i.e. well-fitting respirators like N95s/FFP3s, not medical masks or cloth masks) (Clinical Microbiology, 2024), which is explained in plain English here. They're not just a filter, they also trap the virus using inertial impaction, interception, and electrostatic attraction (which is why you should throw out a mask if it gets wet). Here's an explainer from Dr. Jeff Gilchrist, and a two-minute video from Professor Trish Greenhalgh at Oxford. ETA: a panel of experts are urging the WHO to change their guidelines so healthcare workers are wearing N95s/FFP3s instead of surgical masks.

Clean air helps (CR boxes and ventilation): "Individuals exposed to CO2 concentrations greater than 800 ppm were more likely to report mucous membrane or respiratory symptoms (Health Canada, 2025). Upper room UVGI would kill any viruses, and could be part of hospitals and school either installed near the ceiling or in the HVAC (EPA, 2025). It's expensive, but it would be an absolute game-changer.

Vaccines help reduce the effect of the virus, but you can still get it and spread it, and vaccine effectiveness wanes in a few months because the virus mutates so quickly (because there's so much spread -- it needs to get in a host body to mutate). Getting a vaccine "remains safe and strongly recommended during pregnancy" (Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 2025).

Rapid tests have a lot of false negatives in the first five days, so you can be contagious and show a negative. But by day 6, there's usually enough of it to be more accurate. They still suggesting also testing on day 7 to be sure. A positive line is almost always positive.

There's little access to meds that help (we have to be over 65 to get Paxlovid in Ontario), but in the Netherlands they've seen 75% of cases have viral clearance within 28 days with nirmatrelvir/ritonavir (CROI, 2025), and Pfizer is testing Ibuzatrelvir (but it might still not be available to anyone under 65) (C&EN, 2025). I'm less excited by nasal sprays or any supplements these days, but I'll still do the spray (just Betadine until Azelastine's approved in Canada) if I'm going to be in close contact with people who don't generally mask in public.

Also check out Dr. Sean Mullen's downloadable factsheet and Dr. Lucky Tran's explainer of why it's still a good idea to avoid getting Covid. Both have tons of links to studies. The Delphi Consensus is older, but that just shows we knew all this (Nature, 2022).

I've landed on masks being most vital because it's all that's within our control. Wearing an N95 does a very good job of preventing getting a virus, and it also prevents spreading a virus if you have one and don't know about it, AND, with fewer hosts, it will reduce how quickly the virus mutates which will extend vaccine effectiveness.

The Brave and Stalwart

2026-01-03T18:04:00.009-05:00

As a quick reminder, well-fitting N95s/FFP3s work amazingly to avoid measles, the flu, and covid. I haven't been sick in years, and I love it!! The only inconvenience is not eating food with people who aren't cautious. I throw on a mask before going inside a public building. It's second-nature now, like putting on a seatbelt when I get in a car. Pretty simple and effective. Really, it's a no brainer.

But Jon Stewart (with Jon Favreau and Tim Miller) saw fit to make fun of people like me: crazy people who continue to avoid getting sick. In case you've forgotten, or if this is news to you, unlike the flu, which is brutal this year, Covid stays in the system, hibernating and attacking internal organs, the brain (sticking glial cells into clumps), and the immune system. The only other virus that attacks the immune system like this, causing lymphopenia, is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). So, call me crazy for avoiding getting a virus with similar effects as AIDS.

Putrino Lab wrote,

"There are tens of millions of Americans who have been disabled by LongCovid and must do everything in their power to prevent further infections that make them vulnerable to further worsening of their symptoms. There are countless millions more who are immunocompromised or love someone who is and must therefore mask to protect themselves from a virus that continues to spread without mitigation due to its novel ability amongst viruses to persist in the body and drive immune dysregulation, hypercoagulation, oncogenic processes, nervous system dysfunction, cognitive decline and other terrible long-term effects. Furthermore, after hearing all the things that this virus drives, there are those of us who are perfectly healthy who just think that, until governments enact good-sense measures against the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (i.e. air purifiers, better ventilation, routine testing, far UVC germicidal lights, development of post-exposure prophylaxis drugs and CURES for #LongCOVID), it is really sensible to adopt masking as on of the few reliable ways to protect oneself and others when entering and sharing public spaces

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt rather than condemn you outright given your history of meaningful advocacy for 9/11 survivors. You have done more than most in this space and it seems like you did it because you genuinely care for these folks. Given this, I hope I’m right that this moment on your @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social was a moment where you said something unkind because you are uninformed, not because you are cruel. You have a loud voice, a big following and your actions have consequences. I sincerely hope that you might open yourself up to being educated about all the reasons that those two maskers that you always see are brave and stalwart enough to be continuing to mask in public. There are many clinicians, patients, advocates and scientists here in NY, a city hit harder than most by #COVID and #LongCOVID, who would happily sit down and talk with you about this topic. I truly hope you choose to learn from this and help, because I do believe you to be a helper given your long history of good works. You clearly have a lot of fans in the disabled community, so please apologize and commit to doing better. Walt Whitman never said it, but Ted Lasso definitely did: 'Be curious, not judgmental'."

Karistina Lafae called it punching down in Mother Jones since, "Research shows that Long Covid is very much a working-class problem."

LRSH - Education Podcast pointed out that "Anti-masking is a project 2025 goal literally written out on page 475, and Liberal Currents writes that the pro-infection lobby is battling each mitigation measure.

And Dr. Lucky Tran said "You don't owe anyone an explanation about the health reasons why you are wearing a mask."

I don't have any health reasons to mask except to avoid getting sick. I think that's plenty of reason.

Recent studies found that wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic completely eliminated a strain of the flu. We don't have to get sick over and over; it's a choice.

A recent review in Nature listed the incidence of Long Covid as 5-20% in the community and as high as 50% in patients hospitalized:

It's not a cold. It has long term repercussions. We don't have to let it in.

My fall 2022 info posts still stand (most transmission is from someone asymptomatic, so it's not enough to just mask when you're sick, but it's not nothing, either, and Covid still kills more than vehicle collisions):

ETA on Feb. 19th: A month after I wrote this, lawyer and anti-ICE activist, Will Stancil, posted a doubling-down non-apology from Miller about how "unneighbourly" we are, the "masked thugs" for trying to prevent the spread of a potentially fatal communicable disease.

One-Liner (or so) Film Reviews for 2025

2026-01-01T12:58:00.013-05:00

I embraced retirement fully this year by watching a ridiculous number of movies and shows (despite actually continuing to work). These are in the order I watched them, and I highlighted my top favourites (13 of them) and runners up (21 of them) in the more current shows and films. I watched a lot so you don't have to!

SHOWS and SERIES

1. Psych (2006-14) - it's supposed to be hilarious, but it's really not
2. Apple Cider Vinegar - good enough story of a scammer
3. Adolescence - compelling at the time, but surprisingly it didn't really stay with me; I had to look it up to remember what it was about!
4. Severance s.2 - fantastic
5. Yellowjackets s.3 - good enough for what it is
6. Love on the Spectrum s.3 - well developed through cuts, but with a bit of exploitation ick
7. White Lotus s.3 - sure
8. How to with John Wilson - kind of sad - I hope he's okay
9. Silo - s.2 - good enough -- a lot of "will s/he get out of this situation" suspense keeps me watching
10. Black Mirror s.7 - fantastic -- best one yet!
11. Taskmaster x19 - I love these guys! - It's a game show, but there's enough character development, that I feel like it counts.
12. The Studio s1 - hilarious look at a movie studio -- art vs commerce stuff with Seth Rogen - seriously really funny!
13. Porni - very relatable single mom trying to date in her 40s
14. Stateless - very good - lives of people in an immigration detention center with Yvonne Strahovski (Serena in Handmaid's Tale)
15. Squid Game s.3 - edge of my seat!
16. The Comeback s1 (2005) s2 (2014) - takes a bit to warm up to it; s3 slated for 2026; Lisa Kudrow vehicle
17. Mythic Quest s.4 - surprisingly good show about making video games with Rob Mac from It's Always Sunny
18. Handmaid's Tale s6 - almost comical in places, but it had a good run for five seasons
19. Platonic s.1-2 - men and women can be friends -- sometimes funny and some interesting insights
20. Bad Sisters -- excellent, funny attempt to kill a man; very believable relationships between sisters
21. Your Friends and Neighbors -- Jon Hamm -- fun first season of a former rich guy stealing from other rich people
22. The Bear s.4 - good -- makes me cry every time, but it doesn't really stay with me
23. The Last of Us -- s.2 -- meh
24. The Big Door Prize s.1-2 -- some laughs and goofiness about a machine that gives fortunes --surprisingly realistic dialogue from teens -- cancelled after 2 at a cliffhanger
25. Killing Eve -- fun chasing killer stuff; I'm late to this party
26. The Summer I Turned Pretty -- made it through 1.5 episodes -- great soundtrack, horrible dialogue, acting, and storyline; pretty much unwatchable; I really wanted to like it for Rachel Blanchard (Nancy from Peep Show)
27. Task - Mark Ruffalo -- good story of an FBI agent hunting a killer; standard stuff
28. Black Rabbit -- Jason Bateman and Jude Law as troubled brothers - pretty good, but I still have a hard time taking Jason Bateman seriously; I've seen Arrested Development too many times
29. Nobody Wants This - s2 -- good enough romcom between a rabbi and an atheist (Adam Brody and Kristen Bell); I have to complain about a scene lifted from older movies in which they keep just missing each other, but they have phones!! I learned a lot about Judaism.
30. Slow Horses s.1-5 binge - I love it! Bunch of misfit agents solving crimes. Kinda like Archer.
31. The Morning Show s.4 -- very entertaining about putting on a morning show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston -- women supporting women -- I looked forward to it each week, but suspend disbelief.
32. Pluribus s1 -- fantastic look at being that one person who values critical thinking among a hive mind
33. A Man on the Inside s2 -- Ted Danson vehicle -- NOPE -- season 1 was cute, but this wasn't
34. All Her Fault -- watched the whole thing -- so many plot holes and nobody is likeable -- baffling 1950s sexism set in the present; I just watched for Sarah Snook but even she couldn't save it
35. Dexter Resurrected - I really enjoyed it again. I lost interest in Dexter for a while, but this one's good.
36. The Rehearsal s.2 -- excellent Nathan Fielder show -- ties ASD, dating, talent search and aviation
37. Long Story Short -- from Bojack creator -- not as good, but some solemn moments -- 3 generations of a family; it moves back and forth through time showing how little hurts pile up
38. Heated Rivalry -- I watched it all to see what the fuss is about; I don't understand how some episodes rated 10/10; I hung out with hockey-heads in the1980s, and they weren't nearly as homophobic as this lot is finally bravely coming out in 2017; the acting is unbelievably bad in places. I'm clearly not the target audience despite it being called "mom-porn".
39. St. Denis Medical -- feels like it's a comedy like Scrubs, with a great cast, but I didn't laugh at all

RECENT FILMS

1. Rebel Ridge - former marine vs police chief -- okay shoot 'em up
2. Trap -- hilariously bad expository -- OCD = killer
3. Wicked (the first one) -- fun, but the songs go on way too long
4. A Real Pain - truly beautiful exploration of two cousins making peace with the loss of their grandmother
5. Dune, part 2 - I'll keep watching them
6. The Estate -- some laughs with Toni Collette and Anna Faris, but not as much as you'd expect
7. Juror #2 - hokey, predictable but with Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, and J.K. Simmons
8. Mickey 17 - from Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) - excellent sci fi with Robert Patterson
9. I May Destroy You - really good - about sexual consent and exploitation in complex scenarios
10. Nobody 2 - okay -- nothing surprising
11. Thunderbolts - it didn't do well, but I thought it was lots of fun
12. Monkey Man - excellent - Dev Patel getting vengeance
13. A Different Man -- really good exploration of our perception of our attractiveness, but weird pacing; it kept feeling like it was over, and it wasn't
14. Mountainhead -- dark comedy with Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman -- how tech bros think they can run the world -- it was okay; weird tonal shifts that don't entirely work
15. Friendship -- Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd -- too uncomfortable for me; I couldn't finish it
16. The Life of Chuck -- excellent Tom Hiddleston piece -- fun and hopeful
17. Greta - pretty much Single White Female - some clunky dialogue and awkward acing
18. The Last Showgirl - Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis -- bleak and tragic -- it was well done
19. Weapons - scary and creepy -- I loved it!
20. Eenie Meanie -- really good car chases and character arc - woman has to rescue ex-boyfriend
21. Last Breath -- Woody Harrelson submarine movie -- this is my worst nightmare - edge of my seat!
22. Sinners - great music -- great jump scares -- fantastic vampire movie
23. Sometimes I Think About Dying -- quiet, sad, struggle to connect to others - really lovely
24. Highest 2 Lowest -- Spike Lee film with Denzel Washington; I found it hard to watch because of overly lengthy expository and the score -- a sweeping symphony like Field of Dreams, then abruptly cut to the music you might hear in a Marvel movie or old Western -- I couldn't make sense of it, but I've said that about movies before that go on to win awards for best soundtrack.
25. Twinless -- excellent film about grief and connection between two young men
26. The Baltimorons -- sweet and goofy
27. Flee -- brutal animated refugee story -- very well done
28. The World to Come -- it's okay -- it's no Portrait of a Lady on Fire
29. The Roses -- okay remake -- some funny bits
30. One Battle After Another -- fantastic, beautifully shot -- fun, action packed, and very sweet
31. Good Fortune -- I watched for Keanu Reeves -- it's It's a Wonderful Life meets Freaky Friday -- but it's like they are trying to act horribly
32. Godzilla Minus One -- some nostalgia from watching Godzilla movies as a kid
33. Bugonia -- I wasn't sure I'd like it, but it was really good
34. Eddington -- surprisingly, laughed out loud at time; a dark humour -- it's Covid-related, but that's just the tool they needed to make a current-day western
35. Wake up Dead Man -- I couldn't get into it at all
36. Blue Moon -- great for any fans of behind the scenes of old musicals or fans of Ethan Hawke or Andrew Scott - rivalry story
37. The Running Man -- a remake, but it's Edgar Wright, so lots of fun explosions
38. Train Dreams -- so tender -- it made me think of Forrest Gump but so real as it marked the dramatic shifts in time -- absolutely loved it
39. Can I get a Witness -- Sandra Oh is hitting 50 in a Logan's Run world in which she accepts her fate -- beautiful and sad -- it didn't get great reviews, maybe because it's a quiet film, but I loved it
40. Black Bag -- okay spy thriller
41. It Was Just an Accident -- like 12 Angry Men, but 6 of them on a road trip -- what do you do when you might have found the man who tortured you years ago -- funny yet unnerving tonal shifts that work, and check out the incredible story of how it all had to be made in secret, often only able to get one shot before having to GTFO
42. Sentimental Value -- so very good -- a story of generations living and dying in a house and trying to understand one another -- but it's done perfectly
43. Perfect Neighbor -- a great documentary entirely from police body-camera footage of an argument between neighbours
44. No Other Choice - Park Chan-wook (Snowpiercer and Oldboy) film about getting ahead by murdering the competition, often in very comical ways -- really fun with Lee Byung-hun (Front Man in Squid Game)
45. Marty Supreme - Timothée Chalamet's a super slimy table tennis competitor -- it's really entertaining, but there was nobody likeable to cheer for or connect with -- a great depiction of narcissism, but almost to an aversive degree -- It's interesting that in No Other Choice, I wanted the murderer to get ahead. I cared about him and saw enough of his good to be able to overlook the killing spree. In Marty Supreme, I didn't want him to win - at all. We weren't shown any redeeming features. His mom was annoying, but not nearly bad enough for us to feel sorry for him.

OLD MOVIES
I think I was really missing my mom this year. She got sick and died at about my age, so that's hitting home. I have so many fond memories of watching these kinds of movies with her all the time growing up, pointing out the plot holes and clever bits, but many of these I haven't seen before. I may have learned more about morality and prejudice and general right action from those viewing sessions with mum than from years of reading philosophy. There's a magical sitting around time with kids from about 11 to 15, when they're old enough to have strong well-established opinions, but not yet busy with their own lives, and just like hanging out. It's brief, but pivotal.

Most of these were just in the background as I did household stuff. The length of this list is a bit eye-opening for me. A hand injury, from dismantling and re-building my deck in three days, kept me from pickleball and ukulele, so I'll throw in that excuse, and I also tracked them more this time. But, jeez; get a life! This year: more books and music and real life!!

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) - Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth
Never Say Die (1939) - Bob Hope and Martha Raye unlikely romance
Too Many Husbands (1940) - Jean Arthur and Fred MacMurray love triangle stuff
The Lady Has Plans (1942) - Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland -- spies and intrigue!
Street of Chance (1942) - dude with amnesia finds the truth about himself
My Sister Eileen (1942) - Jack Lemmon and Janet Leigh - written by Blake Edwards -- love this stuff!
Power of the Press (1943) - a journalist hunts down the killer of his publisher -- pretty good!
The Moon is Down (1943) - Jesus! I reacted to it at the time - how a small town in Norway manages a Nazi occupation - based on a Steinbeck book
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - creepy psychological tension -- what to do if your uncle's a killer
The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1946) - valuable art and murder
Suddenly It's Spring (1947) - Paulette Goddard and Fred MacMurray love triangle stuff
A Double Life (1947) - guy gets obsessed with playing Othello
Her Husband's Affair (1947) - Lucille Ball -- great romp
Where There's Life (1947) - Bob Hope -- assassination attempts and terrorism -- I don't remember the Bob Hope movies having so much politics in them as a kid!!
Don't Trust Your Husband (1948) - more Fred MacMurray but about love and business
September Affair (1950) - Joan Fontaine and Joseph Cotten - love of a good woman
The Jackpot (1950) - Jimmy Stewart -- it was hard to sit with his plight
The Fat Man (1951) -- Rock Hudson being accused of murder
Crow Hollow (1952) - three "spinsters" try get an inheritance with murder
The Thief (1952) - Ray Milland; nuclear physicist selling secrets to the Russians
It Happens Every Thursday (1953) - John Forsythe - hey kids, let's start a newspaper!
Dangerous Crossing (1953) - who's will help and who's a bad guy all trapped on an ocean liner!
Dial M For Murder (1954) - Grace Kelly and Ray Milland -- classic Hitchcock!!
Tight Spot (1955) - Ginger Rogers, Edward G. Robinson and Brian Keith - great one about getting a dame to testify against the mob
No Man's Woman (1955) - murder and scheming woman
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day - classic intrigue
Wicked as They Come (1957) - murdering the way to the top
Kiss Them for Me (1957) - Cary Grant and Jayne Mansfield fare
Nightfall (1957) - Anne Bancroft - false accusations and pursuing the real killers
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) -- Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis --- intrigue in the media
The Facts of Life (1960) - Bob Hope and Lucille Ball -- surprisingly realistic depiction of an affair
The Millionairess (1960) -- really annoying pouty childish women
Love is a Ball (1963) - Glenn Ford - matchmaking romcom
Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) - Natalie Wood pregnant after a one-night stand - the shame!
What a Way to Go (1964) - Shirley MacLaine and Paul Newman - this one was annoying
The Night Walker (1964) - legit scary about a rich widow's nightmares
The Pumpkin Eater (1964) -- Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch -- Harold Pinter play about marriage, kids, infidelity, and just getting by with each other day after day -- now we'd say it's about mental illness
The Collector (1965) -- excellent creepy tale -- great depiction of a psychopathic killer
Harper (1966) -- fun who-dunnit with Paul Newman
Eight on the Lam (1967) - Bob Hope slapstick
The Deadly Affair (1967) - excellent John le Carré directed by Sidney Lumet with James Mason
Shame (1968) -- too real about what it's like to live at the beginning of an invasion
Penelope (1969) - Natalie Wood and slapstick sexual assault scene - yikes!
On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) - Streisand exploring past lives - kinda boring
Avanti (1972) - sexist madcap with Jack Lemmon - a bit dull
The Long Goodbye (1973) - Elliot Gould - probably my fifth watching -- I like a cool detective
Murder on Flight 502 (1975) - this was horrible
Mikey and Nicky (1976) - Elaine May movie with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes -- really good!
Silver Streak (1976) -- hilarious! this holds up really well except for some offensive language (N-word)
Sorcerer (1977) -- good edge of seat thriller
Straight Time - (1978) - Dustin Hoffman as a thief -- it was really good!
The China Syndrome (1979) - classic rewatch
Better Off Dead (1985) - I have no idea how I missed seeing this in the 80s - John Cusack falls for a French exchange student -- it's pretty bad but in a very 80s way that makes it almost endearing
Sneakers (1992) fun old romp with Robert Redford
Miller's Crossing (1990) -- I realized how much I missed when I first saw it
Quiz Show (1994) -- John Turturro and Robert Redford in a great moral dilemma
A Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) -- Samuel L Jackson and Geena Davis -- so bad it's funny
Secrets and Lies (1996) - wealthy woman finds her factory working biological mother -- really good
Magnolia (1999) -- better than I expected from the hype back then
All Good Things (2010) - Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst -- Did he kill her? -- not bad
Prisoners (2013) -- Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal -- suspenseful and pretty brutal

Did I miss any good ones???

ETA: I think I got most of the Oscar winners hightlighted on here!!

The Pluribus Utopia

2025-12-31T13:33:00.005-05:00

The recent show Pluribus has got me thinking differently about the kind of ideal state that might be a laudable direction and how to get there. The show is overtly about a hive mind interconnection, that started with a lab-leaked experiment, which affects almost all of the world except for 13 people who have natural immunity. We follow the trajectory of one of these anomalies, Carol, who gives them their titular name, not for "many," a direct translation, but as her own invention: "the plural of succubus."

There will be no significant spoilers here; this isn't about the show specifically, but about its depiction of a perfectly efficient and seemingly happy and altruistic society. Is Carol the last one left in the cave, or is she the only one who made it to the outside?

The hive all works together effortlessly as one, with a prime directive to do no harm, as they distribute food worldwide with the utmost equity. They don't step on bugs or swat flies. They will eat meat if it's already dead, but they won't kill it themselves. They also won't pluck an apple from a tree. They don't interfere with life. They can't lie overtly. It's all very pleasant. The hive won't harm a living body; however, they didn't mind obliterating the human spirit of 8 billion people without explicit consent, rendering their ethics questionable.

Connections to the show have been made with AI and Covid, so it may be useful to keep in mind that the show was originally written over ten years ago. If looking for authorial intent, those aren't necessarily parallels. At that link, the lead of the show, Rhea Seehorn said she originally asked if it's about addiction, and it's not that either. There's an element of just exploring human nature and what brings us happiness, and she likes journalists who "want to talk about philosophical questions about what this is bringing up for them. And we're hearing all these different things. It's wonderful." I'm game!

Plato argues that the products of painters and poets, and likely filmmakers fit here too, are "but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only and not realities" (Republic, Book III). There is the Truth, then the builder's truth, then the artist's rendering of it. There's another layer as well: the viewer is then four times removed from reality as we bring their own ideas to our interpretation of the artist's representation. The story line of the show is vague enough and meaty enough to be provocative of myriad perspectives.

So Happy Together

First, I wonder about the joy of learning and curiosity and discovery. The setup suggests that having the sudden knowledge of all the minds currently in the world, we would be content. We'll just know to do the right thing. However, we know that having a shared knowledge on a scientific or philosophical conundrum doesn't always create agreement or morality. People can have tons of knowledge and still choose to do wrong. So it mustn't just be the ability to access the same facts and logic that creates the tranquility. Maybe it's the ability to share one another's feelings. If we could immediately feel the pain of suffering of others when we pollute or feel others going hungry when we decide not to let food rot in our fridge, then that might make us more planetary-minded. Something like that. Except the hive doesn't appear to really experience empathy in a typical way either. Like bees, they're just singularly minded to protect the hive. They don't make ethical decisions.

Personally, I get so much joy from learning, and figuring things out, and being surprised by things, that I'm not convinced I'd be happier knowing it all. It's the figuring that brings joy. I'm in the middle of one of the hardest jigsaw puzzles I've ever done. It would give me no pleasure to know where the pieces go. The contentment from finishing only comes with the struggle and surprises in the doing. Despite their brilliance, their contentment feels closer to an old-school frontal lobotomy.

Their argument for the superior pleasure of the hive is that they "know what it's like to be like you -- alone, suffering -- but you've never been like us." This is pretty much John Stuart Mill's argument for the superiority of intellectual pleasures over bodily:

"If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account." (Utilitarianism, II 5)

They've been outside the hive and inside it, and inside is better, despite the drawback of losing all individuality. I'd like to hear from one who tried being an individual again before I sign up. And despite loving to read and write and think and argue, I'm not positive I'd choose them if it meant giving up all sensory pleasures.

We relate to Carol as an outsider. Unlike the mere difficulty fitting in during high school or in the neighbourhood, she is literally outside the mind of the people around her, and it's understandably infuriating. In her attempts to convince others like her that this is all clearly bad, she's the Cassandra of the story as most of them focus on the benefits of the system: Is it really so bad to have finally found a way to have world peace, efficient food distribution, no waste, no prejudice of any kind, perfect conservation of resources shared among all, no need for money, and a Buddhist's lack of attachment to possessions and people?

I wavered while watching it.

Who are You?

We definitely value our individuality, and it's a human rights violation to suddenly wipe that away for billions of people without their explicit consent. But even for the baker's dozen of leftovers, our individuality is partly made up of how people react to us. We find who we are relationally. It's not just that we want to feel special, but that we need to feel seen. Surrounded by a unified collective damages that potential. We need to find ourselves and where we are in conjunction with others before we can let go of the sense of self, otherwise joining isn't a profound dissolution of self into the oneness of the universe; it's an assimilation to improve the production line.

Yet I also get that there's something really enticing about this level of efficiency and worldwide equity.

It boils down to what we're doing here, and what we think we should be doing here. In this fictional world, we could have contentment of the community, or we could have the trials and tribulations of individual striving, remorse, and devastation, with occasional successes. Are we here to play a part in the world or to elevate ourselves above the fray? Is it just too boring to be world-centric?

According to Plato, and later B.F. Skinner, the crux of the difficulty with making ethical choices, or even with making wise but selfish choices that will benefit us the most, is the art of measurement.

"The same magnitudes seem greater to the eye from near at hand than they do from a distance. This is true of thickness and also of number, and sounds of equal loudness seem greater near at hand than at a distance. If now our happiness consisted in doing, I mean in choosing, greater lengths and avoiding smaller, where would lie salvation? In the art of measurement or in the impression made by appearances? Haven't we seen that the appearance leads us astray and throws us into confusion so that in our actions and our choices between great and small we are constantly accepting and rejecting the same things, whereas the metric art would have canceled the effect of the impression, and by revealing the true state of affairs would have caused the soul to live in peace and quiet and abide in the truth, thus saving our life?' Faced with these considerations, would people agree that our salvation would lie in the art of measurement?" (Plato's Protagoras)

The hive seems to have solved this completely. They effortlessly follow the long-term goals of the community. Yet the loss is too profound to accept as ideal. It's not just a loss of individual identity, but of authentic connection.

Imagine No Possessions or Countries

In one episode reminiscent of Groundhog's Day, Carol tries various ways to cope with her loneliness. The turning point for her seems to be a piece of art. There are a lot of other things going on with this particular painting, but the relationship to aesthetics is interesting on its own. The hive appreciates things based on an amalgamation of views, not on individual feeling, so pulpy romance novels are as praised as Shakespeare. Without individuality, and without a longing for symbolic representations of ourselves, we have no connection to the creations of others. That's one way our humanity is lost in this scheme.

If I were in Carol's shoes, I would be an archivist. Not just to record the events as they happened, but to save all the stories. I'd be hunting through homes for diaries and journals, and childhood paintings and grocery lists to demonstrate the uniqueness of the human spirit in a museum. But for whom?

We're different from bees and their singular purpose because of our drive to find others who actually get us. At my dinner table this Christmas, nobody else had seen the show, so that potential thread to them was cut short. The holidays make it more overt how much we get tied together from the outfits, objects, songs, and shows that we've played over and over for decades. The internet helps us find others with similar obscure interests, mundane or profound, for better or worse. Art is more than a diversion; it's an indication of identity. What if our discriminating taste for better and worse just went away? Without difference and conflict we're just polite service workers that nobody gets to know at any depth. We delineate ourselves by dancing against one another; superficial cheeriness gives us nothing of significance to push up against.

Without the desire for individual possessions we have no theft, and no desire to have anything more than we need, but we also lack a symbolic means to demonstrate who we are as a way to find connections. We do an ongoing courting dance to find each other by displaying our things as a shortcut. We also lose any sense of culture without significant objects passed down and cherished through generations.

Despite our behaviours to the contrary, particularly at this time of year, we largely understand the problems with rampant consumerism. The proliferation of unnecessary trinkets harms the environment in their consumption, distribution, and elimination. Individually, we're sitting with the bills to pay. So for the sake of the planet, and for our own financial and mental health, we need to pare it down to a few exquisite pieces that are kept forever. But for thousands of years we're made it clear that we suck at the art of measurement. We want all the things in the most convenient way possible despite how much harm it causes the world and the people we haven't met. We need to consume less and distribute resources much more equitably, and worry less about having what we want and more about everybody having what they need. Absolutely. But I'm not sure we can without some kind of serious brain manipulation.

Love the One You're With

I also wonder how well we could cope with never hoping to be special to anyone again. Total lack of discrimination means it doesn't matter to anyone that Carol's a lesbian, but it also doesn't matter that she's Carol. To most, she is unlikable, yet she finds her center and keeps going.

But, for me, the story brings up a different question: How long can we tolerate the loneliness born of our integrity before capitulating to the other side? How long can people who are avoiding Covid or AI or air travel or beef or plastic bags or unnecessary purchases, or whatever difficult ethical stand they're taking, maintain their stance before they decide to join the party? At some point it becomes necessary to find people on-side. Luckily, where there's no local community, social media helps with that. In the real world, people are able to find others like them to spur them on, for better or worse. This show elucidates the importance of even a tiny group of like-minded people to help us stay on whatever path we're walking. Even just one other person.

Ideally, of course, we'd have some sort of middle ground worldwide: less consumption and travel, and more masks in hospitals. If just one person refuses to participate in the hive for moral integrity, that has a negligible effect that dies with them. We already see that if just a small group does the thing that will help humanity survive longer; it's hard to feel confident it makes enough difference to be worth it. If I'm the only one masking in a crowded store, that does little to reduce transmission. If I'm the only one there willfully limiting my purchases to necessities, using a cloth bag, and walking home to house kept at 19 degrees all winter, the consumption machine will keep chugging along. Staying the course requires letting go of outcomes and expectations of change and continuing to do what we believe is right because it's right. But it can be a lonely path. It's hard enough to find connection without being quite so different.

A gift-giving holiday can really bring out these kinds of conflicts. It can be hard to explain the importance of individual choices against the attempts from others to envelop us into the festivities without somebody feeling slighted or judged or belittled. "Sorry, but I can't afford it," is easier to manage than, "It's just not right to fly back and forth to see the cousins again this year." It's especially difficult to stay the course without offending anyone in the process. Hoping to influence others is a whole other ballgame. Last winter, Mel Gibson insisted climate change is a hoax while his house burned down in the California fires, and US leaders are currently promoting a rhetoric of "fear the vaccine, not the virus" leading to a return of measles. Imagine trying to speak up to that without a community at your back.

A final underlying interpretation provoked by Pluribus: we may have been granted free will through the chemicals swimming in our brain, but I don't believe we have accepted it and the responsibility that comes with intentional actions. We would rather be tossed hither and thither by influencers or questionable leaders because measuring well ourselves is so much more effort. Even better, just let something program us to do good so we don't have to think at all. Are they more content in the hive because removing free will removes all those pesky decisions to be made? That's the very thing that makes us human, and it needs to be reclaimed.

The Cyclical Nature of Chores

2025-12-08T13:29:00.009-05:00

Emma Wilkins' excellent piece "On Housecraft" in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward's book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique of a review of a book I haven't read, but on a topic most of us relate to intimately.

Like me, and many of us, Wilkins hates cleaning and is working through how to make the drudgery more palatable. She's "more likely to make the bathroom less dirty than property clean." Likewise, to take the confessions even further, cobweb strands are clearly visible from where I'm currently sitting in my kitchen.

Wilkins and Haywood raise a long-standing struggle for fairness in this field and pin the problem on daily chores being beneath our dignity, so they explore elevating the art of cleaning and finding personal benefits in the work. These paths might help, but I wonder if it could also help to revere the battle around equity and to lower and ground this regular exertion.

NOBLE AND ADVANTAGEOUS EFFORTS

Haywood has found a way to embrace housework as a method of demonstrating caring. As an artform, it can become a noble pursuit to have a well-kept home. Wilkins writes that our disdain for chores is relatively new as Aristotle recognized that,

"...'oikonomia' or 'household management' contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. … It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is."

Wilkins later states her position: "I can't see our attitudes to the work itself changing any time soon." Instead, she hopes to endure the grind by seeing the work as personally beneficial: "Far from being a 'waste' of time, it could be time spent thinking, reflecting, practising, and learning. It could benefit our health as well." If we hate that the dishes need doing again, at least we can reap some side benefits from it, like hitting our fitness goals by working our wax-on-wax-off muscles. I used this line of reasoning when I had little ones who always wanted to be in my arms. I was getting buff from carrying them around!

However, both of these positions remain aligned with our problematic achievement-oriented society. I agree that cleaning doesn't produce anything that can raise our status. My mom, a math prof, would often tell us, "I don't want She kept a clean house on my tombstone," as we crunched a path across the living room carpet, and it wasn't. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han's Burnout Society implores us to make efforts to step outside of this social structure to see ourselves as relational beings with character instead of as projects to be perpetually upgraded for optimal performance. I'm endeavouring to do that, but what does that even look like? One part might be to see tasks from a perspective of connections instead of competition.

Wilkins speaks to the issue of fairness in domestic duties,

"It’s simpler if you live alone, and either clean up after yourself, or pay somebody to. It’s the experience of communal living – cooking for others, cleaning up after them, having them clean up after us; and the time that this might take from a career – that continues to frustrate, and to divide. … Even if we could make each person in a household responsible for offsetting only the wear, tear, and mess they personally cause … the limits imposed by different restraints mean not every member of a household could take equal responsibility."

If connections are key, then we can take a stance popularized by Marx: from each according to ability to each according to need. The authentic ability and the legitimate need in specific cleaning debates can be a conundrum for sure. To whose standards must we adhere? But at least the famous line opens a door for less accusatory discussions. But, more than that, these dilemmas are an opportunity for managing frustration and developing conflict resolution skills. I wonder if we're losing our tolerance for difficulty by avoiding it, causing us to have less and less patience to manage more impressive issues.

When we outsource our cooking and cleaning, that alleviates a potential conflict immediately, beyond deciding who has to open the door for the delivery guy or housekeeping service. But it's important to notice the loss to our development of skills of negotiation, compromise, decision-making, responsibility, and community, as well as a place for parents to practice gradually relinquishing control over their kids as they trust their burgeoning abilities. It forces us to dive into the complexity of meeting different needs and, perhaps vitally, the acceptance of not getting precisely what we want. We really, really want what we want all the time! Imagine a society or home where we all come to terms with some modicum of contentment with what we need. Chores are a place to struggle through learning cooperation. Maybe it can be less exasperating if we recognize the type of character the work is building in ourselves and our housemates.

COMMON RITUALS

Wilkins raises the concern with our busy lives. Part of the problem is we're in it on our own. Trevor Noah sees this as a problem with how much we've lost sight of the village in our quest for personal independence. We had a community of people to help and now we have to "buy someone" to look after our kids, clean, and cook. This system tricked us into getting individual homes where we don't have any help!

Wilkins says that valuing the altruistic aims of cleaning for others, "would require us to value individual status, prestige, and success less." However, I'm not sure altruism is the right lens for this kind of work. Doing work for others often comes with an expectation of appreciation that might not be forthcoming, which just adds to further resentment. Instead, whether in my rare stabs at real cleaning or my daily cooking travesties, I try to take a "because it needs to be done" position. It just is a thing before us. Physical labour is only a lowly task in kingdom-like spaces. Adhering to this view, hoping to elevate it to noble status or ulteriorly benefit from it, forgets that we're all just animals somewhat divorced from our instinct to sweep out the nest.

In the words of Dr. Helen Wong,

"The thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is, it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong that you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work, and some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

Wanting to elevate the task might be part of the problem. We want to only do exciting things, and there's nothing exciting or uplifting to the daily routines necessary to keep our habitat livable. It can be viewed as the Sisyphusian task of pushing a boulder up a hill, as Wilkins writes, but it can also be seen as part of an ongoing cycle of clean/dirty that we're part of. Instead of an upward trajectory of tasks that don't get the medal we hope for, it's a rhythm, round and round. Needing a frame of reference to make it worthy of our time feels like a fight to deny our profane animal nature. We need to clean because we're dirty. Our shit stinks. We can sweep not because it's good for society or to benefit others or to find inner calm, but because of the dirt that accumulates when we don't.

It might feel hard today to do these tasks, despite indoor plumbing and grocery stores, because we're busy with work and have far more distractions sucking up our time. And there's a sense of 'How come other people get servants?' that might keep us dragging our feet, disgruntled. But maybe we're also out of sync with, and contemptuous of, some of our more animal rituals. Trying to paint it as noble feels like gentrifying a task that's explicitly guttural. Philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to aggrandize ourselves above all the lower animals, which merely alienates us from our nature. We are ordinary and mundane creatures.

We are immersed in a perspective of progress with a straight linear path to success. We like to finish things once and for all. We want to check off a box, to relieve the tension of incompleteness, to finally figure out that sofa issue. It's a whole thing to accept tasks that don't end or progress and to accept the back and forth between struggle and resolution, tension and release, life and death, growth and decay… Cleaning is a way to push back against the tendency for things to fall apart, to continue to fix what's broken, repair holes, clean a stain before it sets. It's an act of choosing to carry on.

Many of us want to mechanize our natural processes, either with robots or with the hope of automating tasks to the point that we don't notice the effort in an attempt to forget the time we spent really getting at the gunk behind the toilet. But, like they demonstrate in Severance, there's a cost to wiping out part of our lives, even the tedious parts.

The Tao Te Ching reminds us to embrace the low places (ch. 8):

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.

Two films that also helped me wrap my head around this perspective are both from German directors and set in Japan: the 1999 Enlightenment Guaranteed and the recent Perfect Days. It's possible to find joy in doing our work well just for the sake of doing it well, not for personal benefit, wealth, praise, or honour, and even though people will immediately dirty our clean floors. The dirtying is a necessary part of the cycle.

JUDGMENT AND SCRUTINY

Despite it being seen as low-status, there's still so much judgment around it. It's like, it's a nothing job that anyone can do, and you're bad at it. Getting away from an achievement-society mentality involves stepping outside of the constant comparisons our brain wants to make. Wilkins and Haywood discuss the gender-imbalance in housework, which isn't my primary focus here as I sweat this issue even without a man in my house. But I do believe part of the scrutiny of our habits might be a means to take down women who try to step out of their lane.

In her excellent book Down Girl, Kate Manne explains,

"When women are tasked not only with performing certain forms of emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproductive labor but are also supposed to do so in a loving and caring manner or enthusiastic spirit, patriarchal norms and expectations have to operate on the down-low. Their coercive quality is better left implicit."

We're all judged on how well we're put together, but women get an extra layer that's thick and heavy because it's our domain. And we're swimming in it such that we accept and perpetuate it, sometimes foisting a perfectionism on tasks that don't require quite so much effort. For example, I was at a friend's place for lunch a few years ago. After we ate, her son wiped the table then left. Then her husband berated the effort and wiped it again. After he left, my friend complained about the ineptness of both of them, and washed the table a third time.

I admit a twinge of embarrassment to say that I thought the table looked fine from the get-go!

This element of the problem is clear in any online arena with a question about the right amount of cleaning. For instance, recently The Guardian asked how often we should clean our clothes. The responses range from rotating a double mattress weekly, to waiting until socks can walk to the washing machine on their own, but the comment that can likely capture most of us: "Not as much as some people do and a fair bit more than others." There is no clear standard, so we end up trying to meet the highest standard in our circle. We want validation from others to forge belonging, looking for cues to indicate we're good enough. I think we want to outsource or mechanize, in part, because then it's not our fault if it's sub-par. As an alternative, I'm making a valiant effort to provide the lowest standard for others to meet!

The Tao Te Ching cautions us against judgment too (ch. 2):

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

A crumb is not a crime, yet it wraps us up in shame regardless. And shame drives us to extremes: either obsessive or resistant. Avoiding getting hooked in by other people's potential judgment of us seems to require acknowledging and quelling our own judgment that's been developing from social expectations surrounding us for a lifetime. It's no easy task, but it's possible.

Instead of imagining ourselves like Sisyphus, happy by resigning ourselves to an evening's toil of dishes, sweeping, and picking up, it might be more useful to picture ourselves like songbirds, tidying and fluffing up their nest before they break out in song together, watching the sun finally able to shine through our windows. In the place between sterile and mouldy are tiny fingerprints on the fridge door.

Myth and Motivation: On Dopamine

2025-11-12T14:02:00.007-05:00

There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine hits, detoxing from dopamine, dopamine drains, and craving dopamine, appear to be more like a story we've constructed to understand our actions than a scientific explanation, and I'm not convinced it's the best narrative to help us change our behaviours, particularly around tech-based habits.

As a hormone, it's released by the adrenal glands (above the kidneys) into the bloodstream for slower, more general communications where it primarily helps to regulate our immune system. As a neurotransmitter, it provides fast, local comms between neurons in the brain where it does a lot of different things including affecting movement, memory, motivation, mood, and mornings (waking up). It makes up 80% of the "catecholamine content" in our brain, the ingredients that prepare us for action. Our levels fluctuate throughout each day, so you don't have to try to cram all your work into the early hours of the morning.

It's largely discussed as the heart of our quest for pleasure, yet for decades studies have concluded that dopamine doesn't affect pleasure, since we get a dopamine release before a rewarding activity, not after we've completed it. Instead, it affects how the brain decides if an action is worth the effort. A 2020 study found that increasing it with meds like Ritalin can motivate people to perform harder physical tasks. People with higher levels of dopamine are more likely to choose a harder task with a higher reward than an easier, low-reward task. Low dopamine doesn't reduce focus, but it's believed it provokes giving more weight to the perceived cost of an activity instead of the potential reward. Lower levels lead us to save energy.

So why do we think we crave it or, paradoxically, need to try to intentionally deplete it?

ACCIDENTAL MYTH-MAKING

Dopamine's function wasn't known until the 1950s, when Arvid Carlsson completely blocked the neurotransmitter in rabbits, which paralyzed them, clarifying dopamine's necessity in self-initiated movement. The rabbits fully recovered with a shot of Levodopa (L-Dopa), which was later used (and still is) as a dopamine replacement agent to reduce the physical symptoms of Parkinson's disease. About the same time, Olds & Milner found that animals repeat acts that were followed by electrical stimulation of the brain, which prompted thinking of brain centers that focus on rewards. Roy Wise wrote about it in a 1978 paper.

Then in 1980, Wise wrote a paper that starts by acknowledging that discussing a "pleasure center" of the brain is inaccurate, but can be a useful paradigm for experimenting. At the time he thought the dopamine system was activated from food, sex, drugs, and social interactions. It was a 1997 study that found it's not getting a reward, but the anticipation of a reward that sends neurotransmitters racing, to help us predict and correct for errors in prediction. Dopamine helps us to learn about our environment. "The key element that causes dopamine neurons to fire is surprise, regardless of whether the outcome is rewarding or disappointing." This was the thinking in the 80s, confirmed in the 90s, yet that attachment to the "pleasure center" was hard to shake.

In 2011, Robert Sapolsky's work with monkeys pressing levers demonstrated that dopamine increased with anticipation and decreased at the end of the behaviour. More relevant to internet habits, when treats were only expected after a random number of bar presses (a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement - more on that later), twice as much dopamine was released, and monkeys pushed the bar more. Unpredictable rewards increase motivation. So if only occasional YouTube videos are entertaining to us, we'll maintain clicking behaviours for far longer.

In 2012, further to the 1997 study, John Salamone and Mercè Correa published a comprehensive paper in Neuron on the myth of dopamine. Salamone spent most of his career arguing that dopamine is related to motivation, not pleasure. Soldiers with PTSD "show activity in dopamine-rich parts of the brain when hearing recorded gunshots," which is hardly pleasurable. Stories that depression is from low dopamine or that addiction is from a hijacked reward system are not supported by closer examination. We gravitate to simple stories, but this one is far more complex with Salamone's explanation going back to Schopenhauer (1837)! Dopamine "probably performs several functions, and any particular behavioral or neuroscience method may be well suited for characterizing some of these functions, but poorly suited for others. In view of this, it can be challenging to assemble a coherent view." For instance, in some cases it impairs eating, and in others it doesn't. Once again, depletion can "cause animals to reallocate their instrumental response selection based upon the response requirement of the task and select lower cost alternatives."

The myth of dopamine being part of a pleasure center started growing legs in 2019 when Dr. Cameron Sepah used the term "dopamine fast," despite that he explained at the time that it just makes for a catchy title, but it's not to be taken literally since it has little to do with either fasting or dopamine. He proposed we stop ourselves from automatically responding to unhealthy stimuli around us, like notifications, and instead let ourselves feel lonely or bored from time to time, similar to G. Alan Marlatt's notion of urge surfing from 1985. Just wait for the urge to pass. Sepah also suggested timeblocking abstinence: put away devices for 1-4 hours each weekday evening, a full day each week; one weekend each month. and a full week each year. Great ideas, but an unfortunately catchy title.

The following year, Peter Grinspoon, MD, tried to bring the "maladaptive fad" to light, stating what we might think is obvious: "You can't 'fast' from a naturally occurring brain chemical. … It doesn't actually decrease when you avoid overstimulating activities." Dopamine isn't like heroin, which we can build a tolerance to. Don't try to avoid dopamine, but do actively avoid stimuli that lead to unwanted behaviours. Grinspoon was especially concerned with extreme versions of dopamine fasting: people who stopped anything pleasurable, none of which affects dopamine levels at all but can cause other problems. What was actually being suggested was just a day of rest for mental rejuvenation and real life connections, like many religions have counselled:

"The modern wellness industry has become so lucrative that people are creating snappy titles for age-old concepts."

WELL-MEASURED PLEASURE INDICATES THE GOOD

You'd think that might have settled things, BUT THEN Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation came out in 2021, which furthered the heroin myth that indulging in pleasures desensitizes us from dopamine. She was criticized for being simplistic and judgmental, using anecdotes over hard data, overemphasizing personal blame, downplaying systemic factors, and conflating neurotransmitters with opium: "overusing your 'pleasure center' can result in not being able to find anything pleasurable at all anymore" is all sorts of wrong. The book sold well anyway. A 2023 op ed tried to dismantle the myth of dopamine hits, and another in 2024 called the book "promoting puritanism as an addiction cure." An excellent read by Jesse Meadows asks, "What morals are being communicated to us through this particular science story?", and digs into Lembke's previous work further as well as clarifying that heroin can cause a high without changing dopamine levels and that studies showing increases in dopamine associated with video games are "small and poorly replicated."

"The dopamine mythos ultimately tells us that all the world's problems are just inside our own heads, and the solutions can only be found in individual self-management."

I wonder if that's the part people resonated with that increased book sales. We feel out of control, and want a quick answer, and there's a kernel of truth that we're choosing pleasures poorly. We get that some pleasures are better than others. We get mad at ourselves for scrolling for hours, when we look up and realized we missed a gorgeous day outside, so there is a desire for some self-management that Lembke taps into. She appears to take an all or nothing approach, though, as if we'll be ruined by enjoying great food and sex. Plato and Aristotle wrote about this, not in a moralizing way, but arguing that surely we want the most and best pleasures in our lives. For Plato, it's all about measuring short term gains against long term losses. Don't get so hammered that you're sick all the next day because that's a negative net sum of pleasure. Being mastered by pleasure is a form of ignorance, not sin. Aristotle agrees the solution is education: "we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought." A few thousand years later, Nietzsche said, significantly more judgmentally, "All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus.”

We don't need to shame people for their vices in order to help them recognize how to get more pleasure, greater in number and duration, by being intentional about choosing less fleeting pleasures. We can teach kids the benefits of restraint, tolerating boredom, and using their imagination more to enable it to be used more. Now we understand brain plasticity, so we know that intentionally focusing for longer eventually makes it easier to focus for longer, eventually. We recognize hard work leads to more pleasure, and easy pleasures lose their luster. The big problem is that we know all the things, but we've become accustomed to low-hanging fruit. Even as an adult raised as an outdoorsy kid, the algorithms often own me. This evolutionary mechanism of motivation that provokes long durations of effort worked for millennia to keep us hunting and foraging, particularly when food is scarce, but more and more, changes in production and distribution and then technology have led to a very different system in place that we haven't yet evolved for. We're like squirrels living on a peanut farm unable to stop collecting nuts despite part of us clearly knowing that nobody needs this much continuous information or entertainment. To live with it, the skill of measuring well needs to be taught and re-taught regularly.

Reducing exposure to the object of our compulsions is a great idea. There's nothing wrong with that part of the trend. Despite not being remotely religious, I regularly observe Lent at the end of winter because it feels easier to do knowing about a billion other people are also depriving themselves of something during those 40 days. For me, it's a yearly re-set towards a more simple life, a reminder of what I don't need to live, and a way to notice and surrender any clinging. Reducing exposure does reduce the craving; but it has little to do with controlling dopamine.

DOES IT MATTER?? PERCEPTION AS METAPHOR

When I read or watch people talking about dopamine hits and crashes and tolerance, I translate it in my head to a message about avoiding having a conditioned response. They're struggling to stop a compulsion or habit (craving a hit) and trying to avoid stimuli that provokes it (detoxing). That could just mean they want to doomscroll, and, instead, they put their phone in a drawer for the afternoon. So, does it matter if people think of dopamine as both the cause and solution to their problems?

Jungian analyst, Lisa Marchiano, recently said,

"If we think about myths as stories that are believed to be true by the culture that writes them, I would like to offer that the DSM is a cultural myth. … My favourite quote from [Jung's] Collected Works: 'We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind, but what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases' [CW 13, par 54]. … Heaviness could be ascribed to Saturn. Being in a kind of frenzy could be assigned to Dionysus. And if it matches well enough, people can have that "Aha!" experience. And often, as I've seen in my practice, people can kind of exhale and place it into a certain aesthetic frame that gives them some distance between themselves and the problem that they're suffering. Many different systems do that, by the way, but myth is one way of possibly doing that."

Dopamine has reached god-like status, with some hoping to be granted its effects and others trying to be released from its chains. But this is a god we can see.

Part of the pull towards brain chemistry may be that we can see it with high-tech machinery in a way that feels like we can know the cause and effect. However, psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist, explained the current push to categorize and label and really pin things down can completely miss out on more right-brain attention to complexity and nuance. Just because we can see part of the brain light up doesn't mean we understand what's happening.

"What can be measured doesn't matter and what really matters can't be measured. It's such a simple observation in a way, and it's almost as if the culture has just taken one little simple wrong turn. … The small mistake is simply … the minute you get into a mindset … that if you can't reproduce it in a lab, it's nonsense … that in itself is such a kind of broken worldview."

We think our psyche can be understood from the parts: neurons and chemical messengers, but that's like picking apart a poem or work of art down to its constituting letters or colours to try to understand what it means. We need to see it as a whole, take it in, and feel it to really get it. We are so much more than the narrative of specific chemicals sending messages in our brain to help us survive.

McGilchrist says we're currently living on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island:

"The people who create the technology are rushing us very very fast into this robotic left hemisphere world which takes us into goodness knows what horror. But they don't see it as horror. They see it as utopia. … We sacrifice our freedom, our dignity, and everything to just being this consuming entity. … For a minute, [Pinocchio]'s sort of seduced by this and has to learn the hard way that actually that is not going to be a route to anywhere that he wants to go, and it's not compatible with being alive. … We completely mistake ourselves when we think that every kind of friction, every kind of opposition, every kind of restriction is something that should be done away with and is negative. Fulfillment is often something which doesn't come unless you've overcome some kind of obstacle in doing it. And in doing so, you increase the capacity of what a human being can do, and certainly what you can do. … Suffering is part of what makes us fulfilled."

Tech advances make things easy, particularly in how we fill our leisure time, but that leads to less pleasure. Effort isn't the enemy. We want to stop our compulsion to scroll, in order to start a compulsion to go to the gym so we don't have to make an effort to think about what we're doing. But there are no quick fixes. It's just us here, doing the work over and over and over to get back on a preferred path, which requires having a thought process around what we're doing and whether or not we want to be doing it in the moment.

MYTH OF BEING UNAFFECTED BY THE WORLD

In a takedown of one "reward center" proponent, Stanton Peele said, "if you label things genetic, you are guaranteed some kind of audience, no matter how ludicrous your claims." By "detoxing," we're already doing the things that help de-condition us: avoiding the external stimuli that provokes a response, but people prefer to think of it as a change in chemistry.

Why do we prefer the dopamine story?

I wonder if believing we're scrolling or gaming for hours is because of dopamine affecting us, removes our sense of responsibility for our actions. That might relieve any shame around it, which can feel great, but it also takes away our agency to actually change things.

Perhaps a different narrative that removes shame but keeps agency intact is to see these habits as conditioned by the toughest reward schedule out there devised by a technology that can beat a chess master. Of course we're affected by it. B.F. Skinner identified this back in the 1950s. A variable ratio reinforcement schedule, getting a reward after a random number of behaviours, is most resistant to extinction. That's why slot-machines create gambling addictions. One-armed bandits are stealing from you; it's right in the name. Social media tricks us into feeling social and maybe saving the world with clicks, which add extra layers to wade through. It's a more sophisticated thief stealing our time, energy, and focus for a company's profit.

But people hate to believe they've been conditioned, as if we're too smart for that nonsense. If we're at the mercy of our chemical composition, that's just unfortunate; by contrast, if we can't stop because we're been conditioned, then we're an automaton, or of lower intelligence, or a simple animal, as if we should be immune to conditioning. Operant conditioning has been criticized for creating a mechanistic model of the self, as if believing in schedules of reinforcement usurps our free will, instead of a recognition that we are animals affected by the presentation of stimuli in our environment in a way that developed over millions of years. It's necessary when we struggled to get food and needed something to drive us to seek it out relentlessly, and now it's being exploited by corporations.

We like to think that it's possible to be unaffected by our environment as if it's a weakness to be affected by the world instead of a reality of our lives. Thinking of extinguishing the response by removing the stimuli and admitting the conditioning makes that more evident. Being affected by the world isn't just seen as weak, it might also be kind of scary. It requires peeking over some defenses that help us feel untouchable.

To feel stronger, some people might try to stop scrolling without changing their environment: with the phone full of fun apps and available all the time. That's like trying to quit drinking with a fridge full of beer. There's no shame in making it easier by getting rid of the triggering stimuli because this is notoriously a really hard reinforcement schedule to beat. Most of us can't fully unplug from systems that have become the infrastructure of our daily lives, so we need help to stop once we start. We have more agency over the situation if we acknowledge what affects us and the work it takes to uncondition ourselves. It also means admitting that we are animals. But, like other animals, when rats lever pull for hours obsessed with their inconsistent rewards, they're not bad rats! Rats don't push levers because of any moral failing, but because they evolved to be wired to behave for survival now in a system in which this wiring is less than optimal. Even brilliant human beings are conditioned to do things, so it's still not your fault, AND it's possible to change.

Changing our environment is easier than hoping to change our chemistry. Granted it's so much easier to extinguish the behaviour if the world changes the reward system for us, like schools that won't allow phones in classrooms. Barring that, being aware of our thoughts helps to notice our perception of the rewards, which helps to minimize the potential reward or create distance from the thoughts instead of automatically fostering the cravings (don't feed the fire!). We can also distract from the trigger, find an alternative that aims for less fleeting joys, set time limits and alarm, urge surf, recognize our phone as a slot machine, get a support group or friends to drag you away, promise to chat at a time you often get sucked into scrolling,... It can help to find something to care about outside yourself: instead of touching grass, plant something. There are lots of helpful apps and specific strategies. But it's on us to do it.

Paying attention to be able to think before acting in order to slay our dragons is work, for sure, but it might help us to master that ancient skill of measurement. Once we firmly decide we don't want to spend our free time lever pulling and scrolling, it's still not easy to change, but it's possible. But it requires removing the stimuli: a device detox.

Not Just a Health Issue

2025-11-04T14:47:00.007-05:00

Professor Lidia Morawska just won a quarter million dollar science prize for her work in proving that Covid is airborne, against the WHO's public announcement to the contrary back in March 2020. Her efforts saved lives.

"A renowned expert in air quality and health, Morawska, of the Queensland University of Technology, began contacting international colleagues. She eventually gathered 239 scientists globally to highlight the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The public pressure eventually prompted the WHO and other authorities to update their public health guidelines. ... 'Science and scientists are nowhere near as listened to as in the past, and decisions are not based on science.' It is a problem she hopes to tackle by bringing scientists together as she did during the early years of the pandemic."

That feels like a lifetime ago, long forgotten by many, yet illnesses and death from Covid haven't retreated.

A US study tracked 150 million workers and absences "since the end of the so-called public health emergency in 2023" to find that absences continue to be 12.9% higher than before the pandemic. "Absences were highest in occupations with the greatest exposure to the public." And last month a global insurance firm "pegged that number of excess deaths at 2% above the pre-pandemic annual mortality rate. ... That's roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day." They cited long Covid as a significant factor. Andrew Nikiforuk reports in The Tyee,

"These two realities underscore a fact that is scarcely mentioned in the media and has become politically unpopular to say. Nearly six years after the arrival of the Covid pandemic, the virus continues to undermine public health, rattle politics and unsettle the economy. ... Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complexity scientist and one of the founders of the World Health Network ... was one of the first to champion the importance of N95 masks in an airborne pandemic, and he was one of the first to warn about the long tail of pandemics. ... He thinks the fallout from repeated Covid infections poses a growing 'existential threat' to human health. He is encouraged by the belated recognition of Covid as an airborne disease, including new Canadian standards for masks in health-care settings. And he is deeply worried about new evidence on how children are affected by Long Covid. ... Every infection increases the risk for heart attacks, strokes and heart disease; for new-onset diabetes; for cognitive decline and dementia; for deregulating the immune system; and for reactivating viruses like Epstein-Barr or shingles. ... Researchers are now beginning to see a link between repeat Covid infections and rising cancer rates in young people. ...

A comparison of the two immune destabilizers [SARS-CoV-2 and HIV] helps us see something that public health discourse has largely neglected: 'We may be living through a slow-moving immune decline crisis. A recent Brazilian study also noted parallels to HIV and concluded 'that SARS-CoV-2 is ... a complex immunomodulator that targets central defense cells themselves. ... Brain fog is not a metaphor; it is evidence of structural loss. We see it in the research, and we see it around us. I have friends getting sick repeatedly, losing clarity, judgment and capacity. This threatens everything our societies depend on. After just a few years, the decline is visible. A few more, and large parts of the population may be too impaired to function effectively, leaving us without the collective ability to respond.'

No treatment currently exists for Long Covid, which affects millions of Canadians. 'But we do have prevention tools: clean indoor air, high-quality respirator masks, testing, and smart avoidance of exposure,' explains Bar-Yam. Vaccination won't stop transmission, but it still helps reduce severe acute disease. 'The tools are here. The question is: why we are choosing not to use them?' ... Respirators such as N95 masks need to be worn by health-care workers at all times in health-care facilities. The blue surgical masks known as 'splash guards' aren't good enough. ... Recent surveillance data from Canada's hospitals shows between 25 and 50% of patients hospitalized with Covid were infected inside health-care facilities over the last two years."

There are some good signs out there, places improving air quality in schools, and a few provinces have returned to proactive masking in hospitals: BC, NB, and PEI. Their premiers are in NDP, Liberal, and PC parties, respectively, so these changes can happen across party lines. Studies on N95s in hospitals show they cut infections by 35% for faster recovery of the primary issue. The article goes on to challenge the misperception that it's not affecting kids that much with studies showing kids develop Long Covid after one infection at a similar rate as adults (10-15%), and it can lead to increased risk of major health problems even two years after an acute infection. A second infection doubles the risk of Long Covid in kids, yet people would still rather let their kids get it over and over than insist masks be worn. The danger of social ostracism in school is more immediately worrisome effects than the danger of potentially profound and permanent health problems and disability. But the more we wear them to protect ourselves and others, the more normal and accepted it can become!

Andrew Wilkin in The Hamilton Spectator had a recent article listing some of the wins, noting that some agencies and organization are starting to act:

"Probably because hundreds of thousands of studies continue to show that Covid-19 is destructive for immediate and long-term health. Odds of getting Long Covid or some other health issue go up with every infection. ... It's changing an entire generation. People have lost housing because of Long Covid and are more likely to get Covid again if they are unhoused. ... Given the interconnected nature of society, in a public health crisis, there is no 'you do you' way out of this without cruel consequences for public good. ... Research has drawn similarities between the immune system harms of HIV/AIDS and Covid-19. ... Men's Health recently reported that the TikTok meme, 'The Lion Does Not Concern Himself,' is being used to highlight young people's experiences with brain fog. ... This individual suffering is not good for democracy. ... One-way masking is not as effective as when others mask. These workers in mostly women-dominated jobs no longer have access to CERB if they get Long Covid or any other harms from Covid-19, like cancers, strokes, infections, neurological issues and more. Workers' right to safe work and students' right to safe learning are being violated. ... Democratic governments and equitable public health must protect everyday people more than they protect private sector profits and declining public health standards, or they risk promoting fascist and eugenicist logic."

Covid is a health issue, but it's also a labour issue, an education issue, an equity issue, and a democratic issue. Surely we can all get on board with at least one of those provoking us to care! Help your neighbours stay alive with an N95!

If you need more, both Tom Hanks and Christina Applegate are still masking in public to keep themselves and others safe from a potentially disabling or fatal airborne virus.

There Will Be Time

2025-11-03T14:01:00.012-05:00

I've hit a weird anniversary that I'm not sure what to do with: thirty years in the same place. It seems significant because it's double any other place I've ever lived and exactly half my life. I like when numbers line up like that. My house closed on the 1st of November 1995, but I didn't officially moved in until Friday the 3rd.

I was in my parents' place from age 2 to 17, and it was so boring to have such a stable home life. That sent me moving place to place for the next dozen years or so. At one point, my dad offered me the house when he moved out to live with his new wife, but I was still restless, so I declined. I sometimes can't believe I turned that down! I didn't want to live in my childhood home even though it was amazing with a beautiful forest out back; it mattered more at the time to carve my own path.

In the first five years of my place, I did all the big things I needed to do, and now I've been hitting the end point of all of all that work. Of course the maintenance turnover coincided with retiring. The furnace died in the middle of winter. After fixing one little thing after another to eke out another year, my repair dude told me it had cancer of everything: "That furnace owes you nothing!" The water heater followed soon after. Then this summer I fell through my 25-year-old cedar deck boards outside. I had to fall through a second time before replacing it all.

I moved in here at 30 with a baby in my arms and another in my belly. The closing date didn't line up with my last place, so I needed a couch to crash on for two months with a little one and two cats. My ex offered the other end of his king sized bed, so now we have two kids!

Is that good enough??

My garden is gorgeous, even though neighbours complain from time to time. When it rains and the hostas droop over the sidewalk, if I'm not on it immediately I get a bylaw visit. If my daughter parks in front of the house but facing the wrong direction, she'll have a ticket within minutes. Some see that as security, but it sure can feel like surveillance. I just have to make sure to follow all the rules all the time; just the price of living in a "nice" neighbourhood.

But the cedars that back on to the condos out back are out of control. When I moved in, a company cut them back twice a year and I was given strict instructions to never touch them; they're not my property. At some point that service ended without notice, and cutting back years of growth is going to leave a leafless mess. I can't imagine calling any authority figure about that, but I might try to tackle it a little at a time.

I've always preferred to roll with life instead of planning the details, but nearing the end feels like it might need more forethought. Maybe. Goal-setting is the way towards progress and getting things done, and all that important stuff, but there's something to be said for being like a tree bending in the wind, able to move as needed when the time seems right. I'm pulled towards living near water, but I also love the home I set up for my family. My two youngest were born in this house. This is an incredibly privileged position to be in, and I'm aware of a third option: living in a small apartment and helping people in greater need by selling my place.

Aging adds the illusion of urgency, but tomorrow is still just another day. Today, I think I'll celebrate by taking a stab at cleaning out the basement. A lot has been collected down there over the years. I'm at that point of thinking that I'd hate to leave a mess for others to have to clean up. Kind of morbid, but we're heading into the years of tying loose ends neatly with a bow. I'll get to the cedars another day.

Indeed, there will be time.

ETA: A bit of a retrospective of some of the many places I lived between those two points of boring stability!

A recent google maps photo of my childhood home. My dad sold it to a mason, who covered it in stone. My dad chose this guy out of many offers because we share the same last name. That's how we roll! Back in my day, it was red brick with hideously bright yellow siding. But the beautiful sugar maple forest in the back is the same, maybe thinned out a little, but still an incredible luxury to grow up with.

I moved to Ottawa for a year partly because my sister moved there with her partner, who worked nights, and she kept begging me to join her. And partly because I wasn't having a great time as a teenager. It was a pretty boring suburban place in a brand new subdivision. My new high school was an hour's walk down a highway, and a woman would sometimes pick me up and yell at me for hitchhiking when I was just walking. She unwittingly taught me to hitchhike. She was never around for the walk home, and that's was always a horror show. I've been accosted by more creepy older guys in that one year in Ottawa than in all the rest of my life put together. I had to run back and forth across a highway to escape this one dude who would pass me and pull over, again and again. Nobody considered calling the police about it.

Then I scored my very first apartment of my own (but my boyfriend's best friend soon moved in after his parents kicked him out). It actually looked way worse when I was there. The white siding is hiding rickety stairs to that top left door, and it was full of cockroaches. I slept with a spatula to kill them in the night. When I first got it, my boyfriend said, "As long as it's not those dives facing King Street!" And it was!! I had signed the lease at night, and entered through the front, so I didn't realize how bad it was (although I spotted a roach right away). I was just happy to be out on my own and independent! I got to watch a 7-11 being built just feet from my window. I was for real pretty excited about that.

After getting evicted from that disgusting place, I moved in with a bunch of guys across the street. We called this "the big house" and it was a party house. It was one house in from the main street, and near the hospital, so it attracted men just out of detox there. They'd sometimes offer us $50 to buy them a six-pack, and we happily obliged. It was also near the Labatt's factory, and it was relatively easy to slip between the delivery truck and receiving door to snag a 2-4, which I never did, but I definitely benefitted from. I regret that I don't have a picture of that place because now there's THIS big apartment in its place. Our house was the same style as the one below this, but grey painted brick and very run down. It had a flat roof over the garage that could be accessed from my bedroom, and we dragged a couch up there for a makeshift balcony. I was waitressing at the time, and would often go to sleep in the morning on the roof to sunbathe all day. We got sued for the damage we left behind. And so it goes.

After that bit of lovely chaos, I decided to get a place all to myself. This is the only place I lived completely alone, and I just lived there for four months. It was in the basement with a long dark hallway (I never remembered to leave the light on for myself), and right beside a park where a couple murders happened when I lived there!! The park was a known hangout for gay men, so I felt fairly safe. Kinda.

I left there to live with that bunch of guys again in "the nice house." This was the longest place I stayed in my renting years. We were the scourge of the neighbourhood, having regular front porch gatherings and seasonal "extravaganzas." The backyard was full of dog crap, so I used to sunbathe on the front lawn, right next to the sidewalk. I can't imagine what I was thinking! And, yes, I regularly check for signs of skin cancer. Those were the baby oil days.

I loved my time there, and I only moved out into an apartment because a guy I liked said he was uncomfortable coming over with all those guys around. But by the time I moved, he was dating someone else! Figures. I quite liked the triplex, mainly because it had a separate back door access, not just a fire escape, but it's funny that I never felt allowed to sit on the front lawn. Across the back parking lot was a KFC, so that smell always puts me smack dab in the middle of the 80s. I put an ad in the paper for a roommate to take the second bedroom; she's the only unrelated woman I ever shared a place with.

Her boyfriend moved in, which got crowded, so the three of us moved into a townhouse together. It was in a new part of town, next to a field with no bus running anywhere near it. It was handy that I already knew hitchhiking is a viable way to get around. I've been very lucky! I don't have a picture, but it's a pretty standard low-income place. Now there's a huge strip mall right across from it, and it's on a very busy street that was all but deserted back in the day. I would have been thrilled to have that at the time. We were an hour's walk from the nearest store.

My first house! Through most of these years, I lived with many people in relative squalor, and I banked as much money as possible to scrounge together a down payment. I didn't buy clothes or go out much, and I was pretty spoiled by guys handing me beers. My old boyfriend and a string of others moved in, which helped double my mortgage payments each month. I just kept filling rooms with people to pay it off as fast as possible, putting ads in the paper for whoever was willing. The people who bought it from me added an apartment above the garage, but it was already a pretty big place on a double lot. It was only affordable because the neighbourhood was kind of terrifying. I didn't notice how bad things were until I had a baby and saw it all through a mom's eyes, like regularly waking up to beer cans and booze bottles littering the lawn and hearing fights in the street isn't an ideal child-raising environment. When my neighbour's kids burned my bushes to the ground, it felt like it was time to go.

I moved into a much smaller place in a much nicer neighbourhood, and I might soon be living alone for the rest of my life. It's a daunting prospect, and I'm not sure I'm up for roommates again. They'd have to be Covid-cautious, but, more importantly, willing to give up their room every Christmas when the kids all come over! It's tricky navigating this time of life!

New Air Quality Guidelines

2025-10-20T10:57:00.011-04:00

Health Canada published new Guidance for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Professionals that acknowledge that Covid can be spread through airborne transmission.

"Indoor air quality is considered an important environmental determinant of health. ... Good indoor air can often be achieved using the following three strategies: reducing or eliminating the sources of air contaminants, ventilating by replacing contaminated indoor air with filtered air from outside, filtering the indoor air ... and education of occupants and building staff on best practices for maintaining good indoor air quality. ...
Epidemiological studies on CO2 concentrations and health effects showed that individuals exposed to CO2 concentrations greater than 800 ppm were more likely to report mucous membrane or respiratory symptoms than those exposed to lower CO2 levels. ... Installing demand-based ventilation relying on CO2 sensors may also be an effective strategy. ... Avoid overcrowding indoor environments with more people than the HVAC system can accommodate. Increase natural ventilation by opening windows. ...
The concept of using indoor CO2 levels as an indicator of ventilation has been discussed for decades. With increased public awareness of the importance of ventilation and commercial-availability of CO2 monitors, there is a renewed interest in using CO2 monitoring as a method for quantifying ventilation. ... Continuous measurements can also be used to see how levels change over the course of the day and whether there are certain locations or certain times of day that are more problematic. ...
With some viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, transmission was also found to occur from particles remaining suspended in the air and travelling longer distances, hence the benefit of wearing masks, effective ventilation and building air filtration, and stand-alone air purifiers that utilize high efficiency particulate air filters when and where appropriate to reduce the risk of transmission. ... There are no exposure limits for the range of microbial agents found indoors that can cause disease, as these are dependent on the infectious dose needed to cause an infection. Levels should be kept as low as possible. ... Effective ventilation is important for reducing indoor transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and includes ... increasing indoor/outdoor air exchange with exhaust fans and mechanical ventilation systems, filtering air efficiently, and opening external windows and doors. Ventilation can help reduce viral transmission in indoor spaces by preventing the accumulation of potentially infectious respiratory particles in the air. Good ventilation, combined with other personal protective measures, can further reduce the risk of infection.
In addition to improving indoor ventilation, the following should be considered: encourage occupants to stay home and away from others if they are not feeling well; limit the amount of people in areas where ventilation if poor; have policies that require or strongly recommend people to wear a well-fitting N95 or KN95 respirator mask in indoor public settings, provide supplies for people to clean their hands often. Remind occupants to clean their hands after contact with shared surfaces and objects, and after coughing or sneezing. ...
Preventing issues before they arise and addressing them as soon as they are identified are the best strategies to maintain acceptable indoor air quality."

The OSPE calls this new guidance "a meaningful step forward, a real policy win for engineers and the public." This is great news, but it's so frustrating that this is only coming now, over five years since I first started researching all this independently, learning more than a non-professional should ever have to know about air flow, four years since my school admin tried to prevent me from putting a CR box in my classroom when post lunch CO2 levels were over 2,000 ppm, and three years since I tried my very best to push for change from the board office. I've had negligible effect over the years. The guidance is a little vindicating, but I still doubt anything will change significantly. We've known all this -- all this time the information was there for the taking -- yet the powers that be do all they can to avoid monitoring CO2 levels in classrooms or filtering the air. We live in crazy times!

ETA, infectious disease expert, Dr. Noor Bari, wrote,

"Yes kids should be wearing masks in schools and being given cleaner air. Those masks should be comfy and cheap. Why? Because kids are getting sick with a disease that we know very little about, and what we do know is looking problematic.
No one wants to say it. It sounds really unreasonable. My kid looks fine! But as health professionals, we have to look deeper and advise better. Kids are getting LongCovid. Repeated infections don't reduce that risk. Blood vessel and brain health are important for longevity. I'm not talking any talk where I/we haven't walked the walk. I'd like everyone's kids to have the choice of better health, the way the privileged kids do. Whether that's financial or knowledge privilege. All the health protections that are available to the most privileged amongst us should. be available for every child because they are our future.
Saying kids should wear respiratory protection is extremely unpopular. I get why, but being sick long term is no fun either. I'd like to give the kids the world I had without Covid-19 running through the classroom twice a year and all the other bugs. I can't. So this is the second best thing.
The absolute worst thing is to pretend we know what we are doing and convince ourselves that playing with a novel virus will be fine. It really might not be. Even if you are in the school of thought that if the kids are still dragging their exhausted bodies and minds to class, they'll be fine. We need to teach kids life skills to manage C19 for the long term, for when they are adults, and then older adults. And we need to teach a way of life that means the most vulnerable amongst them gets to be amongst them. Not isolating, sick, or dead.
If anyone asks me if kids should wear masks, I say 'yes', at least for now. I know that people will think I'm a dreadful person, but my personal feelings about being a social pariah can't dictate the medical advice I give. RIP my mentions."

Managing So Much Suffering

2025-10-12T07:56:00.002-04:00

It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn't used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I'm not really sure what flip was switched. It's not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we'll be happier, but how ridiculous it is to expect anything to stay the same at all, much less get better, ever. And that understanding seems to help reduce some anxiety over the things that can't be easily changed. Suffering is inevitable, but it can be somewhat diminished in order to have more contentment. We can change what counts as suffering, and we can change our perspective around tragedies, so maybe we can also change how we can continue to bear witness to, or experience, absolute atrocities.

One simple way to reduce suffering is to narrow the definition. Comedian Michelle Wolf jokes, "It's hard to have a struggle and a skin care routine," which clarifies that we might be considering some difficulties as suffering in a way that doesn't fly when we widen the scope of our horizons. Pain is pain and can't definitively be compared, yet I believe many of us have an automatic judgment in our heads that lists events in a hierarchy. Typically suffering from having to do a task we don't want to do, like write a boring report or clean out the fridge, or from wanting luxuries we can't afford, like another trip, might be relegated to the bottom as whining. The pain from it is there, though: the agony and stress from uninteresting maintenance that's necessary to further our own existence or the grief over lost opportunities. Furthermore, it can develop an extra layer of shame on top of the suffering if we try and fail to elicit sympathy for having so much food that some is left to rot and needs to be cleaned. When we realize we can't afford that trip after all, this is a suffering we are expected to bear without complaint.

The shame on top of the very real distress doesn't help, but a different perspective might: comparing to those worse off, recognizing the tasks as merely one choice with alternatives that are even less pleasant, or maybe even finding ways to enjoy the task or staycation are ideas passed down for millenia. If we can increase our distress tolerance around these lesser calamities, then we can potentially wipe out the bottom layer of our pile of pain.

It might also help to recognize how much unnecessary suffering is created from clinging to capitalist expectations of perpetual progress. We think we should constantly improve and have more and more, but, of course, there are limits to all things, including ourselves. I've watched our schools shift over the last 30 years from messages about doing your best work to insisting kids should be reaching for the stars and finding their true passion, a provocation that inevitably leads to disappointment. The fact that we can't have all the things we want is great news if we can accept our interdependency with others or cultivate a sense of enoughness by accepting our limits. The shame can add to the problem, but it can sometimes help us laugh at our own childishness if we realize our pain is because we wanted a thing that we just couldn't have because ideals are directions, not destinations. We wish we were faster or smarter or prettier or tidier. Things often don't work out the way we hoped, and that's okay.

Carl Jung spoke to this childishness:

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown. . . . This “outgrowing,” as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency."

And Nietzsche advised to think before we react to a misfortune:

”One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts. . . . All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus: — one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged.”

Of course the Stoics were all about this. Health, long life, reputation, a nice home and good food, and the company of people we love are preferences mostly out of our control, much as we try to control them. They're our preferred indifferents. It's wise to make efforts to influence them through wise choices, but it's foolish to expect them. The Stoic goal is mastering perception to see these things correctly, but it's striking how difficult it is to overcome a desire to get our way despite being constantly batted around by life. We suffer from others. Epictetus has advice for the taking an insult in the Enchiridion:

"When any person harms you, or speaks badly of you, remember that he acts or speaks from a supposition of its being his duty. Now, it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from a wrong appearance, he is the person hurt, since he too is the person deceived. For if anyone should suppose a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, but he who is deceived about it. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, 'It seemed so to him.'"

In Meditations, Book II, Marcus Aurelius echoes this sentiment:

"Remember to put yourself in mind every morning, that before night it will be your luck to meet with some busy-body, with some ungrateful, abusive fellow, with some knavish, envious, or unsociable churl or other. Now all this perverseness in them proceeds from their ignorance of good and evil."

We are likely much nicer and not going about insulting others or being a churl of course Despite having some nasty thoughts swirling in mind, we don't actually say them. (Where's our parade??) But, those very thoughts in our head are judgments of others, which, according to Jung, often mirror self-judgments. When we're outwardly congratulatory, but inwardly seething at the success of others, we're suffering from our own expectations of somehow being better than that other guy. The silly part is that we don't have to be. We could just see the achievement as a factual event rather than ascribe meaning to it. It's difficult but possible, and it could make us less miserable.

If we can master accepting what's beyond our control (even when we thought we could control it), then we can reduce suffering by eliminating the unreasonable expectation of things staying the same or getting better. It's an attitude that's the antithesis of our achievement society's presumption of a continuous upward trajectory. We can't always win them all, yet we're curiously flabbergasted when we don't.

We can practice this attitude with negative mediations: premeditatio malorum as described in Epictetus's Enchiridion:

"If you are going to bathe [in the public baths], place before yourself what happens in the bath; some splashing the water, others pushing against one another, others abusing one another, and some stealing; and thus with more safety you will undertake the matter, if you say to yourself, I now intend to bathe, and to maintain my will in a manner conformable to nature. And so you will do in every act."

Prepare for the worst not just by steeling yourself to other people's potential shenanigans, but by mentally practicing your attitude and honourable actions in the face of difficulties. The premise is that our beliefs and expectations that cause suffering have to be acknowledged before they can be diminished, like thinking we shouldn't have to tolerate being splashed.

Moving up that imagined hierarchy, however, can even more tragic suffering be mitigated with just a perspective shift? The idea of suffering being a matter of attitude starts to feel heartless when we're watching devastating clips in the news. I want to be disturbed every time, fearing any sign of desensitization. But then I still have to clean the fridge.

If we spend some time each day imagining the worst, and being prepared to cope with it, then we can be better able to manage when the time comes. The goal is accepting that the worst might happen today, from irritating people to bloody battles. It's seen in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy's exercise of "Cope Ahead Skill": consider how we might prepare for the worst to reduce stress in advance. Stoics also perceive losses as giving back. Everything we have, our things, our loved ones, our working eyes, ears and limbs, and our very selves, are all here temporarily.

If we stop expecting all of it to continue, it might be easier to bear. Seneca says the unexpected nature of misfortune "adds to the weight of a disaster." We might consider it morbid or depressive to consider what could go wrong; however, it's not to dwell on it or ruminate, but to take a limited time each day to ensure we're not taken by surprise by the inevitable. We must particularly remember death: memento mori. In his letters, he writes,

"'Rehearse death.' To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers. What are prisons, warders, bars to him? He has an open door. There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life. There is no need to cast this love out altogether, but it does need to be lessened somewhat so that, in the event of circumstances ever demanding this, nothing may stand in the way of our being prepared to do at once what we must do at some time or other. … We need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck."

Buddhism has similar meditations. In the Satipatthana Sutta (MN 10), we're asked to contemplate the disgusting nature of our body's parts, one at a time, and then our skeleton piled up, decayed, and reduced to powder in order to reduce clinging to anything in this world. All suffering is because we're so attached to things as they are and to potential good fortune and we're so averse to anything going wrong that we miss the present moments that make up our actual lives.

Before sitting with our bones turning to dust, though, we can practice with small objects: imagine losing a favourite cup and making peace with that. Then your grandmother's china passed down to you. Then your mom. Then your partner. Then yourself.

But it's still hard to do.

Since his recent death, Robert Redford interviews have been everywhere. At 65 he said of aging,

"You suddenly realize you have to start being careful, and I find that hard to deal with. You have to give up certain things you had when you were young, you didn’t have to think about, and suddenly you do, and that creates a restriction of some kind, and that’s kind of sad.”

I've had sudden changes affecting my physical capabilities that have thrown me for a loop because I had a silly expectation that my body would continue to function as it has been until one night, always in the far away distance, I gently die in my sleep, blithely oblivious to illness, aging, or death. It can seem like having that privileged illusion keeps us happier, and what's so great about being grounded in reality anyway! But the denial of our limitations not only slams us with an eventual and jarring truth; it can also prevent connection with others. Forum boards for people with disabilities and chronic illness are rife with stories of friends and family slowly disappearing from their lives. Fear of suffering can provoke us to be callous and indifferent to pain in the worst ways. By contrast, courageous awareness of suffering can provoke compassion.

The Stoics have a concept similar to mindfulness, prosochē: an ongoing awareness of our inner disposition as well as acting in accordance with virtues. This similar skill is encouraged in Buddhism, but also in the book of changes that influence both Taoism and Confucianism: I Ching. Pay attention to what you're thinking and feeling in order to develop and hold the right attitude in order to cultivate the right action in the moment. Managing suffering requires the right attitude, which can only be encouraged with inner awareness. In psychology we might urge people to notice and attend to defense mechanisms, like projections, and in existential philosophy, we're cautioned to avoid bad faith, all the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It all starts with noticing.

It's easier to be mindfully attuned to our attitudes when we're around others working on the same practice on a meditation retreat, for instance. It's harder when we're bombarded with ads and clickbait and others also asking if we've seen the latest thing. However, we're really not practiced on acting well amid adversity. As things get more difficult around us, we cling to what we've got. We double down on our current number of vacations and our right to buy everything we can afford or to the limits of our credit. People in power are allowing adults and children to be harmed, if not directly causing their intentional destruction, and it is so hard to see. When our cities feel more dangerous, it can send us into survival mode, hyperaware of potential harm, and no longer attentive to how aligned we are with our values. That's what makes kindness in the harshest times so heroic. It's a difficult internal battle. We don't know if we're up to the task until we're in it.

Sometimes we work hard to fix ourselves through control over cravings, which can just add another layer of striving to overcome. The needed attitude appears to be more of a surrender, which involves removing the idea of suffering from our typical dualistic thinking as something to avoid. It's part of life that is rooted in our attachments and our failure to fully accept that life is impermanent and constantly changing. This is more true than even for many of us as we're existing under the threats of so much violence on top of climate change and unfettered AI. When so much feels out of control, the natural instinct is to reel it in, but that's like trying to cage a tornado. Trying to fight the injustices just keeps us angry, and we can quickly lose hope if we don't make a dent in this triple-headed Goliath. An alternative stance is to focus on our actions in the moment, trying to do the right thing at each step despite our limited knowledge or control, but as virtuously as possible, with compassion, courage, and thoughtfulness. If we're helpless to stop evil, we can at least add something good to the world.

This isn't a cold or callous exercise, nor is it an excuse for complacency. There is still a place for accepting the grief and impotent rage that wells up from time to time. The deepest suffering for me is watching children in pain and having zero to minimal ability to affect their plight besides making my voice heard on petitions, which staves a sense of powerlessness just a bit. Closely related is watching others make unfathomable decisions that will clearly harm people. It's not just that they harm, but that we can helplessly foresee the damage about to happen. We can only take another step, making the best choices we can with the skills and resources we can access, always aware of our devastating limitations and open to the beauty of the world.

From Marcus Aurelius:

"What is it that troubles you? Is it the wickedness of the world? If this be your case, out with your antidote, and consider that rational beings were made for mutual advantage, that forbearance is one part of justice, and that people misbehave themselves against their will. Consider, likewise, how many men have embroiled themselves, and spent their days in disputes, suspicion, and animosities; and now they are dead, and burnt to ashes. Be quiet, then, and disturb yourself no more. … Your way is therefore to manage this minute in harmony with nature, and part with it cheerfully."

Something like that.

They're Heeeerrrrrreeee!

2025-09-26T15:39:00.008-04:00

You might be able to book a Covid shot in Ontario right now with priority given for people who are high-risk, and on October 27th for the general public. That high-risk priority category is significantly looser than it is for who gets a second shot per year, maybe acknowledging how few come out for this shot in the first place. It includes anyone who is at high risk, but also anyone who has significant exposure to birds or mammals, anyone racialized or part of an "equity-denied" community, health-care workers, and more.

It's still here and still causing damage. In the US, the current wastewater rates are about 2/3rds of last winter's peak. It's baffling that they want to wait for the general public until after our Thanksgiving!! In the past, uptake is so low that it's curious they still stagger the appointment openings for a month later. In the states, people have been getting shots for weeks. We're in the upward trend of very high infection rates coupled with very low immunity in the population since we're almost all a good six months from our last vaccination. That's a deadly combination.

You might get a choice between Pfizer or Moderna (no Novavax in sight), but they appear to be pretty comparable this year.

The most recent Ontario information says,

which is interesting because quite recently it said 6 months instead of 3. It looks like they really want people to get this one. Just... not quite yet.

In other Covid news, Violet Affleck (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's daughter) spoke at the United Nations on Covid and Clean Air:

Unfortunately, some in the media picked it up as a celebrity fluff piece, talking about how she looked in her mask and accusing her of having "health anxiety" despite that Covid has surpassed asthmas as the leading cause of chronic illness in children. The event was attended by experts from around the world, many of whom were wearing masks, not from anxiety, but from knowledge of the potential longterm outcomes from infection.

So it goes.

And here are some great Myths vs Facts from Durham County Department of Public Health:

Not Selves, but Not Nothing

2025-09-15T14:39:00.005-04:00

We're living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion that we are selves. "We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence," he writes in his brief yet substantial 2022 book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.

Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop arguments to further his conclusion: you don't have a self, and that's a good thing.

Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we're wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it's hard to imagine it's not so.

However, Garfield argues that feeling of having some manner of core self is an illusory cognitive construction. Hume claimed the idea isn't merely false but gibberish, and Garfield calls it a "pernicious and incoherent delusion." We cannot infer from a sense of self that there is a reality of self. Garfield asserts that, "We are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes--changing from moment to moment--who imagine ourselves to be more than that." We are similar to the person we were yesterday and a decade ago because we're causally related yet distinct. We share enough properties and social roles with ourselves to feel as if we're the same over the years. That causal connectedness enables the memory of the past and anticipation of the future.

It's unnerving to think that our sense of self isn't real if that just leaves us as nothing more than a collection of perceptions. Garfield calls this complex bundle of subjective processes a person. It's not just a substitution of terminology, though. Personhood, in contrast to selfhood, is a legal and narrative term. From persona, we are a collection of roles we play that don't make sense outside of our social context. A person is like a character in a book without a set dialogue, doing improv as an ensemble player. Our identity includes how our role fits in with the people around us. Garfield uses an analogy of money to explain that our physical body and mind aren't enough to make up who we are since we only exist within a social context. A one hundred dollar bill is just worth a few cents for the ink and paper without the social context that permeates it with meaning.

I wrote a while back about the importance of having some sense of a core self in order to take responsibility for our own development of character. We need to be able to look through our past actions and decide to do things differently in order to improve our behaviour in future. However Garfield's notion of being a person fulfills this function as well. The problem comes that we still want to assume we're a concrete agent behind a persona. The term brings to mind the Jungian understanding of self as the very center with the persona just a small part of our ego out in front and our shadow elements in the dark recesses behind this self. This view makes sense to us or at least it's become familiar to us. We know we act differently with different people, but still feel like there's some real self in there somewhere that's informed by some subconscious feelings that we can't quite put a finger on. Garfield wants us to eliminate our attachment to a self and embrace ourselves as just persons.

For Garfield, the concern with this common self-illusion isn't just about living a lie, but that it brings about disastrous moral effects. He argues that our belief in a distinct self is from an egocentricity that has each of us at the center of our own moral universe. It provokes us to feel proud of ourselves as if we're the sole author of our own actions and to be vindictive when others offend us, both of which destroys true caring if we can't take as much joy in others' achievements as we do our own. The self stands against the world instead of being embedded in it. When there's an inner and outer world -- a subject surrounded by objects -- we end up reifying the self. A self allows us to act from self-interest and the interests of close friends and family.

As a self, we feel like our decisions are not caused, as if we exist beyond the parameters of cause and effect. Garfield explains that when we recognize we're part of the causal order, the fact that our thoughts and actions are caused seems obvious. This is something Zen Buddhist and founder of Dialectic Behaviour Therapy, Marsha Linehan also discusses: once we can radically accept the chain of events that caused this moment, it's easier to accept the situation we're in. We tend to believe that we can make predictions about the world because everything runs by cause and effect except our own mind (possibly unless we have a brain tumour or are inebriated.) Garfield says it's bizarre to want our behaviour to be uncaused and random as if it means freedom, when it actually leaves us no control over any aspect of our lives. If actions are accepted as caused, then we withdraw responsibility for the action, and there's less likelihood of blame and vengeance. We're more likely to respond with care. He puts the west's glorification of free will at the feet of Augustine's argument to explain how an all-powerful and all-benevolent God allows so much harm to come to people.

I'm open to the idea of a no-self and accepting a more interdependent understanding of our world; however, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we generally think our decisions are freely made without cause. Decisions are definitely caused: by ideas, by a line of reasoning, by information and experiences we take in, as well as by social influences. Sometimes we're better able to act on our decisions than others. We recognize that we get better at this with maturity and that we regress when sucked in by social media algorithms, and then we struggle to regain control over ourselves. Decisions are caused but still our own agency. It's not that everything's random, but that it's possible to make an uncaused decision. We don't have maximal autonomy in that we don't choose what we desire, but that's not to say we never make decisions from among choices presented to us. If someone plans to cause harm to others, we might care about them enough to try to change their mind without being punitive, but we will also want to make an effort to influence their decision. Maybe we're just one more cause creating that final effect, but without the actor's belief in the agency of their choice, they might lose the influence of being perceived as acting rightly.

I'm not convinced that removing all praise and blame will necessarily lead to more moral interactions. I agree that we've gone off the rails in terms of glorification of the self and an all-by-myself type of egocentricity. Many of us are often loath to acknowledge all the help we've gotten along our journey. And we could definitely benefit from softening all the guilt and shame so many carry from minor lapses in judgment or from harmless behaviours that meet with social disapproval. Neuroscience professor Hermes Solenzol explains:

"When our natural drives towards food or sex conflict with shame and guilt derived from body image (social disapproval from being fat) or sexual repression from religion, this increases dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. It is this conflict, and not the pleasure of eating or masturbating, that leads to compulsive behaviors. The greater the conflict between natural drives and repression, the more we feel that we cannot control our behavior. This explains why ‘porn addiction’ is often found in people with a religious upbringing."

However, shame and independent agency have their place when it comes to actual harm caused to another person or entire groups of people.

Garfield explains that we aren't spectators in the world, but part of it, co-constructing the world and ourselves all the time. Thinking of ourselves as people calls on us to abandon egocentricity and rethink our interdependence, which provokes a deeper appreciation of and responsibility for all others. A selfless morality includes impartiality, friendliness, sympathetic joy, and caring. It wishes all others well and is fully able to take pleasure in their successes, acting to alleviate pain and suffering in general, not just our own. It's a disinterested caring to avoid being impaired by a "contagion of suffering." It lets go of pride and revenge. I love this idea of the world, yet there exists a handful of people in the world right now to whom I would struggle to wish well. I don't hope for revenge, but justice, and that involves a belief in their free will to make the heinous decisions they have made.

Outside of the worst actors, I do see the benefit of at least loosening our attachment to our sense of self. Some Buddhists argue that it's only possible to eliminate our illusion of self with long-term meditation, but Garfield is more optimistic that it's possible by focusing on the times that this illusion weakens or disappears, which happens regularly. He describes moments of flow, when we're so immersed in activity that we lose track of our very being. It's an indication of expertise when we're able to spontaneously interact with the world, and Garfield calls it "our most effective mode of being." Shedding the self illusion means becoming more attuned to the world we inhabit. When we're in a state of self-conscious awareness of our actions, it's typically when we're training or learning. Self-consciousness is a special feature of our cognition; it's not always at play because it has a limited utility.

Garfield's arguments are thorough, yet they still don't entirely hold water. Others have criticized his notion of dualism, his unity argument, his treatment of Buddhist ideas, and his conflation of groups with individuals. He provides some arguments to have us reduce how much we cling to a reified inner self, which can be beneficial to ourselves as well as the world as a whole. It could do us a world of good to get beyond that childish longing to be special and work towards a greater sense of interdependence and connectedness. We hate when we fall short in any comparison, but we hold fast to this artificial sorting when we're ahead of the game to the point that we cling to the entire hierarchical system. I completely agree it's the cause of our suffering, and we'd be so much further ahead if we could abandon that game altogether.

However, Garfield's expectations of the moral utopia we'd achieve as persons seems overblown. Without a sense of agency as a distinct entity, at least in the meantime before we reach some kind of spiritual enlightenment, the argument that all is cause and effect leaves a door wide open to renouncing any sense of personal responsibility. I don't think we're ready for that. More importantly, as an ethical treatise, I'm not convinced that people living in such an individualist culture will be provoked into selfless thinking by understanding the nature of self as egocentric. If all is cause and effect, and we believe we have no true agency, are we more likely to develop a morality of impartial friendliness or dive into potentially harmful hedonism?

I think it's possible to be less egocentric if we can just stop looking inward, desperate to prove we belong or that we deserve some care. Garfield wants to start with a sense of interdependence from a dissolved self in order to build connection, but it may suffice to start by looking outward to the world which then helps us to feel that necessary sense of belonging. We can see ourselves as subjects without necessarily seeing others as objects.

Safe Schools and Hospitals

2025-09-04T11:15:00.003-04:00

We're starting the school year with high levels of Covid in Ontario, and kids are still getting sick from a disease that, unlike the flu or a cold, has potential long-term consequences, leaving behind micro-clots that can lead to strokes, as well as increase chances of diabetes, brain damage, and more as it runs through the bloodstream and can affect every organ.

Vaccinations don't entirely prevent illness and spread, but they CAN keep most people out of the hospital from the acute illness. Unfortunately they wane after several months and most of us are only allowed to get one once/year. If you're going to do it, now is the time. Also unfortunately, they're not ready yet. The government keeps putting them out with the flu shot despite that Covid is not seasonal; it spreads when people congregate. The best time to get the shot might be one in mid-August in time for school, and then early December in time for all the celebrations in late December and winter travel. Then open the windows in the spring and summer! But the powers that be will likely not release this one until next month.

Professor Raywat Deonandan posted about the Covid vaccination back in December 2020,

"I love looking at this graph, showing it to my students, and sharing it on social media, even though it unerringly brings out the trolls. This is the efficacy curve of Pfizer's mRNA Covid vaccine. This, people, is what ended the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic. Despite what RFK Jr. says."

The red line on the bottom shows the illness level in people with the vaccine over four months, and the blue line shows the results in people who got a placebo. It was later immortalized by xkcd:

A recent article in Medscape reports that healthcare works have been significantly impacted by Long Covid.

"I thought that 3 months was a long time ... here I am, 5 years later, and I still have symptoms. AI think that's the case for a lot of patients with Long Covid, that it just keeps getting longer. ... A systematic review of Long Covid's impact on the National Health System out of the UK found that 18% of healthcare workers were out of work due to the condition. ... A large percentage of peopel continued to work despite their condition. 'Our occupational health policies really aren't fit for an episodic disability. It's almost a dichotomy between being in work or being out of work, whereas these people's symptoms can fluctuate over time, and they can have crashes.' ... Four nurses with Long Covid profiled in The Irish Examiner said their lives have never been the same since their initial infection, with none being able to return to work. They feel their voices are being ignored."

One New Brunswick hospital decided to resume mandatory masking in all patient-facing clinical areas, but not hallways or lobbies. "There are currently COVID-19 outbreaks at the Moncton Hospital, in the geriatrics and chronic care units, and at the Saint John Regional Hospital, in the transitional care unit." Patients and visitors are asked to self-screen for symptoms before entering a facility, but that continues to ignore all the asymptomatic transmission. Patients with symptoms must "clean" their hands (not "wash" so hand sanitizer counts) and put on a mask, but they offer medical masks, which still enable transmission.

Covid is similar and different to many other diseases:

Covid is like the flu in that we need regular shots because it mutates so quickly.
It's like chlamydia and tons of diseases in that you can have it and spread it without having any symptoms. Almost 60% of Covid transmission is from someone asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.
It's like measles and polio in the disability rate and fatality rate.
It's like chicken pox (and polio and HIV) in that it can hibernate in the body for years or even decades before showing up as a more serious longterm illness.
It's often like ME/CFS and POTS in its presentation of the chronic condition, Long Covid, but it also shows up as a stroke in young people among many other things.
But it's most frighteningly like HIV/AIDS in that it causes lymphopenia, the reduction of B, T, and NK cells that fight off infection. The big difference is that Covid is airborne. People who contracted HIV in the early 70s, which felt like a flu, started dying of AIDS in the mid-80s.

I plan to continue to err on the side of caution on this one. Wearing a mask in public isn't that big a deal compared to the alternative.

Opening windows helps as does air filtration units, like very affordable and effective CR boxes, but too many schools just aren't into that kind of thing. Upper air UV really works, but it's expensive and requires professional installation. Well-fitting N95s really work, and, so far, they can't stop your kids from wearing one! It's pretty much all we've got at this point.

Facing the Backdraft

2025-09-03T09:02:00.001-04:00

Climate analyst Barry Saxifrage explains how the CO2 from fires is adding significantly to greenhouse gas accumulation. His charts show the dramatic increase in Canadian wildfires:

"Wildfire is now incinerating four times more forest carbon than during the 1990s. In addition to the surging immediate threats of choking smoke, wanton destruction and disrupted lives, rising wildfire is also pumping billions of tonnes of forest carbon into our atmosphere, intensifying long-term climate breakdown. ... It is piling up in an ever-thickening blanket in our atmosphere that will overheat generations to come. The extra heat being trapped by humanity's CO2 now equals the explosions of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. And rising. ...
Wildfire emissions totalled 30 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) [in 1990]. The much taller bar on teh far right shows that this year's wildfires have already burned massive amounts of forest. Emissions are around 500 MtCO2 so far, with many weeks of fire season still ahead. ... It is tempting to think that this current level of wildfire is our 'new normal.' But it's going to keep getting worse until we take our foot off the wildfire accelerator. ... Levels will keep rising until we stop the primary source of them, fossil fuel burning. ... 'It ain't rocket science -- when it's hotter and drier fires burn more easily and more explosively.' ... Burning fossil fuels burns Canada's forests."

He added green bars to the graph to show how much forests used to act as a carbon sink. It was enough to recapture the additional CO2 emitted by fires and more.

Fires are a huge source of CO2 that didn't exist like this before. Their "emissions now average more than all the emissions from Canadian cars, trucks, ships, planes, buildings and electricity generation--combined" even rivalling the biggest impact to forest, logging.

"Overall, Canada's managed forest has lost four billion tonnes of CO2 since 1990. All that CO2 was stored in teh forest. Now it's up in the atmosphere. These forest carbon losses are new. ... This one-two punch of more CO2 emitted by wildfire and less of it being removed by post-fire recovery is accelerating the climate impact. ... The big tipping point was 2002. In that year, and every year since, Canada's managed forest has lost carbon to the atmosphere. That's 22 straight years of annual CO2 emissions. This clearly isn't a problem caused by a few freak years. It's an every-year crisis. ... This accelerating flood of CO2 pouring out of Canada's managed forest now dwarfs the fossil fuel emissions of most nations."

"Europeans have collectively reduced their climate pollution by 36% since 1990 ... using climate policies that reduced emissions across every sector in their economies. ... Since they enacted [UK's Climate Change Act of 2008], the British have reduced their emissions by 40%."

Unfortunately, Carney might not be the guy who will curb climate change. Mark Bourrie wrote about some concerns with his trajectory, calling him "a tree hugger with a chainsaw":

"As soon as he was sworn in, Carney stripped away Poilievre's best slogan by killing the retail carbon tax in a stunt that looked a lot like Trump's executive-order photo ops. ... Environmentalists are worried about Carney's push for east-west trade infrastructure, which might include petroleum pipelines; Indigenous leaders fear that infrastructure might be bulldozed through their territory. ... Carney pledged to increase Canada's military spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 ... Tanks or climate change research? Clean water for Indigenous communities or warships?"

Time will tell.

Not Strategy but Symptoms

2025-08-28T07:45:00.003-04:00

So, things are a mess. But here's an interesting take on Trump from Andrew Wortman:

"Trump's 2 a.m. meltdowns and dictator cosplay aren't part of a predetermined strategy--they're collapse. A malignant narcissist, weak and unhealthy, colliding with the one thing he can't escape: DEATH. And his team knows it, which is why they're going full-fascist now. As a psychologist, I can tell you: when malignant narcissists lose control, they don't fade quietly. They escalate exponentially--rage, smear campaigns, humiliation, projection, even violence. Every move is about punishing those who expose their weakness to claw back control. This isn't 'toughness.' It's disintegration. In my field we call it narcissistic mortification: the sheer terror, shame, and dread of being forced to confront one's own fragility. To them, it feels like annihilation--as the false self they've lived behind for decades shatters.
Mortification hits with both physical and psychological shock--chest pain, burning, panic, humiliation, obsessive thoughts. They feel exposed, worthless desperate. That desperation is what fuels the meltdowns you're watching play out in real time like an SNL skit or horror film. For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can't sue death. He can't cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It's inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he's powerless--and the panic shows in every crazed rant and wild attempt to project control. That's why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting into heaven, legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist's deepest wound--and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can't escape the end.
The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he's spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he's gone, he can't spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation--with no power to control the narrative--is devastating. When narcissists face both mortality AND exposure, collapse deepens. They don't reflect or accept responsibility. They deflect, rage, lie, smear, and escalate authoritarian grabs. Anything to keep the mask intact just a little bit longer--no matter who gets hurt in the process.
So when you hear, 'Many people want a dictator,' understand: it's not strategy. It's the desperation of a cornered man. His inner circle knows his health is failing, which is why they're sprinting to consolidate power for Vance and others before Trump's decline makes it impossible. And this makes him even more dangerous. A collapsing narcissist doesn't calm down--they grow increasingly volatile, reckless, impulsive, and destructive. His unraveling is personal, but its consequenes--given then office he occupies--will not just be national, but global. History shows what happens when leaders in collapse drag nations into their death spirals. The personal breakdown of one man becomes political crisis for millions. That's exactly what we're seeing now.

Trump's rants aren't strategy. They're symptoms. His unraveling isn't just about him--it's about the danger of what desperate men do when humiliated and terrified. As a psychologist, I see this clearly: Trump is unraveling. And he wants to take America (and the world) with him. Trump isn't 'playing 4D chess.' He isn't following a plan. He's mentally unraveling--and when men like him unravel, they burn everything around the down. That's the terrifying moment we're in. And it's everything those of us in mental health warned about for years."

If it helps, Craig Calcaterra has a bit of a consolation for the doom:

"I've said it before, but reading all the medieval history books I've been reading lately has been so comforting. Makes you realize that there have always been mad and incompetent kings and they almost always die in ignominy, and everyone piles shit on them for centuries after they're gone."

Okay, it's barely consolation, but I do find it helpful to know it's not the only time this has ever happened, it's just the only time anything like this has ever happened to us as it bubbles up to affect our own politics and policy. People have endured far worse, and we might actually get to the other side of it all relatively unscathed. Well, except that while Trump's pitching a fit, other baddies are doubling down on war big time, climate change isn't going anywhere, and the CDC is in shambles, all while vaccine uptake is tanking, and Covid is spiking.

In Demetre Daskalakis' letter of resignation from the CDC, he wrote:

"The recent term of reference for the Covid vaccine work group created by this ACIP puts people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader. Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults."

And so it goes.

Blending Psychotherapy and Spirituality

2025-08-12T20:20:00.009-04:00

In my last post on meditation, I suggested that there's not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn't need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we've leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, "Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual" (1984).

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about "developing a new kind of loving relationship with one's experience," and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn't address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn't address the need to transcend our personal feelings.

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (now narratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don't learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the "breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities" so that children just get influenced by parents or just one parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to "spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves" from this singular impact in order to find their own sense of self. It's somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it's necessary to have this "stable self-structure" before trying to go further.

But without a spiritual element, we have "too literal-minded and serious … too small a vision of what a human being is." Psychotherapy can focus too much on content and not enough on the human being. It's changing more recently, focusing less on content and more on how we are with our experience. Welwood wants to stop trying to overcome emotional content and instead open up to it. If we can't open up to anger, for example, we end up trying to be nicer (people pleasing) or overmonitoring our behaviour to avoid triggers, which can create more stress. Yet there's even more ground to cover than just this.

The purpose of spiritual practice is "to help liberate us from attachment to an imprisoning self-structure." Specifically, Welwood talks about working with the five poisons (kleshas) of grasping, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, pride, or clinging, aversion, delusion, and comparison. We can also remember it with rhyming couplets: praise, blame, failure, fame, loss, gain, pleasure, pain. Spirituality focuses on noticing that we're clinging or grasping at things and learning to let go of some of what feels necessary to our lives, like being the best at work or never making mistakes, etc. When we glorify the ego in psychotherapy or focus too much on our issues, it impedes our capacity to move beyond ourselves towards a more open awareness. We're terrified of the idea of being egoless, but it can help us cope with life to overcome our identification with whatever we imagine ourselves to be.

Welwood's version of spirituality hinges on meditation. He traces a misunderstanding we have about it to Jung, who saw meditation as a move inward down a road to the unconscious. However, according to Welwood, Buddhist meditation is to develop transparent perception, which doesn't require inward concentration. It's about sharpening awareness to see things as they are through diffuse attention to everything all at once. Being a part of it all, all the time, by noticing thoughts, feelings, sensations from all senses. I think of it using a film analogy: it's the shift from rack focusing (back and forth between foreground and background) to a deep depth of field where everything is in sharp focus at once. It's not trying to get rid of thoughts, to stop them or ignore them, but trying to notice them and let them go. No longer clinging to or believing every thought that pops in our head, "allows us to eat the poisons of confused mind and also transmute them." The goal is a recognition of our "suchness" by staying in the present moment.

I still don't have a regular meditation practice despite immersing myself in a lot of books on the topic, but I do find a change just from noticing things, the thoughts and feelings that come and go, as well as the behaviour of others in my vicinity, and the larger canvas. One Zen primer suggests that curious, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness is most of the task, with meditation actually a much smaller part of the daily practice, and I'm banking on that for the time being.

With a mix of psychotherapy and spirituality, instead of getting stuck in a problem by dwelling on the content of the experience, or rising above it and the ins and outs of regular life as well, Welwood says we can "stay with our frozen structures and transform them. That is the core of practice, I believe, in both psychotherapy and meditation." Psychotherapy is reflective and spirituality gives us pure presence. Without the mix, we end up stuck in one of three traps.

The first trap, spiritual bypass or "premature transcendence", is from step-skipping: jumping over psychotherapy to immerse in spirituality. When we avoid doing our psychological "work" with any unfinished business, and hope to overcome it all with meditation, it's an attempt to obliterate ourselves, and spirituality just becomes another avoidant defense mechanism. Welwood explains that this originates because, "Many people are introduced to spiritual teachings and practices which come from cultures that assume a person having already passed through the basic developmental stages." But we have to make peace with the "raw and messy side of our humanness" before we can go beyond it. For instance, if we practice detachment by dismissing the need for love, it only drives the need underground where it can act out when we least expect it and grow in intensity. In an interview in 2011, Welwood said this bypassing can develop a compensatory identity that defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel like we're not good enough and use our spiritual practice as a defense against our own inner turmoil. He says,

"I've often seen how attempts to be unattached are used in the service of sealing people off from their human and emotional vulnerabilities. In effect, identifying oneself as a spiritual practitioner becomes used as a way of avoiding a depth of personal engagement with others that might stir up old wounds and longing for love. It's painful to see someone maintaining a stance of detachment when underneath they are starving for positive experiences of bonding and connection."

The second trap comes with being enmeshed with psychology without any spiritual elements, and we end up naval-gazing, being overly fascinated with our own personal stuff. Welwood describes it as becoming an "emotional junky who gets hooked on processing personal stuff." When we lose sight of the rest of the universe, we miss how much our identity is created by everything outside ourselves. In Jay Garfield's excellent book, Losing Ourselves, he discusses the importance of putting aside the egocentricity of self-absorbed improvement because we can't actually see ourselves without also noticing the field around us. Garfield explains,

"We are social animals who only become the individuals we do in social contexts that scaffold our flourishing. We can only make sense of our lives and see them as meaningful when we understand our personhood and when we give up the fantasy of independence encoded in the idea of a self."

This idea also runs as a thread in Richard Polt's book on Heidegger, where Polt explains,

"If our connections to other beings were cut, we would not end up inside our mind - we would end up without a mind at all. The mind is dependent on minding -- caring about other beings, which show up as mattering to us. The less involved we are with who we are, the more we can recognize our deep bond with all sentient beings."

There's nothing inside that we can latch on to that can make sense without also looking outside at the same time.

The final trap is fear-born apathy. Our culture has us too desensitized to our personal and spiritual development. We don't do either well because we hate to look too deeply or feel too strongly. It's scary! We numb ourselves to avoid feeling the full range of pleasures and pains. We avoid what's painful or intense and grasp anything comfortable, familiar, or convenient. This feeds all our addictions and compulsions, which are typically masking our aversions. Nietzsche nailed this idea back in 1872 in Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations:

“Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear–and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability [or scrolling or meditation]. The human being evades suffering as best he can, but even more so he evades the meaning of endured suffering; he seeks to forget what lies behind it by constantly setting new goals.”

I'm not just name dropping what I've read lately, but seeing this same perspective in so many places gives it greater weight.

Welwood offers a solution in three simple principles to remember from ancient China: earth, heaven, man. He reframes it bodily as feet, head, and torso. Our feet stand on the ground, rooted, to remind us that we are part of the world. Our psychology doesn't need to be fixed, but can be pruned and fertilized like a tree by repairing any damage to develop a workable sense of self. He references several methodologies (Jungian, Focusing, Gestalt…) but primarily those that get out of the head and into the felt sense of things to reach the emotional core of issues. At the other end, our head is oriented to the sky, the spiritual, and we need to extricate ourselves from roots that are circling back to the self. Like a plant that's root-bound, ther's no room for further growth. This is done by letting go of attachment to our idea of who we are to "just let ourselves be, without holding onto some structure, some agenda, some goal or purpose." We're terrified of uncertainty, but we can get comfortable with emptiness to see gaps in conversation like rest bars in a piece of music and await the next refrain with curiosity instead of an agenda. We can also psychologically let go of old conditioned patterns by noticing the judgment involved when we're grasping, defensive, resistant, or judgmentally comparing ourselves to others. Just noticing how often we're in that place is a big first step.

Finally, Welwood points out that, unlike most animals, humans move around with our torso exposed, our vulnerable belly and heart, without shells or quills or claws to protect it. Our self is entirely relational, and we're made to be emotionally affected by each other. But that's terrifying! So we build some "character armor". We have to cut through the armor to let others in and appreciate them as they are. Welwood describes the armor like a saloon door; our task is "oiling the door so that it can open in both directions without getting stuck". Psychology can help here, but it's mainly a spiritual letting go and opening space for others to reach us. Fortunately, "letting go also means developing a greater sense of humor which arises from being able to step out of being stuck in a structure," and compassion comes from involvement in the world and having the possibility of transcending limitations. With training, instead of guarding against others, we can let others touch us more deeply, less wary of their emotional expression,

"For pain and neurosis also contain their own colors and energies which wake us up. This dance of phenomena, this play of the mind, has its own kind of beauty. … I can begin to appreciate someone's character armor, how it served to protect him, and what a skillful creation it is in its own way."

It starts with noticing the inner and outer world in the present moment without judgment. That sounds like a life's work right there! Welwood, and so many others, make it seem that meditation is the one task that helps us find and maintain that present moment perspective, so it's understandable that people dive right in before developing a stable sense of self. But we have to find ourselves before we can lose ourselves.

The image that stayed with me from Welwood's work is being a big tent at a festival. The life inside it is the life inside us always at play, but we're also the container that protects that life from the elements with wide open sides that enable an ongoing interplay with the world. We're tied to the earth, but constantly expanding in all directions. It gives me the same feeling as when neuroscientist Louis Cozolino suggested that the space between each of us is like a synaptic gap between neurons. The entire world is a place for communication and connection if we're receptive to it.

Yup, Still Writing About It

2025-07-28T19:07:00.005-04:00

Covid is still here and still killing more people than car crashes. The highest vehicle fatality rate in Canada in the past decade was in 2023, with 1,964 deaths with over 8,000 serious injuries. For Covid, counting less than the last year (about 11 months) and only from participating provinces, we've had 2,248 deaths and over 33,000 serious illnesses that required hospitalization. So, more.

In some places, it's way more right now!

California is experiencing a surge, and Honduras is experiencing such a spike in illnesses that they're mandating face masks again in hospitals, airports, shopping centres, schools, public transport, and other enclosed or crowded paces. A recent study suggests that LongCovid may be far more common than currently estimated at about one in ten people, with non-human primates studied reaching 90% of the population with bio-markers:

"Even if you started off lean and healthy, this study shows it won't protect you from some of the worst consequences of Covid."

I compare Covid rates to car crashes because we still, pretty much all of us, take precautions whenever we get in our car, and most of it don't even think about it any more. Some precautions are imposed on us, like I had to ditch my car because apparently the MTO would take it off the road for rust that could enable exhaust to get inside the vehicle. Air bags and driving laws are imposed on us. But we willingly strap ourselves in our cars, for most of us, even when no cops are around. I do it automatically before I start the car. It became second nature.

N95s really prevent illness from almost any virus, but most are still resistant to wearing them, as if the risk is perceived as too minimal to take precautions. But even if we're not worried about getting it, shouldn't we still at least be concerned about spreading it??

A recent study (from OHSU) discussed how doctors and caregivers are missing signs of LongCovid in newborns to preschoolers because they don't know what to look for, despite that their study found 15% of previously infected kids had it. Symptoms might include stuffy nose, coughing, poor appetite, and low energy. Lawrence Kleinman, a medical school prof said,

"The Covid pandemic began with a myth - that children are spared its ill effects. In contrast, many children were sick with Covid, and we now have a new chronic illness emerging."

As we've known for years, like many other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 hibernates in the body after the initial infection. We've known since 2020 that it damages blood vessels--even in kids!

"Some adverse aspects of Long Covid may not be apparent until some point in the future. That suggests the condition is more common than current estimates reflect."

Another study suggests that Long Covid may have surpassed asthma as the most common chronic condition experienced by American children."

This review of Eddington, a movie about a town fighting over the best way to manage a pandemic, says it for viewers to be able to sink back into the trauma of May 2020:

"Even five years on, the sight of someone proudly maskless inside a grocery store during a time of mask mandates is familiarly disheartening, made even more acutely so by the fact that ... heartless self-importance has become de rigueur. ... What Aster does manage that most Covid media ... doesn't is a perceptive take on how easily kindness and empathy were misdefined. ... Covid is a harbinger of change that Joe [who sticks up for anti-maskers] has no power over, and the lack of control makes him feel small and unimportant in his own being, an insecurity reflected by his squeaky voice and diminutive stance. While it would be considerate to think about a neighbor's safety and mask up, real empathy demands decentering the ego, and that's something Joe is incapable of, going so far as to position himself as a champion of small-town compassion."

Also good to remember that it sucks to be sick! A simple N95 can prevent all of this!

Some Useful Reminders:

Almost 60% of transmission is from asymptomatic cases (either before symptoms appear or from people who don't have any symptoms). So that healthy-looking person might be more of a risk than someone coughing up a lung. If you only throw on a mask when you hear coughing, you might decrease your chance of getting it by a bit, but you'll miss all the cases that are doing most of the spreading. That's why some of us still mask around people who seem fine.

Covid hangs around in the air for a good couple of hours and can cross a room in minutes, like smoke. If you're within distance that if another person were smoking a cigar you could smell it, then you're close enough to catch a virus from them.

Rapid tests show as much as 50% false negative in the first five days. If you might be infected, mask also at home for 5 days, and then test on day 6.

Covid isn't a cold; it's a vascular disease that causes blood clots to form throughout the vascular system and swells glial cells in the brain and can hibernate for years, coming back with a vengeance, like chicken pox, but also like HIV.

N95s can be worn over and over provided they don't get wet or dirty.

Touching things isn't a big deal as long as you don't touch your mouth, nose or eyes. I wear a mask and glasses whenever I go out and don't think twice about handshakes or passing an object around. They prevent any contact with all my face holes. Back home, I take off the glasses and mask and wash my hands before carrying on with my day.

Vaccinations help reduce the acute symptoms, but you can still get it along with lingering blood clots that could lead to a stroke, and vaccines effectiveness is reduced dramatically in a few months.

There's little access to any treatments, so all we have is prevention. N95s actually work (if worn properly and all the time when in public), but they work even better when more people wear them.

On that Sexual Assault Case

2025-07-25T12:17:00.004-04:00

I listened to a CBC call-in show about the London sexual assault trial of five former Hockey Canada players. All the callers were either on one side or another. I think there's a middle path.

The gist of the case: Back in June 2018, a woman known as "E.M." was drinking at a bar where the hockey team was celebrating a big win. She consented to go back to a hotel room with one of the team members. A little later, he texted others to come up for a three-some, and up to ten guys were in the room at one point. Allegedly, five of the guys, all between 18 and 20, either had sex with her or had sexually assaulted her. Afterwards she called a friend, crying, saying she was upset at herself for what had happened. All men were acquitted because E.M.'s testimony wasn't seen as credible. A possible reason for this is that she filed a civil suit in 2020, and, if any of her testimony was different between then and now, that brings her credibility into question. Typically a criminal case is filed before a civil case, and she had started a criminal case soon after the event, but that was put on pause, at which time she moved to a civil case. That civil case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

First of all, how many of us describe an event exactly the same way after five years? Our brain changes our memories slightly whenever we re-remember an event. It's a very high bar to meet to have explain every detail exactly the same way.

Yet I don't disagree with the verdict because, as far as I've heard or read, at no time did she indicate she didn't want to be there either verbally or gesturally. They taped her giving consent. If it seemed like enthusiastic consent, then can we really convict the guys? However, if that video tape was coerced, and she was threatened in some way to make the video, that would be a different story.

I also believe she didn't want to be there, for sure. And it's possible she was so afraid and distraught that she was going along with it to survive the evening, pretending things were okay, letting on that she was cool with it all (if that was, in fact, the case - I don't have all the details). One caller said, if she didn't like it, she should have just walked out. "Nobody was holding her down." However, all sorts of things may have been pinning her to the spot. Fear can lead us to do things that don't always seem to make sense in the light of day. She did what she needed to do to get through it all. I can imagine a brief thought flashing through her mind like, "If I bolt, will they grab me and get really violent?"

She also had been drinking, but apparently not enough for it to be counted as being taken advantage of.

Another caller to the radio show found the whole act morally reprehensible and wondered how any of the guys could take part. If he had walked in, he said, he would have immediately walked back out. But I wonder if he would have, at 18, as part of a strongly cohesive sports team. Groupthink is powerful stuff. On top of that is a whole lot of porn that depicts women appearing to love to be tag-teamed. Too many boys and men are learning sexual dynamics from depraved media.

From a legal standpoint, I'm not outraged by the verdict since it seems like there was consent. But I do worry that those men and many others will look at the verdict to mean they did nothing wrong, which isn't the case at all. I worry the verdict gives men a sense of permission to do more of the same. From a moral standpoint, I also find it reprehensible. I mean, I have nothing against sexual adventures, but we'd do well to remember we're with another human being who, regardless any signals or even requests given to the contrary, deserves to be treated with care and respect merely by being another person, not an object to be used.

If someone asks to be punched in the face, and films the consent, it might not be legally considered assault (I have no idea, really), but it's still wrong to do damaging harm to another person. Right!? Even if they ask to be harmed. Even if they don't duck or otherwise try to stop the harm. Even if they seem to enjoy it. Even if they just stand there and take it, it's still wrong to do it. A person's apparent tolerance of abuse doesn't negate the agency of the abuser. It's why in boxing and wrestling there are rules and a referee to prevent crossing that line. Even if they don't tap out, the ref will stop the fight once they're down. In BDSM there are rules.

Nobody was there to stop things when they got out of hand. And I understand how much it takes to go against the group, but we need to help people be that person who's willing to say, "Guys, this is really fucked up."

Something like that. This is a complex case, but overall it just makes me really sad for them all and worried about the perceived implications of the verdict.

ETA: Rachel Gilmore discussing an article about the effect of the manosphere on boys in the classroom: