By YALE UNIVERSITY Futurity — NOVEMBER 30, 2022
The sharp divergence in excess death rates that emerged in the post-vaccine period “is pretty striking… and the magnitudes are quite large.”
CORONAVIRUS PUBLIC HEALTH
A new study looks at excess deaths by partisan affiliation in two states during the pandemic. Continue reading O.M.G. – What Goes Around Really DOES . . .
When the Yale historian Timothy Snyder was asked by Ukraine’s government to fundraise for the war effort, he considered a project to restore Chernihiv library. It would have been an obvious choice for the bestselling author, who has visited the ruined library – a gracious gothic terracotta structure that survived two world wars but was smashed to rubble in March by Russia’s 500kg bombs.
Yet he soon decided that a fundraiser for a library would be “kind of morally self indulgent”. When he asked his friends in Kyiv what was most urgently needed, nobody hesitated: anti-drone defence. “I thought I should do the thing which is most urgent now,” Snyder told the Guardian in a phone interview from the Yale campus. “The ruins of the library are going to be there. I can raise money for that later. But right now, what’s happening is that the Russians are trying to freeze millions of people out by destroying the power grid. And so what I should be trying to do is try to stop that.”
Continue reading Timothy Snyder on Strategic Fundraising for Ukraine
As after every climate summit, the air is filled with shouts of rage and despair.
What was agreed was unclear and inadequate and what was left undecided or simply ignored was vast and terrifying. For example, they still haven’t managed to agree that the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels.
What? Isn’t that what this whole traveling circus is about? The climate is getting hotter because we’re burning fossil fuels for energy; soon people will be dying in large numbers; in 20 or 30 years, entire countries will become uninhabitable; so stop! Alternative energy sources are available! Act now, or global disaster will happen! Continue reading Gwynne Dyer on The Climate Summit-Maybe A Bit of Hope?
Continue reading Quotes of the Week: Not Many Words; It’s Only Wednesday . . .
[Note: the headline above needs some clarification: actually it’s liberal Quakers who aren’t likely to welcome Penn’s comeback; many others may cheer. More on that below.]
May I have your attention, liberal Quakers? The effort among some of you to expunge William Penn from our Friendly pantheon because he owned slaves has in many ways been a big success: his name has been scrubbed from the rooms, building & events you frequent; his writings downplayed or ignored, and the search for replacement paragons, and even a replacement history, is underway.
But if one were to look beyond the increasingly narrowed liberal horizon, one might catch sight of a novel phenomenon: beyond it, especially in (of all places) the former Quaker stronghold of Pennsylvania: William Penn is being exhumed, dusted off, and readied for a comeback. Continue reading William Penn Is Making a comeback — And Quakers Aren’t Going to Like It
