rwmtest

Many people are writing and talking about how they are happy to see the end of 2020. I posted a Goodbye 2018 as that had been a rough year for me personally. I hadn't been up to writing anything that year since April when I wrote about my new job. Since then I have been thinking about my future in a different way than I had in the past. The year 2020 introduced changes greater than 2019. This Gregorian calendar year I paid close attention to a series of events: Wet'suwet'en blockades, conspiracy theories about COVID and China, and the most recent Black Lives Matters protests.  This inspired me to learn more, and I started some self-directed anti-racism training. As I was born in a place recently called Sudbury, Ontario, Canada , this quickly lead me to learning about the indigenous civilizations and peoples of this homeland. This has been a important turn in my own life. While there was some discomfort during this year due to the pandemic, I feel I am in a better position ...

On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes.  A total of 2,977 people were killed in New York City, Washington, DC and outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Many suggested that the world changed due to these events, and considerable resources have been spent by many countries to seek to prevent future such events. I have been watching as the death toll from COVID-19 has passed that number: first worldwide, then USA, then New York State, and then New York City. According to the Ontario Government COVID-19 case data: All Ontario, as of today the number of deaths in Ontario alone from COVID-19 is 2,813. Far less resources were ever put into preparedness for this far greater threat, which had been predicted well in advance. This intelligence and policy failure on the part of many governments must be acknowledged and prevented in the future. When you hear people claiming the pandemic is a 'COVID fake emergency', please remember that there were also people who denied the a...

On May 15th the Canadian INDU parliamentary committee published my brief to their study on the Canadian Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.  They published a PDF version .  This is a slightly edited (turn footnotes into links) version. Introduction I am submitting this brief as a private citizen with over 30 years experience in the Information and Communications Technology field. With population growth, aided by climate change, virus and other pathogen outbreaks are expected to be more common. With globalisation and increased global travel, pathogen outbreaks more easily become pandemics. While pandemics need to be understood as a fact of life, our response to pandemics and the various costs of those responses are policy choices. There are emergency preparedness plans with considerable resources, including preparedness drills, for other types of threats such as war, terrorism or school schootings. This has not yet been the case for pathogen outbreaks or pandemics. It seems our...

During the September 11 2001 attacks, 2,977 people died in the United States.  As of the morning of August 12 there have been 162,104 reported deaths from COVID-19 within the United States. Rounding the recent numbers it is similar to there being a S11 level of event every 4 days within the United States. Globally there have been 736,766 reported deaths thus far. These are reported deaths for COVID-19, and I expect we won't know the larger complete total until some time after the crisis is over. After September 11, 2001 the west said that "the world changed", and many policies were put in place to try to prevent similar future events. While COVID-19 is a much larger crisis, and a global rather than country-specific crisis, we are not yet treating it with an appropriate level of urgency or requirement for future planning. Several jurisdictions are wanting to send children back to school as if everything is normal.  In Ontario a few pennies per child are being spent for so...

Youtube recommended the following video to me, so I watched.  After watching I posted a public comment, as I felt the video didn't live up to its fairly sensationalist title. I find it interesting that a traditional media style sensationalist "Questioning Conventional Wisdom in the COVID-19 Crisis" headline was used. What I didn't see was much questioning of conventional wisdom. Sure, laypersons in the media and the general public who haven't spent much time trying to understand either the medical or economic issues may think they have wisdom, but that doesn't make it wisdom. There are even people who are commenting along the lines of "Ya, they were wrong -- thanks for correcting the record" as if this were some sort of political partisan issue. But those of us who have been thinking about these things seem to all be on a fairly similar page. This pandemic, or one like it, has been predicted for decades. Viruses are a fact of life, and the intera...

In my last post I offered a geopolitical reply to a geopolitical opinion I disagree with. I was told that I was ignoring the facts, even though I wasn't disagreeing with facts, only a political interpretation of current events. I thought I'd offer some context for my thinking, in case it will help convince others to take a more positive approach to these global health issues. While I have lived all my life within Ontario, a province of Canada, I consider myself to be a human being who happens to live in a specific geographic region. As much as I can I try to live by "think globally, act locally", and to understand the different context in which other people live when trying to offer any support. The most critical issues we face as humans are not confined within the political boundaries drawn up by political entities (countries, provinces, etc), so trying to solve them cannot be confined that way. When looking at disease outbreaks there are many reasons why certain r...

While most people are taking this specific crisis seriously, and coming together as communities and global citizens, there are still people who are wanting to play political games.  While we are all stressed, and not all acting as logically as we could, we need to all do our best to direct our energy towards helpful rather than harmful pursuits. Everyone needs to recognise that this pandemic isn't human-made, and should be treated as a war against an invasion of this planet. The country that was attacked first was China, and from this every other country had warning that the battle had started. You might expect from having the least warning that China would be doing worse than everyone else, but they aren't. China has taken the fight very seriously, and has reduced war casualties in their region of jurisdiction.  They have also been actively engaged in information sharing with scientists and healthcare workers across the globe.  We need this global information sharing ...