Graydon Saunders's Blog

Things being as they are, it looks like it's time for me to take my books down off of Google Play. (And Draft2Digital; they're a lot less evil than Google but still based in the US.)Perhaps in the fullness of time I'll find somewhere else to make my writing available again, but for now, I expect to delete the entirety of my google and Draft2Digital presence in a week or two. I don't know what

 There was a recent post on Mastodon talking about this year's 0.4 C increase in sea surface temperature and why this is grounds to freak out.I read it, and wished with my whole being that people would start applying science to the whole of the problem.The ocean temperature data is the best science; international, interdisciplinary, broad in its data sources and consideration, actively and

Via an anonymous and appreciated comment way down in the timeline:I'm sorry to report that Shirley Allan passed away, quietly in her sleep, at 02:30 yesterday [2023-02-27], Royal Terrace, Palmerston ON.Shirley was a mainstay of online Commonweal discussion and will be sorely missed.

Update 2022-12-31: Is there a next book planned?If I get it written, I will publish it as I have bene publishing these books.  Whether or not I get it written depends on the Everything and the state of my health.  For my health, so far, the trend is recently positive.Where to get my booksThere are two options; Google Play, or the Draft2Digital publication targets.Google Play isn't available

 No.We know that surgical masks aren't sufficient against Omicron; maybe 50% effective in practice.  Do not burn credibility on stuff that isn't effective, because pretending something is effective when it isn't burns credibility fast and there's already a deficit.  (Yes mask wearing has a statistical effect even with inadequate masks.  Not likely enough, and not likely emotionally for

Ontario health care policy under the Ford government is driven by a belief that there should not be any such thing."Privatization" is "give some guys access to a captive revenue stream", but none of Dougie's owners are old money who own insurance companies.  They're new money mammonites, generally developers, and they've decided that the revenue stream from taxes constitute their money.  Public

So the Globe and Mail discusses someone trying to arrange for policy to support the success of an investment.  This looks like part of a general push against the federal fertilizer emissions cap.I am unable to decide if that push is cynical or deluded or arises from a sincere mammonism where profit is an arbiter of wisdom.But, anyway."I wish to become much richer, and for my descent to be richer

 I've seen this come up a few times lately.Somebody synthesized perfluorocubane recently.  ("fluorinated esters as starting materials with dissolved fluorine gas in a perfluorinated solvent at low temperatures".)  Methodological naturalism is fine.  The philosophical framework of a knowable universe is fine, too.A whole bunch of other things are not at all fine, but all of those come down to

There's been some bits of "people don't trust the mainstream news" going by, and well, of course not.There's a lot to say about structural problems, the "it's not justice if it's not general" issues and the "this is the wrong status quo and has been since the 1970s but the money will not acknowledge that" issues, but those are fundamentally secondary.News is, by the philosophical necessities,

There's a number of news stories about impending health care collapse, closed ERs, and so on.We know with some lamentable certainty that the politics of every province in Canada (with the possible partial exception of Quebec) has been captured by mamonites.  It's been painfully obvious in the way pandemic policies have focused on protecting revenue streams over people.  (Something that is