Friday, October 16, 2020

In the news, Wednesday, October 7, 2020

 

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OCT 06      INDEX      OCT 08
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from Anglican Journal

When we moved from the United States to Canada in 2018, my spouse and I faced two questions from inquisitive Canadians: “Why on earth would a Floridian move to Canada?” and “Is it because of Trump?” Canadians have heard me hesitate before answering such questions, but not from a lack of answers. We relocated to Canada for a variety of reasons: an excellent educational opportunity for Kate, more equitable access to health care and a preference for the Canadian way of doing things. We aren’t refugees; we came by choice, deciding we wanted to become Canadians. We’re like many immigrants who call Canada their new home. We want to be here. I know that many Canadians—including Canadian Anglicans—will be glued to the news on Nov. 3, as the American election draws to a close. I know this in part because they’ve told me, but also because of the revelations of 2020. This is the year in which hundreds of thousands of Americans have suffocated—most in ICUs, but some in forest fires and under boots. I think most Canadians now see leadership in the United States as crueler than they had imagined. To many people in Canada and the world, this election matters deeply.

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from City Journal
A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute

Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public. From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus. People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly. Yet politicians and public-health officials conducting this unprecedented experiment have paid little attention to these risks. In their initial rush to lock down society, they insisted that there was no time for such analysis—and besides, these were just temporary measures to “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals. But since that danger passed, the lockdown enforcers have found one reason after another to persevere with closures, bans, quarantines, curfews, and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, the White House advisor, recently said that even if a vaccine arrives soon, he does not expect a return to normality before late next year.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

The state of humanity has never been better. Yet we tend not to realize how much things have improved. Memory often plays tricks with our understanding of the world. We are absolutely sure that we left the car keys on the counter or that a particularly bad storm happened in the spring of 1983 and not in the autumn the year before. It is a well-established neuroscientific fact that memory is often unreliable and subject to priming, mistakes, and erroneous recall. The saying about “good old days” and imperfect memory has been attributed to many people and the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker used it in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now! to explain why we repeatedly underestimate progress in the world.

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from NPR (& affiliates)
Even before the pandemic, the health care systems that serve rural Americans were in decline: rural hospitals were closing their doors, and the medical workforce was shrinking. This year, as the coronavirus outbreak has made its way from major cities to rural America, threats to the rural health care infrastructure have only increased. 

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

Yesterday, October 6, during a routine examination, His Eminence Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro of the Serbian Orthodox Church tested positive for the coronavirus.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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