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Basic income, morality, and integrity

January 14, 2021 By Democracy, Featured, Leadership 2 Comments

Today Ontario goes back into lockdown, complete with curfews and the enforcement of the situation by police officers with the discretion to charge people with a violation of the public health orders. Ths is all being done without any significant new programs to support those who otherwise have to travel or move to non-essential jobs – including night shifts – becasue while the work may be non-essetial, living without income is not. It is a situation that is going to impact marginalized people of all kinds. This is an unprecedented public health crisis. We are battling an easily spread, lethal …

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Paying attention to the rhythms of breath

January 4, 2021 By Being, Bowen, Community, Featured 7 Comments

When you live on an island like ours, Nex?wle?lex?xwm/Bowen Island there are rhythms that are like breathing. They come and go over time on cycles as short as an hour or as long as geological epochs. Most mornings I begin my day on my covered porch, drinking a coffee, reading a meditation, spending some time in silence and contemplation. At this time of year the mornings are dark and, more often than not, wet. This morning we are in day four of what is called an atmospheric river, a massive steady plume of rain that extends from the Hawaiian Islands …

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Never forget

December 6, 2020 By Uncategorized

Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Engineers, scholars, women.

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Power and constraints

November 26, 2020 By Community, Complexity, Democracy, Emergence, Featured, Organization, Power 5 Comments

I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things. Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach …

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Lumpiness and likelihoods

November 5, 2020 By Complexity, Emergence, Music, Organization 5 Comments

I was watching this great interview with Roger Penrose this morning speculating on the origins of the Big Bang, and sharing some of his most recent thinking on how the universe might be in an eternal cycle of recreation in which, at certain points in the cycle, size and time don’t matter. My early morning mind connects a lot of things together, and today that video led to a reflection on smoothness and lumpiness. And the universe, mushrooms, and jazz. One of the fundamental patterns in the universe is that there are clumps of matter. This always amazed me. The …

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