David Pope in Canberra Times

More true now than when I first wrote these words…

Important Long Term COVID study points to serious impacts of something far more than just “fatigue”. Follow the thread !

Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Short 🧵 worth your time. Normal process allows bad policy. Only elections police bad policy. Within the laws and Constitution, we get the govt we elect. Transparency needs vigilance; accountability our engagement. We’ll better endure this global hour if we lean into our part.

Dear Media, STOP calling RFK Jr a vaccine "skeptic". He is an antivaxx liar. An anti-science fearmonger. An exploitive brand builder. He has NOTHING to do with thoughtful skepticism. Don't normalize false balance, middle ground fallacies, or his harmful BS.

“The more the members of the SCC overstep their bounds of acting as judges of a general court of appeal for Canada, the more they are daring us to challenge them. And that is what might in the long run be fatal to the rule of law.” Let the Supremes ferociously guard their lane.

When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime - Thomas Paine Reread Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detector linked at the end.

To me, this is the most remarkable thing about global health: With a relatively small amount of money, you can do a great deal of good for a great many people. This is money well spent, and we should go back to spending it—now.

One way Canada can help defend democracy and the rule of law is to welcome those who flee its demise in the US whether they fear for their safety, loss of livelihood, or just want to help build a society that intends to arc toward justice. We didn’t get this right in the 1930s

Ty Cobb: Former member of the Trump legal team speaks out... "[Trump} is worse than anyone in our history in my experience and opinion. As people seem to have forgotten, I was very critical of Biden and despite knowing him and his family well, I spent 4 years writing about his

The course I teach at Cambridge has become exorbitantly expensive and is inaccessible for most people. So I've decided to share the entire reading list with the public — here, via this thread. My course is called "Development Economics" and consists of 8 lectures. 🧵

Not planning for growth accounts for much of what ails us. In my time in the growth space for NB, we found enormous support - but little confidence. Then COVID brought growth and we were unprepared. For centuries, growth has driven prosperity. We don’t have the alternative yet.

The MAGA/GOP, with it’s erosion of soft power, weakening of our alliances and the dollar, dramatic shift of national wealth to the already wealthy and retreat from our capacity to support scientific research, is ceding Pax Americana to Pax Sinae - an epic unforced error. 3/3

Incoming

Interesting, but note there is disagreement on the probity of the result. In Will Wilkinson’s 2019 Density Divide, he referred to work linking high conscientiousness and low openness particularly with red voters while blue voters tended to be the reverse. Still intriguing.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

1. I've said exactly this for quite some time. Expanding on Adrian's point here, Covid-19 has three distinct characteristics as a disease that enables it to be denied at a societal level.

"Nothing that happened in medieval eastern Europe bound future states to make war against each other a thousand years later" My latest essay: "The myths that made Putin’s war" ft.com/content/97312c…

Just seeing this. Hard to imagine a more quintessential Canadian. I’ll remember his speech to the 2006 Liberal leadership convention. Genuine, thoughtful and stirring, a rare politician whose urge to lead seemed to be about lifting all Canadians.