To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
14
Aug
2017
B.C. is heading for another record year for fentanyl overdose deaths. Despite making Naloxone antidote kits widely available, the death rate is up 88 per cent over last year, which was also a record year.
Last year, according to figures available online, B.C. had 935 deaths from drug overdoses. This year, the province had 780 deaths by the end of June. If the rate continues, the province will hit 1400 deaths by the end of the year.
But in the welter of data, I find two facts interesting.
Excluding fentanyl-related deaths, the overdose rate has held more or less constant, below 300 a year.
And there has been not one overdose death at a supervised injection site. Not one.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: addiction, Nalozone, heroin, overdoses, antidote
9
I cannot deal with a world in which there is no God at all. As I wrote last week, I need something that I can call God.
That’s why I write about God. Writing about God is how I sort out my thoughts. Often, I don’t know what I think until I try to put my vague intuitions into words.
But those words convince me that I am not just an atheist, an unbeliever. Yes, there is a God. I am obsessed by God. I don’t know how to understand that presence. But I keep trying.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, gravity, relationships, attraction
7
The question came at the end of a security conference in Australia. An academic in the audience for Admiral Scott Swift’s public address in Canberra asked a hypothetical question: “If… you were to receive an order from the commander in chief, the president of the United States, to make a nuclear attack on China, would you do it?"
Swift’s answer was an unequivocal yes.
Then he amplified: “Every member of the U.S. military has sworn an oath…to obey the officers and the president of the United States as the commander in chief appointed over us."
“Admiral Swift answered the question the only way a serving military officer could,” explained Rory Medcalf, the program’s host. “It would have been a lot more controversial if he had said no, he would not obey the commander in chief.”
Okay, now let’s switch locales. Imagine a similar question directed at one of Kim Jong Un’s generals in Pyongyang, North Korea: “If you were to receive an order from your Supreme Commander to launch a nuclear attack on the United States of America, would you do it?"
Can you imagine that general saying no?
Tags: Serenity prayer, Nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, ICBMs
2
“Why do you keep writing about God?” a reader asked.
Good question. The only answer I can think of is that I have to write about God. I need something that I can call God.
I use the term “something” loosely. It doesn’t have to be a thing. Or a person. Or a being, supernatural or otherwise. It doesn’t even have to be an idea. It just has to be more than me.
And it has to have some kind of volition. It has to be something more than blind chance, more than a probability field in quantum physics. Whatever it is, I want it to have an ethical sense – to want, even to desire, a better outcome for all.
Tags: God