Spirituality & Ethics

The Centre Does Not Hold

A hundred years ago, William Butler Yeats wrote an apocalyptic poem with the haunting lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It was 1919 and there was, like today, a raging pandemic. Yeats’ pregnant wife caught the virus and nearly died. World War I had left all of Europe exhausted, depleted, and in economic ruin. Meanwhile, in…

Richard Feynman & Unhealthy Systems

I figured out how to solve the current COVID-19 crisis. Resurrect Richard Feynman from the grave. Who? Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a clown, a quantum physicist, an atheist, and one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century. He was famous for playing bongos and infamous for picking the top-secret file cabinet locks and leaving ‘got-cha’ notes at Los Alamos where he helped develop the world’s first atomic bomb. They…

Winning against COVID, elsewhere

A friend of mine recently shared what’s happening in Vietnam where his son lives. When coronavirus came to that country of 100 million (about a third the population of the US) the government immediately responded to the crisis and began following WHO recommendations. They pushed social distancing, moved schools online, and had temperature checks at the entry points of public squares and markets. Further, anyone caught not wearing a mask…

The Science of Masks

There’s a lot of bad science out there, particularly regarding masks. One FB post making the rounds says that since the coronavirus is around a tenth of a micron and N95 masks work in the .25micron range, that they are ineffective. Logical, but wrong. What we know of this virus is that it hitches a ride on water droplets which are in the size range to be effectively slowed or…

What You Need to Know

When a burglar comes in through the window, locking the door isn’t much help. Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been to lock-down the borders against the countries he’s mad at. COVID-19 is a respiratory disease. We get it from other Americans breathing on us. Of the 100,000 people who have died, a handful or less contracted it from a recent arrival from a foreign country. The majority of the…

Prayer and the President

America needs to pray. Please, Mr. President, don’t tell me when or where. The Whitehouse has left a key component out of its guidelines about reopening: the way the virus multiplies when you pack people into indoor spaces. There is an exponential quality to it. If you double the number of people in a room or double the amount of time they spend in that room, you more than quadruple…