News
1. The RCMP’s ‘no apology’ speaks louder than words
Photo: Halifax Examiner.
Last week, the RCMP in Nova Scotia said it wouldn’t apologize to the province’s Black community for the use of street checks because they are “part of the broader RCMP, and RCMP national policy still supports the use of street checks as a policing tool.” STephen Kimber看着缺乏道歉in his column this week and what that actually means. Kimber writes:
The Mounties apparently don’t just enforce the law; they act as if they are the law. And above it whenever it’s convenient.
And what they’re saying here is simply this: Yes, street checks do disproportionately affect African Nova Scotians. But no, that’s not our fault. If you get street checked because you’re Black, well… that’s your problem. You’re Black.
换句话说 - 从臭名昭著的新斯科舍省上诉案中窃取了一条线，涉及唐纳德·马歇尔（Donald Marshall）的不法谋杀定罪，黑人是他们自己的不幸的作者……因为他们是黑人。
2.夏洛特敦的学校在爆发后暂时关闭
Photo: Martin Sanchez/Unsplash
Rebecca Lau at Global News reports on the temporary shutdown of schools in Charlottetownafter several students tested positive for COVID-19. This is the first outbreak in schools in PEI.
As Lau reports, the first case was found at West Royalty Elementary School. Then by Sunday, another six new cases were identified, including four at West Royalty. PEI’s chief health officer, Dr. Heather Morrison said 10 out of the province’s last 11 cases of the virus have been children under the age of 12. Lau writes:
None of the children who tested positive are in hospital.
“This is an evolving and concerning situation,” she said. “Our investigation of these cases continues with contact tracing and testing underway as we speak.”
Close contacts are being identified and will have to test and isolate. Morrison said there are currently 50 close contacts identified, and “the list keeps growing.”
Morrison added investigators have not been able to link the cases to travel outside the province, and until they do, they are considering there to be community transmission and are assuming new cases are the Delta variant.
“We know that COVID-19 including the Delta variant seeks out groups of people who are not vaccinated and that is what we are experiencing,” she said.
3.肯特维尔议员要求监察员调查有毒工作场所的指控
Andrew Zebian. Photo: Town of Kentville
Kentville镇议会议员安德鲁Zebian requested that the Nova Scotia Office of the Ombudsman investigate allegations of a “toxic work environment” at town hall,Pam Berman at CBC reports.
Berman writes:
在六月，Coun。安德鲁·泽比安（Andrew Zebian）获得了肯特维尔（Kentville）前首席行政官凯利·赖斯（Kelly Rice）在2020年7月撰写的一封信的副本。CBC新闻还收到了一份副本。这封信已经由弗兰克杂志出版。
这封信概述了某些议员和桑德拉·斯诺市长对工作人员的待遇。它声称，雪对员工的声音不当，足以让他们听到并威胁要绊倒工作人员，以便她“砸碎她的脸”。
Rice would not do an interview with CBC News, but other sources say the information in the letter is accurate.
In an email to CBC, Snow said she is bound by a confidentiality agreement and cannot comment on the letter, but added that “no threats of violence in the workplace are acceptable.”
“I would not, nor have I, threatened a member of staff,” wrote Snow. “My relationship with staff is professional.”
Snow also wrote that council acted swiftly on the allegations and that “legal and professional HR advice was pursued.”
Zebian brought Rice’s letter to a town council meeting in July, but Dan Troke, the current CAO, told him a public debate on it would put town “in legal jeopardy.”
A spokesperson with the ombudsman’s office said in an email to CBC, that because of confidentiality, it can’t confirm matters that “may or may not be brought to the attention of the office.”
Apparently, the town does have a workplace anti-violence policy and there’s a code of conduct for town councils. However, one councillor, Cathy Maxwell, told CBC the code of conduct was not effective. Maxwell said she was bullied by another councillor during her first term in 2016 and asked that the code of conduct be used. Maxwell said she “felt bullied” and her case was dealt with by the mayor and CAO. Maxwell told CBC, “they refused to enforce the code of conduct and the behaviour continued and I was made an outcast.”
4. Sharks
Photo: Ocearch/Twitter
Ocearch,搜索和标记大白的非营利组织，找到了一只少年的女鲨鱼周日在W. Ironbound Island附近的水域中。就像他们与发现和标记的其他鲨鱼一样，Ocearch给鲨鱼起了一个名字：这是哈利。这条鲨鱼的长度为10'2英寸，重约697磅（少于weight of an average horse).
Ocearch has been in Nova Scotia before searching for and tagging great white sharks and according to their Twitter feed, it looks like they found another shark this morning. They came back again last week for the final expedition. Global Halifax featured Ocearch on its morning show today:
5. PRICED OUT: Community session in Lower Sackville
I’ll be hosting a community session for our series PRICED OUT: Addressing the Housing Crisis in Lower Sackville at Acadia Hall (it’s on a bus route) on Thursday, Sept. 23 from 6pm to 8pm. Click here to sign up.
哦，您可以随时致电1-819-803-6215致电或给我们的定价消息线发短信或给我们发送电子邮件[email protected]
视图
Are you doomscrolling?
照片：Prisilla du Preez/Unsplash
Last week, I watched the COVID-19 briefing via the provincial government’sFacebook page.我通常在其他地方观看现场供稿，这是有充分理由的。当我阅读评论时，我在计算机前大声说：“这个大流行永远不会结束。”
You’ll recall, that was the briefing when Premier Tim Houston and Dr. Robert Strang announced the “proof of vaccination” policy. While some people were clearly pleased with the news, others talked about their loss of freedom and the tyranny of such a policy. The wellness types told people to avoid vaccines and just eat their vegetables and exercise instead. Someone even mentioned the Antichrist. It was all quite something.
在我观看了简报并仔细阅读评论后，我在自己的Facebook页面上评论了 - 足够适当地评论了其中的许多评论。我想起了蒂姆·布斯奎特（Tim Bousquet）经常说的：“互联网上肯定有很多混蛋。”
我与社交媒体有爱恨交加的关系。从头开始 - 我与社交媒体有类似的仇恨关系。我可以看到它有用。这是一种通信工具，一种学习工具和倡导工具。它在这个大流行中发挥了重要作用。There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there making its way to people already scared and weary from COVID-19. And often all that information is treated equally, so for some people it’s hard to judge what’s accurate. Fortunately, there are smart people using social media to fight against all the wrong information.
Timothy Caulfield is a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, speaker, author, and TV host — he had a Netflix series debunking a lot of wellness scams. He’s spent much of the pandemic fighting against misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines, usually via hisTwitter account.并非每个人都是粉丝。他因这样做而受到死亡威胁。他的作品值得一读here).
Dr. Jennifer Gunteris also fighting the good fight against misinformation and disinformation. Gunter, an OB/GYN who writes about women’s health, sex, and the wellness industry, also tackles misinformation and disinformation on COVID-19 and vaccines. Last week, she wrote this article onThe Pandemic’s Worst Woman: Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Gunter calls Northrup a “superstar of pseudoscience” who for years got a platform from Oprah — and even PBS — to share her misinformation about women’s health, which Northrup wrote about in her bestselling book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. In her article, Gunter demands that Northrup lose her certification as an OB/GYN and that Facebook, where Northrup shares all that misinformation to more than 500,000 followers, take that page down. Gunter writes:
Wouldn’t it be great if Oprah owned the connection and tried to undo some of the damage? She could probably call up Mark Zuckerberg and ask him if being one of the 12 most prolific spreaders of disinformation about vaccines makes Northrup bad enough for a Facebook ban? I’m guessing that billionaires take each other’s calls, but I could also be totally wrong.
Let’s be clear, Facebook needs to ban Northrup. I’ve been reading her posts for awhile. This is her primary cesspool where many who haven’t encountered her before meet her propaganda through repostings and shares. This is where her fetid thoughts gain traction. True believers will find her on whatever fringe platform she ends up at, but Facebook needs to shut her down now. Why is it that she is so awful she is banned on Instagram, but still allowed on Facebook which owns Instagram?
I follow both Gunter and Caulfield on Twitter and have learned a lot. Like I said, social media can be an important tool. Through my Facebook and Twitter accounts I get story ideas, connect with sources, and do fact checking. I don’t know what anyone else’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are like but here’s a summary of mine: Facebook is friends, family, and former and current coworkers. For the most part, it’s people I know and like. They share photos of their kids, funny jokes and stories, photos of their travels, stories they published, and generally innocent stuff. But sometimes I’ll see one of those dumb memes with Police Lives Matter or that newcomers to Canada get more money than seniors (I’ve unfriended a lot of people in recent months).
Twitter, on the other hand, is mostly people I don’t know. I reserve it for work, my own (sometimes bad) jokes, and photos of road trips (and more recently my new kitten.) And I post short rants about employers not paying employees a living wage. I do find story ideas on Twitter and connect with sources — it can be helpful! I read some interesting conversations on there. But I find Twitter the hardest on my head and I work to ignore it, especially when there’s a big news story and EVERYONE has to have their say on it.
I find Twitter the worst when someone shares a video of someone doing something awful. Within hours (and likely much less,) that video is shared millions of times. Someone will write, “Twitter, do your thing.” Soon, the person in the video is identified, their name starts trending, Twitter users find out the name of the person’s employer. By the next day, that employer will announce, sometimes via Twitter, that the person no longer works for them. Twitter has done its thing. I struggle with this whole process in a way I can’t articulate here. But I always have to sign off and step away.
The most common words I see (especially on Twitter) are “anxious” and “anxiety.” Is Twitter making us all more anxious? It can be a hostile place. And all those headlines pop up faster on Twitter than they do on Facebook. Like many of you, I have found myself endlessly scrolling through Twitter, overwhelmed with all the shit going on out there. It’s exhausting.I said to a friend last week that our collective mental health would improve if we just all logged off social media for a bit, got outside, took a nap, or did anything else but be on social media.
There’s a word for all this looking at the bad news on social media. It’s called doomscrolling. Here’s theMerriam-Webster的定义。
毁灭性的滚动anddoomsurfingare new terms referring to the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.
And because there are some smart people on social media, there’s the毁灭性的滚动Reminder Bot, which isn’t a bot at all, but rather journalistKaren K. Ho, who writes for Business Insider and other sites; she created the Twitter account in the spring of 2020, early in the pandemic, to help people step back from all that bad news. Through that bot account, Ho shares a few reminders each day. Most of the tweets simply say “hi, are you doomscrolling?” Still others include other good reminders, like to drink water, go to bed early, or plan a fun outing with friends. It’s simple and good advice that has worked for me when I needed to step away.
Ho与Scientific Americation谈到了2月的《毁灭性提醒》机器人，讲述了我们为什么要做毁灭性，如何预防它以及为什么那些批准的提醒对她也很重要：
What I really remind myself of, repeatedly, is that when I die, Twitter means nothing. No one will be like, “I went viral a lot.” They’ll be like, “Did I have enough energy to do my job pretty well? Do the people we love know that we love them?” I think those are the things to really invest energy in.
Not all of social media is bad news, of course. There are lots of people who use Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms in fun, interesting, informative, and clever ways. With a lot of muting and blocking you can highlight the good stuff. So, let me leave you with some of the good stuff I follow.
For tips on road trip adventures, I look toStephen Archibald at Halifax Bloggers, whose work we often share here, and Ron Zwaagstra, who shares photos of his cycling trips via电话pix。For my history info, I like小历史ns, which tweets out bits of news and announcements from rural newspapers published between 1880 and 1910. Those announcements were the tweets of their time. For fun distractions, there’sHourly Fox, which isn’t a news feed, but rather photos of beautiful foxes. And then there’s未经请求的Dik Diks，带有Dik Diks的照片的Twitter提要，这些照片很可爱small antelopes that live in the bushlands of eastern and southern Africa. These diks are far more photogenic than the, um, other dicks that inspired this account.
Social media is a tool, sometimes a good one. And I wonder what history will say about how social media shaped our understanding and response to COVID-19. But social media is not life. Just a reminder: it’s okay to log off. It’s important, because you and I have better things to do with our time.
注意到
Okay, here’s something fun and interesting I found on Facebook!
In last Thursday’s Morning File,I wrote about my road trips and how I often look at mapsto choose a destination or a road to travel. Last week, the Nova Scotia Archives shared this on its social media (again, this is a positive of social media):1960年的地图称为“新斯科舍省加拿大的海洋游乐场”。
This map was was marketing tool to promote the province’s tourist destinations (you can find the map in the Archives by单击此处).
The archives post asked readers if they could find their own town on the map. Halifax is pretty obvious, although I was interested to see a harness racing horse that represented Sackville Downs where I spent time in the 1970s (my father owned and trained horses there; a Sunday morning in the barn was better than going to church. Sackville Downs closed in 1985).
I see there are markers for mines in Inverness, Springhill, and Glace Bay. The Peggy’s Cove lighthouse is there. It looks like fishing for swordfish was big off the coast of Cape Breton. Otherwise, there are a lot of fish, boats, and beach bathers.What would a similar tourist map for 2021 look like? It would likely have more wineries and breweries, and I hope much more diversity.
Government
City
周一
Investment Policy Advisory Committee(Monday, 12pm) —via YouTube
西北社区委员会(Monday, 6pm) —via YouTube, with captioning on a text-only site
Tuesday
Committee of the Whole and Halifax Regional Council（星期二，上午10点） - 整个委员会agendaRegional Councilagenda; both have live captioning on a text-only site
Province
No meetings this week
On campus
达尔豪西
周一
Exploring the Routes Toward Antiracism and (Neuro)science（星期一，下午2点） -Oliver Rollins from the University of Washington will present this属于扬声器系列：打破障碍研讨会。
Halifax Candidates Debate on Student Issues（星期一，下午2点） -online debate覆盖广泛的横截面的话题, focusing on issues of importance to university students
Tuesday
Turn Financial Literacy into Capability（星期二，下午12点） -webinarto learn how to make meaningful changes to spending and overall financial health
Raising Our Hands: Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Relationality in LIS(Tuesday, 1pm) —online lecture与不列颠哥伦比亚大学X̱WI7X̱WA图书馆的Kayla Lar-on
本地富裕类别（星期二，下午2:30） -Zoom seminar与布兰登大学的杰森·帕克（Jason Parker）
在港口
Halifax
09:00：Trinitas，货船，从古巴的MOA到达31码头
10:30:MSC Veronique, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for sea
15:00:Star Damon, bulker, sails from Sheet Harbour for Gibraltar
16:00:Trinitas航行到海
16:00:Vivienne Sheri D, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Reykjavik, Iceland
22:00:Vivienne Sheri D航行前往波特兰
布雷顿角
11:00:Viktoria Viking, fish carrier, arrives at CME yard North Sydney from Bayside, New Brunswick
13:00：Algoma Vision, bulker, sails from Aulds Cove quarry for sea
20:00:Viktor Bakaev, oil tanker, sails from Point Tupper for sea
21:00：Seavelvet，油轮，到达来自利比亚ES Syder的Point Tupper
Footnotes
A year ago this weekend, I started horseback riding lessons. Saturday was my regular lesson and Sunday I went to the Crescent Beach with my trainer and another student, and two of my trainer’s horses. Riding on the beach is a great way to unplug from everything. My trainer has a policy at the ranch: no phones allowed. That rule applies to her youth and adult students. And it’s a good policy! I should unplug more often. It’s much better to take horses on the beach.
订阅to the Halifax Examiner
我们还有许多其他subscription options available, or drop usa donation。谢谢！
It is very unusual to see Nova Scotia portrayed such that a line from Yarmouth to Sydney is horizontal.
Another way to unplug
A few years ago I used to regularly make late night checks of websites that were stationary camera feeds from an intersection in downtown Charlottetown and Des Moines Iowa (I think). Nothing was ever happening. No people. No traffic. Just a quiet night. I particularly likws it in winter when the snow was gently falling. Nothing troubling. Just life going on.