How has religion been used to fan the flames of insurrection on Capitol Hill? - welcome to the participants to our zoom briefing today! We'll be live-tweeting as we go along:

Time once again to emphasize the differences between totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism. They're often used as synonyms but they are different, although they do tend to lead to each other. Order one, and the other two are usually delivered soon enough.

Totalitarianism is best understood as the politicization of everything. Every facet of life is infused with political meaning... and subjected to political control. There is little room for privacy or individualism. Every word and deed is seen as a political action.

Totalitarianism does *not* require authoritarian government, although it usually leads to such. You can be totalitarian without having any real government power at all, enforcing your political will through mob actions and corporate power. Examples from recent history abound.

Totalitarianism is the easiest of the three deadly "isms" to slide into, because it can easily be disguised with claims of its good intentions. Totalitarians usually claim to be motivated by the Greater Good. They claim to represent the interests of sympathetic victims.

Totalitarians claim that society is unjust and must be corrected by force. Before they gain the power to become authoritarians, they often assert the right to use force outside of the law because the government is corrupt or serves the interests of their ideological enemies.

@jeffreyatucker In the end, it is all a natural consequence of a very human foible, namely that we all do everything we can to blame anybody or anything else for our problems, if we can get away with it. It's the reason why rulers start wars to squelch domestic dissent - macro and micro the same

The very notion of the germ theory of disease revolves around this and while it is good for selling medical interventions, treatments and pharmaceuticals, it is no good for either personal health, or public health in any way. We need to start looking at health on a holistic level

More of a systems approach to health would get us to see that the whole instinct to stamp out viruses, like the very counter-factual notion of "zero Covid," and other nonsense, are driven by this need to blame somebody or something else for our problems, so we can have our cake

and eat it too, i.e. we can pass the blame to others and go and kill them, be they bugs or other people (lockdowns???). The results are disastrous for health on both a personal and a public level, and we continue on a path of assured self-destruction. But times are changing, now.

Lifestyle Medicine @aclifemed provides the new paradigm, more of a systems approach to health, in which personal responsibility for our habits comes first, starting with nutrition. Immune systems become depressed by fatigue, stress, inner conflict, malnutrition and so on. Change

Back when I went to Bishop’s University, I managed the student radio station, CJMQ. When I started, it was kind of a pirate station. We had an illegal antenna on a roof, and a couple of residences could get us through the radiators somehow. Nowhere to go but up.

Happily, it was 1993. Pump Up the Volume made it cool to be a DJ. Grunge and indie were huge. We went from, like, 12 DJs to 100 and started acting like a real radio station. God, it was awesome. It was like we were on a quest. It felt like a real crusade.

Eventually we decided to try to get an FM licence. This was no easy feat. The bureaucracy was maddening. It cost a lot. We needed to find a proper tower. Long story short, after two years of solid effort, everything came together: CJMQ was awarded 88.9 on your FM dial.

We were going to launch one blissful night in 1995. I planned a massive party and woke up the morning of, not quite believing we’d finally made it. I went to say good morning to my roommate, David, and… Not a single sound came out of my mouth. Not even a whisper.

I had completely and utterly lost my voice. OH GOD NO. I raced to the pharmacy and scribbled a note to the pharmacist: “I’ve lost my voice, and I really need my voice.” She nodded and retrieved two suppositories. They were each the size of large-caliber artillery shells.