Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, unveiled a plan today for privately run surgery clinics. His entire reasoning for doing that could have been met by unveiling the same plan for publicly run surgery clinics. He did not explain at all why they would better be run by capitalists.

I got tired of writing blog posts that said “yet more family issues, so no real updates” so, although the issues haven’t gone away, just become more chronic, I waited until I had something to add.

I’ve finally been able to get back to this after family illness and hope to be able to continue with more frequent updates. I’ve added a couple of workshops and improved the introduction.

I have decided to restart my nature and garden blogging, after a two year hiatus. Although I have been posting regularly to Twitter, I thought I’d return to the longer form again. I used to have it all on a paid site and it got to be too expensive and no extra value.

I have added three workshops to begin looking at capitalism, starting here. This is my second attempt in this workbook, to apply my high-level systems thinking tools and to establish a structure for the first cut at analysing one.

We have very little time left before the changes in our climate become disastrous. We have even less time to make the changes to our political systems that will allow the scale and speed of changes to our energy economy without having to give power to “strongmen” ruling through threats and violence. Once they have that power, it is very difficult to take it back.

I have found myself starting a series of workshops on a given systems with an analysis of its dictionary definition ― its implications and weaknesses for the purposes of understanding the system ― followed by some brief reasons for thinking the system may not be doing what its advocates claim it is doing. These has so far taken the form of pointing to very strong evidence that it is not, or contradictions between what the advocates claim and their behaviour.

Some of these links are broken, because I have restructured the workbook. I’m not going to fix them here, please just use the main Table of Contents

Once again, my blog entry needs to start with excuses for not having written anything for months, this time because of the illness of at least one household member, which hasn’t really left enough time for sleep, let alone personal time during which I was alert enough to write.

I’m finding that creating this by hand in mostly Markdown Language, with the fiddly bits in HTML and CSS is helping with my thinking, even though it can be at bit painful. Yesterday, GitHub went down and I didn’t realise because I was testing this locally. However, the references back to theme files on GitHub weren’t found so everything was messed up so I tried to fix what was not my error. Sigh. However, trying to set up the navigation through the site has made me think more about the order of things.

I have written a little more in my writing tool (Scrivener), but haven’t published any of it for a long time ― since August and it is now November ― but am finally getting round to it.

It took me a whole year to get anything done on here, but now I have a bit of content for my workbook.

I ran out of money for my old Wordpress site, didn’t like the idea of investing too much into a Google site, so thought I’d try here.