By James Dyke, University of Southampton

And another one bites the dust. The year 2014 was the warmest ever recorded by humans. Then 2015 was warmer still. January 2016 broke the record for the largest monthly temperature anomaly. Then came last month.

February didn’t break climate change records – it obliterated them. Regions of the Arctic were were more than 16℃ warmer than normal – whatever constitutes normal now. But what is really making people stand up and notice is that the surface of the Earth north of the equator was 2℃ warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. This was meant to be a line that must not be crossed.

Saint George’s school is a two story, red brick building in the Georgetown district of South Seattle. In 1946 it had eight grades, four on the ground floor and four on the second. Each school day began with students marching silently into school in two files, one for boys and the other for girls, grade ones leading and grade eights last. Up the stone steps they marched, past the principal, Sister Mary Justin a symbol of authority with her arms folded, and past the wind-up Victrola playing John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” at full volume.

David Hutchinson, will be presenting an overview of the history, medical impacts and opinions of cannabis in 2016. What are the facts surrounding this widely available product and the changing perspectives of politicians, law enforcement, the medical community and the general public?

Recorded at the Sunday, February 21, 2016 meeting of the BC Humanist Association in Vancouver. Learn more at www.bchumanist.ca

Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

The government is working hard to draft legislation to regulate physician-assisted dying in Canada. We need to make sure those rules put the rights of patients first. 

Church leaders are already trying to dictate what choices patients should have in religious healthcare institutions, like those in BC that receive $1 billion in public funding.

We, the public, should have the final say over what happens in publicly-funded hospitals, not Bishops in Toronto or the Vatican.

That's why we need you to write your MP today. Simply use Dying With Dignity Canada's tool and use any of the points in the letter we sent to all BC MPs today.

Dr Ahmed Hussein is a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Northern British Columbia and a research scientist at TRIUMF and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. Dr Hussein will be speaking about a a new and safer design for a nuclear power plants called dual fluid nuclear fission reactor. Among its other benefits, these reactors can make use of waste from traditional nuclear reactors as fuel while also extracting considerably more energy from existing nuclear fuel.

Recorded at the Sunday, February 14, 2016 meeting of the BC Humanist Association in Vancouver. 

Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

The BC Humanist Association has written to all British Columbia Members of Parliament calling for legislation that ensures patients have access to compassionate end of life options.

After studying legislative options for physician-assisted dying, a Parliamentary committee recommended an approach that puts patients first. The BCHA is calling on MPs to adopt these recommendations and ensure that healthcare institutions that receive public funding are required to provide choice in dying.

Posted on March 12, 2016

Most of us try to lead our lives with integrity. But what does that mean?

Recently I was thinking what a waste of time Facebook can be, and asked myself how a medium that simply connects people based on an ‘algorithm’ that assesses their interests, preferences and ‘friends’ can be anything but beneficial?

The short answer is: It lacks integrity. I’m not saying the people who come together on Facebook are any less worthy or complete than anyone else; just that the medium is not capable of conveying or cultivating integrity, and worse, that it could distract and prevent us from getting there. Integrity is face-to-face. It lies at the heart of relationships that have been built over time and proven through action. The main aspects of integrity cannot be established through a medium like Facebook.

Honesty, forthrightness, self-awareness and vision are all qualities part-in-parcel of integrity; they can only be expressed, believed and proven through direct, personal encounters over time. The marketer’s bland bandying of words like ‘integrity’ is an unsubstantiated claim, which all too often proves untrue, and cheapens the very meaning of the word.

We tend to emphasize only honesty when we talk about integrity, as if the two words were synonymous. But, though you cannot have integrity without honesty; speaking the truth isn’t – in and of itself – enough to earn the trust that comes with integrity. You must speak the truth consistently, over a long period; and be fulsome in speaking true, not selecting facts to suit your present purpose; the truth you speak has to be durable, not changeable from day to day; and your truth had best be connected to a larger truth, augmenting and augmented by a common purpose.

These are some of the attributes of integrity. They are qualities that emerge and are tested over time, in direct encounters. It’s next to impossible to convey anything but an unsubstantiated assertion of integrity via a medium as fractured and purposefully casual as Facebook – to which devotees might retort: That’s not the point or purpose of the medium.

Agreed, but that doesn’t prevent people from using Facebook as if it could establish the kind of credibility that comes with integrity. And the observation needn’t be narrowed to Facebook only – social media in general, and traditional media too, pretend to be channels that convey messages of integrity in one way or another. In general there is an inverse relationship between the value of a perception about someone or something, and the number of channels or people it has passed through getting to you; integrity is best established eye-to-eye.

In closing, it’s worth making a distinction between what can be called ‘intentional’ and ‘natural’ integrity. A person who consciously strives to conduct his affairs with integrity is intentionally so; a person, who by nature, exhibits the hallmarks of integrity is naturally so. One version isn’t better than the other, as far as I can tell, but the person who acts intentionally with integrity is more likely to look for ways to strengthen and deepen that aspect of his being and think of it as a measure he expects to be judged by.

Upcoming Ideas: Who am I? / Nothing out of Nothing – so every thing’s always been / The four aspects of living spirit: Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Spiritual / ‘Til death do us part – the inalienable nature of Natural Rights / Ego: The necessary illusion / Just because or jest because.

When good intentions aren't supported by social science evidence: diversity research and policy

By Alice H. Eagly, Northwestern University

You’d be forgiven for assuming a quick and sure way to multiply profits and amplify organizational success is to increase the gender and racial diversity of any group. According to claims in the mainstream media, the effects of gender and racial diversity are universally favorable. News stories tend to mirror this 2014 Washington Post article’s claim that “researchers have long found ties between having women on a company’s board of directors and better financial performance.”

And as Nicholas Kristoff wrote in The New York Times in 2013:

Scholarly research suggests that the best problem-solving doesn’t come from a group of the best individual problem-solvers, but from a diverse team whose members complement each other. That’s an argument for leadership that is varied in every way — in gender, race, economic background and ideology.

The truth is there’s actually no adequate scientific basis for these newsworthy assertions. And this lack of scientific evidence to guide such statements illustrates the troubled relations of science to advocacy and policy, that I have analyzed in an article in the current Journal of Social Issues.

Victoria writer and founder of the Right to Die Society of Canada John Hofsess was fortunate to be able to chose the time and manner of his own death and to die surrounded by his friends.

Hofsess' article “By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead” was published on Toronto Life a few minutes after he died.

Between 1999 and 2001, I helped eight people die, including the poet Al Purdy. Now, as I prepare to take my own life, I’m ready to tell my story.

In December we asked for your support to help us bring a family fleeing the crisis in Syria to Canada. In the past few short months, you answered that call with nearly $10,000 in donations and pledges. This is in addition to the $17,000 we had confirmed before putting out the call

Never let anyone tell you that atheists won’t donate to charity. This is the proof of that generosity. Thank you so much.

I've posted a brief update of where our project is at on our blog. I hope you'll take a look and continue to support this important cause.

We will be looking for more people to volunteer, so please let us know if you might be able to help.