About the Episode

Official death toll in Maui getting close to 100…As smoke and embers started to surround us, we made it home, loaded a few personal items in the car and headed down south to another town some 20 miles from Lahaina, shortly before my house was overtaken by the fire. As I pulled out of the driveway, I couldn’t help but think that this was probably the last time I would ever see my house. It was heartbreaking. The words of Jeff Melichar, a resident of Lahaina, Hawaii for the past 28 yrs.

The odds of a person ever being killed by a shark are less than 1 in 4 million. By contrast, humans kill about 100 million sharks every year writes Holly Thomas. She says Most of this slaughter occurs by way of finning. Sharks’ fins are cut off by fishermen, and the rest of the animal tossed back into the sea. Unable to feed or swim, they sink to the ocean floor and starve to death, or, in the case of those who need to move to breathe, suffocate.

No one knows more about polarization than Ian Bremmer. The big picture thinker who is the boss of the Eurasia group writes words about an increasingly divided United States. “This trend was driven first by political talk radio starting in the ’80s, cable news since the ’90s, the blogosphere since the early 2000s and now social media algorithms. This newest media platform draws advertising dollars from content designed to provoke strong emotional reactions, a process fundamentally incompatible with a well-informed and emotionally healthy society. It’s a business model that maximizes profit with the use of bots and trolls, promotes extremism and deliberately spreads false information.” Ian Bremmer, who by the way is now Evan Solomon’s boss in New York City. Bremmer has much more in his column in the National Post.

Are we turning into a nation of slobs? Blame the Pandemic. That’s what most professional observers do. But the truth it started long before Covid-19 became public enemy number one to the Human Race. Gus Carlson writes about the slobification of dress codes in the Globe and Mail- says during the dot-com era, many businesses moved to all casual, all the time. Along with climbing walls, nap rooms and doggie relief areas, dot-com offices were environments where shorts and flip-flops were acceptable – even encouraged.

The casualization of the workplace evolved over the next two decades, with more businesses relaxing rules. With the pandemic, it dropped off a cliff.