Category: News

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

On this Thanksgiving long-weekend Sunday, we’ll all get to participate in our featured presentation. We’ll reflect on what Oasis means to each of us and have the opportunity to share our thoughts and feelings on that topic. The discussion will be led by Clive Hannah.

Clive Hannah is a Toronto Oasis volunteer, helping us manage our social media. He has a passion for community building. In addition to his volunteer work with Oasis, Clive is also an organizer for Toronto Adults with ADHD Support Group and volunteers his time with a men’s group called MasterHeart. Professionally, Clive is an independent software consultant in IT Enterprise Architecture. All of Clive’s work, professional and volunteer, is driven by wanting to create his life rather than letting life happen to him.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/ptkqxrybcnbpb/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

• Notes from the meeting:
  • Karaoke Night
  • Song Circle
  • Playing of people’s favourite songs to share with the group
  • Finding more social justice music for the group
  • Create a debate club
    • Taking on a contrary position
  • Seeing our community as a buffer against the world. How we still find ways to accentuate the positive.
  • Will we consider putting in place a kids program at some point? What would it take to make this happen.
  • Costs of renting a room and to look at community center options.
  • The idea of Toronto Oasis becoming a cultural center over the next ten years
  • Having consistent events that run monthly on the calendar such as the book club.
  • What will the meeting look like when we have live meetings. Perhaps we alternate between zoom meetings and live meetings
  • Let’s have a euchre tournament

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

This Sunday our featured presentation will be a talk found on YouTube (about 33 minutes long) entitled: On the Future of Gender, Race & Human Nature by Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and feminist. Tania Akon, a Toronto Oasis organizer, will introduce the video and moderate the discussion after we watch the video together.

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

Vaccinations are one of humanity’s greatest medical innovations, saving over ten million lives since 1962. Given their decades long track record of preventing illness in billions, why are so many skeptical about their safety and efficacy? Our featured speaker, Leslie Rosenblood, will tell the story of how he naively fell into the online vaccination debate (it started with a Facebook post of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo). He will examine the arguments used by the anti-vaxxers, distinguish the denialists from the vaccine-hesitant, provide some do’s and don’ts on how to engage (should you choose to do so), and what the results were of his online debate about vaccines. He will also delve into human psychology and cognitive biases, how to distinguish between objective information and propaganda trying to masquerade as such, some considerations about a potential vaccine for covid-19, and what you can do to educate those in your social circle (in real life or online) on this topic (and many others).

Leslie is a secular humanist and supporter of evidence-based decision making (especially for public policy). He has a Bachelors degree from the University of Waterloo in Mathematics (Computer Science) with a minor in Drama and Speech Communication, from which he learned he didn’t want to code for a living and that he couldn’t live on what acting paid. To postpone making any real decisions, he took an MBA in Science and Technology. Since that time, he has worked in multiple roles across numerous industries in several countries. Along the way, he has performed in countless plays and improvisational comedy nights, run one marathon, and created four demi-clones. Leslie volunteers for the Centre for Inquiry Canada (https://centreforinquiry.ca/) and the Canadian Secular Alliance (http://secularalliance.ca/). He started his blog, Opinions and Questions (https://opinionsquestions.blogspot.com/), in the hopes that his review of a particularly dishonest book (https://opinionsquestions.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-vaccine-safety-manual.html) about vaccines would reach a wider audience.

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/ffpjvrybcmbkc/

This meeting was recorded and is available at this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ftrcqixSup5nalE7W_x6QDcGkgy87J_s/view?usp=sharing

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

This Sunday our featured presentation will be part 2 of a two-part talk on: The Rise of Communism and Nazism After WWI in Germany (1918 – 1922ish) by Mark Turi. Mark holds a BA from Brock University and studies the History of Nationalism and Revolution in Modern Europe.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/ffpjvrybcmbbc/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

This meeting was recorded and is available at this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v8yNq2j1_eBOSfTnk1Ds-7rxBDKJjuYO/view?usp=sharing

Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1096166994132528/

meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis
facebook.com/TorontoOasis
instagram.com/TorontoOasis
twitter.com/416Oasis

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

This Sunday our featured presentation will be part 1 of a two-part talk on: The Rise of Communism and Nazism After WWI in Germany (1918 – 1922ish) by Mark Turi. Mark holds a BA from Brock University and studies the History of Nationalism and Revolution in Modern Europe.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/ffpjvrybcmbrb/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

This meeting was recorded and is available at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u2MXvkGoCwzooVoA3Reqsb-EujCQwdrS/view?usp=sharing

Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/237549140996560/

meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis
facebook.com/TorontoOasis
instagram.com/TorontoOasis
twitter.com/416Oasis

This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions

Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm but you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.

This Sunday Paul Kaplan returns for a follow up conversation on his Capitalism 101 talk. Earlier this year, in February, Paul gave a talk on Capitalism at Toronto Oasis, addressing a wide range of issues related to Capitalism and how it is misunderstood. Here is a link to that Toronto Oasis event:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/khgwkrybcdbdb/, a link to Paul’s slides that he used for his presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YbX3XzJMwtavMf-X9WogWlSG3EUQPEf1/view?usp=sharing; and a link to a video clip featured in his February talk (about 10 minutes long by Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication University of Illinois at Chicago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x1uZESt5n0

Our featured presentation this Sunday (20 – 30 minutes) will be a conversation between Paul Kaplan and one of the Toronto Oasis organizers, Tania Akon, following up on Paul’s Capitalism 101 talk. This will be followed by a discussion/Q&A (15 – 20 minutes) when other participants will have an opportunity to join in the conversation.

Paul D. Kaplan, PhD, CFA, is director of research for Morningstar Canada and is a senior member of Morningstar’s global research team. Morningstar is a Chicago-based global investment research firm. Paul led the development of many of the quantitative methodologies behind Morningstar’s fund analysis, indexes, advisor tools, and other services. He conducts research on asset allocation, retirement income planning, portfolio construction, index methodologies, and other investment topics.
Many of Paul’s research papers have been published in professional books and publications. He received two awards for articles published in the prestigious Financial Analysts Journal. Many of his works appear in his book Frontiers of Modern Asset Allocation published in 2012 by John Wiley & Sons. He is a coauthor of the book Popularity: A Bridge between Classical and Behavioral Finance published in 2018 by the CFA Institute Research Foundation.
Before coming to Canada in 2012, Paul served as quantitative research director for Morningstar Europe in London, UK, and director of quantitative research in the United States before that. Before working at private companies, he served on the economics faculty of Northwestern University where he taught international finance and statistics.
Paul holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, economics, and computer science from New York University and a master’s degree and doctorate in economics from Northwestern University. He has served as a member of the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst® designation.

Clive Hannah will do the Community Moment. The Community Moment is a chance for one of our own to share their journey, thoughts about life, or something personal about themselves. It could be light and silly or it could be emotionally heavy. Either way, you’ll learn more about a valued person in our community. Interested in presenting your own Community Moment? Contact Tania at 416oasis@gmail.com.

Please RSVP on meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Oasis/events/ffpjvrybclbnc/

Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/420119822295923/

This meeting was recorded and is available at this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nce2Y1dqn5EC0EeFAtRJJJ7kcNo29R82/view?usp=sharing