Marnie Beaubien

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@strategywoman I came on twitter this am wondering… glad for your post

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

While rural America drowns in despair, the Amish living right beside it are barely touched. No smartphones. No feeds. No doomscroll before sleep.

The country around them is caught in what researchers now call the diseases of despair: suicide, overdose and drink, climbing so fast in Pennsylvania they nearly doubled in little over a decade. In the very same counties, the Amish are an island of calm in the middle of the flood.

Their suicide rate runs at a fraction of the national figure, roughly half or less, and has done across a century of records. Their women report less stress, fewer symptoms of depression and stronger mental health than the general population, with unusually high social support. And in one of the strangest findings in all the literature, the Amish carry the lowest rate of seasonal depression of any population ever studied, through dim propane light and long, black winters.

Look at what stands between them and the modern collapse. No phone in the pocket. No feed to measure a life against. No stranger's highlight reel at two in the morning. In its place, dense and unavoidable community, a faith that gives suffering a shape, work that is needed and seen, and the near-extinct experience of being genuinely useful to the people around you.

We built a world of endless connection and grew lonelier and sadder inside it. The Amish kept the old kind, the sort with a face, a name and a shared harvest, and it is quietly holding the line.

You cannot become Amish. You can put the phone down, sit at a real table, and make yourself useful to people who know your name. That was the medicine the whole time.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In the spring of 2011, a forty-one-year-old software engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick, named Marcel LeBrun sold the company he had co-founded five years earlier to Salesforce of San Francisco for approximately three hundred and twenty-six million dollars in cash, plus another fifty million dollars in stock. The company was called Radian6. It had become, in five years, one of the largest social-media monitoring platforms in North America. The sale was, at the time, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the Canadian Maritimes.

LeBrun, who had grown up in the province and earned his electrical and computer engineering degree at the University of New Brunswick, did not move anywhere else. He stayed in Fredericton. He drove an exotic car for a while. He took some racing lessons. He worked for Salesforce for a few years, then for a venture firm, then for a small automotive software company.

Then he looked around his own city.

By the late twenty-tens, the Canadian housing crisis was no longer an abstraction in his hometown. Fredericton, population around sixty-five thousand, had begun to see a significant rise in the number of people sleeping in cars, in tents along the river, and in temporary shelter beds. Most of them were not addicts. Many of them had jobs. They could not, on those jobs, cover what rent now cost in the city. Marcel LeBrun was a wealthy man living in a community where his neighbors were sleeping outside in the New Brunswick winter. He decided that this was a problem with a solution.

He and his wife Sheila, an occupational therapist, spent the next several years researching what worked. They visited social enterprises in American cities, in Calgary, in Winnipeg, and in Ghana. They concluded that what people coming out of homelessness needed first was not a bed in a shelter, but a door of their own that locked.

In 2021, LeBrun bought a stretch of land on Fredericton's north side, near a Walmart parking lot. He converted a former building-supply warehouse into a small factory. He and Sheila put four and a half million dollars of their own money into a non-profit they called 12 Neighbours, and they began building tiny houses.

Each finished house was two hundred and fifty square feet. Each had a small porch, a private bathroom, a compact kitchen, a sleeping area, solar panels on the roof, and walls of tongue-and-groove pine. Each was painted a different bright color. The factory could produce one of these houses, in completed and inspection-ready form, every four days. Each one cost approximately fifty-five thousand dollars to build. The current average cost of a new affordable housing unit in Canada, by LeBrun's own measurement, was around three hundred and fifty thousand.

The first residents, a couple named Melissa and Payton Armstrong, moved into 12 Neighbours in February of 2022. They had been living in a tent on the same north side of Fredericton for the previous ten months. The community grew from one house to forty-five by the end of that year, and to ninety-six by April of 2024, when the last home was strapped to a custom hydraulic trailer at the warehouse and lifted onto its foundation a few kilometers away.

Randy Burtch, a fifty-seven-year-old construction worker who had been living for about a year in his 2004 Chevy Impala because pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had outpaced what his odd jobs could cover, was among the first to move in. A month later, he was hired full-time as one of the carpenters building more tiny houses at the same factory that had built his. He told the Globe and Mail, when a reporter asked him what the difference had been, that if he wanted a shower he could have a shower, and if he wanted something to eat he could go cook it.

In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments contributed thirteen million dollars in additional funding to the project. LeBrun had not asked for the money to start an idea. He had asked for it after he had already demonstrated, in his own backyard, that the idea worked.

In April of 2025, with 12 Neighbours fully occupied, LeBrun launched a second non-profit. He called it Neighbourly Homes. Its product was a smaller and more rapidly deployable transitional housing unit, designed in courtyard clusters of fourteen, costing approximately seventy-five hundred dollars per unit to build and capable of being assembled at one a day. He intended to scale the model across the Maritimes. By January of 2026, the first Neighbourly Homes site, with twenty-seven units, was operating in Fredericton.

Marcel LeBrun is fifty-six years old. He still shows up at the warehouse on the north side of Fredericton every day. He knows the residents of 12 Neighbours by name. When asked, in a Maclean's profile published in early 2024, how he understood his own role in the situation, he said he had won the parent lottery, the education lottery, and the country lottery, and that it would have been arrogant of him to claim that any of the rest of it had been entirely earned.

If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Marcel, Fredericton, neighbours, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@flemingrut So sorry. Praying for you tonight as you grieve in a new unknown . You are not alone.

[Mary Kenny @MaryKenny4]

The Scots lads cheered up Boston!

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

If I call God “God” I speak truthfully.
If I call God “Lord” I speak submissively.
If I call God “King” I speak servilely.

But if I dare to call God “my Father,” I speak with a brassy audacity, chutzpah, that is shockingly familiar and intimate. So it seems anyway.

You dare to call the Master of the Universe “Father”?
You dare to call the One who controls heaven and hell “Father”?
You call the Omnipotent one “Father”?

Who do you think you are?

It is difficult to imagine a more audacious act than to stand before the Creator of the world and to name him “Father.” And mean it. And not only to mean it, but to act and speak as a child acts and speaks before a loving and doting Dad.

It’s shocking. It’s exhilarating.
And it’s beautiful beyond words.

But here’s a secret: it’s not really chutzpah. It’s not some brassy boldness that we work ourselves into, nor it is gained by swallowing a bottle of liquid spiritual courage, as it were.

To call God “Father” is simply to live in the space which Jesus created. To move from residing far from God as his enemy; or on the other side of town from him as a stranger; or down the street as an acquaintance; or in an adjoining house as a servant; and to move into our own bedroom as a child in his family. To wake up in the morning and see our Father sipping a cup of coffee and saying, “Good morning, my child,” as we respond, “Good morning, Father.”

You see, when we live in this house, when we move into the room built by Jesus, we inhabit the home not merely of a Master or Lord or King, but the one who’s given us his name and made us his own, now and forever.

“Our Father”: two of the most amazing words ever uttered.

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@Colourfulwater1 @mchkzn Montreal

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@fugitiveink Ive never seen a field of poppies like that.

[First Things @firstthingsmag]

A Dreadful Humility
Ephraim Radner

Available at https://t.co/UjkA9KD5gB

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@songbirdpublish This afternoon i came across your posts and searched back through all your posts with anticipation of my favourite restaurant in Canada. Never fails L’express! Thanks for all your posts. Loved seeing habs fans and the cardinals

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Brooklyn, 1952. Judith Love Cohen, 19, asks her high school counselor about math classes.
The counselor smiles like she’s talking to a child. “Honey, nice girls go to finishing school. Learn to pour tea.”

Judith enrolls in Brooklyn College. Engineering.
Hundreds in the lecture hall. Women: one. Her.
“Boys laughed when I raised my hand,” she said. “So I raised it higher.”

She transfers to USC. Finishes bachelor’s + master’s. Never sees another female engineering student.
Graduates 1957. Class of 800. Women: 8.
America’s engineers: 0.05% women. She’s one of them.

Then NASA calls.

1960s. Apollo needs brains. Gender? Secondary. Competence? Everything.

Judith joins the team building the Abort-Guidance System for the Lunar Module. The AGS. The “oh crap” button. If the main computer dies, this box flies you home. Or you don’t come home.

“It had to work,” she said. “Because if you needed it, you were already dying.”

Orbital mechanics. Electrical chaos. Code that can’t glitch. She lives in equations for months.

August 1968. Nine months pregnant. Still at her desk.
Coworkers: “Go home, Judith.”
Judith: “The math isn’t due. I am.”

Morning contractions start. She grabs her printouts — pages of trajectories, circuits, logic — and drives to work.
Contractions get real. Team: “HOSPITAL. NOW.”
Judith: “Fine.” Takes the printouts.

Hospital bed. Nurses walk in. She’s between contractions, scribbling on computer sheets. “Ma’am, you’re in labor.”
“I’m in math,” she says.

Then it clicks. The final bug in the AGS. Solved.
Then she pushes. Baby boy: Thomas Jacob. You know him as Jack Black.

Next day she calls her boss. “I fixed the guidance problem.” Pause. “Oh. And the baby came too.”

April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth. BOOM.

Apollo 13. Oxygen tank explodes. Command Module dying. Three men crawl into the Lunar Module — built for 2 people, 1 day. They need it for 3 people, 4 days.

Primary computer stutters.
Backup comes alive.
Judith’s AGS.

It holds. Calculates burns. Aligns spacecraft. Verifies they’re not flying into deep space forever. “Without AGS, we don’t come home,” said Jim Lovell later.

April 17, 1970. Splashdown. Alive.
The world cheers the astronauts.
Inside NASA, engineers hug. “The backup worked.”
Judith’s backup.

Apollo 13 crew visits TRW to say thanks. Judith shakes their hands. No speech. Back to work.

She keeps going.

Hubble Space Telescope systems. TDRS satellites — ran 40 years. Papers. Patents. Mentors girls. Writes kids’ books: You Can Be a Woman Engineer. “Girls need to see it to be it,” she said. “TV gave them lawyers. I’ll give them astronauts.”

Raised four kids. Danced ballet with the Met Opera while doing engineering school. “My first loves,” her son Neil wrote, “were dancing and equations.”

July 25, 2016. Age 82. She’s gone.
Son Jack Black posts 2019: Photo of Mom, 1959, next to a Pioneer spacecraft. “My mom literally helped save Apollo 13. Finished the problem IN LABOR WITH ME. How do you top that?”

The counselor said “finishing school.”
Judith chose “finishing equations.”
Three astronauts owe their lives to that choice.

“They said I didn’t belong,” Judith said once. “So I built something that belonged in space. And brought them home.”

She never flew. But she made sure others could.
From a hospital bed. Between contractions. With a pencil.

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@charliersmith1 So glad to see your post

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

It's tulips season in Kharkiv 🌷

I know I probably look a bit mad getting so excited about the spring blooms, but to me, they’re something more. They’re a reminder that even after a winter of russian terror, life finds a way, and that we are strong enough to make it through.

[Sarah Parry @SarahWoods66]

Got stuck at the crossing on my way home this morning so had to get out of the car and film this for you.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

I'm going to say something that doesn't reflect well on me or my wife.

We let the kids have the iPad for too long. Way too long.

We realized that it was ruining their personalities.

I watched it happen and I didn't act fast enough.

We took the iPads away. Took the phones. All of it.

And I got my children back.

They’ve been de-zombified. The difference was immediate and it was dramatic.

So let me give credit where it's due.

Shout out to Jonathan Haidt.
Shout out to Kara Swisher

You think you're giving your kid entertainment.

A way to decompress. Something to keep them occupied.

You're handing them something that is quietly rewiring how they think, how they feel, and how they connect with the people right in front of them.

Take it away. You'll get your kid back too.

I promise you won’t regret it!

[Marnie Beaubien @Dotsfone]

@strategywoman Last month ,, i had the opportunity to speak on Matthew, tax collector being called by Christ.
I discovered Caravaggios painting.. much to consider.

[Yaroslava @strategywoman]

A painting by Caravaggio — The Taking of Christ (also known as The Kiss of Judas).

Stolen from a museum in Odesa in 2008.
Found years later, seriously damaged.
Restored piece by piece by Ukrainian restorers.

I saw it today at the Metropolitan House on the grounds of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Google’s single data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa consumed 1 billion gallons of fresh water in 2024. One facility. One year. Enough to supply every home in Iowa for five days.

The reason they need fresh water is pure chemistry. Evaporative cooling towers work by running water over hot surfaces and letting it evaporate. 80% of the water a data center pulls in literally vanishes into the atmosphere as steam. You can’t recycle steam.

The remaining 20% becomes concentrated mineral waste. Calcium, magnesium, silica. Every cycle through the cooling loop makes the water more corrosive. After enough passes, it starts clogging pumps and eating through heat exchangers. Multi-million dollar equipment destroyed by limescale.

Recycled wastewater carries even more of these minerals from the start. You could treat it, but less than 1% of U.S. water is recycled. Most cities don’t even have separate pipes to deliver reclaimed water to industrial customers. A data center wanting to use recycled water would essentially need to build its own treatment plant on site. Meanwhile, municipal potable water costs almost nothing.

So they just drink from the tap. Across all its data centers, Google used 8.1 billion gallons in 2024, nearly double what it used three years earlier. The company claims its water stewardship projects “replenished” 4.5 billion gallons. Those projects aren’t even in the same watersheds where they’re pulling the water. Same playbook as carbon offsets. Consume locally, offset globally, call it sustainable.

The trajectory is the real story. U.S. data center water consumption could quadruple by 2028. That’s 68 billion gallons for cooling alone, before the 211 billion gallons consumed indirectly through electricity generation. Two-thirds of new data centers since 2022 are being built in regions already facing water scarcity.

Nobody’s asking why they use fresh water. They’re asking what happens to the towns sharing a water main with a facility that drinks like 50,000 people showed up overnight.

[WeatherFront @WxFront]

🧊 (ice) BREAKING NEWS 🧊

📍 A huge crack developed in the ice on Lake Erie today.

↔️The crack extends approximately 100 miles from just north of Cleveland, OH to just south of Tillsonburg, Ontario.

🛰️Full-resolution GeoColor satellite imagery like this is FREE in WeatherFront.

📲 Download now at the link in our bio!

[Anthony Farnell @AnthonyFarnell]

Lake Erie headed for 100% ice coverage, for the first time this century.