Huge elephant in the room

I typically disagree with the Margaret Wente's opinions in the Globe and Mail but her piece on Toronto mayor Rob Ford is bang on.

He won't quit and there is no mechanism to remove him.  He lacks the ability to run the city with all the controversy surrounding him but as long as he stays in office he can command the resources of his position to defend himself.  How does that serve the people of Toronto?

He's mocked on every late night show and is an embarrassment for Canada.

I hope he comes to his senses either resigns or steps back to get some help.  Only time will tell.

What will it take?

Shooting the s**t after hockey on Sunday with tales of working in cold climates such as -30 C in Edmonton or one guy saying it was near -70 C up in the Yukon once.  And then someone pipes up that with places being that cold this whole global warming thing is bunk.

In past I would have tried to reason with him but the fact is that people will believe what they want to believe.  Stating facts and evidence from the latest scientific reports won't do a thing because in general, people know so little about science that they go to the extremes of not trusting it.

State sized chunks of ice falling off Antarctica and longer ice free periods in the Arctic are enough for me to believe.  But for me, it is common sense.  If we burn thousands of gallons of fuel a day, that exhaust has to go somewhere.

Some of it is natural but humans play a role in climate change.  If you don't want to accept that then get out of my way because I'm here to do something about it.

 

Math Problems

In our homeschool math group we work through different math exercises to help better the math intelligence of those involved.  It is an interesting group consisting of an older group of two teenagers, a middle group of five ten year old boys and four younger children.

We present the same problems to each group and it is wonderful to see the different thought processes used to attack the problem.

This past week we were working on river crossing problems, beginning with the basic wolf, chicken and grain.

The young ones initial solution was to take the chicken across.  Then they came back for the grain and stated that the wolf would swim along side the boat thus getting everything across the river.  It was interesting this "out of the boat" thinking and a lesson for the parent leaders to clearly define the parameters of a question.

This week we move on to magic boxes, similar to sudoku but involving sums.

The Flying Troutmans

Finished reading the Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

An interesting road trip story about Hattie Troutman who takes her niece and nephew on a trip through the United States to find their father.  Min Troutman, the mother, suffers from mental illness and was placed for treatment at the beginning of the story.

It is a story about family and discovery of one's place in the world when things are seemingly bleak.  I found it interesting because I have become more aware of that part of the world which is often hidden away.

My sister in-law's brother in-law suffers from manic depression and every so often he wanders off the medications.  My brother has never been diagnosed but is probably on the spectrum with a touch of Asperger's.  This became a bit more evident upon reading Raising Cubby by John Elder Robinson.  This is a father's tale of raising a son that has Asperger's while Robinson himself has Asperger's.

And I am coming around to understanding that we can't keep people in the shadows and hope the problem will go away on its own or that someone else will deal with it.  This is an issue that is coming to the forefront in Vancouver with Mayor Gregor Robertson focusing on housing the mentally ill.  There was also a study indicating that it does not cost much more to house the mentally ill as compared to burden placed on the police, medical and social services community.  The closing of Riverview put a lot of people at risk and in my opinion some people need to be institutionalized for their own wellbeing.

The world is getting smaller and more people are living in cities now so we all need to figure out how to get along.

Gabor Mate's letter to the health minister

One of my issues with the current government of Canada led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper is its lacklustre attitude towards science.  Scientists have to go through a strange process to release their data and speak with reporters.  That has gotten to the point that even the media outside Canada has commented on this 'muzzling' of science.

However, today I wanted to make note of Gabor Mate's letter to the Federal Health Minister on the federal government's stance on prescription heroin in helping heroin addicts recover from their addiction/illness.

In this letter, Mate challenges the minister on her decision to block this treatment and questions the basis of this decision.  It is obviously one of emotion not logic as it goes against the scientific evidence.

Addiction is a horrible thing and the war on drugs has not succeeded.  Other methods to help those addicted to drugs, whatever drug, need to be tried.

Just remember this next time we go to the polls.  We are all on this planet together and if we are unwilling to help those around us then this planet will work harder to reject us.

Michael Bloomberg, the soon not to be Mayor of New York

When Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2001, he was worth about $4 billion and as he leaves office at the end of the year he will be worth about $31 billion.

For the year of 2013, he will have spent about $400 million on pet causes, which is only 1.3% of his net worth.

It is commendable that he is willing to spend his money on education, smoking bans, and other health initiatives.  It is also a little scary to think that at the age of 71, that even if he gave away a billion a year, he would probably die before he ran out of money.

Nike, Walmart and Unilever

Once upon a time I was one of the naysayers and critics of Walmart.  But the C-suite of Walmart is working on changing the way they do things.  It is partly a wait and see but it is nice to see that such a massive cog in the world economy is making the effort.

I came across a blog entry on the Guardian that discusses how Walmart, along with Nike and Unilever are looking into changing the shipping industry.  Shipping of products makes up 17.5% of U.S. transportation carbon dioxide emissions and this number is expected to increase.  So it is nice to see that businesses are taking an interest in reducing these emissions.

Every little bit helps.

Workplace Wellness

In researching workplace wellness and the benefits to the bottom line, I cam across a blog on Health Work and Wellness which may have been of use to me a few months ago.

Hopefully the advice will be of use to others.

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By Amy Jen Su, Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Isis Associates, Executive Coach, Author and BWC 2013 Final Keynote Speaker and Workshop Facilitator

In a world filled with endless choice, opportunity, and instant communication, we manage plates too full, run on auto-pilot, and multi-task to keep our heads above water. In our effort to “get it done”, we have lost the joy of the process leaving many things, ironically, incomplete. Yet, research has shown that focus is an essential ingredient to leading a successful and fulfilled life. How then do we build and cultivate the quality of focus?

Make Decisions and Stick to Them
Breakdowns in focus often occur before we begin. We skip the very foundation necessary for true focus to exist – making a conscious decision and then sticking to it. This includes everything – from choosing our life’s work, determining the priorities for our teams, down to what we will accomplish in a given day. Focus begins with setting intentions, declaring our commitments, and then acting directly from these. While decisions are not locked in stone, there is value to making them, sticking to them, and then consciously adjusting them when need be. Conscious adjustment is different than consistent indecision and worry.  A client, Susan, struggled for many years with focus before settling into her current role as a principal in a marketing-services firm. “I’ve always been interested in many things that it has been hard to choose a career path – even now, I find myself distracted wondering if I should be following my life’s passion of working in non-profit.”

Eliminate/Manage Distractions

Maintaining focus is not only hard on the big decisions in life but also difficult in our daily lives as well. After two weeks of self-observation, Susan uncovered two key sources of “focus saboteurs”. First, unexpected requests from other people, which she usually responded to immediately, interrupted her flow of work. Second, she became conscious of how frequently she responded to email to procrastinate on high priority work that she either did not enjoy or required a significant chunk of “thinking time” to complete.

Cultivate the Quality of Focus
Short-term, structures and systems can support our focus but ultimately, we must cultivate the quality of our focus for highest impact. This involves shifting the hard-wiring in our bodies filled with anxiety, tension, and “pushing” to flow, attentiveness, and presence when engaged in an activity. Quality of focus ensures that when we are working on a document, we’re fully engaged in the process. When we’re with our families, then we are fully present with them versus thinking about work deliverables.

Cultivating this quality of focus requires slowing down, engaging in meditative practices designed to build awareness and attention, and quieting ourselves enough to really “hear” what we want. Susan learned that the big paradox in all of this was that by actually slowing herself down, she became more efficient – now eliminating many things on her list that were there because she lacked focus in the first place.

Reflection Questions:
1. In what area of your life would having greater focus benefit you?
2. Throughout your day, what distracts you from your highest priorities or intentions?
3. Throughout your day, what conditions were in place when you experienced great focus or flow?
4. What new systems, structures, or practices could further support your ability to focus?

A small calculation

So, a while back I was ranting about Magic the Gathering and how people are just making weenie decks because it is all about winning.

I did a rough calculation based on the fact that there are over 10,000 unique magic the gathering cards.

If you chose 36 cards with no land and no two cards alike, that would result in more combinations than there are atoms in the observable universe.

This simply adds to my frustration about the lack of creativity amongst some magic players.

Aluminum Can Recycling

According to the Container Recycling Institute, a trillion aluminum cans were thrown away from 1972 to 2003.  This is more than enough to easily go to mars and back if stacked one on top of another.  That's a lot of cans.

What is surprising is that the recycling rate for cans in the United States was only 57% in 2010, despite the fact that it takes much less energy to recycle cans than to make new ones, saving 9.5 tons in greenhouse gases per ton of cans.

One company, Alcoa, is working on increasing that rate to 75% by 2015.  Hopefully their initiatives will help reach this moderate goal.

Even achieving this rate of recycling will leave the Americans behind Europe, where recycling rates are as high as 96% - see this graph from the CRI.

So, please recycle and do your small part.

Valerie Bockstette

In researching shared value, I came across a How to Guide for Creating Shared Value.

One of the authors was Valerie Bockstette.  I googled the name and came across her Harvard MBA portrait project, which i guess is one's statement about what they want to do when they graduate and it went like this:

I plan to build trampolines. Remember jumping on one as a kid - the more you jumped, the more support you got - and like magic - you rose higher and higher, as though you could bounce forever? I grew up on such a trampoline. No, my family wasn't in the circus. I had teachers pushing me, parents supporting my endeavors, and friends encouraging me to follow my dreams. It was this network of expectations that acted as my trampoline, constantly demanding greater heights. Most children aren't so lucky. They grow up in a world devoid of high expectations, or any expectations at all. Those around them are too busy keeping order in the classroom, making rent, or joining gangs to notice them. To ask: "Do you want to go to college?" - "Have you read a good book lately?" - "Can you even read?" How do we prevent these kids from falling through the cracks? The traditional answer is to build safety nets, but I think that isn't enough. I will spend my life building trampolines for children who grow up without a network of high expectations. I want them to experience the magnetic thrill of being pushed, supported, and encouraged. The beauty of a trampoline is that it doesn't have to be big. And it only takes one bounce to get going.

Reminds me to give my child high expectations, or at least expose him to possibilities.  Fortunately he isn't in a situation where joining a gang is the only option.

Can we change our cities?

Came across a book by the architect Moshe Safdie and became aware that cities are changing once again.  The book was titled The City After the Automobile and presents an idea of his for a massive car share program that would help maximize the use cars while minimizing the amount of infrastructure needed to support cars, mainly in reducing parking lot size.

It is an intriguing idea but one that may evolve into something real.  But for now, promoting car sharing ventures will have to do.  Vancouver provides a relatively good model of this with three options available to consumer - Car2Go, Modo and Zip Cars.  However, Modo is the only one that provides cars outside of the City of Vancouver, with cars conveniently placed along the different skytrain routes.  I personally have a Modo membership and fully appreciate this placement of vehicles as I live close to a skytrain station and can access the type of vehicle I need - passesnger car, van, minivan, sports car or hybrid.

Zip and Car2Go are limited by being only found within the city proper and even at that, not throughout the city.  Hopefully it will expand to other municipalities within Metro Vancouver, especially Surrey, as it is the fastest growing city in the region and will eventually become more populous than Vancouver.  It however faces the challenge of probably being the least transit friendly city as there is a vast agricultural strip that makes designing routes around the city difficult.

But that's a story for another day.

Ann Finlayson

Another 100 Words, by Ann Finlayson

My vision? That we will be able to understand how to live within environmental limits and then have the confidence and abilities to do just that.

Fundamentally, then, it is about two things - learning and change.

We don't yet know how to live within environmental limits. We will have to learn, reflect, and test new ideas. There is no single solution or best practice yet. This means changing the way we think about education and learning. Then, because doing this often feels impossible, we need to find strength and support from each other to take this difficult task on. I know we can do it.

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Ann Finlayson worked for the Sustainable Development Commission and it looks like she is with the Sustainability and Environmental Education website now.

Off to the library again

This week's haul included:

Quinn Cummings.  The Year of Learning Dangerously.  This is not so much a manual on how to homeschool but a collected set of observations on Cummings' homeschool experiences.  It is more like adventures in homeschooling with a bit of historical information sandwiched between her hilarious stories.

Joseph Stiglitz was to come to Vancouver for a talk but it has been cancelled.  So, I found one of his books, The Price of Inequality to try to better understand the significance of his work.

Fantasy Football

In 2007 I was asked by the organizer of one of the hockey groups I play with to join his fantasy football league.  Now, I've watched the NFL and was a loose follower of the sport so figured what the heck, I'll give it a try.  Tonight we had the draft for the seventh season of that fantasy football league which is quite long for any activity of what is a fluctuating group of individuals.

I've done okay in general, and actually made (but lost) the championship game last season which was an accomplishment for me as I definitely don't follow things as closely as some of the other participants.  The other interesting thing is I still have two players from my original team, Tom Brady and Calvin Johnson who are both amazing players.  Other league participants are continually trying to trade for Johnson, but I continually decline because I can't part with a player who's nickname is Megatron.

So for the record, my starting lineup in a QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, TE, FLEX PPR league is:

QB Tom Brady
RB Trent Richardson
RB Frank Gore
WR Calvin Johnson
WR Anquan Boldin
TE Kyle Rudlph
FLEX Shane Vereen

I think I have a roster that will put me in the top half of the league on the year but as in any sport, it is the playoffs that count and I just to make it into the playoffs.

Strange Connections

So, I mentioned I was reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which was referenced in another book I'm working through, The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer Dixon.

In the chapter titled Complexities, Dixon describes how as a youth he was able to deal with the basic maintenance of a vehicle and understand the workings of all the components, but as time marched forward, cars became more complex, to the point that:

...even most professional mechanics are little more than diagnosticians now.  The modern car is trundled into the shop and hooked to computerized diagnostic systems, and faulty engine modules are replaced in their entirety.  If the faulty modules are repaired at all- rather than simply junked - they are rarely fixed in shop but instead shipped to specialized facilities with the specific expertise needed.  As the complexity and sophistication of our cards have increased, we can no longer repair them in our backyard or in our garage grease pits.  Instead, we increasingly rely on distance expertise and knowledge.  In short, the rising complexity of our machines has reduced our independence and self-sufficiency.  It's ironic that as technology does its job better and empowers us in various ways, it leaves us with less control, power, and freedom in other ways.

This seems to me to relate to the idea of unintended consequences and something we should be careful of because the less we know, the more vulnerable we are to being deceived by the so called experts.  The proportional amount of knowledge that a person needs to know to be functional in an urbanized and technologically advanced society is growing much faster than most individuals are able of assimilating. Without the motivation and resources to keep up with the most basic understanding of the world around us, most of us will become even more dependent on the things we don't understand.

Zen and the Motorcycle

So, I started reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today.

It is an interesting so far and of impact to me because of the whole father-son relationship.  I have been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks being the primary caregiver to my son and we are certainly developing a certain rhythm to our days.

Anyhow, want I found interesting was Pirsig's use of the term Chautauqua, which looking on the interwebs was an adult education movement founded in the United States and popular during the turn of the century (the previous one).  The ones Pirsig refers to seem to be of a travelling variety, going from town to town, dispensing their knowledge.  And this is the sort that Pirsig emulates with his attempts to reconstruct his old personality of Phaedrus and in his teachings on different subjects.

I will continue to work through the book and see where it takes me but this Chautauqua idea is interesting and can be put down as the new thing I learned today.

World Cafe

In a couple programs I've participated a World Cafe style discussion was implemented.  The Cafe is described on Wikipedia as "a structured conversational process in which groups of people discuss a topic at several tables, with individuals switching tables periodically."

The general principle is to be able to discuss a variety of topics without having all involved talking about one topic at a time which can be cumbersome as not everyone in a very large group would be able to fully participate.  By breaking down into smaller groups and breaking down the main topic into smaller portions, everyone gets an opportunity to have a voice all the topics and gain a cross sectional view of the topics being discussed.

The World Cafe was originated by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, a practitioner's manual exists to help explain the process further.

In the cafe's I've participated, the process was a bit rushed as time was a factor but I can see the value of being able to work in small groups but also being able to move from topic to topic.  But these were just demonstrations on how to apply the cafe concept rather than full implementation of the cafe to generate dialogue on a larger issue.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that has had more experience with this form of discussion in order to understand its full capability.

The Great Disruption

So, was flipping through The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama and came across a passage that implicates in some ways explains that horrors such as the Holocaust are not so difficult to dissect:

Ordinary morality is compatible with - indeed, is the precondition for - shocking immorality at higher levels of social organization.  A disorganized, individualistic rabble cannot pull off a systematic genocide like the Soviet killing of the kulaks during collectivization in the 1930s.  The Southern soldiers of the Confederacy who died to preserve slavery, or the Germans who carried out the Holocaust, often displayed virtues of integrity, courage and loyalty toward their own communities.  The Germans, in particular, are known as sticklers for order, unwilling to cross the street against a red light even as they marched prisoners off to concentration camps.  But the kind of ordinary morality that makes an individual not want to disobey a traffic law contributes, at a higher level of community, to the most monstrous crimes.  Our desire to be liked and esteemed and to conform leads individuals to carry out the most brutal orders when caught in an evil political system.  Morality at the level of humanity as a whole dictates that we violate deeply felt norms of loyalty and reciprocity to our particular group.  The great moral conflicts of our time have arisen not over the absence of ordinary morality, but rather over the tendency of human communities to define themselves narrowly on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or some other arbitrary characteristic, and to fight it out with other, differently defined communities.

I'm no expert on morality but it was interesting that there are different levels of it depending on the scale one is considering.

More from the Ingenuity Gap

In commenting on the haze that is experienced all over the world, Thomas Homer Dixon observes:

Why am I so concerned about haze?  To me, it signifies something more general than just pollution or atmospheric processes.  As haze cuts us off from vivid skies and landscapes, it attenuates our ties to the wider, external reality in which we are embedded.  It is just one of the many ways we are constructing - inside that wider reality - an artificial and self referential world.

Increasingly, only the collective human ego - what I call "the Big I" - bounds and defines this constructed world.  We subordinate, alter and reinvent almost everything around us according to our own interests, from the mounts of Vancouver Island to the Isle of Dogs and the very sky overhead.  Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality - the reality outside our constructed world - is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there.  And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances.  All these trends can push us into narcissism, as they weaken our sense of awe at the universe beyond our human ego; and what is perhaps more important, they also weaken our receptivity to critical signals from the external reality that might awaken us to our deep ignorance of the potential consequences of our actions, and warn us against hubris.  Without this awareness we have a less accurate understanding of how much and what types of ingenuity we will need to meet the future's challenges.

I think part of why this is important to me revolves around a point of contention I have with someone in know about community gardens.  He is perturbed at the fact that developers that lease land to community gardens do not have to pay property taxes for that land.  He argues that community gardens won't feed the city anyways and the property taxes would buy more food.  From my perspective, he fails to see that eating the food is often a side benefit of a community garden.  Community gardens allow individuals to connect with what Dixon terms the external reality.  The benefits of community gardens are well documented and it goes beyond the food.  But I'll leave it at that because food issues are dealt quite well by others.

What the library had to offer this week.

Never seem to be able to leave the library without a book, so this week's selection includes:

Salman Khan - The One World School House, Education Reimagined

Founder of the Khan Academy that features online learning in order to allow anyone to access educational material and to free teachers from their traditional roles as lecturers.
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Mark Dery - I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

This is a collection of what the author calls drive-by essays.  It caught my eye because the foreword was written by Bruce Sterling.
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David Wann - Simple Prosperity, Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle

Always looking out for books on sustainability just to get a feel for where the field is going.  Wann is also the author of The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living, which is a book I'll have to check for.



That's it for this week.

Wal Mart Reinvigorated

Wal Mart is undergoing a transformation to being more green, but can a tiger change its spots?  Well, if it doesn't want to suffer the fate of the tiger, Wal Mart will need to change.

Edward Humes covers some of this transformation in his book Force of Nature, The Unlikely Story of Wal Mart's Green Revolution.

From the introduction:

Wal Mart is proposing to go public with product information that has always been kept secret or that hasn't existed at all.  Few really know where the stuff inside their toothpaste tubes or frying pans or hard drives comes from or how they are made - at least until some sort of contamination or sweatshop scandal erupts, long after the harm to the public and the bottom line is done.  So many things on the shelf and in the home are black holes, from what happens to the plastic tops on your shampoo bottles (nothing - most are nonrecyclable) to the key ingredients in leading brands of perfume, mentioned only as trade-secret "fragrance" on labels (but containing hormone disrupters, allergens, asthma triggers, and chemicals linked to headaches, infertility and cancer.) Because finding this out requires extensive investigation, few people notice the lack of truly useful information about products filling their homes.  And this blindness is not just on the consumer end of the business. Not even the companies that make these things like to trace the origins of the parts and chemicals and raw materials they use - they fear the information and just how bad it would reveal so many products and companies to be. And when they do have it, they hide it.

Not this isn't for some benevolent purpose - Wal Mart understands that to stay competitive and relevant, an evolution of business practice must occur and that by embracing sustainability, Wal Mart can be at the front of the pack.

And if you don't like Wal Mart, don't shop there.

Another 100 words, Julian Agyeman

Flipping through the 100 Words book, the blurb by Julian Agyeman caught my attention:

Sustainable development means using our unlimited mental resources, not our limited natural resources. If this is true, as I believe it to be, then we need to develop constructive ways to unleash these phenomenal mental resources, and quickly. Currently, we waste human potential as wantonly and comprehensively as we lay waste to our environmental potential, and this is no surprise, as both actions are directly related.  We need to mobilize our efforts toward developing the potential of all humans in order to live productively in a convivial manner within environmental limits. Failure to do so will end our ability to approach anything near the just and sustainable futures we are capable of.

 This caught my eye as I'm still working my way through the Ingenuity Gap and this notion of unleashing mental resources for me links to the idea of being able to harness humanity's ingenuity to meet the tremendous environmental and social challenges we face.

Julian Agyeman seems to be a fascinating individual and this will probably send me off on another tangent some day - his blog can be found here.

Write something, anything

So, in the 100 Words book, the first snippet is by Kathleen Adams - the founder of the Center for Journal Therapy.

I have kept a journal, on and off for nearly twenty years now.  Actually sitting down and writing down my thoughts and observations can be therapeutic and it is interesting to see that someone has made a living of it.  Now, keeping a journal isn't for everyone but I would recommend it as it only takes five to ten minutes for an entry.  Even if you don't think you don't have anything write, there are tricks to unblock the mind that I have found that work for me.  Interestingly, these are part of the list of things that Adams suggests on her website:

She has a list of fourteen writing techniques which, if you decide to start, make things definitely easier:

1. Sentence Stem. A sentence-completion process. Fill in the blank with a word or phrase. May be very universal (Right now I feel———-) or highly customized to an individual’s immediate question, problem or interest.

2. Five-Minute Sprint. A timed writing process designed to bring focus and intensity in short bursts. Excellent for those who are resistant or aversive to journal writing, or who are uncertain about how to start, or who state they do not have time to write journals.

3. Inventory. An assessment of life balance in major areas of living (health, family, home, work, spiritual/religious, emotional well-being, etc.) Gives a quick picture of which life areas might need attention.

4. Structured Write. A series of Sentence Stems grouped and sequenced to reveal consistently deepening layers of information and awareness.

5. Clustering. Visual free-association from a central word or phrase. Lines and circles connect key thoughts and associations to the central core. Work quickly to maximize results. A brief writing to synthesize findings may follow.

6. Lists of 100. A list of 100 items, many of which will probably be repetitions, on a predetermined theme or topic. Repetition is an important part of the process. Topics can be about any current issue (for example: 100 Things I’m Sad About; 100 Things I Need or Want to Do; 100 Places I Would Like to See). At the end of the list, group the responses into themes and synthesize the information.

7. Alphapoem. Write the alphabet, A-Z, or any collection of letters, vertically down the side of a page. Then write a poem in which each successive line begins with the next letter. Excellent for groups as it promotes a high level of participation and sharing. Adolescents and reluctant writers respond well.

8. Captured Moments. Vignettes capturing the sensations of a particularly meaningful or emotional experience. Written from the senses with strong descriptors. Captured Moments of beauty, joy, blessing, calm can add balance, hope and perspective to a challenging time.

9. Unsent Letters. A metaphoric communication to another that is written with the specific intention that it will not be shared.

10. Character Sketch. A written portrait of another person or of an aspect of the self. Can also be written about emotions by personifying an emotion and giving it a characterization – an appearance, a style of dress, a personality and temperament.

11. Dialogue. A metaphoric conversation written in two voices. Anyone or anything is an appropriate dialogue partner. There is no constriction by time, space, physical reality or literal voice.

12. Perspectives. An alteration in point of view that provides a different perspective on an event or situation.

13. Springboard. A free-write with a prompt. Starting a free-write with the smallest structure of a question, thought or topic can focus and frame the writing session.

14. Free Writing. Unboundaried, unstructured, unpaced narrative writing. Useful for creative flow or spontaneous writing sessions. Can be structured by adding a time limit or page limit.

I know in a world where we feel that we don't have time to deal with Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and other online activities it seems that keeping a journal is superfluous.  However, I have a belief in the physical, the personal, and the privacy of a journal.  In my history courses, there is constant reference to reading the private papers of Presidents and journals of other historical figures that fascinates me.  I wonder if people don't continue to keep journals or personal records if historians of the future will find it more difficult to unravel the happenings of the past.  Social media is useful but often not candid and cannot contain national secrets.

So, grab a book and start writing.  You'll find that you might actually like it.

What the world needs now isn't another iThing

It seems that every time that I go the library to return some books, I end up leaving with more than I came.

Anyhow, picked up a few, including a compilation of short essays called 100 Words, edited by William Murtha, founder of the Global Visionaries Project.

The book had a short quote on "What the World Needs Now" by Elizabeth Watson:

ONE THING the world needs now is people who can tolerate ambiguity, people who are challenged, not threatened by the state of the world. I want to suggest a few things such maturity might require.

First, do not seek security in things, nor yet in status. The care of possessions, and position, is time- consuming and energy-consuming, and they can be taken from you by a thief in the night, by a fire in the night, by a change in political fortunes, by any numbers of disasters. Whatever security you have lies in yourself.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

If you understand yourself, both your strengths and limitations, If you like the person you are, if you acquire coping skills through experience, if you are not too encumbered, and if you know- inwardly- that disaster cannot ultimately overcome you, then you have gone a long way to maturity. You will be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Second, don't rest In intellectual security, for your philosophy and the knowledge on which it rests are likely to become obsolete. Wisdom is not amassing facts....

Third, the only real security in the end is the love we have given and the love we have received. All else can be taken from us. So pour out your love and friendship and do not hoard it ... And don't delay or hesitate In standing up to be counted with the oppressed.

Finally, cultivate the light touch. Develop a sense of humor. Learn to light up a room with joy when you enter. Accept the challenge of our chaotic and dangerous word with a sense of adventure, of gratitude that our time is now.

Hopefully the book has further spots of inspiration that can push me closer to taking real action.  I'm trying and always have it in the back of mind but need pushes every so often to get it to the front of my mind.

Decluttering my space and my head

Well, I wrote the final exam for my history course on international relations in the twentieth century last night.  It feels good to get that over with as it was a online correspondence course that had started in January.  But now I have more credits in the bank on my longish term goal of acquiring my arts degree.  Some of the facts will fade but many will stick in my head.  It allowed me to keep my writing skills honed with a couple essays notched on my belt.

However, the tidying up of the papers read and materials used begins today.  Need to return some library books and recycle some of the articles that I printed.

But this brings me to how I am working on decluttering my home.  It is a slow process and sometimes daunting when you walk into a room and wonder where to start.  For me, I just start and work on what I have termed the principle of five.  Get rid of five things or work for five minutes.  By compartmentalizing the job into fives, I find that one makes progress without feeling overwhelmed.  And it works, boxes are being unpacked and things are looking better.

TTFN

Ryding A Wave

Was listening to the radio while driving to Playland this afternoon and What I Wouldn't Do by Serena Ryder came on.  Had a debate with my son as to who who the performer was, he said it was Selena Gomez but I found the voice too deep for Gomez and figured she doesn't sing as well as Ryder.

Anyhow, have been watching/listening to some youtube content of Ryder and like what I hear, especially the one with her performing at the Luminato Festival in Toronto.

 Back to studying now...

Buccaneer Scholar

My wife had borrowed a book called Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar by James Marcus Bach so I started flipping through it and was intrigued by his statement that:

School is temporary.  Education is not.  If you want to prosper in life: find something that fascinates you and jump all over it.  Don't wait for someone to teach you; your enthusiasm will attract teachers to you.  Don't worry about diplomas or degrees; just get so good that no one can ignore you.

I have some hesitation to fully accept this but in general I agree that everyone should work on learning through their whole life and that if you don't know something then find the resources necessary to learn about it.


As a homeschooler I was more interested in his later statement:

I don't seek the destruction of schools.  I am out to dismantle something else: the popular belief that school is the only route to a great education, and that the best students are those who passively accept the education their schools offer.

There are so many different learning styles and teaching styles that it is crazy to think that a single approach that is used by so many schools is going to work.  Hammering away at multiplication tables and rote memorization might help you memorize something but is it learning?  I think Bach's approach has value but I think he falls into the same trap that he criticizes in that just because it worked for him doesn't mean it will work for everyone.  He does admit this but he comes across as beating his chest a little to strongly for my liking.

Down by the river

Took a walk with my son along the Brunette river this afternoon on my way to mom's.  It was interesting to hear the flow of the water as it rained earlier in the morning and the storm drains were active.  This was special because it has not really rained much in Vancouver in the last six weeks.

We then crossed the road to get to the Caribou dam at the east end of Burnaby lake. It is one those hidden and little known spots in the city that controls the level of water in the lake. Always neat to see the difference in the water levels on the two aides of the dam - probably approaching two meters. 

Just pass the dam we saw a heron that was just enjoying the sun along with mallard and her four ducklings. 

It was a nice walk and calming to watch the animals in their natural setting. I feel quite fortunate to live in a part of the world where one can witness a variety of animals within the city including eagles and coyotes. And on some days we even have deer and bears wandering the streets. 

And the great thing is my son enjoys these excursions and is always willing to head out for a walk. 

Your plans for the future?

I once took a continuing studies course on existentialism in which one of the instructor's objectives was for each student to write down their five year plan.  He had a whole scheme of things - career, family, education - that were to be covered.

I constructed one at the time but it has long past expired and am in the process of starting anew which works well with the recent changes in my life including resigning what was a secure but unrewarding position.  I am also working on decluttering our house as we are slowly unpacking things after our extended renovations and multiple moves over the last year.

Anyhow, I will work on my short term and long term life plan in order to give some sense of order to my life.  This might not be for everyone but I believe that it would work for most and would encourage you to write one.

A quick search brought up this template by Joanna Optimax

What I am reading today (August 5, 2013)

Just finished reading The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb, a book based in Vietnam.  The jacket indicated it was a story of lost love but that took a while to unravel itself.  I picked up by chance as I was working on my history essay on the Vietnam war so some of the people and places mentioned actually made sense to me which is not the usual thing.

Of the things I've picked up at the library recently are:

Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap
Peter Walsh, Lighten Up
Edward Humes, Force of Nature, The Unlikely Story of Wal Mart's Green Revolution

Comments to come as I work through these books.

Building momentum just takes a tiny push

Began studying for my history course on international relations in the twentieth century and have discovered the power of collaboration.  The instructor has provided a long list of over two hundred terms that will be referred to in the exam and it seemed rather daunting to attack that all by myself.  So, I threw out an email to the rest of the class to see if anyone was willing to break down the list and we just do a small portion each.  Figured it was worth a shot, even if I just one or two responses.  Well it worked out and we have seven of us tackling the list.  I'm beginning to learn that with a little push, people are willing to help.  I wouldn't call myself a leader, I just like to get things done and if I can make the task easier for everyone that's great.

Change will happen, those best prepared for change will prosper.

Why I stopped playing Magic and how I learned to love the bomb.

My son has recently taken up playing magic the gathering because some of his friends go to a "card club" on the weekend.

So, I dug out my twenty year old cards which apparently most are out of print or banned from regular play and tried to construct a deck for him but realized that it wouldn't work.  The game has devolved into a mini-max style of game where decks are loaded up with the lowest cost, highest power cards.  There is no imagination in deck creation because it is all about the win and not actually gathering together to have a good time.

This is why I got out many moons ago because I couldn't convince others to just put together a loosely organized multi-color deck with some rare cards in it and play multi-player games to see how things develop.  Alas, I was ahead of my time with the creation of the Commander rules around the turn of the century.  I guess my only hope is to just stay out of things or convince my son's friends to build commander decks and have multi-player games.

But back to the whole not having fun thing, I am not surprised about the recent Hockey Canada report indicating many children are not participating in hockey at the grassroots because kids aren't having fun.  The sport has morphed into a hyperexpensive machine designed to milk parents of their hard earned money on the narrow chance that their kid will make it big, or at least get a college scholarship.  Fun isn't really part of the equation, or enough of the equation for kids under ten.

I would recommend a book by Ken Campbell, Selling the Dream as it does a much better job reviewing the minor hockey machine than I can here.

My son now plays lacrosse and certainly enjoys it.  I like it because the children are tiered quite clearly and play at a level commensurate with their experience.  As they develop, they can move up and often are called up to play with the next level team for a game or two.  The game is still competitive with respect to playing game against other teams but a much better sense of equality within the team itself.  And even if your child plays hockey, I think lacrosse as an off season sport provides valuable hand-eye coordination and fitness training but without the monotony of playing hockey twelve months a year.

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See this article from the Globe and Mail for more on the hockey issue

What's the Buzz?

I subscribe to the David Suzuki Foundation's "science matters" newsletter and here is an excerpt from today's article on bees. Found it noteworthy as we often forget that much of what we eat needs these important insects but that they have been slowly disappearing and it threatens food production at a time when we need to be finding better ways to ensure we can meet this basic need.


Bees are endlessly intriguing, and incredibly useful to us — and not just for honey and wax. If bees disappeared, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to grow much of what we eat. Bees pollinate crops ranging from apples to zucchini. Blueberries and almonds are almost entirely dependent on them. Some experts say they're responsible for one of every three bites of food we eat. The economic value of pollination services from honeybees alone is estimated at $14 billion in the U.S. and hundreds of millions in Canada.

For the full article, go to the Blogs section of the Foundation's website.

Knowledge for All - Open Course Ware

Was brought up in discussion recently that UBC has begun to offer free courseware to the public, representing materials that are being taught in an institution of higher learning.  I remember a few years back looking at the MIT OpenCourseWare project which I toured again today.  It has definitely expanded and increased available subjects.

So, like usual, I went to see what my local library systems have on the topic and came a cross a book by Taylor Walsh. Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses (Princeton University Press, 2011).

I brought to my attention earlier attempts at sharing courseware that failed, primarily due to being a fee service for materials that did not offer university credit.  It also mentioned other successful efforts including Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative, Open Yale Courses, webcast.berkley and India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.

Why would a university give away their course material for free?  Why wouldn't it I would respond.  I say so because students already share information with each other overtly and covertly in the form of exam questions.  And undoubtedly some student is making public the lecture notes from courses.  Also, in the opinion of Charles Vest, the president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was released, he deemed that it was a direct extension of MIT's basic educational mission.

So, go check out one of these offerings and learn something new.

Creating Shared Value

Have been delving into the concept of Creating Shared Value, first by reading an article by the originators Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer (Harvard Business Review January-February 2011).  The authors present an alternate business model that moves away from the traditional for profit system to one that works with society in order to benefit both the company and society.  By establishing societal needs into the company's core, a company can not only improve its profits overall but it can employees, consumers and society overall.

I've attached a video featuring Michael Porter which will explain things much better than I have.

Books of the Day

Items related to science studies course I took - what it is to be human. Is defining the human essential?



David Midgley. The Essential Mary Midgley.
B1647 M473 M53 2005 (UBC)

Midgley as a moral philosopher. Questions some of Richard Dawkins work.

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Glen A. Mazis. Humans Animals Machines.
BD450 M342 2008

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Rob Latham. Consuming Youth. Vampires, Cyborgs & The Culture of Consumption
HC110 C6 L37 2002

Domenico Starnone
First Execution

...something i keep trying to remember...



Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

* (a) Killing members of the group;
* (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 3
The following acts shall be punishable:

* (a) Genocide;
* (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
* (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
* (d) Attempt to commit genocide;
* (e) Complicity in genocide.

Article of the Day

Paradoxes of Free Will
Author(s): Gunther S. Stent
Source: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 92(6)
2002

in the library today

Arthur O. Lovejoy
Essays in the History of Ideas
B945 L58 E7 (1948)[UBC]

Has an essay on "The Chinese Origin of A Romanticism"
quote on beauty by Sir Christopher Wren (p. 99)

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Max Delbruck
Mind from matter? An essay on evolutionary epistemology
B818 D36 1986 (UBC)

the introduction makes mention of Niels Bohr's lectures "Light and Life" and "Biology and Atomic Physics" - discussions on the impacts of quantum theory on biology

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James Rachels
Created from animals: The moral implications of Darwinism
B818 R323 1990

Had a quote from Charles Darwin:

"Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy
the imterposition of a deity. More humble and I think
truer to consider him created from animals."

Books on Kafka & Conrad

Martin Greenberg. The Terror of Art - Kafka and Modern Literature. Basic Books, New York, 1968.
PT 2621 A3 Z74613 1968 (UBC)

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Angel Flores (ed). The Kafka Problem. Octagon Books, New York, 1963.
PT 2621 A3 Z6 1963 (UBC)

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Patrick Reilly. The Dark Landscape of Modern Fiction. Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, 2003.
PN 3503 R42 2003.
Covers Dostoyevsy, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, West, Camus, Waugh, O'Connor

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Sven Lindqvist. Exterminate All the Brutes. The New Press, New York, 1996.
HT 1521 L4713 1996.

From the Preface:
This is a story, not a contribution to historical research. It is the story of a man traveling by bus through the Saharan desert and, at the same time, traveling by computer through the history of the concept of extermination. In small, sand-ridden desert hotesl, his study closes in on one sentence in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "Exterminate all the brutes."

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Gene M. Moore (ed). Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Casebook. Oxford University Press 2004. PR 6005 O4 H476 2004 (UBC)

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October 10, 2008

still reading about conrad & the heart of darkness

more cross references have emerged:

Jonah Raskin
Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Journal of Contemporary History
Volume 2, Number 2, April 1967, 118

when looking up this article i came across: Orwell's Patriotism

Stephen Lutman
Orwell's Patriotism
Journal of Contemporary History
Vol. 2, No. 2, Literature and Society (Apr., 1967), pp. 149-158

October 7, 2008

a tale of Henry Morton Stanley and his supposed quest to rescue Emin Pasha

The Last Expedition: Stanley's Fatal Journey Through the Congo
By Daniel Liebowitz, Charlie Pearson
Published by Portrait, 2005
ISBN 0749950862, 9780749950866
368 pages

VPL 916.7 S78L

of things that could go wrong, they certainly did

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have been watching Generation Kill (HBO show) - scary how many lives are lost to those that don't care; where is the humanity? how do people become things?

provides me quotes such as "doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative"

October 6, 2008

doing an article search using keywords: conrad & modernity

came up with:

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford.Preview By: Britzolakis, Christina. Journal of Modern Literature, Fall2005, Vol. 29 Issue 1, p1-20, 20p

October 3, 2008

working my through...

N. Jessica Reifer. Hannah Arendt and Joseph Conrad: Memory, History and the Development of Totalitarian Evil in the Belgian Congo. 2007

which discusses "the role of nineteenth century imperialism on the emergence and development of totalitarian evil"

why you may ask? i think that when one tries to understand the present one needs to have a grasp of what has passed

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Reifer (p. 6)
In Conrad’s novel, we encounter glimpses of the genocides, mass murders, and ethnic conflicts that will become prevalent in the twentieth century -- atrocities committed by “civilized” European adventurers in “backward” countries like the Belgian Congo, colonial domination, native de-humanization, subordination, and extermination -- bringing not only serious abuses of human rights, but simultaneously new possibilities for evil.

we sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf - quotation by George Orwell?

September 28, 2008

Gene M. Moore. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Casebook. 2004.

Introduction speaks of Chinua Achebe's essay on Conrad, calling Conrad a "bloody racist."

However, introduction also notes that the words racist and racism did not exist in Conrad's life time - first instances recorded in the OED date from the 1930s and even their predecessor, racialism, was not use until 1907. So Conrad may well have been a racist but not aware of his actions as Achebe's insinuates.

--------------------------------------


Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." In Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, edited by Robert Hamner, 1990.

September 26, 2008

Have been reading a book called Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist - explores genocide and questions if what happened in Germany was a unique case or just another episode along the continuum of European events.

Anyhow, I have a habit of looking at endnotes and came across some other items that may be of interest. Also, cross-referenced databases looking up Conrad & Kafka and came across some other books that piqued my interest.

Gene M. Moore
Heart of Darkness: A Casebook
PR6005 O4 H476 2004

William Randolph Mueller
Celebration of Life
PN3503 M76 1972
- series of essays including one on Conrad & Kafka

Edward Engelberg
The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience, Goethe to Camus
PN56 S46 E5 1972

oppenheimer and the bomb

today i read about oppenheimer and the bomb, well at least an article about it

James A. Hijiya
The "Gita" of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2. (Jun., 2000), pp. 123-167.

fizz, pop, bubble

so, i'm in safeway the other night getting a few things and i shop the way i normally do - one aisle at a time, trying to remember what i wasn't supposed to foget to get

then it strikes me - something i've always known but this time it made me sad because it reveals my realistic attitude that we are doomed

it was the aisle - the one in every major supermarket - with pop down one side and chips down the other

i realized how absurd that is - the amount of materials and energy used to produce those products and bring them to the store, along with the gazillions spent on marketing them; yes, marketing empty calories and carcinogens

in western society, where obese people make up a quarter of the population, do we really need a whole aisle to sell coke and doritos?

imagine if just half the resources to produce these products were used to promote healthier options and organic production of food

anyways, the next step for me is to put my money where my mouth is and eventually eliminate my use of these products - much like quiting smoking, this could be a difficult task, especially when there isn't a patch...

as i get older

last thursday (october 4) i went to see a talk/interview with a maasai warrior whom was visiting north america for the first time mostly to raise awareness of the issues that his people were experiencing

one of the main things was their cows were going 'crazy' (BSE?) - cows are the lifeblood of the maasai people; the other issue was the deforestation of their lands as trees were used as fuel and building material

the maasai people had to go outside of their traditional boundaries to seek work and food; there was also a push to educate themselves so that they could learn how to interact with the outside world

learning swahili, a money economy, tree planting and other skills have allowed the maasai people to survive but there is a gradual erosion of their culture that is occurring

the false promise of a better life through technology is creeping into their world and i felt a bad for what is one of the few remaining cultures that exist more in tune with nature then the rest of us

the thing that affects me is the fear of loss and failure to remember; it was a concern of jane jacobs - the problem of forgetting what we have forgotten - an obliteration from our consciousness that something else actually existed

it reminds me of a scene from the movie 'knocked up' where two of the characters were quoting lines from 'back to the future' while the two women at the table had these big looks of 'huh?' on their faces; it made me scared to think that a reference to movies from the 80s are no longer relevant to people in their 20s

it seems that the younger generation spends more time focusing on the present and the gizmos of the present rather than learning about the past or even having a sense of curiosity of the past which constitutes the cultural memory of their parents/aunts/uncles/teachers

it may be the same old complaint but this text messaging/ipod/virtual world generation is losing touch with the real world with it rich texture and timelines

when the spice girls reunion is a big thing i have to wonder....

reading Orhan Pamuk

from his book the Black Book - Celal commenting on secret meanings

"Most people fail to see the inner essence of the things around them, simply because these things are right under their noses, while they pay great attention to the secondary properties of things that seem just beyond themk, simply because they find them in dark corners, on the edge of things, and therefore think them more obscure. This is why I never make open references to my true purpose in my columns. I mention it only in passing - hide it in a corner, as it were. But never in a particularly dark or secret corner; it's a game of hide-and-seek that any child could play. Whatever my readers happen to find in that corner they believe instantly - which is, after all, my ultimate aim. And this is the worst part: They pay no attention to the overt content of the piece, the things that are right under their noses; they ignore even the secret and accidental riddles it would take them only a little patience, an ounce of intellect, to solve - and as for the newspaper itself, it ends up gathering dust in a corner of its own."

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i found the first line interesting how people overlook the obvious and search for the secrets when perhaps the obvious has the power to provide more

by my calculation

if striking workers in vancouver are paid $50 per day they walk the picket line or $250 per week

newspapers indicate 5000 people are on strike

so, if %80 of them walk pickets each week that works out to 4000 people

4000 people x $250 per week x 6 weeks = 6 million dollars in strike pay OR a 1 million dollars a week

my question is how does CUPE accumulate this much money?

what is it about computers...

so, i've got this dell system that has a Pentium Celeron D 2.53 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM running XP Home that runs like a pig in drying mud

i haul out an old Pentium 3 700 MHz with 512 MB RAM running Windows 2000 and it performs better than the above system - less delay opening programs, playing video smoothly; unfortunately it isn't black but a bit of decorative play with colored sharpies should help

i just don't get how a system that is 5 years old runs better

my challenge now is to resist hucking out the new system - perhaps linux will run more smoothly

but it does go back to my feelings that computers shouldn't be discarded so quickly by people - just have to find a purpose for it

what people want

i started reading the audacity of hope by barack obama and in the prologue he talks about hitting the campaign trail for his run at senate and he writes about a common thread that noticed:

No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what struck me was just how modest people's hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn't have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education - that it shouldn't just be a bunch of talk - and that those same children should be able to go to college even if their parents weren't rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

now these aren't unreasonable expectations - yet, somehow the richest nation in the world and the world's only superpower focuses on other priorities than keeping its citizens happy

why?

and if their government doesn't provide these things, why do they keep voting for them?

i don't have answers but questions like these make me continue to seek the answer and perhaps one day i'll understand politics and the true motivations of those in power - which undoubtedly involves having power and being able to influence the powerful - but until then, i'll just keep plugging away

misheard lyrics

so my son was listening to the mixed cd i had playing while going home

the song was van halen's why can't this be love

however, he heard it as why can't this be loud...

it puzzled him greatly why something couldn't be loud

methods of distraction

so, i take my son to visit my parents on the weekend so that i can get some time to wallow in misery as i suffer from my fever

my brother gets into a back and forth with my son

it's incredible how little children can bring someone down to their level, rather than adults making an effort to bring the children up to their level

just because children are little does not mean they are incapable of learning - actually, they're probably the best learning machines out there as they try so hard to understand the world around them and integrate themselves into the world of adults

or something like that

first death in war

was reading an article from Harper's and it gave insight into why the Bush administration is refusing to comment on the Pat Tillman death

his was the first death of a prominent figure in Bush's war in terror

this article indicates that the first death in a war is often used to gather support from the people to demonstrate how someone in the public eye would give his/her life to defend their country, the country they loved and for a cause they believed in

well, Tillman was critical of the Bush administration and was killed by friendly fire - not the best example to use as a first death

so, Bush and his cronies continue to tell their lies and Pat Tillman's death becomes a rallying point for those that see through the lies

transit thoughts

have been taking the bus lately and thinking about the approved bus fare hike in the lower mainland

as long as the money is used to improve transit than i accept the fare increase but if skytrains are still packed during rush hour then i'm not sure if it is worth it

this compounded by the total lack of a presence by transit/skytrain staff at skytrain stations and on the skytrain itself

i believe this presence is necessary for several reasons, including: to provide security presence, asking for directions, and as ambassadors for the region to tourists

i've witnessed several times people approaching the ticket machines with no clue on how to operate the machine or figure the whacked zone system

if you want to get more people on transit then it has to be made more friendly

and translink has to force the drivers' union to accept part time drivers

until these things happen, people will still sit in their cars, making traffic worse and harming the precious environmental conditions necessary for maintaining human existence at its current level

Pier Luigi Sacco - economics of identity

was listening to a podcast from cbc ideas about economics and social justice

one of the speakers was Pier Luigi Sacco who spoke of the economics of identity

after an individual's or society's basic economic needs of shelter, food supply, energy are provided there is an economic of identity that emerges

this works by applying the rules of scarcity that emerge in basic economics - supply and demand, etc. to basically luxury items - this emerges are branding, marketing...essentially the process of making non-needs needs

this is where social justice issues evolve? when more time and energy is put into obtaining these non-needs instead of focusing on needs for everyone


i'm not an economist and only listened to the podcast once but it has provided a branching off point for me to further investigate and perhaps further comment on in the future

why must we be rewarded

it is bike to work week in the lower mainland this week

some sponsors are providing incentives to people by setting up tents/booths to provide food and water

the irony for me is that much of this food and water (bottled) is trucked around in CO2 spewing SUVs

why can't people be happy doing the right thing and not get a big pat on the back? sure, children need positive reinforcement to learn that doing the right thing is rewarded but adults? adults should know what is right and good - doing what is right and good should be in itself the only reward

is climate change all there is to talk about?

so, should we be truly worried about climate change as much as we are led to believe?

i'm not saying climate change is not happening or that something shouldn't be done about greenhouse gases but perhaps other issues should be forgotten such as HIV/AIDs, women's rights, lack of nutrition for many around the world, totalitarian agriculture, the path of consumption, the depletion of oil, etc.

and then the national post has an article about al gore's inconvenient truth and some of the errors within it and then retorts by mentioning the great global warming swindle movie which in itself is full of s**t

yet, i wonder why people challenge climate change - is it because of the bad science? i doubt that because so many peer reviewed journals publish scores of articles on the topic and its effects

the bottom line is $$$ - big oil, big pharma, big agriculture, and the sweat shop phenomenon depends profit and the myth of progress; without it the rich don't get richer

see, in my opinion, climate change isn't the problem - the culture we are all slowly being enveloped in, smothered in promotes and is dependent on growth

your RRSPs, your pension funds, your net worth is all dependent on growth - it is a futile pursuit because resources are limited

life will go on whether we address climate change or not - nature is resilient; now whether us humans will continue to thrive is a separate issue; and if we do, sure climate change should be addressed but fixing climate change won't feed 6, 7, 10, 20 billion people - only an attitude change and a realization that the world's population before the industrial revolution as maybe a billion which is what a non-oil culture is limited to +/- a few hundred million

people will die even if we reduce our greenhouse emissions, reduce our carbon footprint, turn off our lights, buy CFLs because there aren't enough energy sources and resources to keep the world's population at its current levels

growth will slow and things will change because nature will dictate change

only once people accept this will real change initiated by humans be seen

hopefully we don't act too late

it or us

so, what are we saving the earth for? life goes on, whether us humans are here or not...

is the concern for the environment simply a way of conserving conditions for human existence at its current population levels?

well, that won't work

so, what will?

i'm not sure but i think focusing on social justice issues such as narrowing the gap income, wealth and power - and i think this should be done by pulling down the roof, rather than raising the floor

inequality needs to be leveled out because those without harms everyone; health issues attack the impoverished more seriously because of their lack of sanitation, access to medical help and poor nutrition

by fighting these issues then the health of all will be improved giving everyone a chance at establishing authentic existence - something with meaning and hope

HIV/AIDS

i've been reading AIDS in the Twenty-First Century by Barnett and Whiteside and i've learnt a few things

- HIV only has 10 genes

- the aids pandemic is especially damaging because it affects the demographic that is economically important (15-50 year olds) unlike most diseases that affect the young, elderly or sick

- the delay between infection with HIV and full on AIDS that can range from 5 to 10 years; this allows a lot of time for the infected individual to infect others

yup, HIV/AIDS is a much bigger issue than i previously thought and should be a growing concern for everyone

my comments for this week

actually, i just had to put something here - my brain is mostly idling this week tossing ideas of AIDS, military industrial complex, cultural studies, pierre eliot trudeau, attacks on skytrain, trips to get groceries (with its consequent connections to consumption)

and why don't people bring their own shopping bags to the store?

ugh, this will continue at a better time at a later date

to shoot or not to shoot

so, one thought i've heard from a coworker is if people were allowed to carry guns at virginia tech, perhaps they could have intervened and shot Cho Seung-Hui

this makes a bit of sense as we don't have the ideal situation where no one has guns at all but gun control debates are something that won't go away anytime soon

perhaps the focus should be on acknowledging that some people are troubled and that they should not be excluded from society, instead they should somehow be included so that future incidents such as this are something we only see in history books

remembering the message

visited my sister in-law's on the weekend in deepest darkest maple ridge...

their family lives in a 3800 square foot home which is very nice and i can see the attraction to living in a large home with lots of space

i almost got sucked into "the dream" but some anchored portion of me said "hey, wait a minute"

home builders still don't use methods to reduce environmental impact on a large enough scale - passive heating, solar water heating, grid tied power supplies, heat pumps, triple glazed windows, and as little wasted space as possible

and how much room does a family of four need?

i find it sad that the whole message of less; simplicity; decluttering; respect just isn't working and it pushes me to thinking that things are going to get a lot worse before they even approach being better

LBJ and the vietnam war

Lyndon Johnson in a speech to the American Bar Association of New York City:

It is right that the strong should help the weak defend their freedom...

It is right that nations should be free from the coercion of others.

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this leads me to ponder what freedom is and the importance of nations

also, put into context of the present, does the current american administration believe in this credo or is there some other agenda

there is no easy answer but motives must always be questioned and hopefully the people of the united states that vote for their representatives and president get the necessary information to pick the lesser of two evils in 2008

my thoughts for this day

so, the books on my desk today include

Short History of Tibet by Richardson
The Pan-African Nation by Andrew Apter
Perspectives on Growth and Poverty - van der Hoeven
The Dragon in the Land of Snows - Tsering Shakya
The Status of Tibet - van Walt & van Praag

with respect to Nigeria and Africa in general part of my interests lay in the attempt by indigenous folk to reclaim their resources and the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa in particular

to that end there is a book by his son Ken Wiwa - In the Shadow of a Saint (2000)
[VPL 966.905 S24w]; another one for the list

till next time

what are facts?

i've been thinking about this whole tibet thing and trying to find out more about what happened but this led me to discover that facts are hard to discover, especially about politically charged topics

the britannica website describes the geography, climate, industry of the tibet but only has a brief mention of the conflict between tibet and china; other websites done on google lead to politically charged pages that seek the freeing of tibet from chinese rule

what was the reasoning for the chinese government to "incorporate" tibet - strategic positioning in the geopolitical realm? resources?

and what about the lack of international response by britain and india, supposed tibetan allies?

obviously more research is needed on my part

this questioning leads into the psychology of why people do nothing, or at least very little, in matters that are so distant yet where human rights issues are involved - understanding these situations would help prevent them from occuring in one's own backyard and they can, just look at the PATRIOT Act in the good old U.S. of A.

buying into credentialism

i'm reading the vancouver sun today and come across an article about how some grade 12 students are going to private schools after school to get better english marks to ensure they have a good mark on their transcript for university entrance applications

students are allowed to replace their public school mark, which is often lower, with this new mark yet when these same 'A' students fail their provincial exams

i see this as students and their parents buying into credentialism, described by jane jacobs in her book dark age ahead

this ties into something else i read about the masters degree being the new bachelor's with respect to the work place; it's ridiculous how you needed a high school education, then a university degree, and now it's a post-graduate degree - that's a ridiculous way to judge a person's ability to work and think because from my personal observations of university students, they don't seem to have learned much

student's are so focused on the credential they forget to learn; it is in part why plagiarism rates are increasing; student's are so pressured into performing well that they will do almost anything to get a good mark and they forget that part of the purpose of going to university is to actually learn

aiming for good grades is a commendable goal but to cheat to achieve that goal defeats the whole purpose; one should aim to actually learn something rather than going through the motions because if you didn't actually learn anything from a class why did you take it in the first place?

i think what this rant is about is go to school for yourself and learn something; don't do it to impress future employers or your parents

why we fight

i watched why we fight by Eugene Jarecki a while back - it describes the military industrial complex (coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower) and the possible necessity to start wars in order to maintain the war machine

so i went down to the local libary and read a little bit from The military-industrial complex: a historical perspective by Paul A.C. Koistinen; i'll admit i got into the first article but it raised an interesting question about how the military is designed to support and protect a democracy yet it in itself is a non-democratic organization with the possible danger that it cannot truly identify with what it is protecting

it was a curious observation and perhaps it makes it easier to understand why "civilians" and the "military" are at odds at times

population growth and economic ruin

well, the title was longer than i wanted...

i keep reading articles (one from the guardian weekly in particular - 2007/02/09, John Vidal, Fuelling the Future feature) that talk about the growth of population to 10 billion by the middle of the current century and how competition for resources will lead to economic collapse

is "economic collapse" a new euphemism for massive deaths? and why do we place so much faith in these projected population numbers?

oil will run out before that time, at least at affordable prices and with no oil the whole foundation that the current capitalist society is based on will collapse and there will be deaths associated with that collapse; who really cares about some rich people losing money? aren't human lives more important...yet i worry the problem will be dealt like all crises, in a reactionary way

by focusing on "economic" issues people are only thinking about themselves and their own well being; people need to shift towards social/human issues such as HIV, malaria, woman's rights, poverty, justice, equality

well, this soap box is getting wobbly so i'll return to the multiplicity of issues at a later time...

robert mcnamara

i've been reading in retrospect by robert mcnamara which is his telling of the events surrounding the vietnam war

i was surprised by the revelation that u.s. military policy in the late 50's was based upon nuclear deterrence and that non-nuclear forces were most likely inadequate; to have a policy based on nuking the enemy was/is frightening

and i'm no expert but it seems to me that many of mcnamara's observations about the vietnam war parallel many things occurring in iraq right now

i guess it is true, those that don't study history are doomed to repeat it

more to come...

praise or scold?

so, i'm lined up at choices waiting to pay for my stuff, dutifully carrying my cloth bags and the women in front of me has amongst her purchases tissues and toilet paper made from recycled paper which i thought was great of her but then she gets her purchases placed in plastic bags even when there are paper bags openly available and cloth bags ready for purchase

i'm wondering, is she truly conscious of her choices or does she get the recycled paper products because someone else in the household asked for it?

that's part of my issue with so called environmentalists like al gore and his $30000 utility bills or sustainability pushers in hollywood

nickel and dimed continued...

some excerpts from ehrenreich's nickel and dimed

Any emphasis is by me...

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Work is suppposed to save you from being an "outcast,"...but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch diggers, changers of adult diapers - these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. (p 117)

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How do they feel...about the owners, who have so much while others, like themselves, barely get by? This is the answer from Lori..."All I can think of is like, wow, I'd like to have this stuff someday. It motivates me and I don't feel the slightest resentment because, you know, it's my goal to get to where they are." (p. 118)

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So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace - and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well - you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration fo the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person - a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief - you may being to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals - rats and monkeys for example - that are forces into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behaviour is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin...declines in their brains. And - what is especially relevant here - they avoid fighting even in self defense. (p. 210-211)

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Ehrenreich references two articles that relate to the animal depression and lack of self defense mentioned above

Shively CA, Laber-Laird K, Anton RF Behavior and physiology of social stress and depression in female cynomolgus monkeys. Biological Psychiatry 41(8): 871-882, 1997.

Blanchard DC, Spencer RL, Weiss SM, Blanchard RJ, McEwen B, Sakai RR. Visible burrow system as a model of chronic social stress: behavioral and neuroendocrine correlates. Psychoneuroendocrinology 20(2): 117-134, 1995.

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i've always found it strange that we (in the West) live in democratic societies but that the work environment is typically non-democratic; we fit into a hierarchy and fill our roles often without question even if it endangers our health and well being

and all for what?