UPDATE: Tea Party takes U.S. government hostage so that everyone loses

If the U.S. government shuts down at midnight, the voters will have no one but themselves to thank, for electing a rump of 45 anal, myopic and narcissistic Tea Party Republicans to the House of Representatives. Holding the government hostage in order to postpone or better yet, repeal, Obamacare, is nothing more nor less than political terrorism. The ideology of these people matters more to them than the effective functioning of the many services that hundreds of thousands of Americans depend upon. The ego's of these neo-cons are inversely proportional to their micro-sized intellects, and their lack of comprehension of the history, tradition and protocols of the two-hundred plus years of American constitutional democracy.

Unfortunately, the Islamic terrorists, as one force, along with instant messaging and the 24-7 news cycle, linked to the spike in extreme everything, movies, television, athletics, public vernacular, drug dependence, prison saturation, and the stripping away of the social safety net, along with each citizen's sense of powerlessness have helped to produce a government that refuses to function....oh, and there have been two sequential elections of the first black president, a fact of history that most of them simply cannot abide.

Should the U.S. shut-down last beyond a few days, and millions of government workers fail to be paid, passports fail to be prepared and mailed, and government programs simply close, not only will the direct economic impact of the shutdown linger for months if not years, but the world's confidence in the U.S. government's capacity to function as a "healthy adult" as we all expect it to, will atrophy legitimately, and that includes the global financial markets. And with the debt ceiling crisis looming by mid-October, should that also fall through the cracks, the U.S. credit rating will, once again, take a severe hit, larger, likely than the last time.

While everyone agrees that Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, has both loopholes and inequities, some imposed by the Supreme Court's permission to let states remain outside the extension of Medicare to cover a select group of Americans, the ACA is the law of the land, and postponing it, or defunding it is simply not going to happen. What could happen, however, is that the crisis expands beyond containment, and has an impact similar to a virus in a large computer system, effectively grinding the economic system to a halt....so that everyone, everywhere loses, including those holding a metaphoric gun to the head of the president, and then chastising him for not "giving in" under these circumstances.

Who knows the specific menu for another perfect political storm? Nevertheless, we all know that the economy is still weak, unemployment is too high, confidence, while starting to return has a long way to go to reach par with where it was in 2008, Italy and Greece are still in turmoil economically; the Middle East is clearly boiling and the U.S. leadership on all fronts, foreign and domestic will be threatened and eroded by the determined sabotage of a few loose nuts in the House of Representatives, whom many Republicans are already distancing themselves from.

In trying to make the issue about Obama, the man, the president whom they simply cannot tolerate, they may also be writing their own ticket to political oblivion. At least the world can only hope they are!

From the BBC website, October 1, 2013

Here are some of the implications of the government shutdown:

State department will be able to operate for limited time

Department of defence will continue military operations

Department of education will still distribute $22bn (£13.6bn) to public schools, but staffing is expected to be severely hit

Department of energy - 12,700 staff expected to be sent home, with 1,113 remaining to oversee nuclear arsenal

Department of health and human services expected to send home more than half of staff

The Federal Reserve, dept of homeland security, and justice dept will see little or no disruption

US Postal Services continue as normal

Smithsonian institutions, museums, zoos and many national parks will close

______________

 Markets Slide Worldwide Amid U.S. Budget Battle

 

By Nathaniel Popper, New York Times, September 30, 2013

Investors are worried that even a temporary government shutdown could endanger an already weak economic recovery.

Stock markets fell worldwide on Monday as political disagreements in Washington made a shutdown on Monday night increasingly likely.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down about 0.6 percent in trading at midday. Leading indexes ended down 2.1 percent in Japan, 0.8 percent in Germany and 1.2 percent in Italy.

European stocks are under additional pressure because a growing political crisis in Italy is threatening the government there.

In the United States, investors were most concerned that a government shutdown this week could make it more likely that the United States will default on its outstanding debt when it reaches its borrowing limit in a little more than two weeks.

But on Monday, economists were scrambling to estimate the more immediate effect on the economy if all nonessential government services were closed on Tuesday.

While many economists have said that the direct blow to the economy would be relatively modest if a shutdown lasted only a few days — as past shutdowns have — the political battles could hurt confidence.

“The hit to consumer and business confidence from such an outcome could be substantial, increasing the shutdown’s effects,” Gennadiy Goldberg, a United States strategist at TD Securities, wrote to clients on Monday.

Any reduction in spending would be problematic because economic growth has already been more sluggish than most policy makers want. The Federal Reserve determined recently that the economy was too weak to withstand even a small reduction in the central bank’s stimulus efforts.

The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said during his news conference on Sept. 18 that the budget battles could make matters worse.

“I think that a government shutdown — and perhaps, even more so, a failure to raise the debt limit — could have very serious consequences for the financial markets and for the economy, and the Federal Reserve’s policy is to do whatever we can to keep the economy on course,” he said.

On Wall Street, the fears about a government shutdown were overshadowing a few recent indicators that the economy may have been strengthening. Manufacturing activity in the Chicago area picked up more than expected in September, according to a private index released Monday.

Atlanta: a report on how to solve homelessness that works

Atlanta Logs Dramatic Turnaround in Homelessness

By Jaime Henry-White Associated Press from ABC News website, September 29, 2013
     

After Larry Mainor left the armed forces, he spent years getting high on crack and sleeping in cars, under bridges, behind restaurants and even in the woods. Now, he finally has a roof over his head and his own bed to sleep in.

Mainor is one of hundreds of homeless veterans and other chronically homeless people being helped by an Atlanta initiative aimed at getting people off the streets and in permanent housing in a city that for years has struggled to keep people off the streets. The city is well on its way to meeting its goal of finding homes for 800 people this year, with already more than 700 in homes.

Those like Mainor are eager to find the help.

"I just got sick and tired of living a life of drugs and alcohol," Mainor said. "I saw my friend get shot and lay in the streets and die. That's not how I want to leave this world."

More than 6,000 homeless people live in metro Atlanta, according to a point-in-time count in January. Atlanta's "Unsheltered No More" initiative is in keeping with a national movement toward a "housing first" approach, which advocates say is focused first and foremost on getting the homeless off the streets, and then providing them with any services and other help they may need.

"Atlanta is a really turnaround story in the last year," said Jake Maguire, communications director for the 100,000 Homes Campaign, a national group working to find permanent homes for 100,000 of the nation's most vulnerable homeless. "They have been able to make tremendous change in a short amount of time."

Last year, the city partnered with the group to try to house 100 people in 100 days. That goal was beaten, with 131 people finding homes. Atlanta housed more homeless veterans than any other city participating in the nationwide challenge while also speeding up placement process by one-third.

"Atlanta in some ways is kind of the poster child," Maguire said. "Dramatic change is actually possible in a short period of time."

Nationally, Georgia ranks first in the largest number of statewide homelessness, as balanced by counties, and second in largest number of statewide veterans and chronically homeless individuals, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report.

Atlanta's efforts in addressing homelessness align with a federal strategy, called "Opening Doors," to end veteran and chronic homelessness by 2015. Though only a small portion of the homeless population, research shows the chronically homeless consume a disproportionate amount of public resources, including homeless shelters, hospitals, emergency rooms, jails and prisons. Chronically homeless individuals also are the most vulnerable, with nearly four to nine times higher mortally rates than the general population, according to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

A chronically homeless individual is someone who has been continuously homeless for one year or at least four times in the last three years and has a disabling condition, such as a substance use disorder or a mental illness, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"This is not the guy who could get a job who just didn't want it — that's not the population," Maguire said. "They are folks who really, truly will not be able to sustain themselves and will need to be taken care of by their fellow community members."

Mainor, the man who found a home in Atlanta, also has received help from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing voucher program provides rental assistance, case management and clinical services for homeless veterans through the departments and community-based outreach.

The VA nationally is increasingly viewing homelessness as a permanent problem — not a temporary one.

"The change now is that we want people to get housing first, and then we surround them with services and that helps their process of recovery," said Protip Biswas, Vice President of Homelessness and Community Outreach for United Way of Greater Atlanta.

Recent analysis from Atlanta's local housing authority found that veterans permanently housed through the HUD-VASH voucher program had an average retention rate of 95 percent. It is too early to calculate the retention rate for the city's recent chronic homelessness challenge.

Many of the individuals housed through the city's recent initiatives were identified through a volunteer-driven homeless registry created in January. The registry, based on a vulnerability index that screens for critical health and social conditions, serves to identify and prioritize the city's most vulnerable citizens for housing.

As for Mainor, he's been able to overcome his alcohol and drug addictions, afford permanent housing, receive medical and psychological attention and obtain pension benefits. Building off his skills as a cook in the military, Mainor recently graduated from Atlanta Technical College's culinary arts program, where he also met his fiancée. The two are now making plans to open a bakery and catering business.

"Instead of me trying to find some drugs and alcohol when I wake up in the morning-time, now when I wake up in the morning-time, I can think about the positive things in life," Mainor said. "It tells me that Larry is somebody now. It tells me that the last four years of trying to live a normal life is paying off."

Editor's note:

For some time we have subscribed to the arguments put forward by John Ralston Saul that homelessness is an eminently solvable problem, and that providing housing for the homeless is an act not only of visionary governing but also of economic investment.

Reading the Atlanta success story above, one wonders if and when any Canadian government will see through their own political obfuscation, parsimony and tight-fisted approach to all issues, except perhaps the building of new prisons and the purchase of new military hardware.

If the Atlanta story is not front and centre on the Prime Minister's desk this week, then we will know that the research department of the Conservative Party has  been instructed not to put it there.

Global conference needed to combat Islamic jihad with an international strategy, plus committed resources both human and fiscal

Al Shabab, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra...militant radical Islamists everywhere can no longer  be dealt the kind of blow they require by individual states, nor by a group like the army of the African Union, nor by U.S. drones in Yemen....
In the BBC story (below) Boko Haram shot and killed college students sleeping in their dorm in Nigeria, with reports that the death toll could reach as high as 50. Earlier this week, some 67 were reported killed in the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. In Syria, Al Qaeda affiliates desperate to establish an Islamic state in that country, are reported to be the most effective of all the groups engaged in that deadly civil war.
When the world community can gather twenty leaders to talk about the economy, and come up with little more than a communique and a press briefing, why can't the world leaders gather the courage, fortitude and vision to get together to prepare a global plan to work collaboratively, and even militarily to remove this cancer from the planet.
Innocent men, women and children are being killed, maimed, and/or left as refugees and there is no stated collaborative campaign uniting all the major powers of the world to confront this scourge.
When will the global community waken to the corrosive damage these groups, individually and collectively, have done and are doing and will continue to do, to the  budgets of major economies.
The United Sates, for one, has grown a mountainous budget for the Homeland Security Department, probably more then enough to eliminate most of their debt, in a Hollywood epic approach to their "national security"....while other countries have also taken steps of various kinds to produce counter-terrorism approaches.
Individually, those internal programs may have been successful in breaching and thwarting terrorist plans for various kinds of attacks.
However, it is long past time for the world leaders to stop talking on the phone, privately, and to gather together, with their chiefs of intelligence, their chiefs of national security and their chief military advisors to take on this metastasizing cancerous disease.
It is not merely for the purpose of protecting innocent lives that I make this proposal. It is for the sake of the world economy, and the world's need to demonstrate international cooperation, collaboration and decision making, as it would do in the case of a international threat to world health.
After all, Islamic terrorists are just as significant a threat as any SARS epidemic, or as global warming (another global issue that needs immediate and comprehensive agreement to reduce green house gases significantly) or as the economic crash of 2008.
Wherever there is a weak national government, the terrorists will take advantage of that situation.
Wherever there is a civil conflict, as in Syria, the terrorists will take advantage of that situation.
Wherever militant cells of no more than two brothers, as in Boston, find a public event which through home-made explosives, they will take advantage.
Home-made bombs, instructions on how to make them are, allegedly, readily available to anyone on the internet. Why? Is there no way that such information can not be removed from the internet in all countries?
Home-made meth-amphetamine labs are springing up all across the North American continent, probably also using instructions gathered from the internet with ingredients available in all drug stores, and while I have not read a piece of research linking the two, there is little reason to doubt that fear linked to the growing divide in income, and in employment opportunities and the hopelessness of the poverty in which millions now live could spawn both more labs and more terror attacks. Recruiting in pockets of desperation around the planet seems to be a rather effective method of recruiting new "martyrs" to the radical Islamist cause of jihad.
Infidels, (and anyone who is not Muslim, is considered an infidel), are targets for the hate and the bombs and the bullets of the terrorists. And the world is literally composed of billions of infidels...so the work of the terrorists has many future chapters yet to be written...and they are taking a very long view of history, so according to reports that are emerging in the west, they will be with us for a very long time, possibly centuries.
We are no longer in a stage of this conflict in which leaders of Christian churches walk down major streets of our cities robed, alongside their Muslim brothers, also robed. That kind of compassionate and collegial symbolism may still be needed after we rid the planet of this radical scourge.
The first recruits in the battle against the Islamic terrorists have to come from the Islamic communities themselves. If terrorism is not tolerated in the Koran, then why are the terrorists growing in both numbers and in their devastation of human life and public institutions? Why is the Islamic community not working openly, and aggressively to neutralize their radical peers?
If the United Nations was established to provide a forum or perhaps two fora for the purpose of discussing world issues and attempting to resolve them collaboratively, using the resources of all members, then this would be a time for all nations to submit reports on the impact the Islamic terrorists have had, are having and are projected to have on their individual countries. The United Nations could then at least provide that information to the world community, and propose an international  collaborative response, including the commission of both personnel and resources best defined by an international plan to address the issue globally.
Piecemeal initiatives remind us of sticking a single finger in a hole in a dyke, when we know that there are multiple holes already in the wall and more to come.
Already, Nigeria needs help, so does Somalia, so does Pakistan, and so does Yemen, not to mention Sryia, and other countries on the horn of Africa....and the problem is already larger than one that can be contained in any single country or region, using the forces available to that region. Of course Muslim leaders must be invited to attend such a gathering of world leaders in order to seek and to listen to their insight, especially the insights of those who consider themselves committed moderates who absolutely reject the violence of their jihadist compatriots. And a conference of religious leaders will not be adequate. We do not need more pontificating and more wringing of hands; we need international commitments made and carried out, of strategies, tactics and the long-term resources required to address this menace.

Boko Haram attack college in Nigeria

from BBC website, September 29, 2013

Many students are feared dead after suspected Islamist gunmen struck a college in north-eastern Nigeria.The students were shot dead as they slept in their dormitory at the College of Agriculture in Yobe state.North-eastern Nigeria is under a state of emergency amid an Islamic insurgency by the Boko Haram group.Boko Haram is fighting to overthrow Nigeria's government to create an Islamist state, and has launched a number of attacks on schools.

Classrooms burned
The number of casualties in the latest attack is unclear but there are fears the death toll could be high.One hospital source in Yobe's state capital, Damaturu, told Reuters news agency that 26 bodies had been brought there.College provost Molima Idi Mato told Associated Press the death toll could be as high as 50, adding that security forces were still recovering the bodies and that about 1,000 students had fled the campus.A military spokesman in Yobe state, Lazarus Eli, told Agence France-Presse the gunmen had also set fire to classrooms.
The college is in the rural Gujba district.
In May, President Goodluck Jonathan ordered an operation against Boko Haram, and a state of emergency was declared for the north-east on 14 May.
Many of the Islamist militants left their bases in the north-east and violence initially fell, but revenge attacks quickly followed.
In June, Boko Haram carried out two attacks on schools in the region.
At least nine children were killed in a school on the outskirts of Maiduguri, while 13 students and teachers were killed in a school in Damaturu.

Boko Haram at-a-glance

• Founded in 2002
• Official Arabic name, Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, means "People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad"
• Initially focused on opposing Western education
• Nicknamed Boko Haram, a phrase in the local Hausa language meaning, "Western education is forbidden"
• Launches military operations in 2009 to create an Islamic state across Nigeria
• Founding leader Mohammed Yusuf killed in same year in police custody
• Succeeded by Abubakar Shekau, who the military wrongly claimed in 2009 had been killed
• Suspected to have split into rival factions in 2012
• Military claims in August 2013 that Mr Shekau and his second-in-command Momodu Bama have been killed in separate attacks; no independent confirmation

Thich Nhat Hahn: Buddhist monk who practices and models mindfulness..



Thich Nhat Hahn

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk whose lifelong efforts to generate peace and reconciliation moved Martin Luther King Jr. to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.
One of the best known and most respected Zen masters in the world today, poet, and peace and human rights activist, Thich Nhat Hanh (called Thây by his students) has led an extraordinary life. Born in central Vietnam in 1926 he joined the monkshood at the age of sixteen. The Vietnam War confronted the monasteries with the question of whether to adhere to the contemplative life and remain meditating in the monasteries, or to help the villagers suffering under bombings and other devastation of the war. Nhat Hanh was one of those who chose to do both, helping to found the “engaged Buddhism” movement. His life has since been dedicated to the work of inner transformation for the benefit of individuals and society.

In  his book, Touching Peace, practicing the art of mindful living, he writes these words:

Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. This miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. Peace is all around us--in he world and in nature--and within us--in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn  to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice. We need only to find ways to bring our body and mind back to the present moment so we can touch what is refreshing, healing, and wondrous.
Some years ago I rode in a taxi in New York City, and I saw that the driver was not at all happy. He was not in the present moment. There was no peace or joy in him, no capacity of being alive while doing the work of driving, and he expressed it in the way he drove. Many of us do the same. We rush about, but we are not at one with one what we doing; we are not at peace. Our body is here, but our mind is somewhere else--in the past or the future, possessed by anger, frustration hopes or dreams. We are not really alive; we are like ghosts. If our beautiful child were to come up to us an doffer us a smile, we would miss him completely, and he would miss us. What a pity!
In The Stranger, Albert Camus described a man who was going to be executed in a few days. Sitting alone in his cell, he noticed a small patch of blue sky through the skylight, and suddenly he felt deeply in touch with life, deeply in the present moment. He vowed to live his remaining days in mindfulness, in full appreciation of each moment, and he did so for several days. Then, just three hours before the time of his execution, a priest came into the cell to receive a confession and administer the last rites. But the mane wanted only to be alone. He tried many ways to get the priest to leave, and when he finally succeeded, he said to himself that the priest lived like a dead man. "Il vit comme un mort." He saw that the one who was trying to save him was less alive than he, the one who was about to be executed.
Many of us, although alive, are not really alive because we are not able to touch life in the present moment. As Camus says, we are like dead people.

From the Plum Centre website, here are the Five Mindfulness Trainings

The Five Mindfulness Trainings

The Five Mindfulness Trainings represent the Buddhist vision for a global spirituality and ethic. They are a concrete expression of the Buddha’s teachings on the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, the path of right understanding and true love, leading to healing, transformation, and happiness for ourselves and for the world. To practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings is to cultivate the insight of interbeing, or Right View, which can remove all discrimination, intolerance, anger, fear, and despair. If we live according to the Five Mindfulness Trainings, we are already on the path of a bodhisattva. Knowing we are on that path, we are not lost in confusion about our life in the present or in fears about the future.

Reverence For Life

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger, fear, greed, and intolerance, which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking, I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.

True Happiness

Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to practicing generosity in my thinking, speaking, and acting. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others; and I will share my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need. I will practice looking deeply to see that the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from my own happiness and suffering; that true happiness is not possible without understanding and compassion; and that running after wealth, fame, power and sensual pleasures can bring much suffering and despair. I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy. I am committed to practicing Right Livelihood so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth and reverse the process of global warming.

True Love

Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct, I am committed to cultivating responsibility and learning ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families, and society. Knowing that sexual desire is not love, and that sexual activity motivated by craving always harms myself as well as others, I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without true love and a deep, long-term commitment made known to my family and friends. I will do everything in my power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent couples and families from being broken by sexual misconduct. Seeing that body and mind are one, I am committed to learning appropriate ways to take care of my sexual energy and cultivating loving kindness, compassion, joy and inclusiveness – which are the four basic elements of true love – for my greater happiness and the greater happiness of others. Practicing true love, we know that we will continue beautifully into the future.

Loving Speech and Deep Listening

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening in order to relieve suffering and to promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people, ethnic and religious groups, and nations. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I am committed to speaking truthfully using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope. When anger is manifesting in me, I am determined not to speak. I will practice mindful breathing and walking in order to recognize and to look deeply into my anger. I know that the roots of anger can be found in my wrong perceptions and lack of understanding of the suffering in myself and in the other person. I will speak and listen in a way that can help myself and the other person to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to utter words that can cause division or discord. I will practice Right Diligence to nourish my capacity for understanding, love, joy, and inclusiveness, and gradually transform anger, violence, and fear that lie deep in my consciousness.

Nourishment and Healing

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I will practice looking deeply into how I consume the Four Kinds of Nutriments, namely edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness. I am determined not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs, or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations. I will practice coming back to the present moment to be in touch with the refreshing, healing and nourishing elements in me and around me, not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past nor letting anxieties, fear, or craving pull me out of the present moment. I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety, or other suffering by losing myself in consumption. I will contemplate interbeing and consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and well-being in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society and the Earth.

 

Corporate reductionism of human eccentricity is costing us too much

When the suspended worker asked his boss, "Why am I not returning to work here?" the answer came back like a lightning bolt, "Chemistry!"
When someone like Brian Burke sits in the executive suite in the Saddledome in Calgary, and asks himself, "Why am I not still in charge of hockey operations with the Toronto Maple Leafs?" the answer beating a drum inside his head could well be, "Chemistry!"
The president of Bell Canada Enterprises, now one of the ownership team at MLSE, along with CTV and Rogers, seemed to think Burke did not "fit the brand"...as the pundits put it.
What does it mean "not to fit the brand"?
Does it mean that, in a culture of political correctness and buttoned down collars and tongues and public disclosure, including the disclosure of human emotions within the corporate swamp, Burke's free-flowing, stream-of consciousness interactivity with both the public and the media is thrown under the bus, in spite of his demonstrated ability, energy, creativity and intellectual discipline?
In a word, Yes!
People are no longer sought out for their talents, and their strengths and even their record, without also a much higher emphasis being placed on the "fit" of the personality to the organizational culture.
And one executive's interpretation of the appropriate "fit" could well be the precise opposite of the next's interpretation, since the ego of the CEO includes the prerogative of imprinting his "signature" on the organization.
A few years back, research reports in the U.S. found that up to 90% of all new executives failed in the first ninety days of taking a new post. And the reason, not being able to fit into the corporate culture, was addressed by assigning mentors to the new "recruits" so that they could be given informal and formal training in how to do things around here.
This notion of "chemistry" is not only paramount in corporate culture, it also applies to civil servant culture, college and university culture, and even ecclesial culture...Imagine a professor not receiving tenure, notwithstanding his brilliant academic background because he did not fit the institution's picture of itself in his demeanour. Imagine a clergy who froths at the mouth with both curiosity and political rebelliousness, both of which s/he considers necessary to any leadership role in the church, being turfed because "s/he was not spiritual enough" to suit the corporate suit, or the female mandarin who guards the operating and the foundation accounts of the church.
Imagine the new marketing guy, eager to demonstrate his creativity, and his capacity to build the organization forward hitting a wall in his first team meeting when he hears, "That will never fly around here; we just don't do things in such a loud manner, we prefer a more subtle, and we believe sophisticated approach, which we believe has more integrity in which our customers tell others about us and we grow our business through such authentic story-telling. What's more, it saves our operating budget thousands of dollars we would otherwise risk on marketing and advertising."
That really sounds like a time warp has overtaken the decision-makers in that organization...it may have worked well for decades, perhaps even centuries, while today, there is so much aggressive competition from other organizations, be they municipalities, or professional candidates for positions in law firms, or medical graduates vying for privileges in hospitals.
"Chemistry" is a public relations word for "politics" and for "humility" and for grasping one's place in the timeline of the organization as a "newcomer"...and the power resides in the seniority-holders of the organization even if there has been little or no innovation, experimentation, challenging leadership or 'white water' inside the culture for decades, if not centuries.
Sadly, especially in both the education and religion establishments, signs of permanence and signs of seniority rule with an iron fist, as they do in most civil servant cultures.
Just when and where the clients need to see new ventures, new ways of doing things and iconoclasts bursting through the mildew and the dust balls and the cobwebs of institutional lethargy, even somnambulance and lethargy, we find the greatest resistance to anything that smacks of "pretentious over-stepping" and pushing the envelope, by challenging the authority structure.
While it is refreshing to hear Pope Francis breath some new and fresh tone into the Roman Catholic institution, one has to wonder just how much rope the hierarchy will allow, before they rein him back into the "culture"...especially ironic given the New Testament legacy of a man who overturned so much of what he found was conventional and contemporary culture, so much overturning did he bring that he was found not fitting because of "chemistry"...He did not fit into the established thinking and established perceptions and the established culture.
John Steinbeck reminds us that man's highest achievement is as a rebel...and if one looks at history, it is through the unconventional, eccentric, questioning and even challenging voices of those who did not "fit into" the established order of things who paved the way forward for many legitimate and long-overdue human achievements.
Sadly, we have produced a western culture whose addiction to convention and conformity is so deep that it compromises our economic future, not to mention our individual liberty and human need for both change and innovation. Oh, there are a handful of Steve Jobs at the centre of the tech-revolution, but the vast majority of human beings are still pulling water from the well in buckets, (if they have a well from which to draw it) and are wearing the same grey suits that drove Willy Loman insane in Arthur Miller's Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Death of a Salesman, in the 1950's.
We are still sucking in garbage bags full of toxic fumes, as conventionally we refuse to acknowledge the reality and risks of global warming and climate change, and we are still marching toward a culture so balkanized between have's and have-not's that those who study the steep decline as well as its sound-breaking speed, theorize about the need for a new social compact or contract.
International agencies need to be developed to challenge a state's isolation from the world community, while national standards of, for example, minimum wage laws must be challenged to better identify and reflect different costs of living in various towns and cities. What a WalMart worker needs to live in San Francisco has to be higher than a WalMart worker needs to live in Huntsville, Alabama, as starting employees.
Learning about the real import of chemistry, given the potential contribution to an organization of one who asks a lot of questions, and who challenges much of the conventional "modus operandi" would point enlightened leaders in the direction of seeking them out, offering them contracts commensurate with their unconventionality and their creativity and their courage to innovate, not merely their willingness to march to the beat of the drum of organizational culture, as established a century ago.
Whenever I hear the excuse "chemistry" about why someone is dismissed, I know that the leadership of the organization is too frightened to work with that person to evoke the best that person has to offer. I once listened to an advisor's answer to a CEO's question, "Do you think I should hire person X?"
The answer ran something like this: "There is the potential for both great risk and great reward in hiring person X!"
And several years later, I wonder if that statement could not be made, if truth be told, about all of us...
we are all potentially carriers and generators of high rewards and high risks, and those who consider such a candidate too risky are overlooking a potentially valuable contributor, probably in favour of one "more easily managed"....
Chemistry is just another word for "high maintenance" when used as an excuse to dismiss someone.
And when dealing with human beings, all forms of reduction, including the reductions to simplistic expectations of someone skating up and down a wing on a hockey team, those reductions for which corporate culture is famous for having implemented with impunity, are an insult to us all...and the sooner our complexity and our rebelliousness and our eccentricity and our unique chemistry are seen as having great value, we will significantly shift our culture from fear to fresh hope and insight.

Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian chief of the Quds Force...a man to be reckoned with

From npr website, September 25, 2013
Perhaps the most important military commander in Syria's civil war is not Syrian at all. He's Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, and he's the subject of an article by Dexter Filkins in the current edition of The New Yorker.
For the past 15 years, Suleimani has been the chief of the Quds Force, a small but powerful branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He's not a familiar name to Americans, but one former CIA officer described him to Filkins as "the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today."
Filkins writes that Suleimani "has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran's favor, working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism."
Filkins covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times. In 2009, he was part of a team of Times reporters who shared a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to discuss Iran's involvement in Syria.

Interview Highlights

On the political changes happening in Iran
What's so interesting about what's happening now is that for many years the hard-liners in Iran have been basically unchallenged — they've had the run of the place. What's happened just in the last few months and why everybody is pretty hopeful is that you've got these kind of relatively moderate people coming to the fore. Hassan Rouhani was elected president, surprising everyone.
By Iranian standards, he's a pretty moderate guy, and he appears to have the blessing of the all-powerful Ayatollah Khamenei to pursue a deal with the United States over their nuclear program, possibly over Syria, we don't really know. So I think it's a pretty good bet right now that inside the Iranian government there's a really intense fight going on over the future of the country, the direction of the country and its foreign policy, the nuclear program, all this stuff. And these are not settled questions.

     

Dexter Filkins earned a George Polk award in 2004 for his coverage of Fallujah. His book, The Forever War, is about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

James Hill/Knopf Books          

 

On what the Iranian Quds Force does
There's no equivalent in the United States. If you had to make one, it would be the CIA and the special forces together. So it's traditional spies collecting information, running agents; and then it's guys that pull the trigger and go after people. So they do assassinations, they have advisers like special forces advisers. There [are] thousands of them in Syria now, Iranian Quds Force advisers helping to prop up the Assad government. And then they have spies around the globe. So it's a hybrid.
On how the Quds Force began propping up the Assad regime
If you stand back a little bit, if you remember, say, December/January of this year, Assad was on the ropes, he was teetering, it looked like he was going to collapse. His government was steadily losing ground to the rebels, and I think what happened — it's pretty clear by the evidence that the Iranian regime, which values their friendship with Assad very greatly, for many reasons, woke up and hit the alarm bell.
You can sort of watch the number of [Iranian] supply flights that were going in with troops, with ammunition, with money, with everything, just started increasing greatly. So instead of a couple days a week it became every day, all the time, and that has been the decisive factor in solidifying and probably preventing the collapse of the Assad regime. So the Iranians and the Quds Force are doing a whole array of things. They're down on the ground, so they have military advisers that are getting killed in the fight.
On Qassem Suleimani's history of aggression
Qassem Suleimani — who is this extraordinarily powerful man behind the mask, very mysterious guy, very powerful guy — he was instrumental in 2010 in making sure that the Americans left no troops behind in Iraq. During the Iraq War, he supervised and directed militias which were responsible for hundreds of American deaths.
It appears, by the evidence, that the Iranians, and the Quds Force in particular, were behind the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the president of Lebanon, in 2005. Qassem Suleimani appears to be running or directing or at least playing a very large part in the war in Syria on behalf of the Assad government. So he's everywhere, and, again, the Iranians have been extraordinarily aggressive over the past 15 years in asserting themselves in the Middle East, often at American expense.
On Iran's opposition to chemical weapons, which was shaped by the Iran-Iraq War
The Syrian regime, of course, by all available evidence — there's not much debate — used chemical weapons against their own people. They've done it more than a dozen times at least. And the Iranians, of course, have been supporting that government wholeheartedly. However, I think the evidence is pretty persuasive that the Iranians do not want Assad to use chemical weapons, and they've tried to stop him from doing it, which is remarkable. ...
[Last December], before the first chemical weapons attack, ... American intelligence detected that the regime was loading sarin gas onto bombs, basically, to be put on airplanes and then used. And it appeared that they were preparing for a pretty large-scale attack. ...

The Americans reached out to the Russians, the Russians reached out to the Iranians — I believe Qassem Suleimani — who reached out to Assad, [and] said, "Put 'em away." And they did at the time. And I think the reasons for that are ... the Iranians are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of chemical weapons [because of how they were used during the Iran-Iraq War]. ...

On the one hand, there's a great reluctance on the part of the Iranians to see chemical weapons being used because they were so traumatized by it. But on the other hand, I think ... they have a very specific interest in preventing Assad from using chemical weapons, and that is they don't want the West to be involved in this war. So I think their fear has been, "If you use chemical weapons, it's going to bring in the United States."
On how Iranian hard-liners like Qassem Suleimani view the U.S.
If you want to understand Qassem Suleimani's vision for the outside world and, for that matter, probably most of the hard-liners in Iran, the way they see the world, I think you have to go back to the Iran-Iraq War, which was ... one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. [It left] probably a million people dead; it lasted eight years; poison gas was used against the Iranians.
The Iranians don't really see that war as the Iran-Iraq War; they see it as the West vs. Iran. And they see, if you ask them, the gas attacks and those terrible, terrible moments in that war as being facilitated by the United States and Europe. And I think the evidence is pretty conclusive that the United States knew about Saddam [Hussein]'s preparations to attack Iran. And remember, this is right after the gigantic Iranian Revolution and the [1979] hostage crisis. ...
I think it's also pretty clear that [the U.S.] provided targeting information for the Iraqi military when it used poison gas, and I think the evidence is also pretty conclusive that Iraq, in building its chemical weapons arsenal, got help from certain European countries. Nonetheless, I think the Iranian view is that this was essentially a Western conspiracy. "We are surrounded by enemies near and far," and that is the way Qassem Suleimani sees the United States.
On whether an agreement between Iran and the U.S. is possible
What the Iranians want is a lifting of the sanctions ... and what we want is for them to give up their nuclear program. And they want that nuclear program very badly. So can we make a deal on that? I'm skeptical. ... The Iranians have been extremely patient in the way that they've pursued their nuclear program, particularly in the past decade.
There aren't any fixed timetables about when they have to get it done, and they are willing to proceed at a very deliberate pace as long as they are still moving forward. It's impossible to define their motives or even their objectives, but I think what's troubling to me is that where they appear to be heading ... is essentially [to] have the capability of building a bomb very quickly.

More support for a role for the International Criminal Court in the Assad use of chemical weapons

 

 Editor's note: At the acorncentreblog.com we have been urging the deployment of the ICC in the matter of Assad's use of chemical weapons, from the first clear indication that his regime used sarin gas on his people. We have also included comments from a political scientist in California urging the same action. Of course, we concur with the recommendations included in Jarrah's piece below.                

Why U.S. should back ICC role in Syria

 

By Balkees Jarrah, Special to CNN, from GPS on CNN website, September 25, 2013

Editor’s note: Balkees Jarrah is international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. The views expressed are the writer’s own.
Washington’s response to the chemical weapons attack in Syria has been imbued with words ordinarily reserved for a courtroom. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have spoken of “accountability,” “impunity,” “punishment” and even “standards of proof.”  Yet, the United States, curiously, has made little mention of criminal justice for the atrocities committed not only in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, but across Syria since 2011.
With renewed activity at the U.N. Security Council on Syria, there may be a chance for the Obama administration to match its rhetoric with its actions by publicly backing a role for the International Criminal Court.
Because Syria is not a member of the treaty that established the court, the Security Council would have to give it jurisdiction through what’s known as an “ICC referral.” A draft of a new Council resolution prepared by France, leaked to the media on September 13, included an ICC referral. It’s unclear though what the U.S. position is, in principle, on engaging the court.
The ICC is by no means a panacea for the situation in Syria, and nobody claims that the court’s involvement will stop the killing overnight. Diplomatic and humanitarian activities are critical to resolving the crisis. But a U.S. decision to get behind an ICC referral would signal that the administration is serious about its commitment to end impunity in Syria. Crucially, bringing the court into the picture would send a clear message to all parties to the conflict that grave crimes will carry serious consequences. Indeed, raising the price on today’s abuses has real potential to influence tomorrow’s behavior and help deter further atrocities.
More from GPS: Justice at The Hague?
The Obama administration has given mixed signals about its support for the court’s involvement in Syria. U.S. officials have sidestepped the question by pointing to the improbability of Russian acquiescence, at the same time voicing a preference for some kind of hybrid court. Together, this gives the distinct impression that Washington is, in fact, not in favor of an ICC referral.
Russia’s objection to an ICC referral should not be seen as irreversible. To successfully press Moscow on the issue, though, it needs to be clear that a global coalition of countries stands behind the measure, including members of the Security Council itself. More than 60 countries already do, including six Security Council members: France, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Argentina, Australia, and South Korea. It’s time the U.S. followed suit.
Russia has described the effort to seek an ICC referral as “ill-timed and counterproductive,” touching on the long-running debate about whether seeking justice interferes with prospects for peace.
More from CNN: Humanitarian crisis spilling from Syria
In fact, the record from past conflicts, such as in the Balkans in the 1990s, indicates that criminal indictments of senior political, military and rebel leaders can actually strengthen peace efforts by delegitimizing and marginalizing those who stand in the way of resolving a conflict. At the same time, the failure to hold those responsible for the most serious crimes to account can fuel future abuses. In Syria, we see this playing out in excruciating terms as abuses continue, aggravated by a complete and utter climate of impunity.
Referring Syria to the ICC is a crucial first step toward accountability for the crimes by all sides, whether by government forces, opposition fighters, jihadists, or other militias. It would set a valuable reference point for other judicial initiatives, including national trials and even potentially some kind of mixed judicial entity, which US officials have indicated they are working toward establishing. Other non-judicial measures will also be required, including truth commissions, reparations, and institutional reform. None of this is going to happen quickly or easily in Syria, but all will be essential.
It was just a year ago that Russia described the ICC as a “serious new tool” that the Security Council could use to address the fight against impunity. The United States expressed a similar view. Both countries participated in a unanimous Security Council vote in 2011 to give the ICC jurisdiction in Libya. Perhaps they should use this rare meeting of the minds to start to unfasten the deadlock on Syria and refer the situation in Syria to the court.

Harper rejects UN invite to speak to the world....appropriate for him and his parochial electoral base

Stephen Harper, in poking a finger in the eye of the United Nations, by refusing to "dance" with them, on the very week when all member states are invited to speak to the world, on the biggest platform on the planet, insults not only the United Nations as an institution but also Canada and the Canadian people.
Pundits claim that, by refusing to accept the UN invitation to speak to the General Assembly, he is really pandering to his electoral base, a parochial, narrow-minded, head-in-the-sand, reactionary cult
of fundamental neo-cons in politics, religion, economics. As a group, and as a government, they both despise academia, academic research, fact-based policy decisions, and all forms of social assistance. As a group and as a government, they believe in the supremacy of corporate power and profit, they believe in and practice the mantra of "economic opportunity and job creation" while doing very little to enhance either goal, economic growth or job creation.
As a government, they have spent $50+ millions touting their own horn throughout their time in government, in a perpetual, insistent and highly annoying (not to mention the highly questionable use of public funds) advertising campaign blatantly, unabashedly and unashamedly advertising their government's perpetual job creation programs, without actually putting meat on the bones of those programs.
In snubbing the United Nations, certainly not for the first, or probably the last time, Harper has effectively taken himself, and through him, Canada, and the Canadian voice, out of any substantive conversation over Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Russia and also any future conversations about global initiatives on climate change and global warming. By bullishly (both fiscally and physically) promoting the infamous tar sands dirty oil project, according to some international observers, Harper has turned Canada into another petro state, and the Canadian dollar into a mere petro dollar.
Canada lost her previously normal seat on the Security Council, when the last vote for new members was taken, and there is considerable evidence that Harper's government, and from the perspective of those countries casting ballots, Canada is now outside the acceptable range of moderate and progressive tradition established over the last half century under both Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments. In other words, Canada under Harper is no longer a central, and coveted and admired actor on the international stage, and in "standing up" the UN by refusing to accept her invitation to the "annual dance" (incidentally the same week as the Clinton Global Initiative holds its annual meeting also in New York, where Harper could potentially also be invited to speak) Harper has demonstrated his lack of bona fides on the international stage, and all the huffing and puffing about being part of the international dialogue is just that, hot air coming out of Ottawa, probably enough, if captured to heat and light the capital city.
While Obama is assertively and even aggressively moving to cut carbon dioxide emissions on all new coal-fired power plants, through sequestration under ground of the toxic gas, Harper's government runs through Ministers of the Environment like Wal Mart does greeters. Not a single occupant of the Minister's office in that department has made a dent in establishing a credible environmental policy, (because Harper won't permit such initiative) and only environmental activists are alarmed, disgusted and revolted, while the national media dishes out pablum on the issue, much to the delight of Harper and his cronies.
While even Texas is abandoning it high rate of incarceration (albeit to save money) the Harper government is increasing sentences, building new prisons, and removing judicial discretion from too many criminal cases, by establishing minimum sentences, regardless of the circumstances.
While the world community is becoming conscious and politically sensitive to minority groups, the Harper government is accusing the Atawapiskat First Nations community of bad accounting while their people are living in absolute squalor, without clear drinking water, without access to quality medical care, and without job opportunities to stem the tide of social breakdown and the spike in suicides among First Nations populations. And Atawapiskat is only the tip of the iceberg, given that there are at least 100+ reservations in Canada, most of which live under conditions similar to if not worse than those on James Bay.
While the whole world is concentrating on new high technology planning and purchasing for cyber protection from potential conflict, the wave of the future, the Harper government is attempting to purchase more military hardware like ships, fighter jets and tanks.
As one Canadian sad about Harper's insularity and parochialism, I have to say that it is probably best he take a pass on the UN podium, given that he would have painted a rosy picture of the work of his government to an audience who have already written him and his government off in their deliberations, and in staying home, he spared Canada and Canadians the further embarrassment of another performance of dubious, if not downright swiss-cheese quality full of holes in both "getting in step with the world's program and mood, and in providing creative and courageous and visionary leadership for the many global issues facing all nations on the planet. If all Harper can talk about is trade, and making more money, he will naturally be out of step with the world's leaders who have to chew gum and walk and talk at the same time, to they cannot and must not be Johnny-one-notes as Harper is. So clearly he would not fit into such an international body of thinkers, learners, and leaders, and he undoubtedly knows as much. He also knows that his electoral core could care less about the United Nations, given their already permanent disdain of anything outside their own back yard. Canada is the prototype of the infamous NIMBY archetype, sadly and Harper and his government electoral base epitomize that archetype.


 

Men are the new outsiders....and the struggle for equality is just beginning

What does the word "outsider" mean today?
It was Paul Sartre who reminds us that "hell" is other people...and if that is any guide, then anyone who is not "the self" is part of the hell that Sartre speaks about.
Jonathan Swift took the position that, while he admired and even liked individuals, he really despised the group, any group.
The rich, for the most part, have contempt for the poor.
The highly educated, for the most part, condescend to those  whose education and/or intellect is not up to snuff.
The people in management, while dependent on the blue collar/lunch-pail workers, nevertheless almost universally refuse to associate with those people, except when forced by a company activity, like a corporate picnic, or some form of game, or the retirement of a long-standing executive.
And, conversely, workers have a stereotype of the people in the executive suite, as out of touch, arrogant, insulated and isolated from the realities on the workplace floor, and also conversely, rarely, if ever spend time with those executives.
Union leaders are almost universally despised by the executive group, seen as a severe drain on the expenses because they are continuously arguing for more wages and benefits, more safety and better ergonomic conditions for their members. Naturally, the corollary is that union leaders perceive their management counterparts as obsessed with feathering their own nests, through stocks and bonuses, while they strip the unions of the benefits they have already attained.
Men are so nearly universally hated by women, especially hard core feminists, as interested in only one thing, as lazy, sloppy, irresponsible and more importantly as blocking the ladder to the top for those millions of women who are determined to reach that top rung on the ladder.
Men, conversely have an extremely confused and confusing picture of women, preferring to keep not a respectable distance but rather a "safe" distance, in order to avoid the political, cultural and potentially legal nightmare of harassment, a charge that was spawned by the feminist movement, in order to protect their sisters from the uncontrolled and uncontrollable ravages of male testosterone. At least that is how those feminists see the situation.
And, in too many instances, too many men have provided cover, support and even agency for the feminists, against other men, who have been far too often left hanging in the breeze without any kind of support, protection or even character references.
There is a new group in Toronto, calling itself, CAFE (Canadian Association for Equality) urging public support for its movement to level the playing field between the genders. Of course, the feminist movement is dead-set against such a group even attaining what would be normal conventional steps in the holding of public meetings. Having entered the field long before CAFE, the feminists believe they have staked out their claim on gender departments gender curricula, gender courses and public support for their form of gender equality, based as it is, on their belief and perception that, for centuries, men have been deliberately, willfully and conspiratorially suppressing their female counterparts.
Deliberate, willful and conspiratorial...would be extremely difficult to apply to men, any group of men, for, as some have noted, that would be analogous to herding cats...simply impossible.
Men have joined the military establishments in many cultures for centuries, believing they were going to fight against enemies of their state, their homes, and, not incidentally, their families, including their wives and children. Men have also joined workplace organizations also for centuries, once again believing that to do so was not only acceptable, but was required of any self-respecting male, in order to provide for his family, including his wife and children. A few men have found their working niche in orchestras, theatres, and some athletic fields, where for a long time, those fields were exclusive to men, in the belief and perception that to include women in the activity would put those women at a distinct and severe physical disadvantage. Some professional schools such as medicine, law, engineering and some maths and sciences were, for many decades populated primarily by males, until the breakthrough, both in  belief and in practice, along with public support, of both policies and funding that provided enhanced access to female candidates to the extent that females now dominate both undergraduate and graduate schools in most North American universities.
Once those policies, and funding practices were begun, they were never removed, as perhaps it was originally intended, and the enhanced access continues to favour female candidates.
Are men the new "outsiders" of the twenty-first century?
Some would argue that they are.
Some workplaces are now so heavily populated by women that men really are the exception, like the black-sheep, used only to count the flock, because there are so few of them. And those workplace cultures, including most elementary and increasingly secondary schools, are dominated by female administrators, by a female culture, by a female-centric curriculum and by a female-centric board of education. In one Ontario board of education, between 1990 and 2000, there was not a single male elementary teacher hired, to staff the dozens of elementary schools under its jurisdiction. That benchmark points to how far the pendulum has swung, away from a balanced faculty, given a relatively balanced school population, to one that innocently, and with impunity is obviously going to favour female students, female applicants for promotions, and the embedding of a female-oriented and supportive culture.
It is sheer madness, what we, both men and women, have permitted to occur in the transformation of our education system, our public culture and our political correctness...and we have both participated, whether conspiratorially or benignly.
And we are left with a culture in which men who aspire to be leaders have to exaggerate their "machismo" and their bully strength, in order to demonstrate that they are not "wimps" or effeminate and women believe that 'their time has finally come'....when we all know that, for example, female family practitioners strive so diligently and excessively to earn the respect of their profession, that they are burning out rapidly, attempting to cover the bases of their profession and their families.
That trend may be changing as some have realized there are limits to their energy, their capacity to balance, and they are demanding less demanding work schedules.
Men, on the other hand, are not enrolling in university, as they once did, and are choosing not to join what they see as a competition in which the playing field is significantly tilted in favour of female candidates. Men are also subjected to the greatest cuts in job losses, as the recession has eliminated many of the once-traditional roles of male workers in construction, labour, and similar jobs. Information centric occupations are also more favourable to female applicants, whose ability and capacity to master the details of those jobs does indeed exceed that of their male counterparts.
Men are found to be "sissies" if they are sensitive, especially by other males, most of whom consider gayness to be the most abhorrent condition a male could inhabit. Naturally, women are neither offended by gays and lesbians, nor or they put off by those who are, in the same way that straight men are.
So, if men are the new outsiders, then gay men are the "farthest-out" of the outsider group....and while small voices are beginning to be heard protesting the inequality of men, the battle has many generations yet to work its way through before all the defensiveness of the feminists evaporates and the over-compensating of males is no longer needed, just to make the field look level, even though it does not succeed.

Ignatieff's latest book, a reflection on the clash of theory and action in political life

From Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff, excerpt from Toronto Star, September 23, 2013

Why theoretical acumen is so frequently combined with political failure throws light on what is distinctive about a talent for politics. The candour, rigour, willingness to follow a thought wherever it leads, the penetrating search for originality — all these are virtues in theoretical pursuits but active liabilities in politics, where discretion and dissimulation are essential for success. This would suggest that these theorists failed because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut when flattery or partisan discipline required it of them.

Equally, however, theorists may have lacked those supreme virtues that separate successful politicians from failures: adaptability, cunning, rapid-fire recognition of Fortuna, the keen intuition that a situation has changed and that what was true once is no longer so, together with the noble capacity to lead, to charm and to inspire.

Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a second-class intelligence but a first-class temperament. Holmes was being condescending. Roosevelt himself was happy to admit that he had no theory of politics, other than being a Christian and a Democrat, but no theorist could have created the modern liberal state and revived his people’s faith in politics in the pit of the Depression.
Finding solace and comfort in the lives of men whose writings have inspired the education of political science students for centuries, yet who led miserable if not downright tragic lives as active politicians, Ignatieff honestly and forthrightly links with the theorists.
However, "men of action," even including the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, too often grasp for the most convenient and most easily saleable gimmick to enable them to sale through troubled waters in the body politic. It is the deep thinkers, hopefully linked to some leadership talent, who can see farther than the latest poll, and the next telephone pole, and even the next election. Harper is not such a political leader. He, conversely from Ignatieff, has fixed his personal and his party's star on the wagon of capitalism, endorsed its chief actors and almost completely ignored the people struggling to make a living, earn an education and climb out of poverty and namelessness.
Too much over simplification, reductionism and elimination of the hard knots of both social and foreign policy is rendered homogenized by the national media, believing as it does, that their average reader reads at about the grade six level.
Compressing Ignatieff's complexity of thought into an instant and gripping headline is, in a word, irreconcilable...it can't be done. And, given his commitment to both disclosure and patience with his fourth estate interogators, and his nuanced views, he suffered a public portraiture of wistful, unfocussed, and occasionally distant.
The introvert, at least in a public posture, has a very difficult time winning public applause. Posing as an extrovert, would undoubtedly in Ignatieff's mind, be nothing short of hypocritical. It is in his authenticity, and in his depth of both thought and feeling that Ignatieff found himself swimming against a current of political gamesmanship, lacquered and liquored over with mascara and kleg lights and "life-of-the-party" testosterone, however an audience inhales and consumes such ether.
Canada may have lost a potentially creative, and iconoclastic and even penetrating thinker as prime minister; the University of Toronto, however, rescued him and put him in front of fresh and nimble and hungry minds, the better to nourish the next generations, both with lectures and with writings.
No doubt, Ignatieff's own writings will become the stuff of the political curriculum in political science in the next decade and our grandchildren will be able to learn more about the deep divide between theory and action, and between thought and theatre, in the political sense.

Violence in video games, terrorism and main street politics...can and will lead to the death of truth and trust

The House of Representatives passed a spending bill this week that eviscerates funding for Obamacare, along with a $40 billion cut over the next ten years to SNAP, the early childhood nutrition program that gets millions of children a more level (certainly not a fully level) playing field when they start to school.
In the same week, the latest edition of a popular video game, Grand Theft Auto V, scored $1billion in sales. While one set of figures applies to the legislation of the U.S. Congress, the second figure applies to the consumer, presumably consumers in many countries, but primarily in the U.S.
In the same week, two mass shootings spilled more blood on the front pages of U.S. newspapers. killing a dozen in the Old Navy Yard in Washington D.C., and fortunately, leaving a dozen-plus in varying degrees of woundedness in Chicago, although one of the victims was a three-year-old boy, who is in critical condtion.
From the position of an outsider, there is an apparent linguistic, cultural and perhaps mind-set link between the shootings, the video game and the legislation. They are all about power, immediately effective deployment of power...the power to kill....

• through a violent video game described by one "player" as "the opportunity to enact criminal deaths while knowing that I will never become a criminal" an opportunity that gives me a "rush"...
• through the scream for help from a troubled man who could not make anyone else listen to his cries for help, although, God knows, he certainly waved red flags in the eyes and ears of policemen in Rhode Island, as recently as only one month ago...and
• through passing legislation (the forty-third time!) to slay the dragon (a cancerous beast, to Tea Party Republicans) of Obamacare and indirectly to wound, if not decapitate the presidency....

It could have happened that the Congress could have seriously wounded the President in his bid for a resolution from both Senate and House, authorizing a military strike against Syria, just when Putin stepped so melodramatically onto the international stage, with his diplomatic strategy to force Assad to surrender his chemical weapons to  international supervision and eventual destruction. (Incidentally, or perhaps not, the U.S. has been in the process of destroying their 30,000 tonnes of chemical weapons for the last four decades, and has not completed the process yet!)
It was former President Bill Clinton, appearing on CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria this morning, when asked about the political futures of both his wife, Hillary, and his daughter, Chelsea. "Politics is a contact sport, and if you don't want to get hit, then you'd better stay on the sidelines...but I would never discourage either of them from doing something they wanted to do...I still believe it is an honourable profession"....
And one has to wonder if both football and politics are not becoming, (or have already become) not merely contact sports, but actual sports that endanger one's literal and metaphoric existence....have we not learned that both football and politics have become "extreme sports" potentially carrying the potential to annihilate the participants, through deliberate campaigns of mis-information that could cripple public support for legislation, that could cripple one's reputation and thereby eliminate one from further competition, that could so injure one's skull as to incapacitate one from future worthwhile pursuits.
The 24-7-365 news cycle, the new social media, the stretching of the limits of the rules on what constitutes the truth in advertising, the capacity to libel, slander and wound (through personal and political bullying) anyone courageous enough to "try out" for the football game/team...and  a similar mind-set that seems to infect, even to infest, the koolaid of the culture seems to have so raised-the-ante on what is acceptable and the degrees to which one has to reach to qualify for public acceptance in the game...to a level that far exceeds a former proverbial axiom...(one needs the skin of a rhinoceros) to the level of a bullet-dodger in a action-packed television thriller.
We are now watching the impact on a culture of permanent threats of terrorism, including a permanent state of political "assassinations" using whatever weapons are available, including vocabulary that would and does fit seamlessly into a violent video game, on in a cave in some uncivilized country where terrorists plan their takeover of the world and the accompanying and concomitant fear of lethal attack, from within one's own party and from both open and secret opponents.
One of the normally accepted maxims of war is that the first casualty is truth....
If we are going to consider that all politics is now war, we can expect that its first casualty will be the truth of any statement and the trust of any self-respecting public in those statements....and we will have only ourselves to thank with the demise of our political systems.

Islamic fundamentalist terrorism metastasizes like an unstoppable cancer...with few if any effective opponents

Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are, like a metastasizing cancer, spreading their virulent violence in many quarters, in a growing effort to impose their radical ideology, through death and destruction and the fear that both generate, whenever and wherever they can...and one has to wonder if any country is really "safe" from its ravages.

Here is a brief list of some of the headlines of this past week:

 

Nairobi, Kenya, ....Peshawar, Pakistan, ....Bagdhad, Iraq, and Yemen where government representatives were killed by AlQaeda affiliates, not to mention the reports from Aleppo Syria, which question whether AlQaeda are in control of the local court, administering Sharia Law in that area..and then at least 10,000 AlQaeda-related fighters waging havoc among the rebels in Syria....and we are looking only at this past week's efforts by AlQaeda-related terrorists...and we have made no mention of Somalia, or the Pakistani government's release of a Taliban leader 'to negotiate with the NATO forces in the drawdown of western forces in that country'....How ironic is that release given the violence that this leader has left in the wake of his leadership. Is Pakistan really an ally of the U.S. and the west, or simply a failed state waiting to implode at the behest of the Taliban?

Of course, most governments have taken steps to protect their citizens against this scourge; nevertheless, the violence continues, grows and threatens not only the lives of innocent victims but the stability of those areas where the violence is imposed.

Terrorism, unlike state-actor inflicted violence, is unpredictable, requires no formal army, navy or air force and waits for the 'state' to expose an Achilles Heel, (like the locations of chemical weapons in Syria) to strike, and wreak havoc among their victims.

Human life has no value to these thugs. And non-Muslim lives are blatantly considered infidels...and so given that perspective, the world is filled with infidels who have to be wiped out, if a radical Islamic ideology is to replace the existing order. Reports on the Nairobi massacre yesterday, in an upscale mall, indicate that all Muslims were warned to leave the building before the massacre started, leaving only non-Muslims to be eradicated.

There is no WHO dedicated to fighting this microbial terrorist, as there would be for a new virus.

There is no Interpol dedicated to fighting this life-defying, obsessed and persistent disease of violence, more motivated even that the drug-lord induced violence witnessed this week in Chicago, where another thirteen were shot.

There is no enforcement arm of the International Criminal Court, to which the world can turn to bring these thugs to justice and to take them off the streets of our towns and cities.

There is no co-ordinated military or police action that spans the globe imposing "law and order" on these thugs...and every day their hubris grows with each and every death of an infidel....

 

Suicide Attack at Christian Church in Pakistan Kills Dozens

By Ismail Khan and Salman Masood, New York Times, September 22, 2013

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A suicide attack on a historic Christian church in northwestern Pakistan killed at least 75 people on Sunday, in one of the deadliest attacks on the Christian minority in Pakistan for years.        The attack occurred as worshipers left the All Saints Church in the old quarter of the regional capital, Peshawar, following a service on Sunday morning. Up to 600 worshipers had attended the service, and were leaving for a distribution of free food on the lawn outside, when two explosions ripped through the crowd.        Dozens of people were killed and more than 100 wounded, said Akhtar Ali Shah, the home secretary of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

And this:

From NPR website, September 21, 2013

An upscale mall in Kenya was the scene of gunfire and explosions Saturday, after a group of attackers used assault rifles and grenades to strike during lunch hour in Nairobi. At least 39 people have died in the attack, Kenya's president says, along with more than 150 wounded.
American citizens are among the victims of the attack, although it's not yet clear what their status is. The attack shocked people in the mall, which is known for attracting wealthy and foreign shoppers.
"Rob Vandijk, who works at the Dutch embassy, said he was eating at a restaurant inside the mall when attackers lobbed hand grenades inside the building," the AP reports. "He said gunfire then burst out and people screamed as they dropped to the ground."
The AP reports that police arrived at the mall roughly 30 minutes after the attack began. A gun battle ensued; the situation was described as a standoff. Sporadic gunfire is being reported from the scene.

And this
By The Associated Press on CBC website, September 21, 2013
Two suicide bombers, one in an explosives-laden car and the other on foot, struck a cluster of funeral tents packed with mourning families in a Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad, the deadliest in a string of attacks around Iraq that killed at least 96 people on Saturday.
The assaults, the latest in a months-long surge of violence, are a chilling reminder of insurgents' determination to re-ignite sectarian conflict more than a decade after the U.S.-led invasion.
Thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violent attacks in recent months — a level of bloodshed not seen since Iraq pulled back from the brink of civil war in 2008 — despite appeals for restraint from Shiite and Sunni political leaders.
The attack on the funeral was one of the largest single terrorist assaults on civilians in Iraq in recent years. It happened shortly before sunset in the densely populated Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.
Police said at least 72 people were killed and more than 120 were wounded in that attack. One bomber was able to drive up near the tent before detonating his deadly payload, and another on foot blew himself up nearby, police said.

 

Arch. of Canterbury: "church like a drunk on a cliff edge threatened by a ravine of intolerance and exclusion"

 The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently compared the church to a drunk man staggering ever closer to the edge of a cliff, threatened by “a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion.”
As one excluded from the Anglican community by authorities determined to solve a problem by what a Russian professor of Comparative Education called "the Russian method" ....that is by eliminating it....I can attest to that "fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion" as if the church had become a drunk man....and from my perspective the church, as I have known it by working inside it for a decade and a half, is drunk on its addiction to perfection, to a kind of corporate refusal to acknowledge responsibility for placing men and women in situations that could best be described as intolerable, unsupported, unsustainable and based on decisions of poverty of both money and human resources.
My first appointment found me facing a congregation angered by the removal of their previous priest, and despising the parachuting of this new 'candidate' by the bishop, without so much as a single hour of orientation, of both the new candidate or the parish council, around the circumstances into which I had been thrown. "Thrown" sounds like a verb chosen by a victim, yet it was the word used by the then-supervising Archdeacon, who observed that I had been "thrown into the deep end of the pool" in the appointment. It was a fifteen year-old son of a parishioner, at lunch in McDonalds, who, immediately upon his mother's departure for the rest room, blurted, "Do you know why the previous guy was booted out?"
I honestly replied, "I have no idea."
"Because he shot a dog and turned the gun on the owner of the dog," came the unadulterated, and also innocent story. No adult, including the Bishop or his staff had taken the time, and found the courage to pass along such a story, knowing full well, that no candidate would accept such an appointment without additional support, including a period of transition, both of which would have cost more money. So was the decision to 'throw' me into the jungle based on an attempt to "test" the neophyte, or to "break" the neophyte or to merely put a name on an organizational chart to tell the Diocese the post was filled?
We will never know, because that bishop is now deceased, and his second-in-command has shown no intention of disclosing the inner-thinking of the bishop in that appointment. Personally, I can attest to the fact that I pleaded with both the bishop and the laity in the parish where I had served a summer-extended-into-fall internship, that I would like to be placed as a deacon "under the supervision of a respected and experienced priest," a condition for which I had been told by the man who led my ordination retreat that had special, designated funds available inside the diocese. The bishop's only comment to me about my petition was, "I have no one qualified to supervise you!"
That fact, even it were only partially true, is itself a scathing indictment of a paucity of both resources and the courage imagination and leadership necessary to acquire such resources. For centuries, the "church-mouse" archetype has been the 'guiding light' for parish treasurers, who deliberately and historically, are so tight-fisted about the parish funds as to behave in a manner that could only be described 'as if they were guarding either their own bank account, or the crown jewels or perhaps both.' There is simply no sanctity, no holiness and no heavenly reward for such parsimony, either in fiscal terms or especially in spiritual terms...and yet, in each parish in which I served, (and that number includes at least seven different churches in both Canada and the U.S.) the treasurer considered herself (I encountered only one male) the final decision-maker on all parish decisions...another archetype of control and the need for absolute control under which I writhed until I finally removed as many of these shrivelled witches as I could.
Are you beginning to get the picture?...and these observations are only a brief beginning of a dozen years of enduring a culture in which no spiritual life flourished without some extrinsic insertion of a charismatic interloper, or a contemporary band, or a special project which captured the imagination of a few of the "frozen" who resided in the pews. Too much of the time was spent debating whether or not the church could "afford" a retrofit, a new building, a rental space, new choir gowns, new prayer books, the admission of gay members and/a church initiative to build community among neighbours or what to do in the case of a liturgical suicide, even two years following the tragedy.
There is much more to this story, but suffice it to say, it merits a "slow-telling" and at least this trajectory of the story can serve as an introduction.

 By Joe Friesen, Globe and Mail, September 20, 2013
Today, the (Canadian Anglican) church lives in reduced circumstances. The latest figures from the National Household Survey showed just more than 5 per cent of Canadians identify as Anglican, and only a third of those are actually on parish rolls. It is also a church divided. The church now grows primarily in the global south, where congregants have been alienated by the more liberal approach to same-sex blessings and women bishops in Britain and North America. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently compared the church to a drunk man staggering ever closer to the edge of a cliff, threatened by “a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion.”