We need to "tread softly" on Earth's grand cycles: Whitfield

Professor Michael Whitfield, the direcctor of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, writing in the scientific journal, Nature, declares:
"We should (rather) understand our dependence on Earth's grand cycles, and learn to tread softly in their presence."
When asked, "What do you mean?" by this comment, replies (to Thomas Homer Dixon in his book, The Ingenuity Gap, "We really don't know how many important features of Earth's grand systems work...For example, the MBA has begun a program to gather information on the impact of human beings on marine ecosystems along the English Channel. We're asking: What is the assimilative capacity of the coastal sea? How much rubbish can we dump? And how much fish can we take out? But this is an almost impossible task because we don't really know which species inhabit the waters of coastal Europe. We don't have a proper count of the species there; of those species we have identified, we often don't know what they do; and we therefore can't possibly know how the whole coastal ecosystem operates. We do know, from out studies of other ecosystems, that some species aren't essential to the overall functioning of the ecosystem. But others are 'keystone' species, and if we remover them we will gravely damage the whole system. In the case of the English Channel, determining a particular species' role is often staggeringly difficult.
Our ignorance is compounded by the fact that human societies and many natural systems operate on radically different time scales. It takes countless millennia for nature to build up biological capital--to build up, for instance, the capital represented by the diversity of species in the English Channel--yet we can wipe out much of that capital in an extraordinarily short time. As we exploit these sytems of natural resources at a very high rate, we don't appreciate the length of time it took nature to create the resources in the first place." (From Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, p.47)
Given the blind eye that many of the western countries, especially Canada, are turning to the issues of our relationship to the environment, we have not read, let alone digested, the impact of Professor Whitfield's words. We continue to pour tonnes of carbon gases into the atmosphere. We continue to avoid even talking about implementing a carbon tax to begin the process of lowering our emissions. We continue to watch projects like the "tar sands" oil project operate with minimal environmental restrictions, in our headlong pursuit of sales of those fossil fuels. We continue to keep our collective, political heads in the sand, in you will pardon the pun, on all matters relating to our wanton disregard of the ecosystems, and their complexities. And we continue without so much as a pause to reconsider our simple arrogance.
Some even go so far as to consider the questions about environmental atrophy irrelevant, redundant and unscientific.
While there are pockets of both understanding and concern, there is not a general public commitment, expressed through our leaders, that we need to take the issue seriously.

Ageism: another frontier for prevention of abuse

By Carol Goar, Toronto Star, August 15, 2011
The Law Commission of Ontario is attempting to (turn) ageism into an injustice that can be recognized, documented and remedied.

Last week it published a draft report designed to help lawmakers identify and take action against policies and practices that discriminate on the basis of age. Until November, it will hold public consultations for the next three months to make sure nothing is missing or misconceived. A final draft will be released in early 2012.
“With the aging of Canada’s population, it is increasingly important that we have sound legal and policy approaches to issues affecting older Canadians,” said Patricia Hughes, executive director of the provincial advisory agency. “While pioneering work has been done in this area, there has not yet been a comprehensive, coherent and principled approach developed for this area of the law.”
The carefully researched policy paper won’t win over skeptics. But it will address the concern that ageism is too amorphous to be judged or prevented.
It begins by pointing out both Canada’s Charter of Rights and the Ontario Human Rights Code explicitly prohibit age-based discrimination. It then shows the gap between the legislation and the reality: Caregivers routinely assume seniors can’t make their own decisions. Policymakers don’t bother to consult them on issues affecting them. Health-care and social service providers withhold supports to which are entitled. People patronize them, ignore them or exclude them the life of the community.
To move toward equality for older Canadians, the commission says, all laws should reflect these principles:
• Respect for the dignity of the individual.
• The presumption of ability, not disability.
• The right to be included in community affairs.
• Freedom from abuse or exploitation.


For laws already on the books, it offers policymakers a series of tests to apply: Are they rooted in stereotypes or shaped by unfair assumptions? Are they based on outdated medical knowledge or societal perceptions? Do they contain age-based eligibility criteria that ignore an individual’s actual ability? Do they authorize public officials to take away the autonomy of older adults without their input or consent? Do they sideswipe older people while attempting to accomplish other purposes?

If so they need to be amended or replaced.
There will be some who will argue that this is more of the "nanny state" moving into another "care-taking" area where it is neither wanted nor needed. And they will be wrong.
There is clearly a "youth bias" to the current society that, whether conscious or not, tends to render seniors irrelevant, redundant and perhaps even marginalized. Occasionally, one reads of a judge or a writer, or perhaps even a political leader who has served to an unexpectedly old age. And yet, these are exceptions, certainly not the norm.
Legislating attitudes is difficult and while a "code" or a set a guidelines can raise consciousness, it will not necessarily change attitudes.
We need a body of data that indicates the contribution seniors are making to various organizations, including corporations dedicated to generating dividends for their shareholders, in order to demonstrate the changing facts of both longer lives and longer successful working lives. And we need to educate those in human resources that just because we have either lost most of our hair, or it has turned grey, does not mean that the brain cells have ceased to function. We also need seniors to take to the public podiums to demonstrate the kind of thinking and visioning that is going on among those cells. And we need seniors who witness abuse to confront those committing the offense.
However, what we do not need is a "seniors police" who give out misdemeanour violations as a healthy way to curb abuse.
This is a long and a sensitive process that needs the input of seniors themselves.
It needs their leaven, their experience and their moderation in order to develop both policy and guidelines that seek to bring into focus the change in attitudes that is needed and expected.
Culturally, we also need to close the gap that exists in the minds of many younger people, that seniors are merely candidates for the warehouses of long-term care facilities. We need to develop strategies that bring young and old together in civic projects, in political parties, in church groups and in schools.
We need to develop a culture where both young and old can and do find opportunity to get to know each other.

Otto Lang: Trudeau's respect for dignity of individual a sign of his spirituality

Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's respect for the dignity of the individual is considered the evidence for his spirituality by his former Minister of Justice, Otto Lang, according to a presentation by Lang, among others, at a two-day conference at St. Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo in May, 2003.
The papers and the discussion they provoked have been collected, annotated and published in a book entitled, The Hidden Pierre Elliot Trudeau, The Faith Behind the Politics edited by John English, Richard Gwyn and P. Whitney Lackenbauer.
Here are two examples, from Lang's experience, to support his thesis that Trudeau's deep respect for the dignity of the individual is evidence of his spirituality.
I saw it (also) in the cabinet room very early on. At the University of Saskatchewan, I had been used to the university council where, when someone said something that was verging on the stupid, the general approach was to move right on with the discussion, ignoring it completely. I was just newly in the cabinet room in Ottawa when a comment in a serious debate could have matched this description. True to form, the next minister immediately began to speak as thought that remark had not happened. But Pierre put up his hand and said, "Just a moment. I do not think we understood what was just said." And I thought, my God, he is going to unveil the remark in all its blessed stupidity. But instead he probed until he found the gem that was really the intention of the person who had made the comment. That was the credit he gave to the intention and dignity of the person who made the remark. I developed my own "one-liner" for generally purposes from that: "the stupider the thing you think you've heard, the more likely it is you've misunderstood." ...
I saw his respect to individual dignity in a most telling way one day as we left a huge meeting on Western development in Saskatoon. We were leaving with the usual crowd of RCMP around us; it was, after all, in the West an din some of his more difficult days. Suddenly Pierre Trudeau spotted a little old Aboriginal woman, and he just stepped through the group of RCMP (to their dismay) and spoke to her. He said a few words to her in Cree. Whether he did it so that he could have that communion with a person in that was I do not know, but he was paying all of his attention to her and in that moment tears came streaming down her face.
This is part of what I see as the basic spirituality of Pierre Trudeau: individual dignity in the context of pluralism. (pp.141-142)

Rick Salutin: Financial dogma and faith without religion

By Rick Salutin, first published in Toronto Star, from rabble.ca website, August 12, 2011
For a few days this week, my son and I had some Muslim Arab kids from the Mideast, ages 8 and 12, up at the cottage. They've been in Canada for two years. Since it was Ramadan, we decided to fast with them. It's not mandatory for children but lots do it.

So we rose in time to have a big breakfast of mostly chocolate chip pancakes before sunrise, according to the almanac, at 6:16. Then nothing to eat till sunset around 8:30. In between they refused to get out of the water till they looked blue, spitting out lake water since drinking is forbidden along with eating, then played a lot of Monopoly or backgammon, which they picked up quickly, or lay on the couch with a DSi and Archie comics. After dinner they prayed, led by the 8-year-old since he's the boy, and were perfectly happy to have us watch or join in. My kid positioned himself ahead of them, to get a full frontal view of the prostrations.
This hyperactivity characterized the first day, then the pace slowed. The action alternated with resting, flopping, napping, reading, quiet chat and game playing -- due to fatigue and fasting for about 14 hours. It induced a kind of -- I don't know the precise word -- quietude, even in young kids. You husband your resources, consciously and/or unconsciously. Almost by default, a sort of meditative mood sets in.
I suppose in some cases the content is explicitly religious but it can be less focused: just a slower, more aware sense of moving through your life. I think this is one of the purposes of setting aside a whole month. It interrupts the frantic, self-involved routine of normal life. Even people who maintain a regular work schedule seem to become more deliberative.
It's the most radical version of this kind of interruption I know and I did study world religions as a grad student. The Jewish Sabbath is similar but it's just one day a week and not observed by many or even most Jews -- though it's common in religions for members not to subscribe fervently to all beliefs and practices.
At any rate, this pietistic/quietistic practice at the heart of Islam hardly conforms to images propagated by the extensive, influential anti-Islam industry. Its dominant slogan would be, "Islam is inherently violent," which you can confirm by a Google search better than any swatch of examples I could supply.
My point isn't that Islam is inherently non-violent, which you can also Google in quantity. It's that major religions are inherently diverse and uncategorizable, despite the internal battles they all fight to declare some particular version as the true one. In many ways, religion is simply an alternate way to describe being human.
This is the source of my problem with militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc., who fault "religion" for many human ills. They miss its normality, along with all its contradictions and variety. So they end up as caricatures of the same fundamentalists they caricature. They and those fundamentalists deserve each other, the way Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush deserved each other.
The point is you can have religion without fanaticism and dogma, and you can have fanaticism and dogma without a religion in sight. The ability to hold a deep, irrational certainty is a basic human -- not a religious -- trait. For instance:
- Consumers are tapped out leaving public spending the main potential source of demand to generate growth and investment, but governments won't do it because they don't believe in it. They believe in austerity.
- In the case of Greek debt, European authorities keep increasing the bailout based on conditions that make growth impossible and which Greeks won't accept, making further, equally futile bailouts inevitable.
- As the Los Angeles Times says, it was failure to regulate the mortgage industry that led to the meltdown, but right-wing U.S. legislators now demand less environmental regulation, of all things, in order to restore prosperity.
These are all cases of faith without religion, verging on blind faith. You keep doing it even though it makes no discernible sense. A dose of Ramadan (under another name) might restore some calm and an ability to think rationally.

Blogger Laurie Penny in her own words from London

London's burning: The panic of my city

By Laurie Penny from rabble.ca website, August 10, 2011 
 I'm huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn.
The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Monday night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This has been written after the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham.
Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain's inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder "mindless, mindless. " [Deputy Prime Minister] Nick Clegg denounced it as "needless, opportunistic theft and violence." Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron -- who has finally decided to return home to take charge -- declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable."
The violence on the streets is being dismissed as "pure criminality," as the work of a "violent minority", as "opportunism." This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost 10 times as much as the benefits you're no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don't know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school.
The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.
There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they're paying attention now.
In London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least 50 different areas across the U.K., including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian newspaper reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything -- literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
No-one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain't Twitter.
I'm stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.


Laurie Penny is a journalist, author, feminist, and reprobate who lives in a little hovel room somewhere in London. Her work can be found on her blog Penny Red.

Grover Norquist "enforces rigid ultimatums..that.. make thinking impossible" (Brooks)

By Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail, Autust 11, 2011
If signing the Taxpayer Protection pledge is the kind of covenant any aspiring or sitting Republican officeholder must now make in hopes of electoral salvation, Mr. Norquist is the modern GOP’s Supreme Being.

And in the quarter-century since Mr. Norquist devised the pledge, he has never had as big a flock in the U.S. capital. Only seven of 240 Republican members of the House of Representatives have refused to take the anti-tax oath formulated by Mr. Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Fully 40 of 47 GOP senators have taken the pledge.
The no-tax undertaking made by 234 House members (including one Democrat) nixed any consideration of revenue increases in the Aug. 1 deal between Congress and the Obama administration to raise the U.S. Treasury’s borrowing limit, in exchange for an equal amount in deficit reduction....
At the very least, however, Mr. Norquist has made solving the deficit problem more difficult. Counting on spending reductions alone to halt the rate of growth in the $14.3-trillion debt – which is set to exceed $20-trillion by 2021 – would require such deep cuts to everything from Medicare to the military that the federal government would shrink beyond recognition – sapping, many would say, its effectiveness...
If Mr. Norquist is able hold so much sway over U.S. fiscal policy, it is only partly because ATR (Americans for Tax Reform) has a generous – albeit unnamed – group of individual and corporate donors backing it. His job is rendered much easier by the anti-tax ethos at the heart of America’s founding myth.

Though he is highly partisan, this 54-year-old from the Boston suburbs is more of a libertarian than a Republican. He considers the war in Afghanistan a waste of money. He sits on the advisory council of GOProud, a lobby group for gay conservatives, and on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. He is married to a Muslim.

Harvard MBA in hand, Mr. Norquist worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before founding ATR at the height of the Reagan administration. He helped craft the Contract with America that propelled Republicans to their first House majority in four decades under Newt Gingrich in 1994.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks puts Mr. Norquist at the top of his list of “Beltway bandits” whose ideological blinders prevented them from seizing on a historic chance to right the American fiscal ship.

“Norquist,” Mr. Brooks recently wrote, “is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. … He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible.”
Mr. Norquist dismisses the notion, popular among liberal Democrats, that Tea Party Republicans in the House have held the rest of the country “hostage” to their anti-tax intransigence.

“We have a representative form of government,” he counters. “We elected a majority in the House who committed [to not raising taxes] before [their election], not afterward.”
All six of the Republican House and Senate members named to the 12-member congressional committee that must come up a $1.5-trillion deficit package by November have signed ATR’s pledge.
This man, who plays the role of a some-time comedian, is extremely dangerous for the simple reason that his "locked pledges" and the locked minds of those Republicans who signed them have held both the U.S. and to some extent the global economy hostage to their dogma.
There is no doubt that this "no-tax" position is another form of "dogma" of the kind that paralyses religious communities, and the individuals whose fear is so profound that they cling to such certainties.
The only thing unique that each person who seeks office in a democracy brings to the task, and the responsibility, is his/her unique perception and the freedom to hold that perception. When there is a block of a single-minded, enforced, monitored and controlled position on such an important matter as the unique power of the Congress to collect taxes, then that block is effectively behaving as a single tyrannical force in the country. And the rest of the country "be damned."
People are taking to the streets in the Middle East to push back against dictatorial governments.
When is it going to happen in the U.S.?
The rest of the world can only hope, "Soon!"

Obama: mature balanced and not looking for the villain....evolved masculinity!

By Drew Westin, New York Times, August 10, 2011
Drew Westin is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

When he wants to be, the president (Barack Obama) is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.
Searching for a diagnosis and an answer to the question, "What happened to Barack Obama?"  Drew Westin cites a number of possible explanations: the desire for re-election as a centrist, the hi-jacking of the government by the TeaParty, the corruption of all Washington politicians, and the mutually exclusive conundrum that he ran as both a reformer and a unity candidate who would bring Washington back from the bring of red-vs-blue brinkmanship.
However, it is Obama's refusal to find the villain, name the villain and merely cloud the villain in passive voice terms that he finally focuses on. And, to this observer, that is precisely the quality in President Obama that is most attractive, most mature, most liberating and most visionary. It is as easy as taking candy from a baby to point out the villain, to name the villain and to construct a "straw-man" of the villain that one can then attack and destroy. For the Republicans, Obama himself is the villain, and they have determined that he will be a one-term president.
He is an interloper president, not born in the United States, a communist, a socialist, a free-spending, high-taxing liberal in the middle of a debt and deficit crisis....and underlying all of these epithets, without having to utter the words, he is "black"....the first black president of the racially divided country.
And through it all, he continues to work hard to find ways to bring extremely divided government to the table, to the compromise that the country so desperately needs, to the solutions that will bring the U.S. out of this deep hole of fiscal, social and especially political emptiness.
If his refusal to "shoot the villain" in his many speeches, especially through the use of the "ad hominum" argument that is so popular a device of the "right," turns out to be his own "Waterloo" then the American people will have lost one of their most intelligent and most mature and most moderate and most balanced president of the last half century. He took out bin Laden, whom he knew was the villain; he agreed to support the NATO strike against Libya; he brought about the first reform of health care in half a century, after many other presidents had failed; he faced the most threatening set of factors on Wall Street since the Great Depression and has helped navigate the country through what could have been much worse turbulence; he fought for a debt ceiling hike that would last throughout his first term, so it would not have to be re-litigated just prior to the election; he consistently brings a calm, steady and balanced presence to his many public appearances and keeps his angry outbursts for private consumption.
He has successfully incarnated the most professional, most mature and most psychologically balanced potential of the office of president in recent memory, during the most turbulent political, economic, military and geopolitical tornadoes of what could be called a perfect storm...and because he does not carry the proverbial "Smith and Wesson" that insures so many cowboy trucks in the nation, while a rack of rifles hangs in the window of the cabs of those trucks, and because he is not throwing up political opponents as clay ducks for shooting practice, and because he does not engage in the gutter-politics of the kind the Republicans have got their PhD in, he is faulted for not continuing to tell and to re-tell the American myth of violent attack against the enemy.
This is the evolved male resident of the White House that the macho male neither understands nor respects, and that obviously includes Drew Westin, a professor of psychology who ought to "get it" when he attemps to diagnose an obviously visionary president who is not telling bedtime stories to children voters.
It is time for the U.S. electorate to grow up, to shed the hard power and to begin to listen to what the president is NOT saying....he is saying that these complex problems and issues require a different approach, a creative, collaborative approach that brings all voices to the table so that even the "crazies" are not excluded, in his bold and fresh attempt to be inclusive, something the Republicans reject completely.
After all, they have all the answers, and they have all the political testosterone the country will need for the next millenium....and look where the excess testosterone has got us, after a decade of Bush's big-T.