Year: 2009

The G20 summit.

Baseline Scenario publishes an interesting post and triggers a wise comment.

Regular readers of Learning from Dogs will know that we greatly admire the job done by Simon Johnson, James Kwak and others over at Baseline Scenario in debating this global economic crisis.

The comments that flow in are fascinating and often deeply educational. Not surprising! Baseline Scenario has nearly 12,000 readers! But many of them show the level of anger and frustration felt by so many.

Anyway, a Post published by them on September 24th reminded me that hope is so much a more profitable emotion than anger. The Post starts like this,

The smallest hint of oil surplus leads to a real fall in oil prices

The fragility of the economy shows in many areas.

Last Thursday, the mere hint of a fairly insignificant surplus in U.S. oil reserves pushed down current oil prices and energy-related futures and other speculative plays.

Oil prices have fallen sharply as weak US home sales data and high US oil inventories prompted doubts about a potential recovery in fuel demand. Source: BBC News, 24th September.

Can you imagine the reaction to an announcement of a new source of U.S. oil reserves? Or of renewed off-shore drilling capacity? Relaxed EPA standards? Additional refinery capacity? Oil field

Our energy prices would be cut in half and we’d be so much less likely to war with oil-rich nations on whom we now depend for the functioning of our economy and who, indirectly or not, limit our economic and personal freedoms.

By Sherry Jarrell

Dogfighting

John Goodwin of HSUS teams up with an unlikely partner in the battle against dogfighting.

Thanks to Trish for pointing the Blog to this article in Yahoo Sports. It concerns a surprising success.

Maybe it was one of the times John Goodwin found a more receptive audience while lobbying politicians

John Goodwin

for stricter sentencing against dogfighting.

Maybe it was one of the times a law enforcement training session was packed with police.

Maybe it was while he was riding along on what is an increasing number of raids on dogfighting operations.

Whenever it was, there was a moment over the past two years that Goodwin, the anti-dog fighting expert at the Humane Society of the United States, realized that of all the unexpected things, a silver lining had formed in the ugly clouds of the Michael Vick scandal.

Read the full article here. More on John Goodwin here.

By Paul Handover

Dogs really are smarter!

Fascinating research coming out of Duke University

This Post was stimulated by a link sent to me by Chris Snuggs, who will be joining the author’s team at Learning from Dogs in due course.

The link was to an article published in Time Magazine on September 21st and is available in their online version.

The article is about the extraordinary social skills that have been developed by dogs over the millennia that they have been associated with man. It featured Brain Hare (sort of seems an appropriate name!) Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke.

The article is also rather timely as only a few days ago, there was a Post on this Blog about the befriending of a man with a wild wolf, or was it the other way around!

Back to the Time magazine article,

“Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought.”

The Jaguar XK120 Motor Car

You’ll never feel this way about a modern car!

A few weeks ago I attended a 70^th Birthday celebration for a cousin.

70! Hey this chap has been riding bicycles at competition level, and running marathons for many years, so the surprise party was very upbeat, with two bands keeping everybody dancing. Everything from the Shadows to Roy Orbison.

It was a lovely day so I took my old XK120 Roadster, mainly because another cousin was going along, and he had helped rebuild this car 30 years previously. Actually we arrived together. The XK was running beautifully, but my cousin’s Mercedes had burst a water pipe, and the car park was flooded with coloured radiator water. We laughed that it was the new car that had broken down.

What really matters – to you!

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves what is really important.

We went to a funeral last Monday. It was special in that a friend of ours had died and her husband had phoned to tell us.

They had emigrated to Spain 12 years before to become self sufficient in growing their own food, putting on workshops and working with ‘holistic management’ techniques. I have the feeling that it was quite tough as the climate was becoming more and more arid in the mountain area that had moved to.

She had decided to come home to Totnes (Devon, SW England) to die and had obviously planned the whole thing.
The service was lovely and relatives and friends had written poems and the vicar had been briefed on her life which was quite amazing. Born in Africa, boarding school in the UK, rose to be high up in a large company and then had decided with her husband to follow a completely different holistic route to self fulfilment.

The vicar had asked her how she wanted to prepare for her death and he she had answered that she wanted to saviour every moment whilst she was still alive and had asked him to recount this tale at the service.

A man who was being chased by a tiger and had fled up a tree to escape. He looked down to see the tiger pacing up and down, looking longingly up at him. After many hours, the man must have fallen to sleep and awoke as he found himself falling towards the tiger, waiting eagerly below. As he dropped, he noticed a beautiful fruit and grabbed at it focussing intently on every fine detail of it.

After the church service we retired to a nearby woodland where we all took it in turns to carry her wicker coffin up a hill, into the woods and after music and a blessing, we buried her.

It was a truly beautiful day and one that had echoes back through the millennium. It touched me deeply, not because of sadness but about putting things into perspective – what’s important and what isn’t.

By Jon Lavin

Wolf meets Man

An amazing true story of a relationship between a wild wolf and a man.

This is a story of a particular event in the life of Tim Woods told to me by his brother, DR. It revolves around the coming together of a man sleeping rough, with his dog, on Mingus Mountain, and a fully grown female Gray or Grey Wolf. Mingus is in the Black Hills mountain range between Cottonwood and Prescott in Arizona, USA

DR and his brother, Tim, belong to a large family; there are 7 sons and 2 daughters. Tim had a twin brother, Tom, and DR knew from an early age that Tim was different.

As DR explained,

Tim was much more enlightened than the rest of us. I remember that Tim and Tom, as twin brothers, could feel each other in almost a mystical manner. I witnessed Tom grabbing his hand in pain when Tim stuck the point of his knife into his (Tim’s) palm. Stuff like that! Tim just saw more of life than most other people.

Postscript to Luna, the wolf.

The story of Luna has some interesting connections.

The person taking the picture in the Post about Tim Woods was Willie Prescott. He just happens to be the grandson of William H. Prescott from whom the town of Prescott is named. Here’s that picture again.

Starting a business

Looks like a nice series from USA Today newspaper.

Just happened to be staying in a hotel last week that offered free copies of USA Today. Too mean to buy my own copies!

Anyway, that Monday was the start of a small business entrepreneur’s series running for 6 weeks.

Don’t worry if you missed the paper version, all available online. Week One is here, Week Two here. Bookmark it if you want to follow all 6 weeks – seems well thought out and mostly relevant to both sides of the Pond.

By Paul Handover

Unemployment, Part Three

How much is “too much” Unemployment?

How much unemployment “should” our economy have? How much unemployment is too much, and how much is just right? How high does the unemployment rate have to go before significant changes are made in government policy and approaches?

The question of the optimal level of unemployment has generally been answered by reference to the so-called “natural rate” of unemployment. The natural rate of unemployment is measured as the long-run average rate of actual unemployment in an economy over time; it is a “trend line,” as seen in this graph below:

unemployment3

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