Please watch this! It ‘s amazing, beautiful, and may take your breath away.
These are the words that John H., from here in Payson wrote, when he sent me the email that included the following video. Thanks John.
Here’s that video, Saving Valentina,
Now, while you are still ‘out there’ with the whales, go here and read,
Protecting blue whales along the California coast
The Great Whale Conservancy (GWC) Blue Whale Protection Program
Our Goal
To protect blue whales along the California coast from ship-strike caused injuries and death.
The Facts
The blue whale is the largest animal species to have ever inhabited the Earth. The global population prior to human predation has been estimated at 350,000 individuals. Today that number is ~10,000. Blue whales inhabit every ocean but one of the largest subpopulations is the Northeast Pacific group. These whales transit four favored areas: the California Bight (south of Point Conception,) the west coast of Baja California, the Sea of Cortez, and the Costa Rica Dome. By far the largest number of blue whales congregates in the California Bight between June and October where food availability is very high. This area is also one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, with over 6000 cargo ships/year transiting the Santa Barbara Channel to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The Problem
Blue whales are most vulnerable to strikes by cargo ships, tankers, cruise ships, and other large vessels at night while feeding on krill, transiting, or resting. During the day krill descend hundreds of feet into the water column, but every evening the whale’s photosensitive prey re-concentrate near the surface. The whales follow the krill back to the dark surface waters, and may not react quickly enough to avoid the large ships. A ship collision usually ends in injury or death for these giants of the seas. The documented number of blue whales killed by ships along the coast of California has been as high as 5 whales in a year. The actual number of mortalities is unknown and is suspected to be many times higher because blue whales are negatively buoyant – they sink when they die. The total number of ship-strike kills represents a survival threat to this subgroup and the worldwide population.
The Solution
Despite their size, California’s blue whales are for the most part unseen, which to a great degree is why they remain unprotected. The GWC will utilize media-generating tools such as web-based videos and public presentations and actions involving life-size blue whale floats to inform the public, focus attention on state and federal agencies and ship owners, and force a strengthening of the rules and operational policies for vessels transiting critical blue whale habitat. We will not turn the corner on this issue until the general public becomes aware of the problem and begins to “speak for the whales.” We must succeed – it would truly be a tragedy to lose this magnificent species forever.
It took decades to institute strong protections, including adjusted shipping lanes, ship speeds, and the establishment of protected areas for North Atlantic right whales, despite 60 years of “protected status” and the knowledge that 1/3 of the known mortalities every year resulted from ship strikes. The survival of the right whale population still hangs by a thread. We can’t afford to negotiate for decades on protecting blue whales in the Pacific.
Learning from Dogs first saw the light of day two years ago.
It all started on July 15th, 2009, during a very hot summer down in San Carlos, Mexico where I was first living with Jean.
Now, some 1,000 posts later life is very different. Jean and I are now married and living incredibly happily, with our twelve dogs and six cats, in Payson, Arizona, some 80 miles NE of Phoenix, up at 5,000 feet on the fringe of the world’s largest Ponderosa Pine forest.
Ponderosa pine forest
So apologies if today’s Post is partly reflective on the last two years. It also seems appropriate to revisit the reasons why so many articles on the Blog aren’t about dogs.
I feel the need to do that because the number of new readers now is just staggering.
The first full month was August 2009. Wordpress stats reveal that there were 1,172 unique viewers of the Blog. The last full month was, of course, June 2011. Wordpress figures were 31,664 unique viewers! That’s over a 1,000 viewers a day, and the trend is still upwards!
I am, of course, deeply moved by this response. Thank you, one and all!
In writing Learning from Dogs, I have tried to stay close to the theme that dogs are a metaphor for change for mankind. But that doesn’t mean that this is a doggy Blog.
As I wrote on the Welcome page, “Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value.”
Learning from Dogs is a Blog about the fundamental truths that we need to be reminded of, for our long-term survival. Dogs teach us the importance of integrity, of faith and loyalty and of unconditional love.
But just as importantly, dogs are a reminder that our evolution to Neolithic man may have been an evolutionary mistake. Stay with me for just a while.
Dogs were domesticated a mind-numbing number of years ago. There is good evidence that dogs were co-operating with man 30,000 years ago. However, one might speculate why the DNA of the dog separated from the grey wolf approximately 100,000 years ago. Was it because they evolved even that far back as domesticated companions to man? Science can’t tell us that yet.
But 30,000 years ago man was most definitely a hunter-gatherer. Archaeologists have pondered whether the domesticated dog allowed man to be so successful as a hunter-gatherer that, in time, man was able to evolve into farming which, of course, we describe more accurately as the Neolithic Revolution.
The “Neolithic” Revolution is the first agricultural revolution—the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicate that various forms of domestication of plants and animals arose independently in six separate locales worldwide ca. 10,000–7000 years BP (8,000–5000 BC), with the earliest known evidence found throughout the tropical and subtropical areas of southwestern and southern Asia, northern and central Africa and Central America.
However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history, into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production.
These developments provided the basis for concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing).
There’s one sentence that just jumps off the ‘page’. It’s this one. “During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history”
Here’s a quick bit of history about Homo Sapiens, from here,
Neanderthal man: from 230,000 years ago
Around 250,000 years ago Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record, to be followed in the Middle Palaeolithic period by humans with brains which again have increased in size. They are the first to be placed within the same genus as ourselves, as Homo sapiens(‘knowing man’).
By far the best known of them is Neanderthal man — named from the first fossil remains to be discovered, in 1856, in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, in Germany. The scientific name of this subspecies is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The Neanderthals are widely spread through Europe and the Middle East, and they thrive for an extremely long period (from about 230,000 to 35,000 years ago). Bones of animals of all sizes, up to bison and mammoth, and sophisticated stone tools are found with their remains.
Thus as a species we, as in H. sapiens, survived for approximately 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers!
Now after just 12,000 years, give or take, as ‘farmers’ we are facing the real risk of extinction. Go back to that WikiPedia extract above and re-read “concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing)“.
If you want to fully comprehend the mess we, as in man, have got ourselves into, then watch the stunning movie What a Way To Go: life at the end of the empire. That movie website is here or you can watch it from here. (I will be reviewing the film on Learning from Dogs in the next couple of weeks.)
The filmmakers, Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, towards the end of the film muse if mankind must go back to some form of hunter-gatherer society, not literally, of course, but ‘back’ to a form of society that is fundamentally sustainable with the world upon which we live. As successful as Neanderthal man. Here’s where dogs may have critically important lessons for mankind.
Dogs form small packs, up to a maximum of 50 animals
They have a simple hierarchy within the pack; the alpha female (who has first choice of breeding male and makes the very big decisions about whether the pack should move to a better territory), the beta male (always a dominant male that teaches the young pups their social skills and breaks up fights within the pack – my Pharaoh, as seen on the home page, is a beta GSD), and the omega dog (the clown dog, male or female. whose role is to keep the pack happy through play).
They survive through an extraordinary relationship with humans but if they have to revert to the ‘wild’ they survive as hunter-gatherers.
Maybe humans, at heart, also share certain similar characteristics:
We are happiest in social groups of less than 50
We much prefer simple methods of group order, where rules and discipline are managed within the group. (Think about how easily we form all sorts of local clubs and groups.)
A ‘local’ approach to survival through deep and extensive group co-operation would be so much more effective than what most of us presently experience in our societies.
That’s why so many of the articles that appear on Learning from Dogs focus on the madness of what we experience so often in our present enormous, faceless, distant societies.
Back to Sally Erickson, one of the film makers mentioned earlier. Here’s what she wrote in her Blog
Our world is in need of healing at every level. We as a species aren’t going to survive, the way we are going. If we don’t heal ourselves, evolve a new consciousness, and fundamentally change the way we live, human beings won’t make it.
Where’s it all heading? Who knows? I am reminded of that wonderful quote attributed to Niels Bohr but, more likely, from an unknown author (although Mark Twain is often suggested), “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Happy Birthday, Learning from Dogs. Thank you to all of you that have supported this venture over the last two years.
Just a few recent items to underline what a strange species we are!
This is being written on the 8th, not too many hours after the successful launch of the very last Shuttle space flight. Forget the [valid] question of cost, this launch sufficiently inspired nearly a million people to travel to the Kennedy Space Center to watch this historic flight. That adventuring drive is a wonderful aspect of mankind.
Now to another view of mankind.
Washington’s Blog of the 3rd July, 2011 has an in-depth review of how “the Japanese government, other governments and nuclear companies have covered up the extent of the Fukushima crisis.” In that excellent piece, there is a reference to material in the British Guardian newspaper (I’m taking the liberty of re-publishing quite a long extract from Washington’s Blog).
British Shenanigans
It’s not just the Japanese. As the Guardian notes:
British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.
Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse…
Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power.
***
The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who sits on the Commons environmental audit committee, condemned the extent of co-ordination between the government and nuclear companies that the emails appear to reveal.
***
The official suggested that if companies sent in their comments, they could be incorporated into briefs to ministers and government statements. “We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public.
***
The office for nuclear development invited companies to attend a meeting at the NIA’s headquarters in London. The aim was “to discuss a joint communications and engagement strategy aimed at ensuring we maintain confidence among the British public on the safety of nuclear power stations and nuclear new-build policy in light of recent events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant”.
Other documents released by the government’s safety watchdog, the office for nuclear regulation, reveal that the text of an announcement on 5 April about the impact of Fukushima on the new nuclear programme was privately cleared with nuclear industry representatives at a meeting the previous week. According to one former regulator, who preferred not to be named, the degree of collusion was “truly shocking”.
The release of 80 emails showing that in the days after the Fukushima accident not one but two government departments were working with nuclear companies to spin one of the biggest industrial catastrophes of the last 50 years, even as people were dying and a vast area was being made uninhabitable, is shocking.
***
What the emails shows is a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media.
***
To argue that the radiation was being released deliberately and was “all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation” is Orwellian.
And – as the Guardian notes in a third article – the collusion between the British government and nuclear companies is leading to political fallout:
“This deliberate and (sadly) very effective attempt to ‘calm’ the reporting of the true story of Fukushima is a terrible betrayal of liberal values. In my view it is not acceptable that a Liberal Democrat cabinet minister presides over a department deeply involved in a blatant conspiracy designed to manipulate the truth in order to protect corporate interests”. -Andy Myles, Liberal Democrat party’s former chief executive in Scotland
“These emails corroborate my own impression that there has been a strange silence in the UK following the Fukushima disaster … in the UK, new nuclear sites have been announced before the results of the Europe-wide review of nuclear safety has been completed. Today’s news strengthens the case for the government to halt new nuclear plans until an independent and transparent review has been conducted.” -Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament
It’s us, all of us, that create the systems, the political and government systems that are at the heart of this approach to life.
But it’s also us, all of us, that ‘write’ such beautiful stories as this one from NPR Music.
Paul Simon has brought joy to so many for so long, but on this night he made Rayna Ford’s dream come true. During a show in Toronto on May 7, Rayna Ford, a fan from Newfoundland, called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” and said something to the effect that she learned to play guitar on the song. In a moment of astonishment and disbelief, Paul Simon invited her on stage, handed her a guitar and asked her to play it for the crowd. When she strapped on the guitar, the audience went crazy. In a few strums, the band played along, tears ran down Rayna Ford’s cheeks and Simon stood by her side in smiles.
It was an absolute moment of sobbing joy for Ford and for the crowd. It was a moment so beautiful, so human, it could almost be a story in a Paul Simon song. Excuse me while I wipe my own tears. Go Rayna and all the Raynas out there with dreams. As the song says:
Oh, oh, what a night
Oh, what a garden of delight
Even now that sweet memory lingers
I was playing my guitar
Lying underneath the stars
Just thanking the Lord
For my fingers,
For my fingers
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University.
Finally, Joe Keohane (with thanks to Tom M. for the intro.)
Joe wrote a fascinating article that appeared in the Boston Globe last July that opens,
How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
This is a very smart article and much recommended, do read it fully here.
I suspect very few of you regular readers will recall that in 2009 (24th June to be precise) I ran a very short article under a similar title. This is what was published.
A simple heading but, in truth, a very complex subject. This was brought home by a recent article in The Economist by Bagehot. That is “Politicians frequently lie. So does everyone else. Why all the fuss?”
Bagehot writes a Blog so those who don’t read the newspaper can read the rest of his thesis here.
Here’s some of that essay by Bagehot,
On lying
Jun 30th 2009, 14:43 by Bagehot
THE WORD “lie” means something very specific. It doesn’t mean a misleading statement, or an exaggeration, or a half-truth: it is a falsehood advanced intentionally and knowingly. That is why, in my column last week, I wrote that probably only Tony Blair and his crew could know whether they “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Only they can know what was in their heads, and how far their public utterances diverged from their inner convictions. For that reason the question of lying over Iraq seems to me a bit of a red herring and distraction. What can be proved about their sloppiness and embellishments, and has been, is bad enough.
Lying is back in the news this week. Gordon Brown stands accused by various newspapers and columnists of deliberately misleading the public about the government’s fiscal position. Ditto Ed Balls, the prime minister’s henchman, who evidently doesn’t take kindly to having his integrity impugned in this way. David Cameron is a bit more periphrastic, knowing that in political parlance the “l” word is a nuclear accusation; but he came pretty close to it yesterday with his talk of “a thread of dishonesty” running through Mr Brown’s premiership.
There are (at least) two big questions provoked by this revived interest in lying. First and most obviously, are Mr Brown, Mr Balls and others really and indisputably liars? Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.
Just re-read those last few sentences, “Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.”
Delay your judgement for just a few minutes while we go to this next item. This next item is a recent essay from John Maudlin, the financial expert, about the latest jobs report in the US.
The US jobs report came out this morning, and it was simply dismal. This week we look at not only the jobs report but also “what-if” proffers for the US and global economies. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.
First, there were only 18,000 jobs created in June, the lowest since September 2010. While private employment rose by 57,000, government workers dropped by 39,000, continuing a trend as governments at all levels work to cut their budgets. Long-time readers know I think it is important to look at the direction of the revisions, and we got no help. May was revised down by 29,000 jobs and April a further down 15,000.
I saw some headlines and talking heads in the mainstream media saying the poor number was due to “seasonals,” and I just shook my head. If you are that reflexively bullish when presented with what was clearly a bad report, how can you be taken seriously? You know who you are. And then Philippa Dunne of the Liscio Report sent the following note. She is one of the best data mavens there is on jobs and employment.
John M. then includes quite a long extract from Philippa’s note. You can read it and the rest of John’s article here. Here’s how that extract from Philippa Dunne ends,
Also, there is no adjustment to the headline number – the sectors are adjusted separately (96 different industries at the 3-digit NAICS level, to be precise) and the total is the sum of those components. The whole argument is bogus.
Notice that last sentence, “The whole argument is bogus.” [My emboldening, Ed.]
OK, clearly not lying, in the strict definition of the term. But still delay your judgement.
Back on the 25th June this year, I wrote a piece with the title of Lying is OK, that’s official! Duh! I stated very clearly that lying is wrong! Mind you, one could at least congratulate Jean Claude Juncker for honestly admitting being a liar. (Jean Claude Juncker is the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and the head of the Eurogroup council of eurozone finance ministers.) Here’s that video clip with Juncker admitting that when it’s serious one has to lie! (Listen carefully, the words are quietly spoken.)
Finally, I have long followed Yves Smith’s excellent Blog, Naked Capitalism. Just yesterday, Yves wrote a powerful piece,
Not only is Obama assuring that he will go down as one of the worst Presidents in history, but for those who have any doubts, he is also making it clear that his only allegiance is to the capitalist classes and their knowledge worker arms and legs.
It’s an angry essay that has, at it’s heart, an anger at the lack of true representative government, remember the one that Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he wrote, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
Yves concludes in that article thus,
Even knowing how dedicated to bad ends Obama is, I still feel like I’ve walked into a parallel universe. He’s now determined to make these horrific entitlement cuts a sign of his manhood. This is “Change” for sure, to a more brutal, grasping, dog eat dog society, all administered by self serving elites. They will in the end reap the whirlwind they are creating, but not before it mows a path of destruction through our social order.
Right, time to draw it all together.
Despite my chest-beating on the subject of politicians and leaders deliberately lying in that recent piece about Juncker, there’s something much more fundamental. What defines lying is really not that important. It’s whether or not we trust that our leaders are doing their best for their constituents, to the best of their abilities.
Whether you support left-leaning or right-leaning policies is unimportant; indeed political differences and the ability to vote for one’s beliefs is at the heart of an open democracy.
But if we don’t trust that our leaders are doing their best for our country then that causes the destruction of faith. If we do not have faith in those that lead us then the breakdown of a civilised social order becomes a very real risk.
These are such difficult times impacting us across so many fronts. Scarily, one seems to find many who have lost much faith in their leaders.
[Note: Part Two of The Trap is available to watch in my post of the 7th where one can also link back to Part One. Ed.]
This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. What is discussed in this episode is the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.
Learning from Dogs 