Category: Business

We are what we eat.

Integrity and honesty should certainly apply to what we eat!

Published author Deborah Taylor-French has her own blog Dog Leader Mysteries. She and I follow each other’s blog and I’m very grateful for the connection, as indeed I am with so many other fellow bloggers.

Thus that was how I came to learn of a recent post from Deborah about how rabbit meat is being used for human consumption. On the face of it, nothing wrong in eating rabbit but wait until you have read Deborah post, that is republished here with her kind permission.

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Tell Whole Foods: Do not sell bunnies

Tell Whole Foods, “Don’t sell bunny meat!”

Farm animals suffer greatly in the United States of America. Plus this suffering comes to us well documented. Before the U.S. Congress passes laws allowing Ag-Gag [see my footnote] states to make it illegal for people to photograph, video or report animal abuse inside or outside their meat plants.

The disturbing truth? Pet rabbits now sold for meat at Whole Foods Market come from being raised in U.S.A. Ag-gag states. What’s wrong with that? Everything.

Big farms doing business in Ag-gag states operate free from animal welfare laws.

In fact these huge meat farms have made laws against taking photographs, video recording or any reporting of animal abuse. What have they got to hide?

Enough. All too many cruel animal farming practices already hurt farm animals, enough to make most of us sick. The Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Defense Fund continue working to legally raise farm animal welfare practices. Most Americans know that farm animals do not receive acceptable room for walking nor a humane standard of care. Before we let another category of animal become victims of Ag-gag farm cruelty, we need to improve farm animals welfare.

Adopted from Rohnert Park Animal Shelter.

Rabbits die of fright.

They share the species lagomorph.

There are about eighty species of lagomorph include thirty species of pika, twenty species of rabbit and cottontail, and thirty species of hare family. Wikipedia

I learned about this issue of Whole Foods Market, selling a new category of animal for meat through a volunteer at my local shelter. Kathy, along with volunteers from Save a Bunny and a Southern California group, are working to raise awareness pet rabbits should not end up as mainstream Big Farm meat products. Why?

Whole Foods Market buys meat rabbits from Ag-gag states. If Whole Foods succeeds, farm animal suffering will fall on whole other category of animals, pet rabbits.

It comes as no secret in United States that farm animals end up being raised inhumanely. If you have ever read about the Ag-gag states and how they are able to prosecute anyone willing to go undercover and take photographs and videos to report the truth on this ongoing unnecessary torture of farm animals. What meat animals endure in the U.S.A. is nothing less than cruelty, it’s time we changed that, before adding anymore farm animals.

Nine facts hidden in Ag-gag pig farms

Millions of meat pigs live, eliminate and sleep in cramped spaces.
The environment these pigs endure smell rank. Their wastes drain into a central open sewer and their housing is so unclean many of them die.
Meat pigs lack all exercise to the extreme point that their legs break.
Pigs housed in huge warehouses with thousands of other pigs, hear others screaming day and night from pain.
Female pigs, sows, live horrible lives in gestation crates.
Gestation crates built for female pigs force them to stand up for 24-hours per day. Farmers do not allow pigs to walk or lie down. Gestation crates, notoriously painful for animals, need to be banned. Often the pigs’ legs break because their bones grow soft, due to not being allowed to walk.
Big meat farms build bars underneath sows to brace broken legs.
The meat pig lives in constant physical pain, terror, fear and unhappiness. When piglets die, often in these unsanitary conditions, their bodies get ground up and mixed into the food the sows eat. So mother pigs eat their own young.Pigs do not live as cannibals. Why should they be forced to eat their own young?
What horrible animal welfare to make pigs eat their own young. It’s incomprehensible that animals must live like this so that people can eat pork barbecue, pork steak and pork ribs.

How can they call these farms? Not giving animals room to walk, sit or lie down? Meat farm animals get denied their normal and natural behaviors. They never see the light of the sun nor feel the earth nor wind.

What U.S.A. meat farms won’t let us see.

After four years of hesitation and never mentioning recordings of farm animals lack of good welfare, I break my silence.

Much of the time I avoid eating meat. From now on, I will be seeking out small sustainable and local farms. We have several nearby that do not inflict senseless cruelty on pigs, chickens and cows. After study of commercially farmed pork and chicken and beef, I have returned to my original vegetarian and fish eating ways.

My footnote. As a non-American I didn’t fully understand the phrase “Ag-gag”. Deborah kindly explained it as follows:

Several states have passed laws against anyone photographing, video recording or reporting on animal abuse inside massive meat farms. The Humane Society of the United States keeps working (under cover to film the truth of this unsanitary and cruel business) but now they can arrest anyone caught, send reporters to jail and sue anyone trying to inform the public.

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I know for a fact that Deborah would love that this item is shared and republished as far and wide as possible. Please help.

For spreading the word and being very careful about the meat that we eat are the only ways to put a stop to these unbelievably cruel practices, and the ‘Ag-gag’ laws.

Protecting the brain.

The joys of growing ever more old!

Last Saturday, in a humorous post called Cognitive Ageing, I wrote:

Or put another way: I can remember everything except the things I forget.

Like many others of my age, the short-term memory is not as sharp as it used to be (not that I can remember when that was! 😉 )

Today’s post is to pass on a recommendation for a programme called Lumosity. It was recommended to me by my local doctor and I signed up in February of this year. Clearly, it is impossible to know, in a scientific way, how much good it has done me but instinctively I feel it has made a strong, positive difference. Let me quote from their website:

The Science Behind Lumosity

Neuroplasticity: how the brain is capable of change

Scientists have historically believed that once a person reaches adulthood, their cognitive abilities are immutable. But beginning in the early twentieth century, that theory has been contested by evidence suggesting that the brain’s abilities are in fact malleable and plastic. According to this principle of neuroplasticity, the brain is constantly changing in response to various experiences. New behaviors, new learnings, and even environmental changes or physical injuries may all stimulate the brain to create new neural pathways or reorganize existing ones, fundamentally altering how information is processed.

One of the most dramatic examples of neuroplasticity at work comes from a 2000 brain scan study on London taxi drivers (Maguire et al., 2000). In order to earn a license, London taxi drivers typically spend about two years learning to navigate the city’s serpentine streets. What mark, the study’s researchers wondered, did this long, rigorous period of training leave on taxi drivers’ brains? Under the scrutiny of fMRI scans, 16 male taxi drivers in this study were revealed to have larger hippocampuses than a control group of 50 healthy males of similar ages. And the longer the time spent as a taxi driver, the larger the hippocampus tended to be. As a brain area involved in memory and navigation, the hippocampus likely changed in response to the taxi drivers’ experiences.

Most instances of neuroplasticity-based changes in the brain are much more subtle. But in recent decades, it’s cases like that of the London taxi drivers that have inspired certain members of the scientific community to pursue the next logical step in research: rather than passively waiting to see how the brain might respond to circumstances, is it possible to direct that capacity for change, targeting improvements in specific key abilities?

The science of cognitive training seeks to answer this question. In 2013 alone, 30 cognitive training studies were registered on the government database ClinicalTrials.gov. Lumosity scientists, with the help of outside collaborators, contribute to this research effort: so far, 7 peer reviewed studies have been published using Lumosity as a cognitive training tool for diverse populations, including healthy adults, cancer survivors, elderly people, and children with a genetic disorder.

Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(8), 4398-4403.

Clearly, without trying it out yourself, it’s difficult for me to convey the nature of the ‘games’ that are provided.

What I can do is to republish a review that appeared on the website MD-Health.

Does Lumosity Work?

Lumosity was designed by several leading neuroscientists, which adds an air of credibility to this popular site, and combines the perks of social networking with brain training technology that supposedly makes your brain function at a higher level. But do these brain training games really work? There is plenty of evidence to support and contract the claims made by this popular gaming website, so it is important to look at the facts before making this determination.

What is Lumosity?

Lumosity is a webpage that features several different brain training games. Players are encouraged to create a profile that allows them to track their progress and play certain games that target mental flexibility, memory, problem solving, speed and attention. The idea is that performing these tasks regularly will help “train” your brain to function more effectively.

How Does Lumosity Work?

The web page explains that Lumosity is based on neuroplasticity, which treats the brain like a muscle that needs to adapt when it is presented with new challenges. The idea here is that if you present your brain with harder challenges, the portion of your brain meant to help solve them will grow larger and more functional. Previously it was believed that neuroplasticity was only available in children with brains that were still developing, but recent science leads researchers to believe that this skill is also available for adults.

Lumosity depends on two basic elements when users create their training program. First, users need to use the program regularly. This is similar to creating a daily routine at your local gym to work and tone your muscles. Your routine will not be as effective if you do not stick with it. The second part of this training program depends on users using many different types of games. There are 35 different games available on Lumosity in addition to many different skill levels within these games. Players should use a variety of different games and increase the difficulty level over time to help ensure that they are continuing to challenge the mind. Creating your initial profile gives the player an opportunity to see what weaknesses they have so they can create a routine that is ideal for their situation.

Is Lumosity Effective?

There are several scientific studies that lead scientists to believe that the brain training activities at Lumosity do have an effect on the brain. A study at the University of Michigan found that adults that used brain training games for a regular amount of time saw an improvement in test scores for dual attention asks and memory games in multiple tests. A similar study at Brown University also saw adults exceeding expectations in brain performance after using brain training games to aid in their work. These programs were found to boost the working memory which helps users keep track of tasks they are currently performing.

The thing to remember when analyzing these results is that they came from laboratory conditions. These adults used Lumosity games for hours every day for several months. Users that do not work on a similar schedule will not see these types of results. There is a great deal of evidence that supports the idea that brain training games can help grow and develop the mind, but not necessarily any evidence that Lumosity and the brain training games available here are more effective than other training games that are on the market elsewhere. In general, keeping the mind active and challenging your mind to learn more advanced tasks and ways of thinking are healthy and can help you perform tasks more effectively, and if Lumosity helps you accomplish this, then it can be seen as a positive asset.

There was a review published in The Guardian newspaper back in April, 2013 from which this extract is offered:

According to the website for Lumosity, which devised these games and is one of the best-known internet providers of brain training, setting aside a few minutes each day to complete the above tasks can make you feel “smarter, sharper, and brighter”. By factoring in a mental workout in the same way that we might go to the gym to exercise, we get cleverer and our IQ rockets.

That, at least, is the idea. And there are lots of people who buy it. In recent years, brain training has become a multimillion-pound business with companies such as Jungle Memory, Nintendo and CogniFit developing a wide range of user-friendly neuroscientific puzzles for the average punter. Lumosity itself has grown by 150% year-on-year since its launch in 2005 and now reaches more than 35 million people worldwide. In January alone, the company’s mobile app was downloaded nearly 50,000 times a day and its revenue hit $24m (£16m).

Co-founded by Michael Scanlon after he abandoned his neuroscience PhD at Stanford University, California, the business also has an extensive research programme that studies the effects of computerised cognitive training as well as conducting experiments over the web.

I can also republish another article from the Lumosity website:

The Science Behind Lumosity

The scientific roots of the Lumosity program

Research has found that certain types of activities may impact the brain more than others (Mechelli et al., 2004; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Draganski et al., 2006). It’s believed that as an activity is repeated, the brain tends to fall back on the same set of existing neural pathways. To continue changing, the brain must be exposed to novel, adaptive experiences that challenge it to work in new ways.

Drawing on this idea, Lumosity is designed to give each person a set of exercises that challenge their cognitive abilities.

Lumosity “games” are based on a combination of common neuropsychological and cognitive tasks, many of which have been used in research for decades, and new tasks designed by an in-house science team. Working with experienced game designers, Lumosity neuroscientists have transformed these tasks into over 40 challenging, adaptive games.

Lumosity’s game-based training program is designed to expose your brain to gradually increasing levels of challenges, adapting game difficulty to your individual ability level. As your scores increase, you may encounter new or more difficult games. Modelled from the concept of a physical personal trainer, Lumosity pushes you to operate at the limits of your abilities and stay challenged.

Gaser, C. & Schlaug, G. (2003). Brain structures differ between musicians and non-musicians. Journal of Neuroscience, 23(27), 9240-9245.

Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Kempermann, G., Kuhn, H. G., Winkler, J., Büchel, C., & May, A (2006). Temporal and spatial dynamics of brain structure changes during extensive learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(23), 6314-6317.

Mechelli, A., Crinion, J. T., Noppeney, U., O’Doherty, J., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., & Price, C.J. (2004). Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, 431, 757.

Lumosity is not expensive and while it is impossible to be objective about the positive difference it is giving me I wouldn’t give up on it.

Now where did I leave my car keys???

Welcome to the asylum!

Michael Klare offers convincing proof that the world is mad!

Once again, serendipity has stepped in and provided me with today’s post.

What do I mean?

Well yesterday, I republished in full a recent essay from George Monbiot. He demonstrated that when it comes to “fiddling while Rome burns” the United Nations takes some beating. This is in the context of 23 years of UN gatherings to control the levels of CO2 in our planet’s atmosphere without attempting, in the slightest, to control the production of coal, oil and gas. Take this excerpt as an example of our madness.

You cannot solve a problem without naming it. The absence of official recognition of the role of fossil fuel production in causing climate change – blitheringly obvious as it is – permits governments to pursue directly contradictory policies. While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2°C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it). But few governments go as far as the UK has gone.

In the Infrastructure Act that received royal assent last month, maximising the economic recovery of petroleum from the UK’s continental shelf became a statutory duty. Future governments are now legally bound to squeeze every possible drop out of the ground.

The idea came from a government review conducted by Sir Ian Wood, the billionaire owner of an inherited company – the Wood Group – that provides services to the oil and gas industry. While Sir Ian says his recommendations “received overwhelming industry support”, his team interviewed no one outside either the oil business or government. It contains no sign that I can detect of any feedback from environment groups or scientists.

Then serendipitously, yesterday morning up pops an essay from Michael Klare published on Tom Dispatch that continues to underline the absence, the global absence, of any form of smart thinking. It is republished today with the kind permission of Tom Engelhardt.

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is Big Oil Finally Entering a Climate Change World?

Posted by Michael Klare at 8:00am, March 12, 2015.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Welcome to the asylum! I’m talking, of course, about this country, or rather the world Big Oil spent big bucks creating.You know, the one in which the obvious — climate change — is doubted and denied, and in which the new Republican Congress is actively opposed to doing anything about it. Just the other day, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a column in his home state paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, adopting the old Nancy Reagan slogan “just say no” to climate change. The senator from Coalville, smarting over the Obama administration’s attempts to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, is urging state governors to simply ignore the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed “landmark limits” on those plants — to hell with the law and to hell, above all, with climate change. But it’s probably no news to you that the inmates are now running the asylum.

Just weeks ago, an example of Big Energy’s largess when it comes to sowing doubt about climate change surfaced. A rare scientific researcher, Wei-Hock Soon, who has published work denying the reality of climate change — the warming of the planet, he claims, is a result of “variations in the sun’s energy” — turned out to have received $1.2 million from various fossil fuel outfits, according to recently released documents; nor did he bother to disclose such support to any of the publications using his work. “The documents,” reported the New York Times, “show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.”

There’s nothing new in this. Big Energy (like Big Tobacco before it) has for years been using a tiny cadre of scientists to sow uncertainty about the reality of climate change. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote a now-classic investigative book, Merchants of Doubt, about just how the fossil fuel companies pulled this off, creating a public sense of doubt where a scientific one didn’t exist. Now, the book has been made into a striking documentary film, which has just opened nationally. Someday, perhaps, all of this will enter a court of law where those who knowingly perpetrated fraud on the American and global publics and in the process threatened humanity with a disaster of potentially apocalyptic proportions will get their just desserts. On that distant day when those who ran the planet into the ground for corporate profits have to pay for their criminal acts, Merchants of Doubt will undoubtedly be exhibit one for the prosecution.

In the meantime, TomDispatch regular Michael Klare continues his invaluable chronicling at this site of the depredations of Big Oil on this fragile planet of ours. Tom

Big Oil’s Broken Business Model

The Real Story Behind the Oil Price Collapse
By Michael T. Klare

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply — no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock — was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm, posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline; on the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of Tough Oil

No one better captured that moment than David O’Reilly, the chairman and CEO of Chevron. “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February. “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.” Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O’Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. “Increasingly,” O’Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O’Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world’s problem, not theirs. “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O’Reilly declared. “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What’s Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia. Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP. Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply. “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002. For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil’s output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach. “Some may question whether so much of the [world’s energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009. “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].” Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80% of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggering the Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the Cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP’s latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions: that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise — that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population — but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Consider this: in 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it’s lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels. Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil’s multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction. With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come. In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption. While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next — a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its one million barrel increase in 2010. In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations). While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020. Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects. Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects. Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway’s Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the wellbeing of Big Oil: climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model. The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing. Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting to worry about its effects — extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like — and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades. China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20% of total energy use by then. In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day. (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress — heavily subsidized by Big Oil — will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase. Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there’s no turning back from that. “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown. “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development… On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels. But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams. As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil’s production-maximizing strategy rested. The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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Both yesterday’s essay from George Monbiot and Michael Klare’s essay above are not quick reads. But reading them thoroughly is rewarding because it underlines the degree to which the lives of millions of hard-working citizens comes to naught when big money, power and politics are involved.

Smart thinking – something else to learn from our dogs?

Because some of the things we humans do are insanely stupid!

Here’s a picture of Oliver taken yesterday afternoon.

Becoming a dear, smart dog. (And those eyes!)

A few days ago, I was sitting in our living room on one of our settees (more or less where Oliver was sitting when the photograph above was taken) with my knees up against a low coffee table; the table separates our two settees.

On the settee to my left lay Cleo and on the floor across my feet slept Hazel.

It was clear that Oliver wanted to join me on the settee but couldn’t work out if there was room. I shifted about two feet to my left leaving an Oliver-sized gap to my right. However, Oliver couldn’t come past my knees, from left to right as it were, because of Hazel. He very quickly worked out to run around behind the settee and jump up into the space I had newly created to my right.

Don’t worry if I lost you!

The point I am making is that Oliver, who has grown into the most delightful young adult dog, with a gorgeous temperament, demonstrates daily a keen intelligence and a nose for working things out quickly.

All of which is a preamble for me wondering if among the list of qualities that we humans should learn from dogs we should add intelligence.

For there’s been a few items around the ‘blogosphere’ that have highlighted how silly we can be.

Take this item that recently was featured on Grist.

Walmart’s new green product label is the most misleading yet.

A giant, 150-foot roll of bubble wrap may not be your idea of an environmentally friendly product, but over at Walmart.com this one-pound ball of plastic now boasts a special “Sustainability Leaders” badge. It’s one of more than 3,000 products tagged with this new green label, which Walmart executives unveiled last week, together with a web portal where shoppers can find these items.

Dozens of news accounts hailed the giant retailer’s move as a significant step toward clearing up the confusion and misleading information that often greet consumers trying to make ecologically responsible choices. “The world’s largest retailer took a major and important step toward helping all of us shop more smartly,” declared corporate sustainability consultant Andrew Winston in Harvard Business Review. Triple Pundit concurred: “It’s about to get a lot easier for Walmart.com shoppers to make the responsible choice.”

Actually, a green-minded online shopper is likely to find Walmart’s new badge confusing, murky, and downright misleading. I searched the bubble wrap’s product page high and low for its secret sauce, the invisible feature that makes it a smarter choice amid the many seemingly less harmful packing options available, but found no explanation.

It turns out that the key to this mystery lies in a remarkable disclaimer tucked into the middle of the home page of Walmart’s sustainability shopping portal: “The Sustainability Leaders badge does not make representations about the environmental or social impact of an individual product.” (my emphasis)

You can read the full item here, and you should! It’s unbelievably stupid, apart from being highly misleading, to my mind because when the word gets around it will damage the trust that all retailers need from their customers. And don’t even bring up the notion of integrity!

Then over on George Monbiot’s blogsite, there is a recent essay about the UN and progress on climate change. Here’s how it starts (and I’m republishing it in full tomorrow):

Applauding Themselves to Death

If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.

The celebratory nature of the images testifies to the world of make-believe these people inhabit. They are surrounded by objectives, principles, commitments, instruments and protocols, which create a reassuring phantasm of progress while the ship on which they travel slowly founders. Leafing through these photos, I imagine I can almost hear what the delegates are saying through their expensive dentistry. “Darling you’ve re-arranged the deckchairs beautifully. It’s a breakthrough! We’ll have to invent a mechanism for holding them in place, as the deck has developed a bit of a tilt, but we’ll do that at the next conference.”

Humans have the potential to be incredibly smart thinkers, and down the ages there have been many such thinkers.

But!

Over on the Patrice Ayme blogsite there have been a couple of recent essays that highlight examples of both stupid thinking and the rewards that flow from smart thinking. In one essay, Added Value in the XXI Century, Patrice writes:

SUPERIORITY OF THE WEST?

Why did the West become so superior? Or China, for that matter?

Technology. Superior technology. Coming from superior thinking. Both the Greeks and the Chinese had colossal contempt for barbarians. (In both cases it went so far that the Greeks lost everything, and the Chinese came very close to annihilation).

Around the year 1000 CE, the Vietnamese (it seems) invented new cultivars of rice, which could produce an entire crop, twice a year. The population of East Asia exploded accordingly.

A bit earlier, the Franks had invented new cultivars of beans. The Frankish Tenth Century was full of beans. Beans are nutritious, with high protein.

Homo is scientific and technological. Thus, two million years ago, pelt covered (tech!) Homo Ergaster lived in Georgia’s Little Caucasus, a pretty cold place in winter. And the population was highly varied genetically (showing tech and travel already dominated).

A GREATER OBSESSION WITH FREEDOM MADE THE WEST SUPERIOR:

Here is the very latest. Flour was found in England, in archeological layers as old as 10,000 years before present. It was pure flour: there were no husks associated. The milling had been done, far away. How far? Well the cultivation of wheat spread to Western Europe millennia later. The flour had been traded, and brought over thousands of miles. Most certainly by boat. Celtic civilization, which would rise 5,000 years later, was expert at oceanic travel.

What’s the broad picture? Not just that prehistoric Englishmen loved their flat bread, no doubt a delicacy. Advanced technology has permeated Europe for much longer than is still understood now by most historians. Remember that the iceman who died in a glacier, 5,000 years ago, was not just tattooed, and had fetched in the lowlands a bow made of special wood. More telling: he carried antibiotics.

Then in a subsequent essay, What Is It To Think Correctly?, Patrice opens, thus:

What Is It To Think Correctly?

Some say that correct thinking has to do with avoiding “logical fallacies”. That is, of course, silly. Imagine a pilot in a plane. Suppose she avoids all logical fallacies. Where does the plane go? Nowhere. Thinking correctly is more than avoiding logical “fallacies”.

One needs more than logic, to proceed: one needs e-motion, or motivation (both express the fact that they are whatever gets people to get into action; the semantics recognizes that logic without emotion goes nowhere).

There is another, related, fallacy in thinking that correct thinking is all about avoiding “logical fallacies”.

I don’t have the answers to the conundrum of stupid thinking a la Walmart and the United Nations (not an exclusive list; by far) but I do believe that the only way for humanity to overcome what looks like a very dangerous era ahead is through smarter thinking!

Oh, nearly forgot.

Oliver will be happy to run classes on smart thinking!

Please sign for the Irish Greyhound

Very grateful to Deborah over at Dog Leader Mysteries for today’s post.

The following appeared over on Dog Leader Mysteries last Monday and is republished with Deborah’s permission. Please share this as far and wide as you can.

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1 minute for Irish Greyhounds

Featured by dogleadermysteries

Please help Irish Greyhounds by signing this Care2 petition

Save greyhound dogs’ lives in less than 1 minute

Bring Irish Greyhound Racing Regulations in line with the United Kingdom

I will not submit my readers to the horrors racing greyhounds endure or lose their lives from. I never thought any thing could be worse than dogs bred in puppy mills. After reading the Care2 petition’s explanation of the conditions and animal cruelty in Ireland’s dog racing world, now I feel sadder but an informed and wiser person.

My friend, Rosee Riggs, sent me this petition. The situation and welfare for dogs on Irish racetracks distresses all animal lovers everywhere. Without boring you with research and background, the essence of this petition effort targets raising Irish greyhound racing rules to match those in Great Britain.

4 great things about greyhound dogs

When living in a home with a family

Greyhounds love to snuggle
Greyhounds enjoy being couch potatoes
Rescued track greyhounds often hate to run
Greyhounds cannot swim. They sink due to extremely low body fat

Myth buster: Not true that former track greyhounds become runaway dogs!

This is Rosee’s dog, Speedy. Read more about him on her site Good Dog Practice.

speedy-kopfportrait — Former Irish greyhound, now safe and happy. **Photo credit: Judith Utner**

From Care2: legal changes needed to better protect Irish track greyhounds

Have a veterinarian present at all race meetings, trials and sales trials who must inspect every greyhound before it runs;
Provide the veterinarian with appropriate facilities;
Provide suitable kennels, diet, hygiene standards, for all greyhounds that are going to run in a race or trial and for the dogs NOT to be muzzled for 23-24 hours a day; Ensure that the greyhounds have access to an outside area for exercise and be supplied with food and water.
Only allow greyhounds that are healthy, micro-chipped, registered and, were required, tattooed, to run in a race or trial.
Keep up to date records of owners, trainers, greyhounds and any injuries/deaths to greyhounds.
Monitor all licensed and private Breeders to reduce excess Dogs thereby reducing the need to euthanize/kill unwanted puppies.
To regulate Ireland’s greyhound breeders, not governed by the same regulations & welfare stipulations as the UK. All aspects of greyhound dog breeding, training and kennelling.
To provide adequate travel facilities, breaks (on long journeys) and water/food as required.

Speedy came as a racetrack rescue from Ireland. Photo credit: Katrin Bargheer — Speedy came as a racetrack rescue from Ireland. **Photo credit: Katrin Bargheer**

Care2 Petition Bring Irish Greyhound Racing Regulations in line with the UK

Please sign and share

Thanks for reading, Deborah Taylor-French

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Delighted to say that at 15:30 PST yesterday, the Care2 Petition site read:

we’ve got 169,061 signatures, help us get to 170,000

and went on to explain the background to the petition:

There are major concerns about animal welfare issues relating to the racing greyhound industry in Ireland. Many puppies and older dogs which don’t perform to racing owner expectations are killed simply because they won’t make money for the owner. They are discovered in mass graves with their tattooed ears hacked off so they can’t be identified – so that their owners can’t be held accountable.

Dogs are generally kennelled, constantly muzzled, for 23-24 hours a day for their entire racing life. There are usually at least two dogs per small kennel, sharing one bed (with straw if they are lucky). The kennels are overcrowded, not properly maintained and badly cramped.

In the UK there are regulations which provide some protection for racing greyhounds. These regulations do not exist in Ireland where most racing greyhounds come from. Changes need to be made to bring the laws in Ireland in line with those in the UK. These rules aren’t perfect but they do offer a lot of improvements to the lives of these beautiful dogs.

Please sign the petition to show the Irish Greyhound Racing Board that the public cares about these dogs, to encourage them to support laws to protect these dogs.

At least 20 greyhounds a day, either puppies, which do not make the track because of lack of “prey drive”, or ‘retired’ dogs, aged between 18 months to 3-4 years, simply ‘disappear’ according to “records”. All dogs should be identifiable by the tattoos & registry records. When they are tattooed the dogs are roughly handled & dragged around by their ears with pincers.

Continue reading “Please sign for the Irish Greyhound” →

The Pen

Reflections on what makes us who we are.

(This is a two-part post, with the concluding part tomorrow.)

My father was born on June 15th, 1901.

Here is a photograph taken of him on his twenty-first birthday.

asasas — Frederick William Handover – June 15th, 1922

He was an architect for Barclay Perkins & Co., a London firm of brewers. Here are the opening words of the Wikipedia entry.

The Anchor Brewery was an English brewery located in Southwark, London. Established in 1616, by the early nineteenth century it was the largest brewery in the world. From 1781 it was operated by Barclay Perkins & Co, who merged with Courage in 1955. The brewery was demolished in 1981.

A Barclays Public House in Southgate, London N1. Picture from The Brewery History Society.

I was born in November, 1944 and at the start of the school year in September 1956, me aged eleven, I started in the first term of Preston Manor County Grammar School near Preston Road, Wembley, just a few miles from where we all lived. (Mother, father, me and Elizabeth, my younger sister by four years.) Frankly, I had been regarded as a bit of a dreamer at my primary school and more than a few were surprised that I passed the ’11+’ exams, a prerequisite for attending a grammar school in those days.

I became twelve-years-old in November, 1956. Just six weeks after my twelfth birthday, on the evening of December 19th, 1956, my mother, as normal, came into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight. However, what transpired was very far from normal.

For she sat down on the edge of the bed and told me that my father was not well and may not live for much longer. To this day, I can still see her sitting on the edge of the bed, adjacent to my knees covered by the sheet and bedcover, a very drawn look on her face.

I had been aware of my father being at home in bed for a while but had no notion whatsoever, prior to this moment, that he was seriously unwell. In hindsight, it was more than I could emotionally embrace for not only did I not go back into my parent’s bedroom and again say goodnight to my father, I went off to sleep without any problem.

During that night, in the early hours of December 20th, my father died, the family doctor attended and my father’s body was removed; I slept through it all and awoke in the morning to find my father gone.

Now fast forward just a few years.

It’s too long ago now for me to recall who it was who gave me my father’s fountain pen that he used on a daily basis when he was alive. It is a Sheaffer Crest Snorkel with a 14K gold Triumph nib with a platinum plated tip.

I have had the pen for nearly sixty years and treasure it, as you can imagine. But in recent times it was not functioning properly and I put it down to old age, and transferred to a modern pen.

By a wonderful stroke of luck I recently came across an American company, Pendemonium, who restore and service a wide range of pens, including Sheaffer pens of the age of my father’s pen; that particular model first was produced in 1952.

On Saturday, the restored Sheaffer pen was sent back to me. It is a real joy to find that it writes so well and remains a living memory of my father from so long ago.

My father's Sheaffer fountain pen. — My father’s Sheaffer fountain pen.

Now all you dear readers must be wondering just what on earth I’m rambling on about!

My answer will be offered in Part Two that will be posted tomorrow.

But I will give you a clue.

Go across to Sue Dreamwalker’s blogsite and read her recent post Cracking our Inner Shells!

See you tomorrow.

One small step at a time

We have absolutely no choice other than to change our ways.

I closed yesterday’s post, Stepping back from the future, with these words:

Tomorrow, I want to offer the example of someone who has been sufficiently strong to take one small step back to sanity.

What I am offering is the reposting of an item in 2013 on Transition Network over in the UK. As you read it, do bear in mind that the references to Amazon are, in the main, to Amazon in the United Kingdom.

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The day I closed my Amazon account

Published on December 5, 2013, by Rob Hopkins

I’ve done it. I’ve closed my Amazon account. I now stand before you as an ex-Amazon account-holder. I feel curiously shaky, but at the same time empowered, excited even. While opening a new Amazon account is easy as pie, closing one is another matter altogether. I’d like to share with you how, and why, I did it.

Was it the recent Panorama programme about working conditions in those vast Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that tipped me across into doing something? Was it the stories about the appallingly low levels of tax Amazon pay in the UK? Was it the recent video showing Amazon’s plans to be delivering across the UK within 30 minutes through the use of drones? Was it hearing the level of taxpayers’ money that goes in sweeteners to attracting Amazon to open up in different communities, while the profits generated pour out of those same places? What actually tipped me across was a conversation I had with a book seller in my town. It was that that led me, finally, to build the steely resolve needed to close down my Amazon account.

Yes, I confess, I had an Amazon account. I buy music from my local record shop, I support my local book shops, but there are times when I need a book quickly, or feel I do, and it’s just easier and more convenient. And, if I’m honest, I love getting exciting parcels in the post. And isn’t it cheap? But as Carole Cadwalladr, who went undercover in Amazon’s Swansea ‘fulfilment centre’ for The Guardian puts it:

Our lust for cheap, discounted goods delivered to our doors promptly and efficiently has a price. We just haven’t worked out what it is yet.

I’ve always had that nagging conscience that it’s not OK really, but I have just had it ticking away in the background and carried on using it on occasion. The conversation that tipped it for me, with my local bookseller, was around “what would it take for you to stop supporting Amazon?” His example was Primark, recently implicated in child labour in the manufacturing of some its clothes. We know that’s the case, but we still shop there. If we knew that 8 year olds work there, would we stop shopping there? Or 5 year olds? If we knew that every day they arrive for work they get hit with a stick, would we still pop in there for a cheap new shirt? And if they got hit 3 times, and then again in the middle of the day? Where do we draw the line?

Our tendency is to draw a line, but then for that line to slip. What swung it for me was thinking that actually, what I already know should be enough to make me withdraw my support. Also, it was thinking about where the world will be in 5 years time if we continue to give Amazon our support. More and more low paid jobs, with little Union protection, in conditions described in the BBC documentary as “… all the bad stuff at once. The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”

We’ll see Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that look like a wasp’s nest, with drones flying in and out. High streets swept clean of bookshops, indeed of most shops, as Amazon spread into selling virtually everything that local economies sell, but far cheaper. It made me think about what kind of a world I’m creating for my sons as they enter the work place. What kind of opportunities will Amazon offer them, as they gut local economies and focus economic activity into vast warehouses along the side of motorways?

I give so much of my time every day to trying to create a different, more just, more resilient world, yet my shopping decisions undermine that. There is also an extraordinary arrogance to thinking that it is OK for you to fill peoples’ airspace, the sky above their heads, with your drones, delivering your products to people for your profit. What happens for a company to get so huge that that is considered acceptable? It is about getting too big. Amazon is too big. Far too big. But it clearly sees that it has only just started. That’s not good.

So, decision made, and with a commitment to source those things in other ways, I went to the website to close my account. Closing an account with Amazon is like breaking up with a girlfriend whose level of obsessive denial is such that the possibility you might want to split up with her doesn’t even enter her consciousness. It’s a fascinating process. Opening an account with Amazon is so easy. Closing an account is, as my 15 year-old son might put it, a right mission.

Click on ‘Your account’ and there is no option anywhere of “Close my account”. Nothing. Like it’s not even a possibility that it might entertain. I had to Google (and don’t get me started on them) “closing your Amazon account”. If you search the Amazon site for “close my account” it yields no results. See below:

The Google link took me to their Help section, on pages that bear the slogan “we’re the people with the smile on the box”, prompting the thought that the inside of their box-like warehouses are probably somewhat bereft of smiles. If offers you a drop-down menu under the helpful title “what can we help you with?”. Surely that’s where I’ll find “Close my Account”? No. You get a range of choices, “An order I placed”, “Kindle”, “Digital services” and, er, “Something else”. Guess I’m “something else” then. So I click that.

I’m then given another 4 options, none of which are “Close my account”. I’m asked to “tell us more about your issue”, and given another list where my option is “other non-order question”. Given that still, the idea that I might have got this far could mean I want to close my account is clearly unimaginable, I am then given an option to email, to phone, or to “chat”. So I click on “chat”, and am told “a customer service associate will be here in a moment”.

A charming man then begins to chat with me. Here’s how our conversation went:

Me: I want to close my account please. How do I do that?

Tom (not his real name): Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk. My name is Tom. May I know your name, please?

Me: Rob

Tom: Thank you. I’m sorry to hear that you want to close the account. May I know the reason for closing the account please?

Me: Certainly. I am appalled by the way Amazon operate as highlighted in the recent BBC Panorama programme. I am appalled at the recent story on Amazon considering deliveries in future by drone. I am appalled by the low level of tax Amazon pay in the UK. I have been a customer for years, but I feel Amazon has become too big, and eats everything in its path. It is no longer something I wish to support.

Tom: I’m sorry for the situation. For confidentiality reasons, I’m not able to close your account for you in chat, so I’m going to send you an e-mail with the information to close the account. When you receive it, please respond to that e-mail so that we will close your account.

Me: Thank you Tom. I would really like my reasons for leaving to be registered somehow, as I think a lot more people will be closing their accounts for similar reasons, and it would be good for that to be noted by those in charge. Will that be possible?

Tom: Unfortunately we will not be able to comment on this issue. However, I will send you an email regarding the closing of the account. Is there any thing else I can help you with?

Me: I am not asking you to comment on the issue. I am asking you to make sure that the reasons for my closing my account are passed on to management. If I ran a business I would want to know why my customers were closing their accounts. Is that not the case at Amazon?

Tom: Sure, all the information’s will be recorded and forwarded to the appropriate department.

Me: Thank you Tom. I appreciate your help.

Tom: Thanks for your understanding. We hope to see you again soon! Have a Nice Day!

I later received an email from Customer Support to say:

“We appreciate your feedback and have forwarded it to the appropriate team internally. We are proud to provide a safe and positive working environment for all of our associates. Information about working at our fulfilment centres can be found at the following link: www.amazon.co.uk/fcpractices“

Amazon may be cheap, but cheap comes at a cost for someone else. And, after all, much of what is bought on there is throwaway rubbish. As Carole Cadwalladr puts it:

The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon’s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK’s largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap.

Me, I resolve to buy less, but better. Less, but longer-lasting. Less, but local. The thought of where we will end up in 5 years time, 10 years time, 20 years time, if companies like Amazon continue as they are, really frightens me. It’s not good, it’s not right. It’s not about our needs, it’s about the needs of huge investors. I want a different world for my boys.

I can’t, on my own, do that much about it. I can’t insist that the UK government legislate so that, as in Holland, the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) is the legal minimum at which any book can be sold, although I think that is grounds for a really timely campaign. Because of that, Amazon don’t really operate in Holland. Bring back the RRP for books here, and let’s have a level playing field. As I say, I can’t do much, but I can withdraw my support. I just have withdrawn my support. It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….

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As you might expect, I do have an Amazon account but will look closely into alternatives. In that regard, I just want to expand on the link underneath the earlier phrase, “commitment to source those things in other ways“. The link takes you to an article in the Guardian newspaper, online version, dated the 16th May, 2013. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Amazon’s tax bill is in the news again, after a Guardian investigation put the spotlight on its financial arrangements. There’s a growing swell of people who want to use an alternative place to buy – including my colleague Patrick Collinson who wrote about his attempts to kick the Amazon habit in November.

But it is not always easy to find good alternatives online: if you want to buy either the latest Dan Brown novel (and clearly some people do), Mad Men series five on DVD, or even a packet of Pampers nappies, Amazon seems to come top of the search pages.

That Patrick Collinson piece is a ‘must-read’.

To close today’s post, just spend four minutes watching the following video.

Why growth and the environment can’t coexist

Published on Feb 9, 2015
Featuring: Sam Bliss
Production: Daniel Penner
Animation + Illustration: Amelia Bates
Music: “Nincompoop (No Vocals)” by Josh Woodward (http://www.joshwoodward.com/)
“Favorite Secrets” by Waylon Thornton (http://waylonthornton.tumblr.com)
Footage: Prelinger Archives

The background to the video, first seen referred to on the Grist blogsite, is republished here:

Watch our juicy explainer about the environment’s growing economics problem.

By Sam Bliss on 9 Feb 2015

Consume less, share more. Those are some basic principles behind degrowth, an idea and movement that rejects economic growth as a goal for society. This video explains degrowth with oranges, juice, and peels.

But wait, you ask, isn’t growth a good thing? In an age when we’re conditioned to equate growth with progress, degrowth sounds insane. In reality, pursuing endless exponential expansion of the economy is insane — and impossible. Humans already use resources faster than Earth can replenish them and produce wastes, like carbon emissions, faster than Earth can assimilate them. Hence, degrowth.

Degrowth isn’t about making everyone poorer; it’s about redefining wealth to acknowledge that real well-being can’t be measured in dollars. It’s about breaking down the artificial barrier between life and work; it’s about valuing cooperation over competition; it’s about democracy, autonomy, solidarity, and climate justice. Most importantly, degrowth means sharing society’s surplus for awesome art projects and epic, week-long gatherings.

Check out the vid to get juiced on degrowth.

Stepping back from the future!

In more ways than one.

I freely admit that I have been putting off today’s post, and I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s the continuing escalation of words between the West and Russia over the Ukraine? (But for some clarity do read this analysis written by Anatol Lieven, Professor, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar.)

Maybe it’s because my last republication of a George Monbiot essay was so hopeful. Indeed, the blog post was called Voting for hope. Whereas today’s Monbiot essay is very sad.

Maybe it’s because I am not immune to the temptations that are described.

But whatever the reasons, there can be no denying that there is a real sense of finding the modern world increasingly strange and frequently upsetting.

That theme continues today with the republication of a George Monbiot essay that he released on his blog a week ago.

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Lost in the 21st Century

3rd February 2015

Consumerism has broken its promise. Perhaps now we can begin to reconnect.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th February 2015

A woman walks into a department store. She takes in the racks and stacks of stuff, the sugared music, the sale signs, the listless customers shuffling through the aisles, and is moved – suddenly and to her own astonishment – to shout. “Is this all there is?!”. An assistant comes round from behind his till. “No madam. There’s more in our catalogue.”

This is the answer we have been given to everything, the only answer. We might have lost our attachments, our communities, our sense of meaning and purpose, but there will be more money and more stuff with which to replace them. Now that the promise has evaporated, the size of the void becomes intelligible.

It’s not that the old dispensation was necessarily better: it was bad in different ways. Hierarchies of class and gender crush the human spirit as effectively as atomisation. The point is that the void that was filled with junk is a void that could have been occupied by a better society, built on mutual support and connectedness, without the stifling stratification of the old order. But the movements that helped to smash the old world were facilitated and co-opted by consumerism.

Individuation, a necessary response to oppressive conformity, is exploitable. New social hierarchies, built around positional goods and conspicuous consumption, took the place of the old. The conflict between individualism and egalitarianism, too readily ignored by those who helped to break the oppressive norms and strictures, does not resolve itself.

So we are lost in the 21st Century, living in a state of social disaggregation that hardly anyone desired, but that is an emergent property of a world reliant on rising consumption to avert economic collapse, saturated with advertising and framed by market fundamentalism. We inhabit a planet our ancestors would have found impossible to imagine: 7 billion people, suffering an epidemic of loneliness. It is a world of our making but not of our choice.

Now it appears that the feast to which we were invited is only for the few. Figures released last week show that wages in the United Kingdom are lower than they were 13 years ago(1). A fortnight ago, Oxfam revealed that the top 1% now possesses 48% of the world’s wealth(2); by next year it will own as much as everybody else put together. On the same day, an Austrian company unveiled its design for a new superyacht. It will be built on the hull of an oil tanker, 918 feet long(3). There will be 11 decks, three helipads, theatres, concert halls and restaurants, electric cars to take the owner and his guests from one end of the ship to the other, and a four-storey ski slope.

In 1949, Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell, to argue that his dystopian vision was the more convincing(4). “The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. … The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.” I don’t believe he was wrong.

Consumerism is at odds with common purpose: you could pay your taxes or you could spend the money on a new car(5). It stifles feeling, dulling our concern for other people. Freedom to spend displaces other freedoms, as lotus eating allows us to forget our losses. Most forms of peaceful protest are now banned, but no one stops us from devouring the resources upon which future generations will depend. All this helps the global oligarchs to rip holes in the social safety net, find relief from the constraints of both democracy and taxation, and enclose and privatise our common weal.

Just as human society has been pulled apart by consumerism and materialism, pushing us into an unprecedented Age of Loneliness(6), so ecosystems have been shattered by the same forces. It is the consumerist mindset, raised to the global scale, that now threatens us with climate breakdown, catalyses a sixth great extinction, imperils global water supplies and strips the soil upon which all human life depends(7).

But nor do I believe that the acceptance of servitude Huxley envisaged is a permanent state. Wage stagnation, the brutality of the new conditions of employment, the breaking of the link between educational attainment and social advancement, the impossibility, for many young people, of finding good housing, all these confront us with the question that could be deferred only during conditions of rising general prosperity: is this all there is?

As the growth of Syriza and Podemos suggests, we cannot build political movements to challenge these issues unless we also build society. It is not enough to urge people to change their politics: we must create not only communities of interest but also communities of mutual support, offering the security, survival and respect that the state will no longer provide.

In a remarkable series of contemplations, extending beyond its familiar brief, Friends of the Earth has begun to explore how we might reconnect(8), with each other and with the natural world. It is looking, for example, at new models for urban living(9), based on sharing rather than competitive consumption: the sharing not just of cars and appliances and tools, but also of money (through credit unions and micro-finance) and power. This means community-led decision-making, over transport, planning and, perhaps, rent levels, minimum and maximum wages, municipal budgets and taxation. Such initiatives are not a substitute for government action – like David Cameron’s Big Society they are meaningless without facilitation from the state – but they can bring people together with a sense of shared purpose, ownership and mutual support that centralised decision-making can never provide.

Friends of the Earth also supports the empathy revolution championed by the author Roman Krznaric(10), and lifelong education that might counter the ever narrower schooling now inflicted on our children, whose purpose is to prepare people for jobs they will never have, in the service of an economy ordered for the benefit of others.

In these ideas and movements we find the glimmerings of an answer to the question: no, this is not all there is. There is attachment. Despite the best efforts of those who believe there is no such thing as society, we have not lost our ability to connect.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/30/british-wage-slump-post-financial-crisis-uk

2. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/19/global-wealth-oxfam-inequality-davos-economic-summit-switzerland

3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2916523/Welcome-aboard-gold-superyacht-size-OIL-TANKER-indoor-ski-slope-board-BMWs-five-helicopters.html

4. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.html

5. See also the discussion of Rami Gabriel’s work (2013. Why I buy: Self, taste, and consumer society in America. University of Chicago Press) in Friends of the Earth, December 2013. Consumption and identity: A review of literature which is relevant to the question: ‘what is a better foundation for people’s identity than consumption?’ http://bit.ly/1ECZopQ

6. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us

7. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/jun/05/the-farming-lobby-has-wrecked-efforts-to-defend-our-soil

8. http://www.foe.co.uk/page/big-ideas-change-world

9. http://www.foe.co.uk/page/big-ideas-cities

10. http://www.romankrznaric.com/

ooOOoo

Tomorrow, I want to offer the example of someone who has been sufficiently strong to take one small step back to sanity.

Bitter Lake ripples.

Reflections on last Thursday’s post.

Last Thursday, I published a post under the title of Oil, money, banks, guns and blood. It was such a departure from my normal style of blog post that I anticipated that it would slide by without any comment. Wrong! It had the highest readership of the week and attracted some powerful and insightful replies. So much so that I expressed the desire to reflect on those replies before responding. Thus, today’s post is my response to your comments and feelings.

First, Hariod Brawn of the blogsite Contentedness responded, in part:

Now, where are we? Val’s words are a good place to begin: “Nothing is what is seems, or will ever be the same again.” Nobody knows for sure, but piecing together fragments of world events, my instinct (fwiw) tells me that we are in the incipient stages of the collapse of the 20th.c. paradigm. Neoliberalism has failed; further than that, Capitalism has failed – we have no free markets where it counts; they’re all rigged. Politics has failed too, having been bought out by the corporates. [There are over 30,000 lobbyists in Washington alone] All that Western Governments have to offer is a doomed re-run of failed practices (same with Japan actually). Worse still, they have gone down on their knees and begged the financial sector to create a fix. The private banks have been given access to vast sums of QE cash at virtually zero interest in order to continue rigging markets (via their agents) all to their benefit whilst also creating huge market distortions in asset bubbles. Has the wealth they created trickled down? Has it hell. Whilst all this is going on, and as the film so clearly demonstrates, the Middle East looks like fulfilling its promise of the last century as being the flashpoint for warfare on a vast scale. And of course, if by some miracle we escape financial collapse, and world peace is not threatened by warfare, then the environment is going down the pan because – guess what? – our politicians have failed us once again. I have said enough on this.

Hariod then went on to recommend the films of Chris Hedges that will be featured on Learning from Dogs at a future date.

Then Val Boyco, her blogsite being Find Your Middle Ground, wrote a response before viewing the film:

Without being informed yet … my thinking is that the world we live in is so complex, stressful and fast that we can’t absorb everything that happens. We simplify and label, in order to make sense. We chop and segment in order to understand, but we miss the full story and many have lost the ability to grasp the bigger picture…. or are too fearful of going against the expectations of others and becoming one of “them” instead of one of “us”.

Then reinforced by her comment after watching the film:

I just watched the movie Paul. It is powerful and very disturbing. As you say, it undermines what we believe is real. It also reveals the complexity – misunderstanding – manipulation – corruption – opium, oil and the struggle for power – naivety – chaos.
In the dualistic fairy tale world of good vs evil it has created a nightmare of errors.
Nothing is what is seems.
Or will ever be the same again.

There was a comment from Patrice Ayme:

Giant American global corporations, the 200 largest ones, do 100 billion dollars of tax evasion through Luxembourg alone. Each year. Many are media companies. Wonder why stories make no sense?

Juncker directed that. Now he is head of the European Commission, and insist Greece shall pay every single penny.

As it happened, my dad was among a European group of geologists working for the Afghan government, who discovered Afghanistan’s riches… In the 1970s. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.

I write about these sorts of things, day in, day out. But most people prefer the opium of feel-good…

Patrice then went further in offering a post over on his own blog that carried the specific title of Great Bitter Lake. Let me quote a little from that:

“Bitter Lake” is about the conspiracy between American plutocracy and Saudi plutocracy. Plutocrat Roosevelt was freshly flown from Yalta, to the Great Bitter Lake, on the Suez Canal. The idea was to steal the Maghreb, and the Middle East from the French and the British, by making a theocratic alliance.

At Yalta, Roosevelt had given half of Europe to his Comrade Stalin. (Plutocrats of the world naturally unite!)

Never mind that Poland had fought the Nazis courageously the Nazis, at a time when the USA was militarily and diplomatically collaborating… with the Nazis (or maybe, precisely, the Poles had to be punished!) Roosevelt had to be strict: the French had successfully escaped from the military occupation (AMGOT) he had set-up for them.

The movie “Bitter Lake” exposes (some) of the American plutocracy led conspiracies which led to the devastation, among other things, of Afghanistan, and other constituencies, thanks to the Wahhabist Islam it unleashed on the world.

Readers of this site will be familiar with the general ambiance.

One caveat: all what is in the documentary and makes American plutocrats (Roosevelt) and their servants (Reagan) look bad, is correct. However the real situation, the real badness is way worse. (For example the secret, official USA intervention in Afghanistan was under Carter, on July 3, 1979. However the real even more secret intervention, through the Pakistani ISI was even earlier and even more vicious.

So what is my response?

It is this:

In 1887, Oscar Wilde said, referring to the differences between the British and the Americans: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

By way of example there is a saying back in my old country that when something is “… going to the dogs”, it means an irreversible decline in standards; the phrase usually aimed at an organisation or even a country.

Many, especially those of my age, might nod sagely and reflect that something ‘is going to the dogs‘ in terms of the wider Western world.

Let me be specific. There are destructive and dysfunctional issues in modern societies that I would list as: Selfishness; Power & Corruption; Short-termism; Materialism; Population growth; Greed, inequality and poverty. It’s not an exhaustive list!

Now many would argue the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ about what precisely is wrong with Western societies in this 21^st century but far fewer would argue with the underlying premise; that something is fundamentally wrong with today’s world.

Indeed, one of the things that is impossible to miss is the body language, the look on a face, the shrug of a shoulder, when one casually remarks that these are interesting times! From strangers and friends alike.

There is no question that what mankind has ‘enjoyed’ these last fifty years or so cannot be continued for very much longer. That the era since the 1960s of growth, materialism and consumption is running one very basic and fundamental resource dry. You know the one I am referring to: Planet Earth.

My hope is that the widely-felt feelings that something is fundamentally wrong with today, are the feelings man has always experienced, since time immemorial, when mankind has passed through the threshold between two eras.

My hope is that the new era, one that we quite possibly may now just be entering, a new era of sustainable living on this planet, of social and political changes to replace extreme levels of inequality, of stronger communities of like-minded persons, will be obvious to all, but especially obvious to our next generation, within the next ten years; possibly fewer than ten years.

One thing is for sure. The sharing of ideas and feelings as is the style of modern blogging is critical to the forming of the opinions that precede the changes that so many now see as unstoppable.

How NOT to sell beer!

Adding to the chorus of voices criticising Budweiser.

I’m going to republish in full what arrived in my ‘in-box’ yesterday from Howling For Justice.

But before I do that, let’s consider the ancient history of the wolf and the connection with our dogs of today. I shall do that by offering a small extract from something that I will be presenting at a meeting in Grants Pass on February, 10th.

Dogs are part of the Canidae species, a family including wolves, coyotes and foxes, thought to have evolved some sixty million years ago. There is no hard evidence as to when dogs and man came together but dogs were certainly around when man developed speech and set out from Africa; about fifty thousand years ago.

What is clear is that the dog represents man’s longest domesticated animal companion; by far. Some scientists believe that we have had the benefits of dogs in our lives for thirty thousand years. Indeed, some have proposed that the benefits of having tame wolves around us humans helped man be so successful a hunter and gatherer that it was instrumental, a mere ten thousand years ago, in humans first discovering how to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. Becoming the most significant single development in human history.

Because reflect that for a previous three million years Stone Age man, the hunter-gatherer, had engaged in activities as natural as the swoop of a hawk or the grazing of a horse.

ooOOoo

OK, on to that Budweiser advertisement.

Budweiser Takes Low Road – Demonizes Wolves To Sell Suds

February 1, 2015

We all know about the Budweiser ad, a little lost puppy being threatened by a wolf. I won’t show the ad because it’s BS and I don’t want to give it any publicity but Budweiser should be ashamed. Are they that desperate to sell beer?

Get a grip Budweiser, very poorly played. Beer drinkers around the country should boycott Bud if the ad is not pulled. It’s a low blow to wolves, one of the most persecuted animals on the planet.

Please click the link below and sign the petition to tell Budweiser what you think of their blatant demonizing of wolves.

===

Tell Budweiser: Don’t Demonize Wolves to Sell Beer

author: Center for Biological Diversity

target: Anheuser-Busch CEO, Thomas W. Sante

Purposefully demonizing an animal that is part of America’s natural heritage is no way to sell beer.

But that hasn’t stopped Budweiser from crafting a commercial for this year’s Superbowl that intentionally drums up anti-wolf sentiment to try and capitalize on our culture’s outsized fear of wolf attacks.

The ad pits a cute puppy against a snarling, evil-looking wolf. In the ad the puppy is saved from the vicious wolf by the arrival of a team of Clydesdale horses.

Here’s a reality check: 1.2 million dogs are euthanized in shelters in the United States each year while another 1.2 million dogs are hit and killed by cars on America’s roads.

By comparison, wolves are a virtually non-existent threat to our furry canine friends, only in very rare instances attacking dogs if they feel threatened or perceive them as competitors. The real threat to both dogs and wolves, as these numbers show and as Budweiser’s cynical attempt to boost sales indicates, is people.

Take action — tell Budweiser to pull its wolf-hating ad, demonizing an endangered species is no way to sell beer.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/872/023/837/

ooOOoo

Please feel free to share this post to spread the word that animal and nature lovers are not amused by this!

Tell Whole Foods: Do not sell bunnies

Rabbits die of fright.

Whole Foods Market buys meat rabbits from Ag-gag states. If Whole Foods succeeds, farm animal suffering will fall on whole other category of animals, pet rabbits.

Nine facts hidden in Ag-gag pig farms

What U.S.A. meat farms won’t let us see.

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The Science Behind Lumosity

The Science Behind Lumosity

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is Big Oil Finally Entering a Climate Change World?

Big Oil’s Broken Business Model

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1 minute for Irish Greyhounds

Please help Irish Greyhounds by signing this Care2 petition

Save greyhound dogs’ lives in less than 1 minute

4 great things about greyhound dogs

From Care2: legal changes needed to better protect Irish track greyhounds

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The day I closed my Amazon account

Watch our juicy explainer about the environment’s growing economics problem.

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Lost in the 21st Century

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Budweiser Takes Low Road – Demonizes Wolves To Sell Suds

Tell Budweiser: Don’t Demonize Wolves to Sell Beer

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