Category: Core thought

Afghanistan and truth!

“But better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”

The quote is from the film, The Kite Runner, which was based on the book  of the same name written by Khaled Hosseini.

This Post is not about taking a position, at any level, about the West’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan – far too dangerous territory!  But it is a reflection on what truth means.

At first that proposition might appear bizarre, of course we know what truth means. My Thesaurus offers three meanings: Correspondence with fact or truth; Freedom from deceit or falseness; The quality of being actual or factual.  Clear?  H’mmm not really in this instance.

OK, to the motivation behind this article.

Last Sunday two outwardly disconnected actions came together, as often seems to happen, to cause me to ponder on how my opinions are formed.  The actions concerned Afghanistan.

The first was that a friend from the congregation gave me his copy of TIME Magazine for January 17th.  In it was an article about a Black Hawk Medevac unit in Afghanistan.  From the TIME website:

The Birds Of Hope: With A Black Hawk Medevac Unit In Afghanistan

By James Nachtwey Monday, Jan. 17, 2011

General William Tecumseh Sherman got it right. War is hell. But even within the cruelty of war, there exists mercy.

Across a dusty field, two U.S. Marines walk toward a helicopter, each carrying a bloodied and bandaged child. They hold the children as if they were their own. Although at this moment they appear as saviors, a few minutes earlier, they had called in air support in response to enemy fire. The shooter was among children, however (a fact that I have to believe was not known to the Marines), and two were seriously wounded by fragments from machine-gun rounds.

Innocent people are caught in the cross fire in all wars. That’s reality. The two Marines never signed up to hurt kids, and in the shock and confusion, their default reaction was to be protective of the children they indirectly had a hand in wounding. The kids were not left to die, as they might have been in another time and another place by other armies. Instead, a U.S. Army air-ambulance medevac crew was dispatched to fly them to the same medical facility that treats American casualties. If the shooter had survived, he too would have been helped.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2041191,00.html#ixzz1Byu1S0xj

The article in TIME Magazine contained some emotionally powerful pictures, such as the one below.

 

A Marine carries an Afghan child.

The full description of the photograph, taken by James Nachtwey for TIME , is Helping Hand
A Marine carries an Afghan child, one of two wounded by coalition aircraft during an air support mission.

My reaction on reading the gruelling story was confused and difficult to articulate clearly but certainly not complimentary! Something along the lines of big and powerful nations, such as the USA, Russia and the United Kingdom, playing out their global strategies with no real insight into the pain and suffering caused by their big ‘war games’.

The second action was that Jean had returned a rental film to the local Blockbuster store and returned with another one that had caught her eye for us to watch on Sunday evening.  That film was The Kite Runner based on the book of the same name by Khaled Hosseini.

There’s a good summary of the plot of the film at WikiPedia.  Here’s a flavour.

In Kabul, prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, well-to-do young boy Amir and his loyal young Hazara servant Hassan are best of friends. Amir enjoys writing and literature, reading stories to the eager but illiterate Hassan. Amir’s Baba (father), is contemptuous of Amir’s writing and privately regards him as a weakling for letting Hassan protect him from bullies. Baba’s friend Rahim Khan demonstrates interest and encouragement to Amir. Assef, a bully with rancor towards Hazaras, and two accomplices confront Hassan and Amir, but Hassan prevents the attack with a slingshot, a birthday gift from Amir. Assef swears revenge, ridiculing their relationship as mere master and servant. .

Soon the Soviets invade Afghanistan; forcing Baba, a known anti-communist, to flee the country leaving Rahim Khan as property caretaker. En route to Pakistan, Baba bravely risks his life defending a female refugee from a Soviet soldier who demands to rape her in return for safe passage for all. Baba and Amir eventually reach the United States as humble refugees in Fremont, California. Baba tends a gas station while Amir attends community college and vends at a weekly flea market. There, Amir meets Soraya Taheri; Soraya is interested in Amir’s writing although her father, the ex-General Taheri, a proud traditional Pashtun, is contemptuous. Baba is stricken mortally ill but manages to obtain General Taheri’s permission for Amir to marry Soraya. Although Soraya feels bound to confess her previous relationships, they are happily married despite an inability to conceive children. As foreshadowed in the movie’s first scene, Amir’s debut novel is published, dedicated to Rahim Khan who encouraged his writing.

It was a fabulous film, one of the more thought-provoking films seen in many years.  If you haven’t seen it, do so.

So to the point of this article.

The film demonstrated to me that my rather black-and-white opinion of the West’s involvement in Afghanistan was based much more on my instincts that ‘war is bad’ and that the USA tends to throw its military weight around, than having a clue as to the enormous complexities, both at the level of a family and of the nation, that these conflicts entail.

The film showed a much more compassionate aspect to the activities of the USA, specifically in getting involved in Afghanistan and, more generally, in a policy of offering a new home and new hope to those from afar.

And for me, the realisation that while it may be said, ‘There is only one truth’, knowing what that truth is is something very much more challenging!

“The first casualty when war comes is truth“. (Hiram W Johnson, senator for California, 1917)

Approaches to ‘growth’.

Some thought-provoking articles on the need, or otherwise, of continued growth.

Intellectually, most people, if they stopped and thought about it, would not challenge the absurdity of the notion that a finite rock in space, Planet Earth, can handle an infinite increase in the demands and resources of that finite planetary body, our home in space!

Yet the reality is very different.  For many complex reasons, way beyond the competencies of this writer to fully explain, we, as in the peoples of Planet Earth, continue to behave as though there are no limits to the resources of this beautiful planet that is home for all of us.

Here are some extracts from some recent items that have passed across my ‘in-box’.

A piece from the CASSE website:

What If We Stopped Fighting for Preservation and Fought Economic Growth Instead?

by Tim Murray

Seriously.

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Just read again the sentence, “For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks.” Powerful ideas.

Anyway, do read the article in full and see if it changes your attitude.  Here’s how it ends.

Sir Peter Scott once commented that the World Wildlife Fund would have saved more wildlife it they had dispensed free condoms rather invested in nature reserves. Biodiversity is primarily threatened by human expansion, which may be defined as the potent combination of a growing human population and its growing appetite for resources. Economic growth is the root cause of environmental degradation, and fighting its symptoms is the Labor of Sisyphus.

The next article is from The Christian Science Monitor writing about how scientists are getting a new idea about the rate of loss of polar ice.

The seasonal cooling effect of light-reflecting snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere may be weakening at twice the rate predicted by climate models, a new study shows, accelerating the impact of global warming.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer / January 18, 2011

A long-term retreat in snow and ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere is weakening the ability of these seasonal cloaks of white to reflect sunlight back into space and cool global climate, according to a study published this week.

Indeed, over the past 30 years, the cooling effect from this so-called cryosphere – essentially areas covered by snow and ice at least part of the year – appears to have weakened at more than twice the pace projected by global climate models, the research team conducting the work estimates.

This is a well-constructed article, easy to read with obvious conclusions.  Towards the end, the author writes:

Snow appears to have its maximum cooling effect – reflecting the most sunlight back into space – in late spring, as the light strengthens but snow cover is still near its maximum extent for the year. Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has its biggest effect in June, before its annual summer melt-back accelerates, explains Don Perovich, a researcher at the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and a member of the team reporting the results.

The final article that I want to include is one from the website Foreign Policy. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing it in full because it strikes me as an extremely intelligent commentary on where mankind is in terms of our attitudes to growth.

Thomas Homer-Dixon
ECONOMIES CAN’T JUST KEEP ON GROWING

Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.

Limits on available resources already restrict economic activity in many sectors, though their impact usually goes unacknowledged. Take rare-earth elements — minerals and oxides essential to the manufacture of many technologies. When China recently stopped exporting them, sudden shortages threatened to crimp a wide range of industries. Most commentators believed that the supply crunch would ease once new (or mothballed) rare-earth mines are opened. But such optimism overlooks a fundamental physical reality. As the best bodies of ore are exhausted, miners move on to less concentrated deposits in more difficult natural circumstances. These mines cause more pollution and require more energy. In other words, opening new rare-earth mines outside China will result in staggering environmental impact.

Or consider petroleum, which provides about 40 percent of the world’s commercial energy and more than 95 percent of its transportation energy. Oil companies generally have to work harder to get each new barrel of oil. The amount of energy they receive for each unit of energy they invest in drilling has dropped from 100 to 1 in Texas in the 1930s to about 15 to 1 in the continental United States today. The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, yield a return of only 4 to 1.

Coal and natural gas still have high energy yields. So, as oil becomes harder to get in coming decades, these energy sources will become increasingly vital to the global economy. But they’re fossil fuels, and burning them generates climate-changing carbon dioxide. If the World Bank’s projected rates for global economic growth hold steady, global output will have risen almost tenfold by 2100, to more than $600 trillion in today’s dollars. So even if countries make dramatic reductions in carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, global carbon dioxide emissions will triple from today’s level to more than 90 billion metric tons a year. Scientists tell us that tripling carbon emissions would cause such extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms that farmers would likely find they couldn’t produce the food needed for the world’s projected population of 9 billion people. Indeed, the economic damage caused by such climate change would probably, by itself, halt growth.

Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source — fossil fuel — is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.

We can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This contradiction is humankind’s biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it’s a challenge we can’t possibly address.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.

As Rob Dietz of CASSE wrote in a recent email to me, “I’m a big Thomas Homer-Dixon fan.  His book, The Upside of Down, is outstanding.”

“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).

 

Well said, Hannah!

A small epiphany.

A lovely and unexpected result from seeing Dr David R. Hawkins last Saturday.

Jean and I drove across to Cottonwood, just South-West of Sedona in Arizona, last Saturday to attend a Question and Answer meeting hosted by Dr David R. Hawkins.  It’s described on the website thus:

Question & Answer Sessions

These Saturday sessions open with a few remarks by Dr. Hawkins. He then receives and answers questions from the audience that relate to information presented in his books and lectures, as well as other spiritual matters and current events.

To my mind, apart from the pleasure of seeing this famous man in the flesh, so to speak, the event was not as inspirational as I might have hoped.  Largely, in my view, because so many of the people lining up to sit opposite the great man and ask their question seemed more motivated by hero worship than in a search of their personal truth.  In fact, many did not wish to ask a question, just to sit there in silence or shake his hand.

However, that isn’t the point of this piece.  The point is that Jean realised, deep in her heart, what really can be achieved through the power of love.  Jean had been reflecting, sitting there in the audience, about how quickly our sweet Corrie had died last Tuesday night.

Corrie was a young dog and despite the injuries she received having been fatal, Jean was still surprised that Corrie went from being conscious of her name and responding to touch to dead in about 45 minutes.  She was in a great deal of pain during the last 20 minutes or so.  Jean’s significant experience is that young, healthy dogs take many more hours to die from the sort of wounds that Corrie had sustained.

The epiphany that came to Jean on Saturday was that the love and comfort that Corrie was receiving from both Jean and me, gave Corrie the permission to stop fighting for her life and just go gracefully and peacefully.  It doesn’t in any way lessen the tragedy of losing Corrie but from that has come the revelation that our unconditional love for that small animal made a difference, a real tangible difference during the last few moments of her physical life.

It was an unexpected but very beautiful outcome from the day.

“To understand everything is to forgive everything” Buddhist quote

Postscript on dear Corrie

Even in death, there is goodness.

Learning from Dogs has been running since July 15th, 2009. Between all of the authors and contributors there have been 813 Posts presented.  None has had more comments than the Post published on the 12th January, 2010 about the loss of our dear Mexican rescue dog, Corrie.  So for all our sakes, I just wanted to highlight the love that Corrie’s death has mirrored by reproducing the comments added to that article.

 

Corrie in Winter snow - January 2nd 2011

 

From Rosemarie and Joe (see the poem later on).

We are so sorry to hear of your loss of beloved Corrie. This is a beautiful picture of Jeannie with her girl! Our thoughts are with you both!

From Dogkisses.

Corrie… so beautiful. I’m very sorry for your loss. Bless your hearts with peace.

From Gloria and Barry.

Sorry you lost your darling dog – today has been full of tears for us Australians so much lost in so short a time can only be thankful our family is all safe – our thoughts are with you.

From Sue Dreamwalker.

I know only too well the grief of losing such a beloved friend of our most loyal of animal kingdoms.. My heartfelt thoughts are with you both. Her soul goes on, and she will be forever faithfuland stay close to those who gave her back the unconditional love she gave you.

From Becky Bains.

Our love and thoughts go out you guys. When we lost Susie we were heartbroken. One of our friends posted this to us. I hope it brings some comfort. Love to you. xx

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together….

From Dogkisses.

Dear Paul,
I just wanted to say my girl Free is there, running in the meadows and playing with her cousin.
I saw her many times after she left this earth. She was happy in my very clear visions until one day when I was so sad. I was crying over missing her. I saw her that day in my living room. Her head was leaning to one side, as if to say she didn’t understand, and I heard her spirit questioning me. I didn’t hear words out loud, but I heard her message –”I thought you promised you would be okay.”
That day, I met my girl Ruthie. I’ve never seen Free again, not so clearly, not like I did in those weeks before I found Ruthie. I know it sounds off the wall, and it is, but it sure happened.
Sometimes, I still see a picture of Free in my mind. She is always smiling and happy. I promised her I would remember our good times and as hard as I imagined that would be, every time I think of her, I nearly laugh, just like I am as I write about her.
She continues to give, even though she had to cross that bridge.

Peace to you and your family.

A poem sent in the mail to us from Rosemarie and Joe.

When God had made the earth and the sky,

The flowers and the trees,

He then made all the animals

And all the birds and bees.

And when His work was finished,

Not one was quite the same.

He said, “I’ll walk this Earth of mine,

And give each one a name”,

And so He travelled land and sea,

And everywhere He went,

A little creature followed Him,

Until its strength was spent.

When all were named upon the earth,

And in the sky and sea,

The little creature said, “Dear Lord,

There’s not one left for me.”

The Father smiled and softly said,

“I’ve left you to the end,

I’ve turned my own name back to front,

And called you Dog my friend.” Author unknown.

That’s all for today, but tomorrow I want to add a further thought about the power of love that has come out of Corrie’s sad but meaningful death.

Power of social networks in the area of finance

“The nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena.”

The above sub-heading is from a recent Post on Naked Capitalism that rather spookily comes hot on the heels of one of my recent musings.  Here’s what I published on the 12th January although I wrote it on the 9th.

In the past opinion and commentary has been in the hands, more or less, of the giant media moguls.  But technology has changed that.  Now more than ever a huge people have access to the Internet.  Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that of a world population of 6.85 billion people, just under 2 billion (29%) have internet access.  In North America that percentage is 77.4% (226 million) and in Europe the percentage is 58.4% (475 million).  I.e. nearly a billion people in just North America and Europe!

My point is that, in a manner never before experienced in human history, the vast majority of us have the ability to read, learn and muse about the critically important issues facing us today, coming to conclusions that carry political weight.  We have almost infinite choice as to where and how we form opinions.

Thus having access, via the internet, to the scribblings of so many wise people may end up giving democracy the boost it really needs in the face of overwhelming powerful plutocratic forces.

Coincidentally, also on the 12th Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism published an article entitled, The 20 most influential blogs in financial media.  You can find that article here.  Here’s a flavour of what was written.

Thanks to Minyanville for publicizing this study by MindfulMoney on the nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena. But even bigger thanks go to loyal readers and contributors for their frequent comments, leads, and critiques. The success of a blog depends on its community and I am very grateful for all the input so many of you have generously provided.

Perhaps the most interesting finding (boldface ours):

The research confirms the existence of a network of investment super-connectors with extraordinary media influence and reach. These super-connected new influentials are, for the most part, not well established voices in the media but individual bloggers who fiercely champion their independence….In the US, the network functions as the unofficial voice of Wall Street & the US federal bank with no mainstream media players at the centre of the network.

Given how many of these top blogs are critical of the status quo, this map may be hopeful sign that the blogosphere is beginning to become a important channel of discourse outside the reach of the PR machinery of major corporations and government entities.

And rather than publish all the top 20 names, you can see that list here, the top 10 are as follows:

1. Naked Capitalism
2. Infectious Greed
3. The Big Picture
4. Jesse’s Cross Roads Cafe
5. Zerohedge
6. Mish’s Global Economic Analysis
7. Calculated Risk
8. Paul Krugman’s Blog
9. FT Alphaville
10. Ludwig von Mises Institute

Anyone interested in downloading the original report as published on the MindfulMoney website can go to the article here; the link to the pdf, requiring prior registration, is towards the end of the article.  The article opens thus:

Most investors would acknowledge that social media is playing an increasing role in their investment decisions. Yet no-one has mapped the emerging network of influence likely to be playing a crucial part in those decisions.

Until now that is.  MindfulMoney’s ‘Social Finance: The New Influentials” report is aiming to better understand what this network looks like and to see if a number of super connections, so beloved of writers like Malcolm Gladwell, exist.

The research indicates that they do.

As I said, to download the article you need to register first – that link is here.

It’s a very interesting new world that we are living in and one, I pray, that is returning real power to the electorates.

 

 

 

 

Dr Bruce Lipton continued

The concluding videos from his lecture The Biology of Perception.

No point in going any further if you haven’t seen Parts 1 to 4 which are here.

Here are Parts 5 to 7.

Dr Bruce Lipton

The astounding work showing that what we believe affects our genes and our DNA.

Regular followers of Learning from Dogs have probably read the two Posts published earlier this week about the work by British biochemist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake.  If you missed those then allocate just a couple of hours of your private time to a) watch the video contained here, and then b) learn more about this scientist here. The implications of energy fields, Morphic Fields as Dr Sheldrake has named them, are almost so profound as to be beyond rational description.  Animal and human telepathy is shown to be real, as in scientifically reproducible.

There is much that flows out of Sheldrake’s work but before I try and pull together all my thoughts and feelings, there is more astounding evidence to share with you on the power of thoughts, the power of your beliefs and how they make you how you are both in terms of your biology but also your behaviours.  That comes from an American developmental biologist, Dr Bruce Lipton.

I’m not going to write any more at this stage but hope that you will watch a lecture given by Dr Lipton with the title of The Biology of Perception.  That lecture is available as 7 shortish (9 mins plus or minus) You Tube videos.  They are easy to watch, Dr Lipton has a lovely fast-moving style, and the conclusions are, as I said, astounding.

So the first four sections are below, the balance will be published tomorrow.

Concluding parts tomorrow – do watch them.

Corrie R.I.P.

The painful loss of a beautiful dog.

This is not the time to engage in deep philosophical thoughts about death, dogs and what we can learn from them.  I shall leave that for later.

Just to hold dear in our minds what dogs offer humanity.  Dear friends, Rosemarie and Joe, who lunched with us yesterday gave us the following poem and it seems a very apt way to send out prayers into the universe.

Corrie, just 10 days ago.

With eye upraised his masters look to scan,

The joy, the solace and the aid of man.

The rich man’s guardian and the poor man’s friend,

The only creature faithful to the end. George Crabbe

Corrie died at 01:30 this morning with Jean and me holding her tight in our arms and our prayers.  She was a good dog.  Her loving and faithful soul will return.

Dear Corrie – you are now at peace for evermore.

In humble recognition of great writers

The technology of the Internet will prove to be of huge democratic value.

Those who know me know a disquieted man.  Someone, who despite being more at peace with himself than ever before, nonetheless senses that we, as in the mankind of Planet Earth, are already deep in the ‘no mans land’ of change between the last, say, forty years and a very different future just around the corner.

In the past opinion and commentary has been in the hands, more or less, of the giant media moguls.  But technology has changed that.  Now more than ever a huge people have access to the Internet.  Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that of a world population of 6.85 billion people, just under 2 billion (29%) have internet access.  In North America that percentage is 77.4% (226 million) and in Europe the percentage is 58.4% (475 million).  I.e. nearly a billion people in just North America and Europe!

My point is that, in a manner never before experienced in human history, the vast majority of us have the ability to read, learn and muse about the critically important issues facing us today, coming to conclusions that carry political weight.  We have almost infinite choice as to where and how we form opinions.

Thus having access, via the internet, to the scribblings of so many wise people may end up giving democracy the boost it really needs in the face of overwhelming powerful plutocratic forces.

Here are just a couple of those wise voices.

Simon Johnson

I first came across him in an article in The Atlantic Magazine back in May 2009.  That article was called The Quiet Coup.  If you haven’t read it, go here.  It is introduced thus:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Simon is also one of the lead writers for the Blog Baseline Scenario.  Have a read of a recent article about the appointment of Bill Daley as President Obama’s new chief of staff.  That article concludes thus:

Top executives at big U.S. banks want to be left alone during relatively good times – allowed to take whatever excessive risks they want, to juice their return on equity through massive leverage, to thus boost their pay and enhance their status around the world.  But at a moment of severe financial crisis, they also want someone in the White House who will whisper at just the right moment: “Mr. President, if you let this bank fail, it will trigger a worldwide financial panic and another Great Depression.  This will be worse than what happened after Lehman Brothers failed.”

Let’s be honest.  With the appointment of Bill Daley, the big banks have won completely this round of boom-bust-bailout.  The risk inherent to our financial system is now higher than it was in the early/mid-2000s.  We are set up for another illusory financial expansion and another debilitating crisis.

Bill Daley will get it done.

Now let’s turn to that other writer, Patrice Ayme.

That name is a nom-de-plume but so what!  Having read Patrice for some time now and corresponded via email from time to time, I have to tell you this is one giant of an intellectual thinker.  Take this Post from example: Pluto Lie #1: Glass Beads Matter More It’s a beautifully written article but not something that you should try a skim read through; it deserves a really focussed mind on the words and the meanings expressed. Here’s a flavour:

Abstract: An American historian paid by the hyper rich, exhumed again the old fallacy that material riches matter more than anything else. He points at recent electronic gadgetry, and attributes it to Reagan. This article of faith in Reagan and American plutocracy amusingly gives, obviously without knowing, prominence to recent French and German governmental research, which allowed to make such gadgets.

I skewer this lamentable, not to say corrupt, piece of dismal propaganda which was published all over the American media, for Christmas. I use the occasion to give a new metric to evaluate riches over the last 100,000 years, explain why the USA does not use the metric system, and what European kings were really about.

Too great a disparity of riches is another name for plutocracy.  Indeed, money is power, and thus, too much money is too much power.

Here is how Patrice’s article closes (but it would be so much better if you read the article in its entirety):

Morality? Europeans Kings of old could live long, and lived strong.The best of them were working relentlessly, brandishing whatever it took to stabilize the situation ethically, politically, and civilizationally. They were incredibly brutal. They would die, and kill, just over the length of hair (kings and prospective kings wore it long, religious wore it nought). Even small children, if viewed as potential kings, would be presented with the scissors and the sword (if they did not go for the former, they would get the later).

So of course, kings of old would have made it to today’s highest class. Kings were often the richest people around, and they got there, or stayed there, by killing, in the name of new, and higher principles. This only happened because their subordinates agreed to strive towards the same new and higher principles. Hanson misses completely the spiritual dimension of the kings of old. Kings of old led an ethical revolution, which was their reason for being in power, and why people elected them (or elected to follow them).

Kings of old lived very comfortably by their metrics, with residences all around Europe, and wives, concubines, nobles under oaths to serve them (to death). Some, such as Charlemagne, were very healthy into old age. What’s more fun than to make war for decades, mostly winning, as Charlemagne did?

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

That appurtenance, too, tells volumes. Hanson has tales to tell, and they sing of American plutocracy. It remains to be seen if history will sing along. Two things, though: history does not tell lies, and human beings are not reducible to gadget loving midgets.

So to repeat my point.  Whether or not one choses to agree with the likes of Simon Johnson and Patrice Ayme there is no doubt that in my mind it will be writers like these that, through the better education of millions of citizens, will not only preserve democracy in so many countries but will ensure that the age before us will be fairer and more just.

Change can be achieved by the threat of tomorrow being the same

even quicker than by the hope of tomorrow being different! C. Graham-Leigh.

Serious Learning from Dogs!

A fascinating talk by Rupert Sheldrake on Morphic Fields, Morphic Resonance and ESP

In 1981 Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment with his hypothesis of morphic resonance. A morphogenetic field is a hypothetical biological field that contains the information necessary to shape the exact form of a living thing. A presentation at the Biology of Transformation Conference in 2007.

If the sub-heading means as little to you as it did to me when I was introduced to this speaker and his ideas, then hang on for a small while.  But thanks to Peter N, I have had my eyes opened big time about a number of concepts.  Such as have you ever wondered how at times you ‘sense’ who is ringing you before you answer the phone?  Or how your pet cat or dog, especially your dog, knows when you are returning home even outside a normal pattern of your behaviour?

Rupert Sheldrake is a serious scientist, indeed a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University.  He is a Research Fellow of the Royal Institute.

So if you trust what is presented on Learning from Dogs, then trust this one and settle down and watch the video.  It will truly open your eyes in a way that you won’t anticipate.  The video is 1 hour 20 minutes long but within 10 minutes you’ll be hooked!

The link is here http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4105824266525326404&hl=en&fs=true

More about Rupert Sheldrake tomorrow.