Just a collection of items that I hope you will enjoy.
So enough of the book this week for you dear readers.
It’s the week-end and time to offer you some odds and ends that have come my way in recent days.
First up is some really glorious singing.
Some years ago, I was working with a colleague and subsequently got to know that his wife was a brilliant singer/songwriter enjoying a good singing career. Her name is Rebecca Bains and there is a website here although still under construction according to the home page.
It’s an advertisement for Volvo Trucks. Sent to me by friend, Neil, from my Devon days. The short video has been seen over 45 million times! If you haven’t seen it, prepared to be wowed!
Now back to Rebecca’s singing. But with this introduction from me. Many know that here in Oregon we have nine dogs. Four of those are dogs that were rescued by Jean from earlier days in Mexico and two from the shelter in Payson, Arizona where we were living before coming to Oregon. There are many, many others who adopt rescue dogs or care for homeless dogs in countless ways.
So as we approach Christmas, the Season of Good Will, please do everything you can to help man’s best friend and companion for, literally, thousands upon thousands of years. If you are thinking of adopting a dog, or a cat, please visit your local shelter or the Pet Finder website.
OK, now to a short video with the singing from Rebecca Bains.
Trust me, this will rightly grab your heartstrings.
But on this Saturday in November it really is a fish story, or so I thought.
Earlier in the month, I received an e-mail from Dan Gomez. It told of this tale from Grand Lake St. Marys:
A guy who lives at Lake Saint Mary’s (60 miles north of Dayton, OH ) saw a ball bouncing around kind of strange in the lake and went to investigate.
It turned out to be a flathead catfish that had apparently tried to swallow a basketball which became stuck in its mouth!!
The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to, because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface.
The guy tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his wife cut the ball in order to deflate it and release the hungry catfish.
You probably wouldn’t have believed this, if you hadn’t seen the following pictures:
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Be kinder than necessary because everyone bites off more than they can chew sometime in life…
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I loved the story but then wanted to know: was it true?
Sadly, the story is true but the location is false. Snopes.com researched this back in 2005. Hoax-Slayer.com wrote about it in 2007 after it “went viral”.
The true story originated in the Whichita (Kansas) Eagle on May 30, 2004. The man in the photo turns out to be Bill Driver, a fisherman at Sandalwood Lake who discovered the catfish with a taste for hardwood glory.
Two wonderful lessons to be learned from both the story and the story behind the story!
Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet and there’s always something fishy about a fisherman’s tale.
Up to 100,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico in the last 6 years. We might think this has nothing to do with us, but in fact we are all complicit, says Yale professor Rodrigo Canales in this unflinching talk that turns conventional wisdom about drug cartels on its head. The carnage is not about faceless, ignorant goons mindlessly killing each other but is rather the result of some seriously sophisticated brand management.
Rodrigo Canales wants to understand how individuals influence organizations or systems–even those as complex as the Mexican drug cartels.
“Before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.”
That quote comes from the sub-heading of an article in the magazine The New Statesman, Britain’s current affairs magazine. In fact, written by Russell Brand from the week that he is guest editor for the magazine. Hence it following on from yesterday.
Guest editor for a week.
To remind readers, my post yesterday A powerful brand of truth centred around the interview on BBC Newsnight of Russell Brand by Jeremy Paxman.
Thus for today I wanted to offer some further thoughts from Russell Brand together with the film made by Dr Nafeez Ahmed. You will possibly recall that Dr. Ahmed was the author of the Guardian article that I quoted from yesterday.
Russell Brand’s New Statesman article spoke powerfully and eloquently of the issues that he covered in his BBC Newsnight interview. With The New Statesman’s permission let me offer a few extracts:
First from where Brand is speaking about “young people, poor people, not-rich people”.
They see no difference between Cameron, Clegg, Boris, either of the Milibands or anyone else. To them these names are as obsolete as Lord Palmerston or Denis Healey. The London riots in 2011, which were condemned as nihilistic and materialistic by Boris and Cameron (when they eventually returned from their holidays), were by that very definition political. These young people have been accidentally marketed to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the carnival. After some draconian sentences were issued, measures that the white-collar criminals who capsized our economy with their greed a few years earlier avoided, and not one hoodie was hugged, the compliance resumed. Apathy reigned.
There’s little point bemoaning this apathy. Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.
Russell Brand is also no slouch when it comes to offering solutions, as in:
These problems that threaten to bring on global destruction are the result of legitimate human instincts gone awry, exploited by a dead ideology derived from dead desert myths. Fear and desire are the twin engines of human survival but with most of our basic needs met these instincts are being engaged to imprison us in an obsolete fragment of our consciousness. Our materialistic consumer culture relentlessly stimulates our desire. Our media ceaselessly engages our fear, our government triangulates and administrates, ensuring there are no obstacles to the agendas of these slow-thighed beasts, slouching towards Bethlehem.
For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political. This, too, is difficult terrain when the natural tribal leaders of the left are atheists, when Marxism is inveterately Godless. When the lumbering monotheistic faiths have given us millennia of grief for a handful of prayers and some sparkly rituals.
By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
Towards the end of the article, or manifesto as Brand calls it, he speaks about the change that is required:
We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.
We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.
We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated.”
Then shortly thereafter:
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in – clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.
With the article/manifesto concluding:
But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up.
The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun.
It’s a powerful and very personal response to the issues facing all of humanity now and I can’t recommend too strongly reading the article in full.
So on to another powerful and personal analysis of the issues facing humanity. This time in a film made by Dr Nafeez Ahmed. The film is called The Crisis of Civilization and shows, oh so clearly, the interconnectedness of the many issues we are facing these days. It’s nearly an hour-and-a-half long but eminently watchable.
Author and international security analyst Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed on The Crisis of Civilization. Dr Ahmed is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and co-producer of The Crisis of Civilization.
It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. The Crisis of Civilization argues that financial meltdown, environmental degradation, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.
Most accounts of our contemporary global crises focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. The Crisis of Civilization suggests that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about the nature of the global threats we face. The Crisis of Civilization attempts to investigate all of these problem areas, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a ‘clash of civilizations’ as Samuel Huntington argued. Nor have we witnessed ‘the end of history’ that Francis Fukuyama prematurely declared. Rather, we are dealing with the end of the industrial age, a fundamental crisis of civilization itself.
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OK, that’s the end of the serious stuff for this week. Things are going to be very different here on Learning from Dogs for the month of November.
It’s really terribly easy – we just have to leave the oil in the ground!
The current issue of The Economist has an article on page 43, under The Americas section, headed Cheap at the price.
It’s a review of the biggest oil auction this year.
A single bid for a vast field shows the weakness of Brazil’s state-led approach to developing its oil reserves
SIX years after discovering giant offshore“pré-sal” oil deposits, so called because they lie beneath a thick layer of salt under the ocean bed, Brazil has finally auctioned the rights to develop some of its deeply buried wealth. On October 21st the Libra field, off Rio de Janeiro’s coast (see map), was sold to a consortium led by Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil firm, and including France’s Total, Anglo-Dutch Shell and China’s state-owned CNOOC and CNPC. Libra’s estimated 8 billion-12 billion barrels of recoverable oil make it the biggest oil prospect in the world to be auctioned this year. Once it reaches peak production, sometime in the next decade, it should increase Brazil’s output from 2.1m to about 3.5m barrels per day.
The article was critical of the way Brazil managed the auction resulting in just one consortium bidding, against the expectation there would be strong competition for the oil from possibly 40 companies despite the huge costs in extracting it from over 6,000 metres (nearly 20,000 feet) below sea-level. The article didn’t even hint at the madness of even thinking it should be extracted but I guess that’s The Economist for you.
So with that in mind, let me turn to a recent essay from TomDispatch by world-renown climate-change activist Bill McKibben. As regular readers will be aware Tom Engelhardt of the TomDispatch blog has given blanket permission for TD essays to be republished here on Learning from Dogs.
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Can Obama Ever Stand Up to the Oil Industry?
Recently, “good” news about energy has been gushing out of North America, where a cheering crowd of pundits, energy experts, and government officials has been plugging the U.S. as the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century. You know, all that fracking and those luscious deposits of oil shale and gas shale just waiting to be pounded into shape to fill global gas tanks for an energy-rich future. And then, of course, just to the north there are those fabulous Canadian tar sands deposits whose extraction is reportedly turning parts of Alberta into an environmental desert. And that isn’t all.
From the melting Arctic, where the Russians and others are staking out energy claims, to the southernmost tip of South America, the dream of new energy wealth is being pursued with a fervor and avidity that is hard to take in. In distant Patagonia, an Argentinean government not previously known for its friendliness to foreign investment has just buddied up with Chevron to drill “around the clock in pursuit of a vast shale oil reservoir that might be the world’s next great oil field.” Huzzah and olé!
And can you even blame the Argentinean president for her choice? After all, who wants to be the country left out of the global rush for new energy wealth? Who wants to consider the common good of the planet, when your country’s finances may be at stake? (As with the Keystone XL pipeline protest movement here, so in Argentina, there actually are environmentalists and others who are thinking of the common good, but they’re up against the state, the police, and Chevron — no small thing.) All of this would, of course, be a wondrous story — a planet filled with energy reserves beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — were it not for the fact that such fossil fuel wealth, such good news, is also the nightmarish bad news of our lives, of perhaps the lifetime of humanity.
There is an obvious disconnect between what is widely known about climate change and the recent rush to extract “tough energy” from difficult environments; between the fires — and potential “mega-fire” — burning wildly across parts of overheated Australia and its newly elected government run by a conservative prime minister, essentially a climate denier, intent on getting rid of that country’s carbon tax. There is a disconnect between hailing the U.S. as the new Saudi Arabia and the recent report of the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground — or else. There is a disconnect between what our president says about climate change and the basic energy policies of his administration. There is a disconnect between what the burning of fossil fuels will do to our environment and the urge of just about every country on this planet to exploit whatever energy reserves are potentially available to it, no matter how “dirty,” no matter how environmentally destructive to extract.
Somewhere in that disconnect, the remarkable Bill McKibben, whose new book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, is at the top of my personal reading list, has burrowed in and helped to create a global climate change movement. In this country, it’s significantly focused on the Keystone XL pipeline slated, if built, to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. For the last several years at TomDispatch, McKibben has kept us abreast of the most recent developments in that movement. Here is his latest report from the tar sands front. Tom
X-Ray of a Flagging Presidency Will Obama Block the Keystone Pipeline or Just Keep Bending?
By Bill McKibben
As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on — and it’s now well over two years old — it’s illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high, and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid 7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.
Let us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its construction, far more of the dirtiest oil on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach the U.S. Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production in the far north.
The history of oil spills and accidents offers a virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow south. The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however: everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate change to new heights.
In June, President Obama said that the building of the full pipeline — on which he alone has the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down — would be approved only if “it doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” By that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.
These days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October, a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell, not to mention the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a letter demanding that he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100 billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and democracy).
But don’t think it’s just Republican bigwigs and oil execs rushing to lend the pipeline a hand. Transcanada, the pipeline’s prospective builder, is at work as well, and Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn is now on the Transcanada dime, producing TV ads in support of the pipeline. It’s a classic example of the kind of influence peddling that knows no partisan bounds. As the activists at Credo put it: “It’s a betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping as top strategist on the 2008 campaign and communications director in the White House.”
Credo’s Elijah Zarlin, who worked with Dunn back in 2008, wrote that attack on her. He was the guy who wrote all those emails that got so many of us coughing up money and volunteering time during Obama’s first run for the presidency, and he perfectly exemplifies those of us on the other side of this divide — the ones who actually believed Dunn in 2008, the ones who thought Obama was going to try to be a different kind of president.
On energy there’s been precious little sign of that. Yes, the Environmental Protection Agency has put in place some new power plant regulations, and cars are getting better mileage. But the president has also boasted again and again about his “all of the above” energy policy for “increasing domestic oil production and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” It has, in fact, worked so well that the United States will overtake Russia this year as the biggest combined oil and natural gas producer on the planet and is expected to pass Saudi Arabia as the number one oil producer by 2017.
His administration has okayed oil drilling in the dangerous waters of the Arctic and has emerged as the biggest backer of fracking. Even though he boasts about marginal U.S. cuts in carbon emissions, his green light to fracking means that he’s probably given more of a boost to releases of methane— another dangerous greenhouse gas — than any man in history. And it’s not just the environment. At this point, given what we know about everything from drone warfare to NSA surveillance, the dream of a progressive Obama has, like so many dreams, faded away.
The president has a handy excuse, of course: a truly terrible Congress. And too often — with the noble exception of those who have been fighting for gay rights and immigration reform — he’s had little challenge from progressives. But in the case of Keystone, neither of those caveats apply: he gets to make the decision all by himself with no need to ask John Boehner for a thing, and people across the country have made a sustained din about it. Americans have sent record numbers of emails to senators and a record number of comments to the State Department officials who oversee a “review” of the pipeline’s environmental feasibility; more have gone to jail over this issue than any in decades. Yet month after month, there’s no presidential decision.
There are days, in fact, when it’s hard to muster much fire for the fight (though whenever I find my enthusiasm flagging, I think of the indigenous communities that have to live amid the Mordor that is now northern Alberta). The president, after all, has already allowed the construction of the southern half of the Keystone pipeline, letting Transcanada take land across Texas and Oklahoma for its project, and setting up the beleaguered communities of Port Arthur, Texas, for yet more fumes from refineries.
Stopping the northern half of that pipeline from being built certainly won’t halt global warming by itself. It will, however, slow the expansion of the extraction of tar sands, though the Koch brothers et al. are busy trying to find other pipeline routes and rail lines that would get the dirtiest of dirty energy out of Canada and into the U.S. via destinations from Michigan to Maine. These pipelines and rail corridors will need to be fought as well — indeed the fights are underway, though sometimes obscured by the focus on Keystone. And there are equally crucial battles over coal and gas from the Appalachians to the Pacific coast. You can argue that the president’s people have successfully diverted attention from their other environmental sins by keeping this argument alive long past the moment at which it should have been settled and a decision should have been made.
At this point, in fact, only the thought of those 900,000 extra barrels a day of especially nasty oil coming out of the ground and, via that pipeline, into refineries still makes the fight worthwhile. Oh, and the possibility that, in deciding to block Keystone, the president would finally signal a shift in policy that matters, finally acknowledge that we have to keep most of the carbon that’s still in the ground in that ground if we want our children and grandchildren to live on a planet worth inhabiting.
If the president were to become the first world leader to block a big energy project on the grounds of its effects on climate, it might help dramatically reset the international negotiations that he allowed to go aground at Copenhagen in 2009 — the biggest foreign policy failure of his first term.
But that cascade of “ifs” depends on Obama showing that he can actually stand up to the oil industry. To an increasingly disillusioned environmental movement, Keystone looks like a last chance.
President Obama turned 52-years-old on August 4th this year. Michelle, his wife, will be 50-years-old next January, 17th. Their children, Malia and Sasha, are aged 15 and 12 respectively.
Thus this family of four are all sufficiently young to be alive when the consequences of burning all this oil will be very painfully obvious, when all the power and money in the world will come to naught.
So it strikes me that young Malia and Sasha should be shown where Planet Earth’s master circuit-breaker is located. Would be such a shame to leave the lights on when there’s no-one at home.
North America burning bright – an image from NASA.
Today is our first anniversary of living in Oregon.
In many ways, it’s difficult to comprehend that we have now lived in our house a few miles from Merlin, OR, for a full year.
There are so many different, wonderful emotions associated with our move from Arizona to Oregon, of moving into a property quite unlike anything that Jean and I have ever lived in before, of seeing our dogs so happy with their surroundings, of being immersed in Nature, and so much more.
But rather than waffle on about everything in general and nothing in particular, I just want to write about the several acres of grassland that slope down from our house towards Bummer Creek, flowing North-South through the Eastern part of the property.
Wild deer feeding in the North-West corner of about 5 acres of our grassland.
Having mown the grassland a number of times in the Spring musing that there must be better ways to spend your time, a few weeks ago we came across an article about not mowing lawns. It was on the Mother Nature Network website and here’s how the article started.
Get off your grass and create an edible lawn
What would happen if you stopped watering, fertilizing, pesticiding and mowing your lawn?
Americans currently spend more than $30 billion, millions of gallons of gasoline, and countless hours to maintain the dream of the well-kept 31 million acres of lawns. An estimated 67 million pounds of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are applied around homes and gardens yearly. Commercial areas such as parks, schools, playing fields, cemeteries, industrial, commercial and government landscapes, apply another 165 million pounds.
Lawn grasses are not native to the North American continent. A century ago, people would actually pull the grass out of their lawns to make room for the more useful weeds that were often incorporated into the family salad or herbal tea. It was the British aristocracy in the 1860s and ’70s, to show off their affluence, that encouraged the trend of weed-free lawns, indicating one had no need of the more common, yet useful plants. Homeowners were encouraged to cultivate lawns that would serve as examples to passers-by. These types of lawns also lent themselves to the popular lawn sports, croquet and lawn tennis. From the 1880s through 1920s in America, front lawns ceased to produce fodder for animals, and garden space was less cultivated, promoting canned food as the “wholesome choice.” Cars replaced the family horse and chemical fertilizers replaced manure.
It has been estimated that about 30 percent of our nation’s water supply goes to water lawns. In Dallas, Texas, watering lawns in the summer uses as much as 60 percent of the city water’s supply.
Next, a newsletter from The Xerces Society mentioned bee feed wildflower seed mixes from a company called Sunmark Seeds in Portland, OR. A call to them quickly produced the answer about what we could sow to help our local bees.
Hi Paul:
Upon further searching I did find 2 mixes that might fit what you are looking for. They are attached. The Bee Feed Mixture would be $36 per lb. The Honey Bee Flower Mixture would be $38 per lb. The price is a little higher but you would need a lot less. It is suggested 6-12 lbs per acre. You can still add the clover at $5 per lb and you should add 1 oz per lb of wildflower seed. There is still the option of the Knee High Low Profile mix which would be a little less at $30 per lb but the seeding rate is higher at 8-16 lbs per acre.
I have attached a spec sheet on all three mixes. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Decision made. Three pounds of Bee Feed Mix to sow on a half-acre area as a test before we do all five acres next Spring.
Thus not so much later a box arrived with our Bee Feed Mix and the next afternoon saw Jean and me marking out the test area and scattering the seed.
3 lbs of wild flower seed for next Spring’s bees!
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Hand-scattering the seeds with Dhalia keeping an eye on things.
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It’s been an amazing year with plenty of challenges as we learnt to be rural people; yet another thing the dogs were able to teach us! However, the joy of living in such beautiful surroundings will last for ever. And more or less picking up on the theme for the week, the sharing, caring community of neighbours around us doubles that joy.
Jean and I consider ourselves two very lucky people. And no more mowing grassland! 🙂
My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide. In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead. Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.
Those echoes, as I chose to call them, were kicked off by a recent item on the blog Economic Populist. The item was called Maps of Economic Disaster and had some sickening information. Such as:
Today 15% of Americans live in poverty. Below is a county map showing the previous year’s poverty rate and we see once again the South has high concentrations.
People are living on the edge. People living in liquid asset poverty is a whopping 43.9%. This means 132.1 million people lack the savings to cover basic expenses for three months if they lose their job, have a medical emergency or some other sort of crisis. The below map** breaks down that percentage state by state. Pretty much half the country is living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck.
** I’ve not included that map but it may be seen here. However, I did want to republish the closing map.
Finally, the next map shows how income inequality has grown in United States over time. The gini index is a measure of income inequality, the higher then index gets, the worse income inequality is. If there is ever a map which shows the the destruction of the U.S. middle class, it is this one.
[N.B.The following map is an automated GIF so just left-click on it to see the sequence. That sequence is essentially a coloured graphical image of each year, from 1977 through to 2012. Don’t struggle with it. All you have to note are the changing colours. More colours towards the green end of the spectrum indicate a worsening gini index, i.e. a worsening measure of income inequality. ]
America is clearly in dire straights and the above maps it all out. Why then has this government, this Congress not put wages and jobs as jobs #1 is a good question. Why America hasn’t outright revolted, demanding this government do so is a better one.
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George Monbiot.
Let me now turn to George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. WikiPedia describes Mr. Monbiot, in part, as:
Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology, Gavin and Stacey and Father Ted.
Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.
Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.
There was a recent essay concerning the UK’s energy strategy posted by George Monbiot published in the Guardian on the 22nd October. It is also on his website.
The essay opens, thus [my emphasis]:
Fiscal Meltdown
The government is betting the farm on a nuclear technology that might soon look as hip as the traction engine.
Seven years ago, I collected all the available cost estimates for nuclear power. The US Nuclear Energy Institute suggested a penny a kilowatt hour. The Royal Academy of Engineering confidently predicted 2.3p. The British government announced that in 2020 the price would be between 3 and 4p. The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p. 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible. It falls a penny short of the price now agreed by the British government.
Mr. Monbiot’s essay concludes:
An estimate endorsed by the chief scientific adviser at the government’s energy department suggests that, if integral fast reactors were deployed, the UK’s stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to meet all UK demand for 500 years. These reactors would keep recycling the waste until hardly any remained: solving three huge problems – energy supply, nuclear waste and climate change – at once. Thorium reactors use an element that’s already extracted in large quantities as an unwanted by-product of other mining industries. They recycle their own waste, leaving almost nothing behind.
To build a plant at Hinkley Point which will still require uranium mining and still produce nuclear waste in 2063 is to commit to 20th-Century technologies through most of the 21st. In 2011 GE Hitachi offered to build a fast reactor to start generating electricity from waste plutonium and (unlike the Hinkley developers) to carry the cost if the project failed. I phoned the government on Monday morning to ask what happened to this proposal. I’m still waiting for an answer.
That global race the prime minister keeps talking about? He plainly intends to lose.
NB. I edited out the links to a comprehensive set of references to make the essay easier to read off the screen. But all the facts reported by Mr. Monbiot may be seen here.
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Just two more or less random pieces of writing that have graced my ‘in-box’. Nothing scientific about my selection; just the sense that they are representative of the reams and reams of articles, essays and reports coming in on an almost daily basis from right across the world showing an ever-increasing credibility gap between the peoples of many nations and those who purport to serve those peoples in their respective Governments.
Frankly, I can’t even imagine how or when we will ‘transition’ out of this present period. But one thing I am sure about. This schism between us, the people, and those who govern us is unsustainable!
“Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.”
My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide. In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead. Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.
Today, I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on dogs and communities! After all this blog is called Learning from Dogs!
In Monday’s post I opined that the future may well see a return to people re-evaluating and re-energising the benefits of local communities. Now when it comes to communities, there are no better examples than dogs and, so many thousands of years before dogs, grey wolves. These species have an incredibly strong social structure. I mean, of course, the pack. It’s a shame that the expression ‘pack of wolves’ or ‘pack of dogs’ has such misplaced negative connotations.
Before dogs were domesticated, as in when they first evolved from the grey wolf, they shared with wolves a natural pack size of around 50 animals. There was a very strong social cohesiveness within that pack yet a very ‘light’ status differential between those dogs having pack status and the mass of the pack group. Ditto with wolves.
In fact there were (still are) just three status roles: Mentor/Monitor/Nanny. Or has been described previously on this blog: Alpha/Beta/Omega roles. Even within the domesticated dog, thousands upon thousands of years later, those social instincts are alive and well. Many followers of Learning from Dogs will know that Pharaoh, him of the Home Page, now an elderly German Shepherd is a Monitor or Beta dog. I could write about this aspect of dogs for hours!
Pharaoh being a monitor for young Cleo.
So back to us funny old humans.
I closed last Monday’s post off with three predictions:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
Dear Paul: I like your predictions. They will play some role. But maybe somewhere in the bushes only. I think predictions of the future beyond the next 12 months are obsolete.
Jeremy remarked: (and do click the link and read some of Jeremy’s fantastic poetry)
I am hoping for a new localism. I see signs of this in the local food movement and a growing concern about factory farming, for one thing. I think people are really scrutinizing where their food comes from, where their medicines are made, and I think there also is a dawning awareness of how we are living on the backs of exploited third world workers (and poorly paid service workers here at home). I do see signs of these things permeating the consciousness of many people and leading them to want to become more “local.”
Your predictions are good, and I liked the one of communities from different parts of the world working with each other… that was creatively brilliant.
(Click on their names to see three wonderful blog sites, by the way.)
So my idea of a return to an era of localism, but a 21st C. version reflecting the way so many millions of us are connected electronically, wasn’t immediately rejected.
Patrice recently published a post called Devils In The Details. I mentioned in a comment to that post that I would be referring to it in this place. Patrice replied [my italics]:
Very good, Paul! No doubt you will bring more common sense to one more of these interesting collaborations you bring together! Internet debates! A long way from the paleolithique cave!… But still the same idea. Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.
I found that last sentence so powerful that it was used as the sub-heading to today’s post. Then Alexi Helligar commented:
The word consciousness, breaks down to con+scious+ness, which literally means together knowing or shared knowledge.
Adding in a subsequent comment:
In other words: Without society there is no consciousness. The sages of old knew this. Why has it been forgotten?
So right before my eyes (and yours!) we are seeing the power of ‘finding together‘.
Finally, just on the spur of the moment, I did a web search under an entry of ‘early caveman social structure’. Guess what! One of the top search returns was an essay by an Erik D. Kennedy under the title of On the Social Lives of Cavemen. From which jumped off the screen:
Human beings are no strangers to group living. Call it a family trait. Our closest animal relatives spend a good bulk of their time eating bugs off of their friends’ back. While I’m overjoyed we’re not social in that manner, I’m less pleased that we’re not social more to that degree. In study after study, having and spending time with close friends is consistently correlated with happiness and well-being. And yet, the last few decades in America have seen a remarkable decline in many things associated with being in a tight-knit social circle—things like family and household size, club participation, and number of close friends. Conversely, we’ve seen an increase in things associated with being alone—TV, commutes, and the internet, for example.
This trend is quite unhealthy. It’s no surprise that humans are social animals—but it may be surprising that we’re such social animals that merely joining a club halves your chance of death in the next year—or that living in a close-knit town of three-generation homes can almost singlehandedly keep you safe from heart disease.
My goodness me, this sharing idea may be core to a healthy society in ways that we need to return to. Erik’s essay goes on thus:
That particular case—of Roseto, Pennsylvania—is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In 1950’s Roseto, the incidence of heart disease in men over sixty-five was half the national average (and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and serious crime were also basically unheard of[ii]). Bewildered doctors searched for solutions in genetics, diet, exercise, and geography, but finding nothing, reached the conclusion that it was the close-knit social life of the community that kept its residents so healthy. Dinners with grandma, friendly chats between neighbors, and a precocious level of civic involvement were the driving factors in the health of a town that nothing but old age could kill.
The happiness and health I’m describing are not, however, ingredients to a long-lost elixir of well-being. This sort of paleo social life occurs in cultures large and small all over the globe. America just happens to be an enormous exception (and the one that I live in). The whole reason Roseto was an outlier is because it was a town whose inhabitants more or less collectively moved from rural Italy to the middle of Pennsylvania over a few decades. This was basically an Italian village in the American countryside, and it stood out because Italy’s social culture was remarkable compared to America’s—and that was in the 1950’s. America’s social culture has only deteriorated even further since then. We’ve lost a lot, but my thesis is a positive one; we have as much to gain as ever.
So if wolves and dogs naturally settle into packs of 50 animals, what’s the optimum ‘pack’ size for humans? Dear Erik even offers that answer:
Along with that urban emigration came a shrink in residents per household and a widespread decline in community and organization engagement. This isolation has been taxing on our physical and mental health, and the reason has been clear from the beginning: it’s not good for man to be alone.
So we’ll spend more time with other people. Fine. But who should we spend our time with? What kind of groups should we hang out in? And how big of groups? The simple answer is: as long as you’re pretty close to the people you’re with, it hardly matters. Piles of research back up what is essentially obvious from everyday experience: that the more time you spend with people you trust, the better off you are. That’s not to discourage actively meeting new people, but seeing as though close friends push us towards health and happiness better than strangers, there does appear to be a limit on the number of people you can have in your “tribe”.
And that number is about 150, says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who achieved anthropologist fame by drawing a graph plotting primates’ social group size as a function of their brain sizes. He inputted the average human brain size into his model, and lo and behold, the number 150 has been making a whirlwind tour of popular non-fiction books ever since. Beyond being the upper bound for both hunter-gatherer tribes and Paleolithic farming villages, it appears that everything from startup employee counts to online social networks show this number as a fairly consistent maximum for number of close social ties.
You really must read Erik’s essay in full; it really ‘spoke’ to me and maybe it will do the same for you.
So no other way to close than to say that of all the things we can learn from dogs, the power of sharing, of living a local community life, may just possibly be the difference between failure and survival of us humans.
Dogs and man should never be alone.
oooo
I’ll say it again! Dogs, and man, should never be alone!
Somewhere in my aged brain cells is the memory of having heard that humans are great lovers of patterns. In other words, patterns are deemed to be very important for the progress and evolution of homo sapiens. Of course, it is not just humans who learn from patterns; I’m sure most of the animals who live around us are great pattern matchers. To support that proposition, anyone who has owned a dog or cat will have spotted how quickly they learn patterns. (As an aside, some months ago our puppy German Shepherd, Cleo, work me at around 4am because she needed to go outside for a ‘call of nature’. I now get woken every single night variously between 2am and 5am for Cleo’s benefit!)
The British mathematician G. H. Hardy who lived from the last quarter of the 19th Century well into the 20th Century, reputedly said (and I cheated and looked it up!):
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
So why has this post opened with the theme of patterns? Because, call it coincidence or what, within the last couple of weeks there have been three articles, each from very a different source, predicting that the present levels of inequality in society are both unsustainable and the beginning of the end.
Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%
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Just 8.4% of all the 5bn adults in the world own 83.4% of all household wealth (that’s property and financial assets, like stocks, shares and cash in the bank). About 393 million people have net worth (that’s wealth after all debt is accounted for) of over $100,000, that’s 10% own 86% of all household wealth! But $100,000 may not seem that much, if you own a house in any G7 country without any mortgage. So many millions in the UK or the US are in the top 10% of global wealth holders. This shows just how little two-thirds of adults in the world have – under $10,000 of net wealth each and billions have nothing at all.
This is not annual income but just wealth – in other words, 3.2bn adults own virtually nothing at all. At the other end of the spectrum, just 32m people own $98trn in wealth or 41% of all household wealth or more than $1m each. And just 98,700 people with ‘ultra-high net worth’ have more than $50 million each and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million each. Half of these super-rich live in the US.
Michael Robert’s essay closes:
All class societies have generated extremes of inequality in wealth and income. That is the point of a rich elite (whether feudal landlords, Asiatic warlords, Incan and Egyptian religious castes, Roman slave owners, etc) usurping control of the surplus produced by labour. But past class societies considered that normal and ‘god-given’. Capitalism on the other hand talks about free markets, equal exchange and equality of opportunity. But the reality is no different from previous class societies.
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
The PRI editor’s preamble to the Chris Hedges essay included a couple of videos that he recommended watching. One was a talk by Robert Reich: How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?
The other one was a recent TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson (his profile is here).
Mr. Wilkinson explains that for the majority of people there is an instinctive feeling that societies with huge income gaps and corresponding high levels of social inequality are somehow going wrong. He charts the hard data on such economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: ergo, the very real effects on health, lifespan, and even such basic values as trust.
Just 16 minutes long, it’s a very revealing talk. Do watch it.
oooo
The final, third piece of the pattern was me coming across an essay on the blog DeflationLand, not a blog I had come across before, on the same day that I saw the PRI article. This essay, published just two days before the PRI article, was about patterns; the patterns of the centuries. More specifically, how the characteristics of a century generally evolve to a new culture within the first 10 to 15 years of the following century. It was a most interesting proposition and, to my delight, I was given permission to republish that essay here on Learning from Dogs. So here it is.
oooOOOooo
Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse
For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years. Let me explain. Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end with World War I, starting in 1914 and building to a nasty crescendo by 1916. The 20th Century had arrived, and it had some real horrors in store for us.
Germans before Kraftwerk
But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.
“Sorry, guys. My bad.”
In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years. The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.
War of Spanish Succession
We still live in the 20th Century. Nothing much significant has changed in our lives in the past twenty years. Symptoms of a deeper rot are appearing here and there, foreshadowing a larger crisis, but the crisis itself has not arrived yet. We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
That is going to change.
The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go. Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless. The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.
There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic. Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse. They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.
Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations. We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide. These transitions tend to involve war.
Deflation first — it clears the way for the complete loss of faith and hyperinflation that will follow. The next big wave down in the financial markets is the battering ram. The U.S. national debt is about faith, so is quantitative easing, and so is the very idea of magical coins that could ever be “worth” a trillion dollars. When this faith breaks, in concert with loss of faith in perpetual growth and unlimited cheap energy, then things will move very, very quickly.
There is nothing any of us can do at this point, except navigate the rapids as well as possible, and to stay out of the way of a dying empire, which is still very dangerous in its death throes. We are actually very privileged to be alive and witnessing this next transition, to what we do not know just yet. But what an honor to live at this time, not in ignorance but with an existential resolve to come out of it alive and much the wiser.
Ass Americana.
oooOOOooo
** Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
I am neither a scientist nor a historian; just someone who has lived in and observed the world for coming on for 60 years.
So you have to understand that my prediction is hardly worth the ‘paper I write upon’ (which certainly dates me!). But, undaunted, here are my predictions for the 21st Century:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
Learning from Dogs 