Category: Culture

Total, utter madness, Pt 4

Continuing the review of Lester Brown’s book World on the Edge.

Regular readers will be aware that I have been summarising each chapter of this pivotal book.  Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are part of the section that Lester Brown calls A Deteriorating Foundation.  But I am aware that wall-to-wall gloom is often too much for people to take in so I wanted to let you know that the third section, The Response: Plan B, is very much a realistic and pragmatic approach to the alternative, a planet that will let countless future generations live in harmony and sustainably.

So please take in the dire situation that we are in by reading these summaries or, better still, buy the book!

Chapter Four, Rising Temperatures, Melting Ice, and Food Security.

  • The Petermann Glacier calves an iceberg that covered 97 square miles on August 5th, 2010.
  • Scientists for some years have been reporting that the Greenland ice sheet was melting at an accelerating rate.
  • Richard Bates, from the University of St Andrews, part of a team monitoring Greenland ice melt, was reported as saying:

Dr Richard Bates, who is monitoring the ice alongside researchers from America, said the expedition had expected to find evidence of melting this year after “abnormally high” temperatures in the area. Climate change experts say that globally it has been the warmest six months globally since records began.

But he was “amazed to see an area of ice three times the size of Manhattan Island had broken off.

“It is not a freak event and is certainly a manifestation of warming. This year marks yet another record breaking melt year in Greenland; temperatures and melt across the entire ice sheet have exceeded those in 2007 and of historical records.”

  • A temperate rise of between 2C and 7C would cause the entire Greenland ice mass to melt – raising sea-levels world-wide by 23 feet (7 metres)!
  • In the United States last year saw record hot temperatures on the East Coast.
  • On September 27th Los Angeles recorded an all-time high of 113 degrees F, then the official thermometer broke.
  • A nearby thermometer survived to register a temperature of 119 degrees F, a record for the region.
  • Crop ecologists use a rule of thumb that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields.
  • Temperatures are rising much faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.  Winter temperatures in the Arctic, including Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia, have climbed by 4-7 degrees F. over the last half-century.
  • This record rise in temperatures in the Arctic region could lead to changes in climate patterns that will affect the entire planet.
  • Even a 3-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia. It would inundate Bangladesh, a country of 164 million people, submerge part of the Mekong Delta ( a region that produces half of Viet Nam’s rice).

That’s enough from me, simply because although this chapter in the book continues with many more frightening facts, I can’t continue to list them in this particular Post.  If the above doesn’t cause you to think and want to change, then a couple of dozen more facts aren’t going to do it either.

Just look at the photograph below and ponder on what we are leaving our children and our grand-children.  Indeed, if you are, say 50 years or younger, ponder on what the next few decades could offer for you.

We have to break our addiction with our modern way of living – or Planet Earth will do it for us.

A mother of an iceberg!

On Aug. 5, 2010, an enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles (251 square kilometers) in size, broke off the Petermann Glacier, along the northwestern coast of Greenland. The Canadian Ice Service detected the remote event within hours in near real-time data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-kilometer (40-mile) long floating ice shelf, said researchers who analyzed the satellite data at the University of Delaware. Taken from here.

This most beautiful of relationships

That of man and dog.

A number of items have crossed my screen that, together, present the most wonderful story of the intensity and length of the time that mankind has shared his life with the dog.

First is this piece from Anthropology.net from 2008 when this was big news.

A Possible Domestication Of Dogs During The Aurignacian: 31,700 Years Ago

Both Dienkes and John Hawks have shared news about the latest research on the domestication of dogs. The researchers analyze 117 skulls of prehistoric canids from sites in Belgium, Ukraine and Russia. They conclude that a 31,700 year old canid from Belgium is ‘clearly different from the recent wolves, resembling most closely the prehistoric dogs.’

The draft can be found in the Journal of Archaeological Science under the title, “Fossil dogs and wolves from Palaeolithic sites in Belgium, the Ukraine and Russia: osteometry, ancient DNA and stable isotopes.” If the dating, and phylogenetic analysis is correct, these remains makes them the oldest known remains of domesticated dog, pushing back domestication time by 17,700 years, since the second oldest known dog, found in Russia, dates to 14,000 years ago as explained by Carl Feagans.

Doral View of the Goyet Cave Dog (a) and wolf skulls (b & c)Doral View of the Goyet Cave Dog (a) and wolf skulls (b & c)

Prehistoric dogs are distinguished from both prehistoric and extant wolves in having a shorter and broader snout, relatively wider brain cases, and a general reduction in skull size. Palaeolithic dogs in the study conform to this pattern. The researchers extended their anatomical analysis to mtDNA and stable isotopes on the Belgian samples. All fossil samples yielded unique DNA sequences.

This is a fascinating article, read the rest of it here.

Next a further explanation of the history of the dog from About.com Archaeology:

Dog history is really the history of the partnership between dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and humans. That partnership is based on human needs for help with herding and hunting, an early alarm system, and a source of food in addition to the companionship many of us today know and love. Dogs get companionship, protection and shelter, and a reliable food source out of the deal. But when this partnership first occurred is at the moment under some controversy.

Dog history has been studied recently using mitochondrial DNA, which suggests that wolves and dogs split into different species around 100,000 years ago; but whether humans had anything to do with that, no one really knows.

Just think about that – 100,000 years ago!  But even if one assumes that early man wasn’t linked to this species divergence, the hard evidence of dogs being special to man still goes back a very long way.  Continuing the piece above:

The oldest dog skull discovered to date is from Goyet Cave, Belgium. The Goyet cave collections (the site was excavated in the mid-19th century) were examined recently (Germonpré and colleagues, cited below) and a fossil canid skull was discovered among them. Although there is some confusion as to which level the skull came from, it has been direct-dated by AMS at 31,700 BP. The skull most closely represents prehistoric dogs, rather than wolves. The study examining the Goyet cave also identified what appears to be prehistoric dogs at Chauvet Cave (~26,000 bp) and Mezhirich in the Ukraine (ca 15,000 years BP), among others.

However, I am told that what the Goyet Cave skull represents is not a “domesticated dog” but rather a wolf in transition to a dog, and that the physical changes seen in the skulls (consisting primarily of the shortening of the snout) may have been driven by changes in diet, rather than specific selection of traits by humans. That transition in diet could well have been partly due to the beginnings of a relationship between humans and dogs, although the relationship might have been as tenuous as animals following human hunters to scavenge, rather like the behavior that is believed to have existed between humans and cats. You could argue that cats never have been domesticated, they just take advantage of the mice we attract

As they say, dogs have masters, cats have slaves! Millions of dog owners have a relationship with their dog that is close to spiritual, and that also isn’t new. Let’s read on:

A burial site in Germany called Bonn-Oberkassel has joint human and dog interments dated to 14,000 years ago. The earliest domesticated dog found in China is at the early Neolithic (7000-5800 BC) Jiahu site in Henan Province. European Mesolithic sites like Skateholm(5250-3700 BC) in Sweden have dog burials, proving the value of the furry beasts to hunter-gatherer settlements. Danger Cave in Utah is the earliest case of dog burial in the Americas, at about 11,000 years ago.

Haplotypes and Grey Wolves

A recent study led by Robert Wayne (vonHoldt et al., below) at UCLA and appearing in Nature in March 2010 reported that dogs appear to have a higher proportion of wolf haplotypes from grey wolves native to the Middle East. That suggests, contrary to earlier studies, that the middle east was the original location of domestication. What also showed up in this report was evidence for either a second Asian domestication or a later admixture with Chinese wolves.

Dog History: When Were Dogs Domesticated?

It seems clear that dog domestication was a long process, which started far longer ago than was believed even as recently as 2008. Based on evidence from Goyet and Chauvetcaves in Europe, the dog domestication process probably began as long ago as 30,000 years, although the oldest evidence for a broader relationship, a working relationship, is at the Bonn-Oberkassel site, 14,000 years ago. The story of dog domestication is still in transition itself.

14,000 years ago people buried a dog with a human!  That is so beautiful.

Finally, National Geographic have been showing a series on this wonderful relationship between man and dog.  Enjoy this introduction video.

Dear Ma and Pa

With grateful thanks to John and Janet Z who sent this the other day.

Dear Ma and Pa,

I am well.  Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled.

I was restless at first because you get to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. But I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things.  No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing!

Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there’s warm water.  Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc., but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food, but tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by the two city boys that live on coffee. Their food, plus yours, holds you until noon when you get fed again. It’s no wonder these city boys can’t walk much.

We go on ‘route marches,’ which the platoon sergeant says are long walks to harden us.  If he thinks so, it’s not my place to tell him different.  A ‘route march’ is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks!

The sergeant is like a school teacher.  He nags a lot.  The Captain is like the school board.   Majors and colonels just ride around and frown. They don’t bother you none.

This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing.  I keep getting medals for shooting.   I don’t know why…  The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don’t move, and it ain’t shooting at you like the Higgett boys at home.   All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it.  You don’t even load your own cartridges. They come in boxes!

Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training.  You get to wrestle with them city boys.  I have to be real careful though, they break real easy.  It ain’t like fighting with that ole bull at home.  I’m about the best they got in this except for that Tug  Jordan   from over in Silver   Lake   .. I only beat him once…  He joined up the same time as me, but I’m only 5’6′ and 130 pounds and he’s 6’8′ and near 300 pounds dry.

Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.


Your loving daughter
Alice

 

Words fail one

Income inequality, when it becomes excessive, is very corrosive to a society.

This is clearly a complex subject because one man’s excess is another man’s just reward for building a successful business that employs his fellow citizens.

Nonetheless, I do want to touch on this sensitive area because, to my mind, they are connected with the tragic story that is the point of this article.

But first, a couple of quotes from an article by Prof. G. William Domhoff of the Sociology Department of the University of California at Santa Cruz.  It was entitled Wealth, Income, Power.

This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators.

Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is.

Later on, Prof. Domhoff writes:

The Wealth Distribution

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).

That table and the whole article is powerful and a well-worth reading. Read it here.

Stay with me a little longer.  Here’s an extract from an article from Nicholos Kristof of the New York Times written in November last year.

Nicholas Kristof

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

By the way, Kristof has his own blog site and added material from him about this topic and readers’ comments are here.

Now to the core of this article on Learning from Dogs which, I passionately believe, is closely tied in to the background theme already expressed here.  It’s from the blogsite Corrente and, once again, I am indebted to Naked Capitalism for having it in a recent set of links.

It concerns Jack, his family and their house.

The House that Jack’s Bank Took

Jack was a friendly man, who always had a pleasant word and a smile and handshake for everyone. The men hung with him at barbeques and discussed sports. He was strong, had a belly, and always wore a baseball cap. He was married to his high school sweetheart, Mary. He was good to his 4 kids and took care of his oldest child when he had a breakdown in his early twenties. He went to all school and family events and encouraged his children in their dreams. He took care of the family needs and finances. He was a small business owner and had invented his product, which a short while ago became outmoded. He always decorated the house with lots of Christmas decorations and candles. They are still up. He lost his house to foreclosure and the family was given 3 days to move out.

He drove into the deep woods and drank poison to make sure he was dead. I knew him. My family knew him; he lived within walking distance of one of us. At his funeral his childhood sweetheart and their children told a lot of Jack stories. The family did their best to resurrect him to our eyes. One of his kids sang and the eldest read a poem he’d written. Mary said she didn’t know what she was going to do and that she would now have to rely on those from town sitting in the packed chapel pews. There are other houses nearby that haven’t been foreclosed on but Jack’s house was nice and had a good view. The bank has now given Mary 3 weeks to move out.

It was written on the 15th February, 2011; you can read it here.  Click on the link and read some of the comments expressed – very powerful.

Wish I could think of something apt to say but I can’t.  All I can feel is great sadness and a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that this ‘Jack’ story is being echoed in many other places.

People power

A lovely postscript to a recent campaign.

On the 9th February, there was a Post on Learning from Dogs about the flower industry.  Here’s a small extract.

At flower farms in Ecuador and Colombia — the countries that export the most to the U.S. — two-thirds of the workers are women. These women are routinely subjected to harassment and even rape from their male supervisors. They suffer eye infections and miscarriages from consistent contact with dangerous pesticides.

In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, they’re routinely forced to work 80-hour weeks with no overtime pay. Attempts to form a union are met with opposition by police and armed forces.

Apparently some 40% of annual purchases of flowers are purchased for Valentine’s Day in the USA.  Anyway, in today’s in-box is this lovely update from Change.org

Dear Paul,

We are blown away by the incredible impact Change.org members have made around the world by starting, joining, and winning dozens of meaningful campaigns over the past few weeks. So we wanted to drop you a quick note to say thank you. And congratulations. And let’s keep fighting.

Here are a few of the top victories and successes we’ve had together:

  • Late last week, the largest florist in the world, 1-800-Flowers, responded to 54,000 Change.org members and agreed to begin selling Fair Trade flowers and insist on a strong code of conduct for all their suppliers to counteract the deplorable working conditions that thousands of female flower workers face in South America. They’ve promised to offer Fair Trade flowers in time for Mother’s Day, making 1-800-Flowers a leader in the industry. (Click here to write a thank you message on 1-800-Flowers’ Facebook wall.)

Nice one!  The website Change.org can be found here.

Joseph Campbell, first taste

This is one remarkable man.

Really tight on time at this moment (Sunday afternoon) so all I want to do is to lightly introduce this great thinker to those that haven’t come across him before.

Joseph Campbell died in 1987 but his influence continues to be strong and powerful, positively increasing year by year.

His works, his life and his messages are wonderfully promulgated by the Joseph Campbell Foundation.  Becoming a JCF Associate is free!

Much more in due course!

What the world looks like!

Sent in by John and Janet, here in Payson, Arizona. Thanks to them.

This is what

SORRY

LOOKS LIKE.

This is what

Tired

Looks like.

This is what

Bad spelling

Looks like…

This is what

Intimacy

Looks like.

This is what

Courage

Looks like.

This is what

‘good grief!!’

Looks like.

This is what your

Tax dollars

Look like.

 

This is what

‘I can wait’

Looks like.

 

This is what 

Impatience looks like..

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what a

Helping hand

Looks like

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what

Cold

Looks like.

 

 

 

This is what a

Bad mood

Looks like.

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t matter how many people you send this to.

Just remember if it made you smile .. . . your friends will smile too!

Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so  .  .  ..

‘Love the people who treat you right.  Pray for those who don’t.’


Nothing ‘knows’ like a dog’s nose

Lovely what comes across one’s PC screen.

It started when someone we know in Payson, Peter N, posted an item on Facebook about dogs being able to smell out cancer.  The Facebook item referred to an article in Natural News.  That item here went as follows:

(NaturalNews) The mainstream media is suddenly reporting on the idea that dogs can sniff out cancer in human beings. This concept is no surprise to NaturalNews readers, of course, as we’ve talked about this before, but until now the idea that cancer patients could be detected by smelling them was considered pure quackery by conventional doctors.

Of course, conventional doctors are once again wrong:Cancer patients do have a particular smelldue to the metabolic off-gassing of cancer cell tumors. But here’s the real story the mainstream media isn’t telling you: It’s not just dogs that can smell cancer — manyhealth practitionerscan also smell cancer patients.

I’ve personally spoken to numerous natural health practitioners who say they can smell cancer in patients. It’s not really a difficult thing to do, it turns out. With a bit of training, I believe most doctors could even be trained to do it, much like this dog in Japan which correctly identified cancer from stool samples 37 out of 38 times.

It doesn’t mean doctors have to sniff patients’ poo, either: You can also smell cancer on someone’s breath, so just talking to a patient can give a doctor an opportunity to do that. (Historically, by the way, physicians use to taste patients’ urine, from which they could diagnose a number of diseases, especially diabetes.)

This particular research on dogs’ ability to sniff out cancer was conducted by researchers at the Kyushu University in Japan. Dr Hideto Sonoda, who conducted the research, told the BBC, “The specific cancer scent indeed exists, but the chemical compounds are not clear. Only the dog knows the true answer.”

An important point in all this is thatthe cancer-sniffing dogs were able to detect early-stage bowel cancer— something that is extremely difficult for modern medical technology to detect. And it only takes a dog a few seconds — at virtually zero cost — to make the assessment.

Now, of course, medical scientists are busy trying to build an electronic device to replace the dog, because conventional medicine can’t stand the fact that something built by nature (the dog’s nose) might be better than some million-dollar electronic gizmo they come up with that can be billed out at $500 a test. So rather than just using dogs who can already detect cancer right now, they’re going to wait around a few years and try to create some high-tech equipment that will probably be a poor replacement for the dog.

That’s how modern medicine works: It steals good ideas from nature and replicates them, but the results are almost always a poor imitation of what Mother Nature has provided for free. Here’s how the end results would likely stack up:

CANCER-SNIFFING DOG
Accuracy: 98%
Cost: One dog biscuit and a pat on the head

CANCER-SNIFFING HIGH-TECH MACHINE
Accuracy: 60%
Cost: $500 billed to Medicare [the US medical system for those unfamiliar with the term. Ed.]

Gee, which one do you think conventional medicine will end up using?

In fact, a quick web search finds much information on the topic including these YouTube videos.

Now how to get our dogs to tell us ……… we’re OK; assuming we are!

Then from HousePet online magazine comes this:

The British Medical Journal published a ground-breaking research reporting how dogs have been trained to detect bladder cancer by its smell in urine, bringing together dogs’ exceptional sense of smell, with the theory that cancer produces chemicals with distinctive odours. (on September 24th, 2004 )

Six dogs, none of which had any prior experience in scent discrimination, were trained over seven months to distinguish between urine samples from bladder cancer patients and those from healthy people and individuals with non-cancerous diseases. For the final tests, each dog was offered a set of seven urine samples, and their task was to determine which of them was from a patient with bladder cancer. All of the samples used in the tests were completely new and unfamiliar to the dogs.

The dogs, comprising three spaniels, one papillon, one Labrador and one mongrel, correctly selected the bladder cancer urine on 22 out of 54 occasions – an average success rate of 41% compared to the 14% which would have been expected if the dogs had randomly selected a sample each time. This was statistically significant.

The research was undertaken by a unique partnership of medical scientists, including a statistician, and dog trainers. An orthopaedic surgeon from Buckinghamshire, Mr John Church, brought together colleagues from the Department of Dermatology, Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust (funded by the Erasmus Wilson Dermatological Research Fund) to develop and supervise the scientific protocol for the research, and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People (based near Princes Risborough) for the purpose of training the dogs for the trial.

“We were flattered to be asked to assist in this study on the basis of our reputation in the field of training dogs,” Claire Guest, Operations Director at Hearing Dogs said, “although we have been very careful not to let this project affect our normal work which involves training dogs for deaf people. The four of us who trained these cancer detection dogs did so using our own pet dogs, in our own homes, in our own spare time.”

Back row: And Cook, Claire Guest, Martin Church. Front row: Carolyn Willis, John Church, Susannah Church

I rather loved the quote from John Church, “I am a passionate believer that animals have a huge amount to teach us, and I have heard many stories of people who have been alerted to the presence of cancer in their bodies by their pet dogs. I was delighted to find that the two charities were open-minded enough to participate in this study, so that we could really examine this phenomenon scientifically.”

As I keep going on about – we really can learn from dogs!

Thanks Peter.

What a Way to Go

An interesting companion to the World on the Edge book

Regular readers of the Blog will know that yesterday an article was published, the first of a series, looking more closely at the book by Lester Brown of EPI called World on the Edge.  That article followed on from this Post, Group Human Insanity, and yesterday’s Post, Total, Utter Madness, Pt 1.

Today, if you will forgive the emotional battering that the book and this film create, I want to draw your attention to a film that was produced in 2007, called What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.

It was lent to us by John Hulburt, who lives in Payson, and holds many views that are close to the views of the founders of Learning from Dogs.  John has offered to write the odd guest article for the Blog, which is fantastic.

Anyway, back to the film.  Here are a couple of trailers.

A 2-minute trailer giving an overview of the film ..

and another one dipping into more detail.

And if you still want more, then here’s an interview of the two behind the film, Producer Sally Erickson and Writer/Director Tim Bennett.  Twenty-seven minutes long but so what.  Watch it!

We really do have so much to learn from dogs! (Before it’s too late!)