Category: People

Integrity and democracy.

“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”

Thus said Aristotle.

Here’s another quote from more recent times.

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”

So said President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Today’s post started as an ill-defined idea in my head following me reading a recent essay over on Patrice Ayme’s blog. It was his (her?) post of the 17th July in which was written, “Representative democracy has to be destroyed as an ideal.” and later,

Meanwhile the French People would be well advised to search for a new form of government more appropriate to the modern world, and the increasing democracy we all dearly need.

One does not have to look very far for inspiration: the Confoederatio Helvetica next door, an independent, and central part of the Franks’ Francia, is enjoying a much more direct form of democracy.

that caused me to leave a comment,

I read a deeper malaise in your essay, Patrice, and that is the failure of ‘representative’ democracy in country after country around the world. In fact, it’s inspiring me to write a post over on LfD about the possibilities for truly democratic government.

that, in turn, was replied to by Patrice:

Please go ahead, Paul, and keep me informed! ;-)! And you are completely right. Representative democracy is actually oligarchic representation. Athenians had 80,000 citizens, and 80,000 legislators. France has about 1,000 times more citizens, and one half of a thousandth (1/2,000) fewer legislators. That makes the French democratic index half of a million times less than the Athenians!

Let me step back for a moment.

Over the life of this blog, I have touched on the vulnerability of human life on this planet more than once. It’s not being at all smart to say that mankind is crapping on its own doorstep and our future is in severe doubt. The reason I say it’s not smart is simply because millions of people almost certainly think that or something pretty damn close.

Maybe the huge divide between what ‘the man in the street’ knows makes common sense and the terrible lack of common sense shown by so many of our governments is at the root of the problem. In other words, our representative democratic system isn’t working.

Here’s a letter from the pages of the Tampa Bay Times from just last Tuesday.

Tuesday’s letters: Our democratic system is at risk

There are thoughtful, informed people who are worried that our democratic system of government is not working and the whole enterprise is at risk. I think there is only one solution to the problem: to elect people who have demonstrated the ability to work cooperatively with others and solve problems.

It is foolish to think that the personalities of members of Congress change when they arrive in Washington. A worrisome number were fools, buffoons and rigidly ideological before they were elected, and there is no realistic possibility that anyone or anything can change their personalities after they are elected and while they are in office.

It is a crisis long in the making. Most students finish high school with little or no understanding of American history or the way their government works. There is no understanding of the idea of citizenship and the heavy responsibility imposed on citizens who live in a democratic republic. There has never been so much information so easily available that could allow people to make wise use of their votes. But without the perspective of education and a deep understanding that voting is everything in our system of government, it all may slip away.

Roger C. Benson, St. Petersburg

“to elect people who have demonstrated the ability to work cooperatively with others and solve problems.”

I wouldn’t argue at all with the wisdom in those words. But I would add to it.

It’s my sense that many citizens in many countries feel that the whole business of government has got to large, too complicated, too remote and, frankly, has less to do with working “cooperatively with others and solve problems” than with feeding its own mouth. Take voter turnout.

Graph of voter turnout percentage from 1824 to 2008. — Voter turnout in the USA; 1824 – 2008

Why such high levels of absenteeism; for want of a better description?

Let’s go back to the Athenians as Patrice mentioned. Plenty on the web to read but this article caught my eye.

Athenian Democracy: a brief overview

Christopher W. Blackwell, edition of February 28, 2003

· Summary ·

This article was originally written for the online discussion series “Athenian Law in its Democratic Context,” organized by Adriaan Lanni and sponsored by Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies. Its purpose is to introduce, very briefly, the institutions of the Athenian democracy during the late 5th century BCE through the end of the radical democracy in the late 4th century. This is a companion-piece to “The Development of Athenian Democracy,” also written for the CHS’s discussion series.

· Introduction ·

The city of Athens lived under a radically democratic government from 508 until 322 BCE. Before the earlier date there was democracy to be found here and there in the government of Athens, and democratic institutions survived long after the latter date, but for those 186 years the city of Athens was self-consciously and decidedly democratic, autonomous, aggressive, and prosperous. Democracy in Athens was not limited to giving citizens the right to vote. Athens was not a republic, nor were the People governed by a representative body of legislators. In a very real sense, the People governed themselves, debating and voting individually on issues great and small, from matters of war and peace to the proper qualifications for ferry-boat captains (for the latter, see Aeschin. 3.157).1 The Athenian democracy was not, of course, a free-for-all of mob rule. The Athenians understood the value of checks and balances and of enforcing time for reflection before acting. They understood that professionalism is necessary in certain jobs, that accountability was necessary of most jobs, and that some jobs required absolute job-security. The system evolved over time, suffered two complete breakdowns in the 5th century, and is certainly open to criticism at many points during its history. Nevertheless, it was coherent enough during those two centuries that we can describe it, in general terms, without being too far wrong on any point. And despite its moments of imprudence, injustice, and indecision, it was an experiment remarkable enough to deserve our attention.

The early history of Athenian Democracy and its development is the subject of another article in this series. This general description of how the Athenians governed themselves will focus on the 4th century BCE, both because the democracy was most fully developed during that time and because the majority of our evidence either comes from that period, or describes the the Athenian government during that period.

Now there’s much more to read here for those so interested but I want to highlight a section from the above. This section:

In a very real sense, the People governed themselves, debating and voting individually on issues great and small, from matters of war and peace to the proper qualifications for ferry-boat captains. The Athenian democracy was not, of course, a free-for-all of mob rule. The Athenians understood the value of checks and balances and of enforcing time for reflection before acting. They understood that professionalism is necessary in certain jobs, that accountability was necessary of most jobs, and that some jobs required absolute job-security.

So from 322 BCE to 2014 AD!

A few days ago, Jeannie needed to change some details regarding her US Social Security payment. We saw that it could be done online. As one would expect, setting up online access for Jean meant jumping through a number of security hoops. All more or less sorted in 20 minutes.

It was clear that it would be incredibly difficult for someone to fraudulently break into her online SSA account. Think of the millions who perfectly happily manage their bank accounts online.

Ergo, there are no technical issues why every single eligible voter in the USA (and many other countries) couldn’t move towards governing themselves in a direct manner just like the Athenians. Indeed, voting in the USA at times of Presidential elections is permitted. But all that is doing is participating in a system that isn’t delivering real democracy.

We need to govern ourselves: “debating and voting individually on issues great and small, from matters of war and peace to the proper qualifications for ferry-boat captains.” Because humanity is facing some issues that are very great indeed!

Or have I missed something bloody obvious?

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I opened today’s post with two quotations. I shall close by offering another two.

“If we don’t hang together, we most assuredly will hang separately.”

Benjamin Franklin advising the original continental congress of what became the United States of America.

“A key political question today is: Do you support the well-being of the Earth and the life that the Earth supports?“

From a good friend and supporter of this blog who chooses to remain anonymous. Who then added: “This question has spiritual, natural and rational implications which frame the debate in terms of human values greater than money.”

Embracing happiness

We receive what we put out!

There are so many aspects of the dog world that we have to learn. Top of the list of what we must learn from dogs is unconditional love.

You all know how if you approach a strange dog with love in your heart, how that dog senses your love immediately and responds in the same loving fashion.

So approach every conscious being in your life with love in your heart. It will truly change the world!

So with that in mind, it seemed very appropriate to follow up yesterday’s post that included the essay by Chris Johnstone on celebration with this short film from Rick Hanson. Especially just now.

Published on Nov 7, 2013
Hardwiring Happiness : The Hidden Power of Everyday Experiences on the Modern Brain. How to overcome the Brain’s Negativity Bias.

Rick Hanson is a neuropsychologist and the author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, best selling author of Buddha’s Brain, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he’s been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide.

(Thank you, John.)

How to stop drowning in a sea of gloom!

A fascinating essay courtesy of Transition Network in the UK

I have very little doubt that I share with the majority of ‘common folk’ out there a feeling of these being dark and desperate times. I’m not even going to list the things that, on an almost daily basis, come along under the category of ‘doom and gloom’.

Yet it is also pretty widely known that change is embraced much more easily through reward. In other words, we commit to change, in a thousand different ways, from the expectation of reward: reward in many varied and numerous ways, many of them non-financial, of course.

The challenge for us all is that the negative has great pulling power. If we read news websites, watch television, read newspapers, and more, we are exposed essentially to wall-to-wall bad news.

So how on earth do we keep our spirits up? How on earth do we maintain hope in there being a positive way forward? Whatever ‘way forward’ translates to in terms of the individual?

Over in the UK there is the website of the Transition Network. From that home page one can link across to a number of blogs. Anyway, recently on Rob Hopkins’ blog there was a very interesting essay by Chris Johnstone about the power of celebration. Read it and reward yourself for so doing! 😉

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Without celebration, we wither away

An interview of Chris Johnstone by Rob Hopkins

Chris Johnstone works in the area of the psychology of resilience, sustainable happiness and is co-author, with Joanna Macy, of Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. [1.] Chris appeared at both the Unleashing of Transition Town’s Totnes and Lewes, and has interacted with different Transition groups ever since. He’s also an accomplished musician (you can hear him playing briefly at the end of the podcast of our interview). I started by asking him why celebration matters:

“I’m just thinking about how important food is. Without food, we wither away. Food is nourishment. We also have needs for psychological nourishment or psycho-spiritual nourishment, emotional nourishment. I see celebration as one of those things that nourishes us psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. I was thinking about this also in terms of how important celebration is in keeping us going.

One of the thought blocks that people bump into sometimes is the voice that says “well what’s the point of doing this?” What celebration does is it gives us an answer to that. I think of it as helping shifting us from a going nowhere story where we feel we’re making no progress and have no direction to what I think of as a going somewhere story, where we feel that we’re on the way somewhere because we’re celebrating and marking important steps along the way.

What are the risks of not pausing to celebrate, do you think?

If you don’t pause to first of all notice that you’ve made any progress, it’s very easy to feel that you’re not making any progress. If you’re not making any progress, one of the risks for burnout is that loss of meaning where you lose the sense that there’s a point to what you do. Basically you run dry.

I see one of the parallels here as sustainable agriculture. One of the keys of sustainable agriculture is to nourish the soil. If you look after the soil, you get good crops. In terms of personal productivity, I think it would be to have sustainable activism. The parallel to topsoil is, I guess, our enthusiasm. We need to look after our enthusiasm for something. If we don’t, our enthusiasm gets thin like thin topsoil and you can get to a point where there’s no enthusiasm left and you just have that sense of, well what’s the point. You lose the oomph, you lose the energy, and you lose the plot.

What does good celebration look like? What for you would be the ingredients of a good celebration?

You can do it alone. It’s good to have ways where we notice the steps that we’re taking by ourselves and find some way of marking those and reinforcing those, but I’d say that celebration generally is much better in company. It’s also socially bonding and there’s very interesting research here about what really makes a difference in relationships.

There’s a psychologist called Shelley Gable who worked at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she was trying to work out what are the vital things that really make a difference and she recorded lots and lots of relationships. One area of communication that seemed to make a key difference in relationships was the response to good news.

If one person had good news and shared it with the other and the other person responded to the good news by being ‘joy in the joy of another’, by celebrating the good news, that deepened trust, that deepened the sense of satisfaction in the relationship. But if somebody shared good news and it passed by without notice or even worse, the person tried to persuade them that really it was bad news, that led to a drop in the level of satisfaction in the relationship that was so strong that Shelley Gable found that she could work who was at higher risk of breaking up over the next 12 months just by looking at their response to good news, whether somebody celebrated the good news when it was shared, or whether somebody passed it by or poured cold water on it.

There was a thing that I wrote for this month’s framing editorial that was my attempt at what some of the ingredients of good group celebrations might look like. What does celebration on a more day to day basis in a group like a Transition group – how can we design it into our meetings, our everyday rather than having something we just do once a year?

I’d say there’s something here about celebration needing to be meaningful. It’s asking yourself “what exactly is it that we are celebrating?” What we’re doing with celebration is celebrating the things we appreciate, the things that we value. By having a shared celebration, what you’re doing is reinforcing the system of values, the shared system of values within that group. In terms of what keeps us going, it’s really important to celebrate success. So what comes up there is we need to look at how do we notice success, how do we notice progress and how do we define that?

It’s particularly important when working for social change, for social and ecological justice, that we can often have a lot of disappointment and frustration along the way. If we only celebrate the really big things, the really big victories, we can have long gaps between the celebrations which makes us feel that we’re losing, that we’re not making progress. And so therefore I think what’s really important is to look at the mini victories along the way, and to both celebrate the positive outcomes that happen, but also to celebrate the effort put in, and one way of doing that is just to find some way of appreciating what has been done, so for example research on our mood shows that one of the things that improves mood is both the experience and also the expression of gratitude.

One of the ways that you can build celebration into everyday meetings and things is just finding some way to appreciate each other, appreciate the steps that we’ve been taking. If you’ve noticed that someone’s worked really hard on something, to have some gap in a meeting, some agenda item in the meeting where you just notice the things that have been done and the effort put in, and find some way of valuing them, marking them, noting them.

It might be first of all there’s a slot for anyone who’s got any good news to share and then to celebrate that, but also has anyone got any appreciations of gratitude to express. To actually build that into part of a group culture that we take time to notice and celebrate the steps we notice each other taking, and also if somebody has noticed a step that we’ve taken, for it to be completely more than fine, I’d say brilliant, for us to step forward and say – one thing I’m pleased about, you may not have seen this but one thing I’ve done is… where we take time to notice and to celebrate the steps we’ve taken ourselves.

It’s great when other people can notice it, but we don’t want to end up feeling resentful because no one cheered for this hard piece of work I did. We actually get better at stepping out there and saying – yes, I’m really pleased that I did this, I’m really pleased that I did that, because when we mark the steps that we’re taking, we reinforce that in a way that helps us keep taking those steps.

The environmental movement, in as much as I’ve been around it for the last 25 years or so, feels to be fairly spectacularly bad at stopping and celebrating. The culture is like a marathon, “got to keep going, got to keep going”, so there’s lots of burnout. Why do you think the environmental movement has been so poor at that?

Partly it’s the scale of the tasks that we face. We can’t have a party to celebrate climate change being sorted out, because that’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime. There’s already problems in the post, as it were, from the carbon that’s already been released into the atmosphere. The task is so huge that we could be working, well, there’s 168 hours in the week and we could be working all of those for a whole year and still feel that there’s more and more to do. There’s two things here.

There’s the to-date thinking which is where we look at what we’ve done so far, but there’s also to-go thinking where we look at what we’ve still got to go, the distance we’ve still got to cover. When we look at the distance we’ve still got to cover, it’s further than we can get in our lifetime, so that’s the trouble as I see it. We can just be working, working, working, and feel that there’s always more to go.

But also if we only focus on the work that’s still to be done, the danger is we just get exhausted. We become like what we’re doing to the fields of wheat around the world – we harvest them unsustainably and end up depleting the soil. I’d say that activist enthusiasm is a vital renewable resource, and we need to get much more skilful about how we treasure it. How we look after it in a way that can help it grow.

My last question is, can you think of one celebratory event that you were particularly moved by or inspired by which could be a story that might be useful for Transition groups to hear?

I’ve shared a number with you that I really delight in. One that comes to mind is when the two of us spoke together at the launch of Transition Town Totnes. It was the official unleashing of Transition Town Totnes and that was years ago now. But I think that was in 2006, so eight years ago now. What we do is celebrate launches of things in a way that we’re marking them and saying – hey, this is the beginning of something. We don’t know what will happen, but we’re marking our very clear intention.

There’s a form of energy, I call it ACACI which means A Clear and Committed Intention. It’s like a form of psychological energy. When you have strong, clear and committed intention, it drives you on. One of the ways of building that up is to have a launching celebration. I really enjoyed that event with you. We spoke together at the unleashing of Transition Town Lewes as well and we’ve both been back there since then. You wrote recently in your July 1st blog about being at their 7 year celebration and I was there at their 5 year celebration.

If you have a party to begin something, then you can also revisit that point some years on. So they become markers in time. We can say yes, we were here when this began, we celebrated the launch of this. And now here we are meeting again, this number of years later and we also celebrate the effort put in and the steps taken and the distance covered in that between time.

What you do there is build in the journey approach to change. This sense that we’re on a cultural migration. That’s why I love the term Transition. Transition is about moving from one place to another and we mark the steps along the way. So we celebrate when we begin this journey with the unleashing, the launch, but we keep coming back to that at periodic intervals and say – hey, we’re still on this journey. It’s still important to us.

While there might be some steps forward and some steps back and frustrations and disappointments along the way, there will always be things that we can look at and say yeah, that’s what we did and I feel really good about that.

When you mark the things that you feel good about, you get something which I call afterglow. This is the warm feeling of satisfaction after you’ve done something or noticed something that you feel good about. That’s what keeps us going, it’s fuel for the journey. So back to that original idea that celebration is a form of psychological nourishment and it’s absolutely vital to keep ourselves going.

You’re a very gifted musician and you managed to weave music and getting everybody moving and joining in as well. What’s the role of music in that, do you think?

It’s so interesting, because they’ve found bits of bone that have been turned into flutes that are 20,000 years old. I see music as a form of social glue. It draws people together. There’s something very remarkable that can happen when people move rhythmically together. It’s where we shift out of just seeing ourselves as separate individuals to where we sing and dance together it reinforces our connectivity, our sense of being part of something larger.

That’s great – actually ‘great’ is an understatement. I talked about psychological nourishment, also how do we reinforce and grow social capital? Social capital is the wealth that comes out of relationships. Shared music and dance is one of the ways that happens.

Here is the podcast of our interview with Chris.

Published on July 15, 2014, by Rob Hopkins

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I wanted to know more about Chris and very quickly came to this place, from where I read:

Chris Johnstone is a medical doctor, author, and coach who worked for nearly twenty years as an addictions specialist in the UK National Health Service. A former Senior Teaching Fellow at Bristol University Medical School, he trains health professionals in behavioral medicine and gives courses exploring the psychological dimensions of planetary crisis. Chris is known for his work pioneering the role of resilience training in promoting positive mental health, developing self-help resources and setting up the Bristol Happiness Lectures. He is author of Find Your Power: A Toolkit for Resilience and Positive Change (2nd Ed, 2010) and co-presenter of The Happiness Training Plan CD (2010).

Chris has been a trainer in the Work That Reconnects for more than two decades, working with Joanna on many occasions and running facilitator trainings in the United Kingdom. In 2004 he set up the free email newsletter [2.] The Great Turning Times, which is now read by thousands of people throughout the world. He has been active in the Transition movement since its very beginnings and contributed to a chapter on the psychology of change in The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins.

After many years living in Bristol, Chris recently moved to the North of Scotland, where he lives with his wife, Kirsty, their dogs and chickens, pursuing his love of growing fruit in their evolving forest garden. He continues his coaching and training work, as well as his writing and music. His website is at www.chrisjohnstone.info
He runs workshops and a facilitator training in the Work That Reconnects in the UK. Details at: www.facilitationforlifeonearth.org.
He also offers online courses in Active Hope, Resilience, Sustainable Happiness and Change-Making Skills at www.resiliencehappinesschange.com.

[1.] The following video is from the Active Hope theme.

[2.] If you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, then the link may be found on this page. (I have just done so.)

Intimately connected to Nature!

Three stunning photographs.

Just a quick reminder that, as heralded in my post of the 10th – Time waits for no man – arriving family in fewer than two weeks is cutting into my blogging time.

So going to make today’s offering three stunning photographs of lightning strikes on the World Trade Center. As seen on EarthSky News.

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Boom! Three perspectives on July 2 lightning strike at One World Trade Center

Beth Alison (@bethalison) got this shot of the July 2, 2014 lightning strike of One World Trade Center from her Manhattan apartment … with her phone!

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Jennifer Khordi caught the lightning hitting One World Trade Center from New Jersey.

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Lightning strikes One World Trade Center July 2, 2014. Gary Hershorn (@garyhershorn), who took this photo, said it turned the sky red.

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Wow!

Evolution of the family dog.

A republication of an essay on the history of dogs.

For some time I have been aware of an essay authored by Dr. George Johnson under his On Science series page umbrella. As that page explains:

ON SCIENCE is a weekly science column written by me (George Johnson), published initially in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and now in the online newspaper St. Louis Beacon (stlbeacon.org). For over 30 years I taught biology to college students at Washington University. For the last decade of these years, I taught a freshman course that introduced nonscience majors to current issues where science plays a key role, issues such as AIDS, the environment, cloning, genetic engineering, and evolution.

The course was intended to give them the tools to think about these issues as citizens and voters. I write my column as a way of teaching the general public about these same issues.

Most people are very interested in science, but put off by the terminology. When you don’t know what the words mean, it’s easy to slip into thinking that the matter is difficult, when actually the ideas are simple, easy to grasp, and fun to consider. It’s the terms that get in the way, that stand as a wall between citizens and science.

It is the intent of my column to turn those walls into windows, so that readers can peer in and join the fun. Analogies are my tool. In each column I look for simple analogies that relate the matter at hand to things we all know. As science, analogies are not exact, but I do not count myself compromised. Analogies trade precision for clarity. If I do my job right, the key idea is not compromised by the analogy I use to explain it, but rather revealed.

A quick trip to Dr. Johnson’s bio details reveals a substantial academic background.

Anyway, the particular essay that I was very interested in was, unsurprisingly, one about the history of the domestic dog.

I wrote Dr. Johnson asking for permission to publish his essay here on Learning from Dogs and promptly received such permission. Indeed, better than that, here is his reply email:

By all means, but please cite a revised version of the article (in ESSENTIALS OF THE LIVING WORLD, 5e, George B Johnson, McGraw Hill Publ., 2015). It is somewhat shorter, but more up-to-date. I enclose a copy of the relevant page below.

Enjoy!

Five years old!

A part of me really can’t believe it!

Yes, on the 15th July, 2009, I published my first post! Five years ago today! That first post was called Parenting lessons from dogs; a shortish post that I republish now.

Much too late to make me realise the inadequacies of my own parenting skills, I learnt an important lesson when training my GSD (who is called Pharaoh, by the way). That is that putting more emphasis into praise and reward for getting it right ‘trains’ the dog much quicker than telling it off. The classic example is scolding a dog for running off when it should be lots of hugs and praise for returning home. The scolding simply teaches the dog that returning home isn’t pleasant whereas praise reinforces that home is the place to be. Like so many things in life, very obvious once understood!

Absolutely certain that it works with youngsters just the same way.

Despite being a very dominant dog, Pharaoh showed his teaching ability when working with other dogs. In the UK there is an amazing woman, Angela Stockdale, who has proved that dogs (and horses) learn most effectively when being taught by other dogs (and horses). Pharaoh was revealed to be a Beta Dog, (i.e. second in status below the Alpha Dog) and, therefore, was able to use his natural pack instinct to teach puppy dogs their social skills and to break up squabbles within a pack.

When you think about it, don’t kids learn much more (often to our chagrin!) from other kids than they do from their parents. Still focusing on giving more praise than punishment seems like a much more effective strategy.

As was read somewhere, Catch them in the act of doing Right!

According to my stats page, Learning from Dogs has accumulated 1,000,624 viewings, with a ‘best-ever’ of 3,980 for Trust me, I’m an engineer, courtesy of Bob Derham in March, 2013. A total of 2,125 posts have been published. Plus, it has been a wonderful journey for yours truly with ever so many great connections made across the world of blogging over these last five years. As evidenced by the rest of today’s post.

Regular readers will have seen comments from Alex Jones. He is a Brit living in Colchester, Essex in England and is the author of the blog The Liberated Way. He and I follow each other’s blogs.

Recently, Alex posted under the title of Relating business to planet earth and these are Alex’s last two paragraphs.

I discover my values and personal insights from how I react to what I see and experience in the world around me. I reacted in anger at the greed and vanity of money investors in business ideas in the US reality television series Shark Tank on YouTube. I reacted in dismay at the wasteful stupidity portrayed in a video on consumerism: people queuing for a week to get hold of the latest iPhone, whose only enhancement from the last was its colour; IKEA marketing telling consumers to throw out perfectly good possessions; Apple designing a new type of screw on its smartphones in order to prevent people repairing damaged phones, thus encouraging waste; the extensive scams brands go to called obsolescence to make objects the consumer buys break quickly increasing waste and needless replacement. The contempt the modern economic paradigm has to this planet is at odds with our human ancestors, and at odds with my worldview.

I am part of a new business paradigm, where I can compete against rivals on equal terms with innovation and clever strategies, but where I care for the planet earth in the same manner as I cared for the grasshopper this morning and my oak saplings. In thinking on these matters in the garden this morning, my garden fox Amber appeared, yawned, then went to sleep in the sun.

Two days ago, another blogger signed up to follow this place. He writes under the name of Cully and his blog is Ahaa. As I always do, I went across to take a look at Cully’s blog, liked what I saw, especially this ‘header’ post on Gaia. Very promptly I was given permission to republish that post here.

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Gaia

It’s Time To Stop Living On The Earth and Start Cohabitating With Her – The Earth is a Sentient Living Organism

We are saturated with information and we are used to clipping and selecting segments of what news is thrown our way every day. We can process very little of it for use later on and it is well known that we only see ‘pertinent’ information as information that already supports our existing belief system. This narrow mindset is one of the main reasons why things don’t change. It is why we are happy to listen to shallow news, we simply don’t have time to do anything else. In this we kid ourselves we really don’t need to know which celebrity is dealing with addiction or changing partners.

On this page we hope to introduce a topic that will inspire you to contemplate, even meditate on its importance.

Gaia is more widely accepted now than when it was first introduced, and you’re not being asked to believe it wholesale and certainly not see it as a part of the New Age or hippy movement. Hopefully though whatever you think about our planet you will find it to be a useful platform to consider AND TAKE ACTION on the health of the environment that we are leaving our children.

It is easy …as with all the other scares that we hear about every day to think that we are too small, or that it is a governmental or corporate problem, so why spend any time considering it.

Whatever your particular mindset, Gaia related activities will become increasingly connected and important to leaving a beautiful world behind us. The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth’s conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life

The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. Topics of interest include how the biosphere and the evolution of life forms affect the stability of global temperature, ocean salinity, oxygen in the atmosphere and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth.

The hypothesis, which is named after the Greek goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal largely for his work on the Gaia theory.

It will take an enormous amount of time to create a menu that covers everything related to Gaia, please be patient or if the time help out in any small way that you can 🙂

respect

[If you haven’t watched this BBC programme about James Lovelock and his history of scientific understanding about how our planet works then settle down and watch it. I assure you that you will be entranced. PH]

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What can I say!

Other than to be extremely grateful for the opportunity to ramble on and make so many good friends, WordPress style, over these last five years.

Thank you.

Can you speak WordPress?

If you can, then there may be a job opportunity for you.

Republished from Naked Capitalism.

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Help Us Find a New WordPress Person

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Yves Smith

We are looking for a new person to take over WordPress support for Naked Capitalism. Even though our old WordPress person Kristin was technically skilled and did a fine job with the redesign, the professional relationship wasn’t working out.

The difficulty for finding a replacement is that the overwhelming majority of WordPress specialists have never worked on a site like NC. WordPress scales badly and its Achilles heel is its database. Most WordPress support staff have never encountered a site with large databases (close to 12,000 posts and over 500,000 comments) that loads them the way we do (hundreds of updates a day).

Please also bear in mind we are NOT looking for a host. We are happy with our webhost. But WordPress is complicated and breakage prone enough that any site that is run on a professional basis needs a WordPress expert in the mix.

So we need someone with experience in supporting a WordPress site with:

• Very large database that updates very frequently
• Advertising. We use a third party ad service and often have to change ad code and make layout adjustments

Aside from routine support, we also have some projects we’d like to undertake, like fixing categories and tags.

A WordPress specialist also needs to understand that we are in a news-driven business and work constantly to deadlines. So while there are often weeks where there is only routine activity (monitoring site performance and working on non-time-critical assignments), when we have problem, we have a sense of urgency about getting it fixed.

Kristin operated solo, but if the provider was in a small firm (as in had more than one person who could work on our account) that could be even better, particularly if it got us closer to 24/7 support.

If you have any ideas or leads, please e-mail me at yves-at-nakedcapitalism.com, with “WordPress” in the subject line. Thanks!

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Anyone interested may benefit from reading this NC post: The Glamorous World of Big Time Blogging.

Independence Day

Another gem of an essay from guest writer John Hurlburt.

It was just a short while ago, on the 26th June, that I posted a guest essay from John under the title of Arrogance ‘R Us. It was very well received with twenty-two ‘Likes’ and, without exception, many favourable comments.

Therefore I am delighted to offer another of John’s essays; again beautifully crafted as you are about to see.

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Independence Day

Human beings on planet Earth are a tiny component of the Nature of the Cosmos. Life is an experiential opportunity which obeys Natural cycles and adapts in order to survive and grow. Cosmic awareness is unlimited. The statistical probability of consciousness awareness being a purely local phenomenon is so remote that it’s actually ridiculous to consider.

Human awareness is limited. We’re a very young cosmic species. Sometimes we don’t see much beyond the end of our own noses. We need to learn to play nicely with other children before we go much further beyond the living nest called Earth that we consistently befoul.

Time changes. In a consciously aware biological world, we may choose to build for the future or to ignore the future in favor of our short term lives. Those who accept change and make a coordinated effort to adapt have a better probability for a future than those who fear change. Responsibility to adapt to change comes with the territory.

What’s happening on Earth today is simply a matter of Mother Nature cleansing herself of an unhealthy species that’s lost track of the spiritual, natural and reasonable moral foundation necessary for equitable balance. Our problem today is that we tend to blindly follow the noisy mouthpieces of unified financial interests into bottomless pits. The pits are already dry or are rapidly drying.

We’re aware of the opportunity of each new day at the depth of our being. We’re aware that anything can happen and probably will sooner or later. It’s easy to develop a blasé attitude of acceptance without action. Why worry about it? It’s difficult to accept the truth about our self and make the effort necessary to change. What a drag ….

Nature is telling us that it’s time for Final Exams. How much have we learned? Are we aware or are we unaware of being unaware? Do we know that today is the tomorrow we dreamed of yesterday? What will be the harvest of our lives?

At a time when the Nature of our planet is changing rapidly, there’s an understandable cultural, social and economic churning taking place. Human history, particularly our wisdom tradition, record human successes and failures in adapting to the natural constant of change. Records of natural disasters date back to verbal histories of a great flood and beyond. We continue to ignore the obvious.

Ego keeps us in denial of our natural reality. Ego is our common villain as we lose what little that remains of our natural heritage through ignorance and arrogance. Ego is fear driven. We fear losing something we think we have or not getting something we believe we want or need.

Fear fuels anger. Anger fuels hate. Hate fuels war. War escalates the level of planetary destruction dramatically while doing relatively little to slow the relentless expansion of our ravenous species.

We are inclusively blessed at this very moment with the opportunity to make a positive difference in a negatively inclined world. Consider how attractive positive is to negative.

We need to proceed as the way opens and cross the next bridge as we come to it based on an emerging set of unifying human values which places the Nature of whatever we call God above and beyond the inventions and opinions of a species which has as yet to be proven trustworthy.

Speaking of trust, we have as yet to learn to trust our own realty as cosmically energized creatures sharing a transitory biological learning experience. Support for environmental suicide and global murder is insane.

We gain sanity and serenity through surrender. Recovery and healing follow surrender in direct relation to an increasing understanding of how everything fits together and an acceptance of our true purpose to live as stewards of Creation.

Peace be with you,

an old lamplighter

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Doesn’t this man write superbly well!

Picture parade fifty-two

Can’t believe how quickly a year flows by!

Yes, fifty-two Sundays ago, I had the idea of posting a set of photographs. That first set was published on the 30th June, 2013 and just for fun I’m going to repost them.

Plus, I can’t resist adding a photograph that Chris Snuggs sent me.

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Sit back and be amazed!

A friend from Payson, Arizona, Lew Levenson, recently sent across a set of 38 astounding photographs, all on the theme of perfectly timed shots.

They are so fabulous that I have decided that for today and the following four Sundays I will post a selection.

So today, the first set of 8 photographs. Trust me you will love them, so a big thank you to Lew. Do say which are your best ones!

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To close here is that picture courtesy of Chris Snuggs.

By the way, if you would like see again the rest of Lew’s photographs just leave a comment to that effect.

You all have a great week.

We are all connected.

Such a fundamental aspect of all conscious life on Planet Earth.

As many of you know, weekend posts on Learning from Dogs are usually pretty innocuous. But two things came together to make me want to offer today’s central thoughts while they were fresh and clear in my mind.

The first thing flowed from good friend, John Hurlburt. Together with Jon Lavin, John had helped me develop my Statement of Purpose for my book. It was John who proposed a chapter under the heading of “The biological interconnectedness of all conscious earthly life“; a proposal I embraced with open arms.

The second thing was that Alex Jones, he of the blog The Liberated Way, published a post yesterday that, succinctly and beautifully, supported John Hurlburt’s thesis.

What do we mean by the idea that all of us are connected? (…. and ignoring the many of you who wonder why the question even has to be asked.)

I’m going to answer that most fundamental of all questions in this rather roundabout manner.

As someone who in previous times has been a glider pilot (aka sailplane in US speak), and a long-distance sailor (Tradewind 33), the weather about me was very much part of my life. Long ago I came to love clouds. Yesterday morning we had to take puppy Oliver to the vet and, unusually for this time of year in Southern Oregon, overhead there were beautiful grey stratus clouds covering 90% of the sky. There wasn’t the time to grab my camera but the following stock photograph found on the web is close to what we saw.

Still en-route in answer to the question, take a look at the next photograph; also from the web.

Now to the next photograph. (Hang on in there!)

See how the road, a man-made road stretching away to the horizon, is such an intimate part of the landscape and the sky.

Now to my final photograph.

I see a strong and clear theme behind these four beautiful images. A theme that answers the question of what we mean by the idea that all of us are connected.

It is this.

Our planet’s atmosphere gives us all that we need to live. All the oxygen and water and other essentials for all of life. Over millions of years it has provided all that life has needed to evolve and grow.

The land prospered. Beautiful animals arrived. Then came man and over time he left his mark on the lands of the planet. For aeons of time, man and animals shared their lives upon the land. Indeed, man and animals frequently demonstrated they had the capacity to love each other without denying the fact that both man and animals, in many cases, were also meat-eaters. To state the obvious, the beauty of the obvious, is to say that everything on this planet is connected under Nature. Man, animals, lands: all part of that same Nature.

Let me close by republishing with Alex’s permission his post from yesterday.

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One in nature

The joy of knowing nature and self are one.

The butterfly and I enjoyed a common connection in the sun on a fallen tree – we became one.

Sitting upon a fallen dead tree, one that could have but did not kill me when it fell in the storms last year, an orange butterfly flew and settled next to me. Here we were, butterfly and I, enjoying the warm sun sitting on the same tree trunk like two people on a park bench. The butterfly would after a time fly away returning later to sit next to me. In this moment I shared something in common with this butterfly, different species, but living on and coming from the same planet earth.

Another day it is raining, I huddle under the garden conifers eating raspberries, watching the clouds empty their water upon a thirsty garden, my cat Pebbles sitting at my feet. Out of the fallen branches two little mice played, oblivious to me and the cat, which did not seem to notice them.

For many people there are degrees of separation from nature, us and them. For some like me, Ubuntu, I am because we are. There is only connection, the animals and I are one.

Camping in the rain, a knocking at the tent door. I looked out of the tent, I looked into the eyes of a frog, which then vanished into the rainy darkness.

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Last words from John.

1. Competition is a natural result of evolution.

2. Population growth intensifies competition.

3. Nature maintains our equilibrium.

4. Denying Nature is a sure path to extinction.

Tuesday’s letters: Our democratic system is at risk

Athenian Democracy: a brief overview

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Without celebration, we wither away

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Boom! Three perspectives on July 2 lightning strike at One World Trade Center

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Gaia

It’s Time To Stop Living On The Earth and Start Cohabitating With Her – The Earth is a Sentient Living Organism

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Help Us Find a New WordPress Person

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Independence Day

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One in nature

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