Category: Writing

What a funny lot we all are!

We must constantly remind ourselves that we are the servants of Nature, not the other way around!

There is only one species of creature on this planet that has the power to destroy its own species, and much else: Homo sapiens!

It’s such an obvious reflection, yet it is also such an incredibly difficult commitment to make. I am speaking of the commitment to do more than “tut, tut” but to make a real difference in how each of us live, ensuring that we are making real changes year by year.

I am being little more than a “smart arse” in saying we should learn from dogs to live in harmony with our planet because, in truth, this is the one key area where we can’t learn from our dogs: we each have to learn for ourselves and influence others to do the same.

All of which is my way of introducing a very recent essay from Tom Dispatch. It now follows, but be aware that there were simply too many links to recreate in my republished version. It is republished with the very kind permission of Tom Engelhardt.

ooOOoo

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival

Posted by Michael Klare at 8:00am, October 8, 2015.

In mid-August, TomDispatch’s Michael Klare wrote presciently of the oncoming global oil glut, the way it was driving the price of petroleum into the “energy subbasement,” and how such a financial “rout,” if extended over the next couple of years, might lead toward a new (and better) world of energy. As it happens, the first good news of the sort Klare was imagining has since come in. In a country where the price of gas at the pump now averages $2.29 a gallon (and in some places has dropped under $1.90), Big Oil has begun cutting back on its devastating plans to extract every imaginable drop of fossil fuel from the planet and burn it. Oil companies have also been laying off employees by the tens of thousands and deep-sixing, at least for now, plans to search for and exploit tar sands and other “tough oil” deposits worldwide.

In that context, as September ended, after a disappointing six weeks of drilling, Royal Dutch Shell cancelled “for the foreseeable future” its search for oil and natural gas in the tempestuous but melting waters of the Alaskan Arctic. This was no small thing and a great victory for an environmental movement that had long fought to put obstacles in the way of Shell’s exploration plans. Green-lighted by the Obama administration to drill in the Chukchi Sea this summer, Shell has over the last nine years sunk more than $7 billion into its Arctic drilling project, so the decision to close up shop was no small thing and offers a tiny ray of hope for what activism can do when reality offers a modest helping hand.

As Klare makes clear today, when it comes to the burning of fossil fuels, reality — if only we bother to notice it — is threatening to offer something more like the back of its hand to us on this embattled planet of ours. He offers a look at a future in which humanity, like various increasingly endangered ecosystems including the Arctic, may be approaching a “tipping point.” Tom

Welcome to a New Planet

Climate Change “Tipping Points” and the Fate of the Earth

By Michael T. Klare

Not so long ago, it was science fiction. Now, it’s hard science — and that should frighten us all. The latest reports from the prestigious and sober Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make increasingly hair-raising reading, suggesting that the planet is approaching possible moments of irreversible damage in a fashion and at a speed that had not been anticipated.

Scientists have long worried that climate change will not continue to advance in a “linear” fashion, with the planet getting a little bit hotter most years. Instead, they fear, humanity could someday experience “non-linear” climate shifts (also known as “singularities” or “tipping points”) after which there would be sudden and irreversible change of a catastrophic nature. This was the premise of the 2004 climate-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. In that movie — most notable for its vivid scenes of a frozen-over New York City — melting polar ice causes a disruption in the North Atlantic Current, which in turn triggers a series of catastrophic storms and disasters. At the time of its release, many knowledgeable scientists derided the film’s premise, insisting that the confluence of events it portrayed was unlikely or simply impossible.

Fast forward 11 years and the prospect of such calamitous tipping points in the North Atlantic or elsewhere no longer looks improbable. In fact, climate scientists have begun to note early indicators of possible catastrophes.

Take the disruption of the North Atlantic Current, the pivotal event in The Day After Tomorrow. Essentially an extension of the Gulf Stream, that deep-sea current carries relatively warm salty water from the South Atlantic and the Caribbean to the northern reaches of the Atlantic. In the process, it helps keep Europe warmer than it would otherwise be. Once its salty water flows into sub-Arctic areas carried by this prolific stream, it gets colder and heavier, sinks to lower depths, and starts a return trip to warmer climes in the south where the whole process begins again.

So long as this “global conveyor belt” — known to scientists as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — keeps functioning, the Gulf Stream will also continue to bring warmer waters to the eastern United States and Europe. Should it be disrupted, however, the whole system might break down, in which case the Euro-Atlantic climate could turn colder and more storm-prone. Such a disruption might occur if the vast Greenland ice sheet melts in a significant way, as indeed is already beginning to happen today, pouring large quantities of salt-free fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its lighter weight, this newly introduced water will remain close to the surface, preventing the submergence of salty water from the south and so effectively shutting down the conveyor belt. Indeed, exactly this process now seems to be underway.

By all accounts, 2015 is likely to wind up as the hottest year on record, with large parts of the world suffering from severe heat waves and wildfires. Despite all this, however, a stretch of the North Atlantic below Iceland and Greenland is experiencing all-time cold temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What explains this anomaly? According to scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Pennsylvania State University, among other institutions, the most likely explanation is the arrival in the area of cold water from the Greenland ice sheet that is melting ever more rapidly thanks to climate change. Because this meltwater starts out salt-free, it has remained near the surface and so, as predicted, is slowing the northern advance of warmer water from the North Atlantic Current.

So far, the AMOC has not suffered a dramatic shutdown, but it is slowing, and scientists worry that a rapid increase in Greenland ice melt as the Arctic continues to warm will pour ever more meltwater into the North Atlantic, severely disrupting the conveyor system. That would, indeed, constitute a major tipping point, with severe consequences for Europe and eastern North America. Not only would Europe experience colder temperatures on an otherwise warmer planet, but coastal North America could witness higher sea levels than those predicted from climate change alone because the Gulf Stream tends to pull sea water away from the eastern U.S. and push it toward Europe. If it were to fail, rising sea levels could endanger cities like New York and Boston. Indeed, scientists discovered that just such a slowing of the AMOC helped produce a sea-level rise of four inches from New York to Newfoundland in 2009 and 2010.

In its 2014 report on the status of global warming, the IPCC indicated that the likelihood of the AMOC collapsing before the end of this century remains relatively low. But some studies suggest that the conveyor system is already 15%-20% below normal with Greenland’s melting still in an early stage. Once that process switches into high gear, the potential for the sort of breakdown that was once science fiction starts to look all too real.

Tipping Points on the Horizon

In a 2014 report, “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability,” Working Group II of the IPCC identified three other natural systems already showing early-warning signs of catastrophic tipping points: the Arctic, coral reefs, and the Amazonian forest. All three, the report suggested, could experience massive and irreversible changes with profound implications for human societies.

The Arctic comes in for particular scrutiny because it has experienced more warming than any other region on the planet and because the impact of climate change there is already so obvious. As the report put it, “For the Arctic region, new evidence indicates a biophysical regime shift is taking place, with cascading impacts on physical systems, ecosystems, and human livelihoods.”

This has begun with a massive melt of sea ice in the region and a resulting threat to native marine species. “For Arctic marine biota,” the report notes, “the rapid reduction of summer ice covers causes a tipping element that is now severely affecting pelagic [sub-surface] ecosystems as well as ice-dependent mammals such as seals and polar bears.” Other flora and fauna of the Arctic biome are also demonstrating stress related to climate change. For example, vast areas of tundra are being invaded by shrubs and small trees, decimating the habitats of some animal species and increasing the risk of fires.

This Arctic “regime shift” affects many other aspects of the ecosystem as well. Higher temperatures, for instance, have meant widespread thawing and melting of permafrost, the frozen soil and water that undergirds much of the Arctic landmass. In this lies another possible tipping-point danger, since frozen soils contain more than twice the carbon now present in the atmosphere. As the permafrost melts, some of this carbon is released in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with many times the warming potential of carbon dioxide and other such gases. In other words, as the IPCC noted, any significant melting of Arctic permafrost will “create a potentially strong positive feedback to accelerate Arctic (and global) warming.” This, in fact, could prove to be more than a tipping point. It could be a planetary catastrophe.

Along with these biophysical effects, the warming of the Arctic is threatening the livelihoods and lifestyles of the indigenous peoples of the region. The loss of summer sea ice, for example, has endangered the marine species on which many such communities depend for food and the preservation of their cultural traditions. Meanwhile, melting permafrost and coastal erosion due to sea-level rise have threatened the very existence of their coastal villages. In September, President Obama visited Kotzebue, a village in Alaska some 30 miles above the Arctic Circle that could disappear as a result of melting permafrost, rising sea levels, and ever bigger storm surges.

Coral Reefs at Risk

Another crucial ecosystem that’s showing signs of heading toward an irreversible tipping point is the world’s constellation of coral reefs. Remarkably enough, although such reefs make up less than 1% of the Earth’s surface area, they house up to 25% of all marine life. They are, that is, essential for both the health of the oceans and of fishing communities, as well as of those who depend on fish for a significant part of their diet. According to one estimate, some 850 million people rely on coral reefs for their food security.

Corals, which are colonies of tiny animals related to sea anemones, have proven highly sensitive to changes in the acidity and temperature of their surrounding waters, both of which are rising due to the absorption of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a result, in a visually dramatic process called “bleaching,” coral populations have been dying out globally. According to a recent study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, coral reef extent has declined by 50% in the last 30 years and all reefs could disappear as early as 2050 if current rates of ocean warming and acidification continue.

“This irreversible loss of biodiversity,” reports the IPCC, will have “significant consequences for regional marine ecosystems as well as the human livelihoods that depend on them.” Indeed, the growing evidence of such losses “strengthens the conclusion that increased mass bleaching of corals constitutes a strong warning signal for the singular event that would constitute the irreversible loss of an entire biome.”

Amazonian Dry-Out

The Amazon has long been viewed as the epitome of a tropical rainforest, with extraordinary plant and animal diversity. The Amazonian tree cover also plays a vital role in reducing the pace of global warming by absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during the process of photosynthesis. For years, however, the Amazon has been increasingly devastated by a process of deforestation, as settlers from Brazil’s coastal regions clear land for farming and ranching, and loggers (many operating illegally) harvest timber for wood products. Now, as if to add insult to injury, the region faces a new threat from climate change: tree mortality due to a rise in severe drought and the increased forest fire risk that accompanies it.

Although it can rain year-round in the Amazon region, there is a distinct wet season with heavy rainfall and a dry season with much less of it. An extended dry season with little rain can endanger the survival of many trees and increase the risk of wildfires. Research conducted by scientists at the University of Texas has found that the dry season in the southern Amazonian region has grown by a week every decade since 1980 while the annual fire season has lengthened. “The dry season over the southern Amazon is already marginal for maintaining rainforest,” says Rong Fu, the leader of the research team. “At some point, if it becomes too long, the rainforest will reach a tipping point” and disappear.

Because the Amazon harbors perhaps the largest array of distinctive flora and fauna on the planet, its loss would represent an irreversible blow to global biodiversity. In addition, the region hosts some of the largest assemblages of indigenous peoples still practicing their traditional ways of life. Even if their lives were saved (through relocation to urban slums or government encampments), the loss of their cultures, representing thousands of years of adaptation to a demanding environment, would be a blow for all humankind.

As in the case of the Arctic and coral reefs, the collapse of the Amazon will have what the IPCC terms “cascading impacts,” devastating ecosystems, diminishing biodiversity, and destroying the ways of life of indigenous peoples. Worse yet, as with the melting of the Arctic, so the drying-out of Amazonia is likely to feed into climate change, heightening its intensity and so sparking yet more tipping points on a planet increasingly close to the brink.

In its report, the IPCC, whose analysis tends, if anything, to be on the conservative side of climate science, indicated that the Amazon faced a relatively low risk of dying out by 2100. However, a 2009 study conducted by Britain’s famed Meteorological (Met) Office suggests that the risk is far greater than previously assumed. Even if global temperatures were to be held to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, the study notes, as much as 40% of the Amazon would perish within a century; with 3 degrees of warming, up to 75% would vanish; and with 4 degrees, 85% would die. “The forest as we know it would effectively be gone,” said Met researcher Vicky Pope.

Of Tipping Points and Singularities

These four natural systems are by no means the only ones that could face devastating tipping points in the years to come. The IPCC report and other scientific studies hint at further biomes that show early signs of potential catastrophe. But these four are sufficiently advanced to tell us that we need to look at climate change in a new way: not as a slow, linear process to which we can adapt over time, but as a non-linear set of events involving dramatic and irreversible changes to the global ecosphere.

The difference is critical: linear change gives us the luxury of time to devise and implement curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and to construct protective measures such as sea walls. Non-linear change puts a crimp on time and confronts us with the possibility of relatively sudden, devastating climate shifts against which no defensive measures can protect us.

Were the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation to fail, for example, there would be nothing we could do to turn it back on, nor would we be able to recreate coral reefs or resurrect the Amazon. Add in one other factor: when natural systems of this magnitude fail, should we not expect human systems to fail as well? No one can answer this question with certainty, but we do know that earlier human societies collapsed when faced with other kinds of profound changes in climate.

All of this should be on the minds of delegates to the upcoming climate summit in Paris, a meeting focused on adopting an international set of restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Each participating nation is obliged to submit a set of measures it is ready to take, known as “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs, aimed at achieving the overall goal of preventing planetary warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. However, the INDCs submitted to date, including those from the United States and China, suggest a distinctly incremental approach to the problem. Unfortunately, if planetary tipping points are in our future, this mindset will not measure up. It’s time to start thinking instead in terms of civilizational survival.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

ooOOoo

Just to repeat myself in that if you find this essay from Michael Klare one that you want to refer to again, then go across to the version published on TomDispatch so you can follow up the many links in that essay.

The Reno Gun Show

A delightful story from Lynda Demsher.

I have referred previously to AIM, the authors’ group based in nearby Grants Pass, OR. Lynda is a published author who is one of the AIM members. The other day, Lynda sent me the following:

Paul, I know you’ve been busy so I sent you this if you need something for your blog if it’s the kind of thing you use. Might be timely as well given the latest talk about guns. It is somewhat about my dog and how I ended up at one of the biggest gun shows in the west while looking for dog training equipment. This was published in “Invisible Memoirs,” a Bay Area journal.

So with no further ado, here is Lynda’s story. It is about dogs!

ooOOoo

The Gun Show

If not for my youngest hunting dog, the one my husband calls “the idiot,” I might have missed it. Instead, I put on my best leather vest and dressiest black jeans (known as “wedding jeans” where I lived in Modoc County) and joined the hundreds of people streaming into the Reno Gun Show set up in the basement of the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino. The entrance yawned like a dim and secretive man-cave, beckoning lines of mostly men to enter, after forking over a $10 fee of course. I wondered if I needed a password or a special handshake as well. The furtive restlessness of the crowd suggested this was a place with protocols. I was in line with my husband and two of his hunting buddies so I asked what they were. I got the look men give when they think a woman asks a stupid question. Women are allowed of course, when the show opens for its three-day run in November, but few attend. Women whisper that gun shows are the equivalent of hanging out at your brother’s scout meeting. No one tells you to leave but they wish you would.

The Idiot happens to be an odd little bird dog I rescued from the pound who needed some work for this year’s hunting season, so I decided to tag along with my husband and his friends, even though the trip was their annual guy-getaway. They made the mistake of telling me the show had “all kinds of hunting stuff” so I decided to see for myself. My young German wirehaired pointer was the laughing stock of my husband’s hunting group last season when he insisted on carrying his favorite toy into the field. He’s a bit gun-sensitive and feels more secure with something in his mouth. He does hunt when the excitement kicks in, but a dog pointing a bird with a big red Frisbee in his mouth isn’t taken all that seriously where I lived until recently. In that rural high-desert county, way out in the northeast corner of California, bordering both Nevada and Oregon, you don’t escape a good razzing if your hunting dog is a clown.

I was certain a place featuring guns would have the latest in gun dog supplies too, since guns and dogs go together like soda and pop. I have to admit though, curiosity was also a motivation. My husband has attended these shows for years even though the guns in his safe far outnumber his annual critter kill. He rarely purchases anything, but he always brings back entertaining observations about the characters floating around in the gun galaxy.

I had a camera in my vest and was anxious to record some of these characters, or possibly the appearance of a film star or political figure also known to attend. But when the guys and I inched forward toward the ticket booth I noticed a large sign with bold black letters saying photographs were prohibited. A stern-looking armed guard wearing combat fatigues stood nearby. Darn. I really did want to sneak a picture of the woman just ahead of us. Her general appearance suggested biology had advanced to the point where it was possible to mix warthog and human DNA. Dressed in baggy camouflage sweats, she rolled toward the entrance like an Abrams tank. Completing her ensemble was a large red button with black letters pinned to her chest. As I got a closer to her, I realized it said “Obama Scares Me.” Now I knew what to do in case she decided to have me for lunch. I could just wave my arms over my head and yell “Obama!”

My husband, tall and thin, with wire-rimmed glasses, was wearing a v-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and tan khakis. He looked more like a college professor emeritus than a gun enthusiast in this crowd. I could tell where he was in the room while his stockier friends, wearing the more standard uniform of white t-shirt, forest-green down vest and sagging blue jeans, quickly melted into the browsing crowd.

Left alone, I felt like a migrant in an alien universe, even though guns are not alien to me. I lived within walking distance of a duck blind and my house was full of shabby hunting lodge décor, including 30 or 40 antique duck decoys, old shotguns, ammunition boxes, and deer horns, while back issues of Gun Dog and other hunting magazines littered my end tables. Outdoor supply catalogues were required bathroom reading. Hunting season in the fall is my favorite time of year, but I don’t shoot much anymore. Shooting is a precise sport, requiring hours of ear-blowing, shoulder-banging practice. Without a lot of practice, you could end up killing your brother-in-law. Since hunters are morally obligated to eat what they kill, I do most of my shooting with a camera now. I have yet to come across a good brother-in-law marinade.

My role in hunting is mainly working the dogs and I’ve trained a couple of generations of them. From my point of view, hunting isn’t really about the guns, or even the game, it’s primarily about the dogs. Guns are tools to get the game, which requires a gourmet cooking degree to render edible. And unless you hunt on a club, or hunt ducks down on the river, finding wild upland game birds usually requires a before-dawn trip out into nowhere land and then a bone-rattling drive over 30 miles of volcanic rock followed by a shin-bruising hike up a steep brushy hill. The dogs, however, make it all worthwhile. Upland game birds, such as mountain grouse, quail and chucker seldom welcome a hunting party so it’s the dogs’ job to find their hiding places. The pointers put on a field ballet in their pursuit, leap-flying over rocks and brush, dancing across icy streams and twirling to follow a backtracked scent that says “bird this way.” The dog locating the flock stretches into a steady point with foreleg curled and tail straight out. Others in the hunting pack quietly honor his point by staying slightly behind and perfectly still. The dogs stay motionless because the birds, having bird brains, think no one can see them in the bushes if they stay perfectly still. On command the dog leans in slightly, setting off a whirring explosion of blurred brown wings. Guns go off and the dogs track falling birds with their internal geometry, then race to find them in the brush. Some bird dogs are trained to bring the game back to hand, some drop it in front of their hunter, but all prance back with their birds, undeniably proud.

My little wirehair was on the verge being left out of the next hunt because of his eccentricities, but I had hope of finding him some help, possibly in the form of new training technology, realistic training birds and game scent for saturating them, or even a field rope that wouldn’t tangle up on itself. Something, anything, that would get him past the silly juvenile stage in the field.

After browsing the floor for a while and getting blank stares when inquiring if anyone in the room had dog gear, I realized this was not a hunters’ expo but a raw display of powerful arms, some just happening to be for wild game. Rows and rows of gunmetal under florescent light made everything look eerily green and iridescent. Gun hammers clicked empty threats throughout the chamber as vendors demonstrated the bolt action, trigger sensitivity, and firing pin mechanisms of their wares. From the hum of the hype, I’d swear testosterone was being dispersed through the air conditioning to mingle with the ambient odor of sweaty socks.

The room I was in could have housed the first floor of a department store in the mall nearby where the wives of my husband’s friends were enjoying a shopping spree. I counted at least 50 gun sellers with their wares spread neatly on folding metal tables. “Cowboys” in western dress had a row of tables along one wall, where they leaned their folding chairs back as far as they could, trying their best to look like they’d just come in from ropin’ and wranglin’ on the range These vendors also displayed saddles and horse tack along with some rusty cast iron cookware for effect. Other tables had a few duck decoys, old metal signs, antique weaponry and Native American artifacts made in China mixed in for color. One vendor had a nice selection of silver and turquoise jewelry, indicating some purchases here would require softening up the wife back home.

Toward the rear of the area was a cordoned off space stacked with cases of ammunition. Men with hand-trucks stood patiently in line, waiting their turn to purchase as much as they could pile onto their rolling devices. I stood near the line for a while, admiring the craftsmanship of some wooden boxes housing the more expensive ammo. The men around me weren’t there for the boxes though. They were convinced the government was trying to make ammunition scarce as a form of gun control. That’s why they were stocking up. The ammo sellers loudly agreed, while their cash registers sang a money song.

After wandering around and getting bored by the monotony of gun metal and noise, I almost ditched the place for the mall. But then I remembered the woman I saw at the entrance and decided I couldn’t leave without at least one story about a gun-show character. I didn’t see her anywhere, but I did notice a stream of people heading toward a big double-door at the back of the room. I decided to explore.

Turns out, there was a second room of vendors, nearly as large as the first. That room was accessible only through the Refreshment Station where three men in black from their hats to their boots, resembling worn out old villains from a 1948 John Wayne movie, leaned against a bar drinking beer with whisky shooters. Each of them had a scruffy beard and a long-barreled pistol in a holster strapped to a leg. While I have a strong appreciation for the peculiar, I’m very wary of guns in the vicinity of alcohol, so I hoped these guys were just for show. When they caught me looking at them though, none cracked a smile. I felt like a Martian at a rodeo. I quickly ducked between a passing group of men in big hats and entered an arsenal that would put a Syrian rebel in a jealous rage.

It wasn’t just an arsenal though. It was an education. If I hadn’t stumbled in here I never would have learned about Apocalyptic Zombies.

Only one vendor in the room had guns actually meant for shooting animals, probably a last-minute booking, and there was no sign of anything related to hunting dogs. The rest of the 30 or 40 vendors seemed to display an unsettling urgency to scare up business, literally. The place looked like a war zone Wal-Mart. There were a few women in this room but they hardly fit the description of the one I saw at the entrance. One was a tall blond in a low-cut blouse with a holstered gun strapped to a bare leg. Not to be outdone, another vendor had his own buxom blond parading around in a Daisy Mae outfit, showing off AK-47s. The third woman was a tired-looking grandmother playing a game on a tablet computer. She seemed to be in charge of a cash box.

Even though Christmas decorated the outside world this time of year, in here it was Fourth of July. American flags along with red, white and blue streamers were everywhere. It all seemed very patriotic until a closer look revealed the joyful colors swirling into stacks of T-shirts, bumper-stickers, posters and even baby bibs featuring clownish pictures and boorish sayings about the President of the United States. Although I usually keep myself in observation mode in jarring places, my curiosity gnawed. Finally, I asked one vendor why he had so much Obama stuff for sale, since the President had won a second term and election season was over.

“I just like the humor, it’s just humorous,” he said with a hiss. I looked for the lemon he must have been sucking on just before I got there. Of course, his tone made it irresistible for me to ask my next question:

“Aren’t you afraid of losing business by offending someone who might actually like the President?”

He shot me a definite NO! and said he didn’t have anything more to say.

Two booths past the gun-show humorist I came across a display of Nazi paraphernalia for sale under a large poster warning “What worked for Hitler will work for Obama!!” I wondered what would work for both Hitler and Obama. Obviously not a twitter account. The table under the sign had a full-length glass case displaying a collection of what appeared to be old Nazi war souvenirs. Almost everything had a swastika on it. There were tattered leather wallets, worn pistol holsters, moth-eaten wool gloves, yellowed ID cards, heavy gold watches, pistols, money clips, buttons, key chains, belt buckles, helmets, worn but well-polished boots, , ammunition holders, cups, silverware and unidentifiables with wires sticking out. The black velvet lining of the cases made the rather creepy items look important. Some did not look like original Nazi war items though, especially the cell phone cases. I walked over to the vendor, hoping to ask him where this stuff came from. He was bent over something in his lap, looking like the kind of old, green-aproned shoemaker you see in foreign films. He did not look up at me. Was he trying to sell this stuff, or just make a statement? I didn’t find out what would work for both Hitler and Obama until I browsed the next display down.

Six long tables, three on each side, were shoved together and piled with books. I picked up one with a swastika on it. Skimming through it I quickly learned the perils of a “gun-less society” and how disarming citizens would allow government to “go wild” and start hauling off defenseless people to be enslaved in work camps or tortured in some hideous way before being thrown in a ditch and shot. Hitler had taken everyone’s guns away before the Holocaust, the book noted, and signs that the U.S. government was headed in that direction were becoming evident. Gun control was part of a bigger plan by our sneaky president and his socialist supporters to abolish the Constitution and end Democracy. The book was published in 2011. I hid that book under the pile it came from.

Then, from other books in the selection, I learned the world is on the verge of destruction, society is about to break down, and we’ll all have to defend ourselves against those who did not have the foresight to prepare for the Apocalypse. So much for the return of Hitler. These books indicated I had bigger things to worry about. The word “Apocalypse,” always capitalized, peppered these publications, but few foretold much of a cause beyond some vague hint of world-wide economic collapse caused by Obamacare. One book mentioned we might be hit by a giant meteorite and had the distinction of being the only one I skimmed that didn’t blame the impending disaster on the President, although I didn’t read the whole thing.

Selecting another book, I discovered that preparing for “The Apocalypse” not only involves stockpiling long-lasting packs of food and water, conveniently for sale at the gun show, but learning to kill, gut and skin your pets for food, and how to harvest and cook weeds and certain kinds of dirt (the kind with animal poop in it) in case the Apocalypse lasts longer than your supplies. I imagined how someone reading that book might just double or triple his order of archival food buckets being sold at the booth down the aisle to avoid eating his beagle or the equivalent of cat litter during dire circumstances.

For city dwellers there were books on how to fix up your car so you could escape to the wilderness and live in it when you run out of gas. In the back of these books were web sites where you could order overpriced canning jars, all kinds of knives, and archery equipment, as you don’t really want to run into people you know while stockpiling at a local shopping center. The books tell you not to let on you’re prepared for survival, or you might be overrun by your starving friends and neighbors, referred to as the Apocalyptic Zombies, who will be desperate and not above killing you for your stash. And, of course, to complete your survival package, readers were advised to get at least one high-powered assault weapon and teach every member of the family to shoot after accumulating enough ammunition to hold off three battalions of U.S. Marines.

Moving on from the dire warnings, I noticed more signs, posters and even targets picturing the dreaded Apocalyptic Zombies tacked up behind the assault weapons vendors. These warned that I would be at the mercy of monsters unless I owned a big black gun. Who knew the awful Zombies coming to get me would look exactly like the walking dead from old horror movies, complete with purple skin and bloody faces. I thought they’d look more like the lady I saw at the entrance, the one with the Obama button.

Emerging from the book table I wondered if they had a psychiatrist’s booth around where I could pay a dollar to have my paranoia removed. Looking up at the whole of the room, my world was suddenly full of glistening gun barrels jutting in the air like millennial symbols of manhood. I expected a worship dance to begin anytime. The air felt thick and smelled of gun oil and the ever-present dirty socks. I looked for something to hide behind until someone I knew came along. I picked the biggest gun in the show. This gun was a cannon-like affair on a shooting stand, set up on a sturdy table with an ammunition clip flowing to the floor. It was outfitted with a computerized night-vision contraption advertised as something the military uses to find terrorists in Afghanistan. The whole package cost more than $6,000. I hadn’t seen anything like it anywhere else at the show. I thought about sneaking a picture of it.

“What do you use it for?” I asked, after actually admiring the technology on the thing.

A very serious dark-haired man in his early 30s who was seated at the table directed his icy blue eyes toward me, squinted, and said flatly “chicken-stealing coyotes.” I started to laugh but held back when the man continued to stare at me like a vampire who senses his favorite blood type. The guy even had a widow’s peak. Had he seen my camera? I slowly took my hand off it in my pocket and pulled away, saying “nice gun, nice gun.”

To catch my breath and get a better sense of perspective, I continued exploring from there, stopping to have a chat with a grandfatherly-type who made ink pens out of spent bullet casings, and a wiry old codger who tried to sell me a leather purse featuring an opening along the back seam for my handgun, so it would be within easy reach if I suddenly needed to shoot a mugger. I don’t think he realized the featured convenience on the shoulder bag would also put the gun within easy reach of a nosy little kid who’s exploring hands might find Grandma’s toy while standing in line with her at the bank. After politely refusing the purse offer, I stopped at a booth where a vendor assured me his “miracle” canvas bag, which resembled a diaper for a three-legged toddler, would keep food frozen for two weeks. Then, at a booth selling pistols, I watched with growing anxiety as a salesman pitched a pocket-sized weapon to a short, baggy-eyed man with bed-hair who seemed to be contributing most of the dirty-sock smell. The guy looked like he could really use a psychiatric booth, but that didn’t seem to concern the enthusiastic salesman telling him he was running a special that day – free membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA) for a year with every purchase. That was odd because the NRA table out front was hawking free memberships to anyone who’d fill out a form.

Finally, I ran into a pair of vendors violating an apparent rule against having fun at a gun show. They were the only non-Caucasian sellers, young men of Asian descent, who were happily booking “Full Auto Shoots” for “that special occasion.” They had a couple of M-16s on display, but they weren’t selling them. They were “renting” them at a gun club so people could shoot their hearts out at steel targets. Why steel? “People like to hear the pling,” one of the men told me with a wink. These two guys beamed with their clever idea. For $50 a clip you could unleash your inner killer without harming anyone, they explained. I asked him who the typical customer might be. He showed me a video on his smart phone of a bachelor party and said he gets a lot of requests for these.

“You can film these kinds of bachelor parties,” he said, “and the brides-to-be love it because the men can have fun without getting drunk with naked women!”

He also said they did birthday parties. “Eleven-year-olds love to shoot, and we have special padding on the guns for them,” he said. “Moms love it because it’s something different!”

About that time my husband caught up with me, and became very interested in the rent-a-machine-gun idea. Might bring tourists out to our economically challenged community, he remarked. I told him I was ready to ditch this place as the only thing I found here having any connection to dogs was a book that gave instructions on how to skin and eat them. He said he was ready for lunch but I couldn’t think of eating until I got the image of dog snout stew out of my head. We left, but not before I finally spotted the woman with the Obama button on our way out. She was examining a nice little AR-15. When she looked up at us with that gun in her hands I knew we were all doomed. The Apocalyptic Zombies were buying guns here as well.

ooOOoo

Will leave it there as have a host of things to do before leaving to go to Medford Airport and welcome Jean back from her trip to Mexico. (As of yesterday afternoon!)

English: How She is Spoken!

For all those who love the English language.

With thanks to neighbour Dordie who forwarded the following under her introduction of: “This will give you something else to ponder while editing.”

ooOOoo

Heteronyms…

Homographs are words of like spelling but with more than one meaning. A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym.

You think English is easy?

I think a retired English teacher was bored…THIS IS GREAT!

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes..

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong for me to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

oooo

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible..

PS. – Why doesn’t ‘Buick’ rhyme with ‘quick’?

You lovers of the English language might enjoy this.

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is ‘UP.’

It’s easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?

Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends.

And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.

We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning.

People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special..

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.

In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.

It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.

When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP..

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

When it doesn’t rain for a while, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it UP,

for now my time is UP,

so…….it is time to shut UP!

Now it’s UP to you what you do with this email.

ooOOoo

Well, I’m glad that’s all clear then!

No hiding place!

I am referring to my forthcoming book!

Late yesterday evening, I loaded onto a memory stick the final version of my manuscript, 32 black & white photographs, and a list of the captions to said photographs.

Around 4pm this afternoon (Tuesday PDT), that memory stick will be passed to Deborah Perdue of Illumination Graphics. It is Deborah who designed the cover of the book, as shown above, and is handling all the interior design work to ensure that the book is visually attractive, and that the final print file is perfect. Once there has been a final check for any typos, then the print file will go to IngramSparks, who I am using for my Print on Demand requirements plus other services, as their website fully describes. (There will be an eBook version as well.)

I met Deborah the first time I was invited to a monthly meeting in nearby Grants Pass of AIM, an acronym for Authors Innovative Marketing: a group of authors who work together to help sell their books. Deborah is an author in her own right and an AIM member.

However, this post is much less about me promoting my book than me applauding the incredible, professional talents of Deborah and Joni Wilson, my editor, who was recommended by Deborah. If there is anyone out there thinking of writing their first book, or has another one in the pipeline, I couldn’t recommend too strongly Deborah and Joni.

Joni has spent dozens of hours, literally, going through my manuscript time and again recommending changes. Her degree of attention to detail simply beggars belief. Here’s a tiny example of that showing my marked-up draft, followed by Joni’s recommended amendments:

In March 2013 there was a study published in the PLOS ONE10 scientific journal that revealed, according to lead author Dr. Robert Losey(1) talking with Discovery News:

Dog burials appear to be more common in areas where diets were rich in aquatic foods because these same areas also appear to have had the densest human populations and the most cemeteries. . . .(2)

If the practice of burying dogs was solely related to their importance in procuring terrestrial game, we would expect to see them in the Early Holocene (around 9,000 years ago), when human subsistence practices were focused on these animals. . . .

Further, we would expect to see them in later

Losey(1) Comment [JW6]: Your reference is only for the journal article. The quote below does not appear in the journal article. Instead these words are what Losey said to Discovery News about the article. See http://news.discovery.com/animals/pets/prehistoric-dog-lovers-profiled-130521.htm. I added this to reference 10.

. . . .(2) Comment [JW7]: These ellipses indicate that the text was left out of the original article—it is not quoted verbatim here.

I wanted Joni to share a few words with you and this is what she wrote.

ooOOoo

Words to Share

While I was an advisor for a college nursing program, I met many older adults who often lamented that they wished they could have had become students when they were younger. To them, it seemed a bit awkward to be going back to nursing school in their later years. I shared with them that their life experiences and what they had learned would serve them well to become better nurses. Everything that had occurred in their lives to this point had prepared them for the next part of the journey.

Those words struck home with me, as I too have had a wealth of experiences to prepare me for where I am now. From nursing to religion to liberal arts degrees; from single life to married life to parenting, and then back to single life; from working with hospitals, corporations, religious institutions, and celebrities, I have learned a lot from the people who have crossed my path.

I am now a fulltime freelancer, providing professional editing and formatting services for individuals and businesses, sharing what I’ve learned during a lifetime of interacting with others in various situations. I have met the most incredible people from around the world who have written their thoughts and feelings and want to share their expertise and wisdom through writing fiction or nonfiction, usually ebook or print books, but also websites, blogs, brochures, and manuals.

How envious I am of authors who are able to express themselves—to tell a story, to share a passion, or to express a concern! It’s incredible the way that words can be used! I do not consider myself a writer, but instead I help mold the words to help the author say what they really mean to say in the most acceptable, reader-friendly manner. I’ve found that my talents include attention to detail; knowledge of spelling, grammar, and punctuation; and a perception to discern if things just seem a bit off. I offer suggestions for revisions of words, phrases, or formatting, always remembering that these are the author’s words and I’m helping to fine tune the finished product.

I love what I do—the people I meet through their words, the new concepts that I’m introduced to that help me grow to create a better life, and the knowledge that our paths intersect because we have something to share with one another.

ooOOoo

I consider myself very fortunate to have Deborah and Joni alongside me.

But that was then, and this is now! This is a moment that is difficult to define in emotional terms. But I am aware that it won’t be long before the marketplace votes with their feet, so to speak, as to whether they like the book or not.

I would be less than human if I didn’t admit to a slight fear of failure. Hence the title to today’s post!

The power of hope!

It really is about good people refusing to let evil dominate our world.

The response to yesterday’s post was incredible and very gratifying.

For I was conscious that many would simply reject the proposition that I saw in John Zande’s book, namely that, “there was an evil origin to the universe and, more directly, that the deep, and growing, suffering of the pinnacle of evolution, us humans, can be traced back to that evil origin.”

The emotional challenge, of which I am acutely aware, is recognising that core proposition, that as we humans evolve so too does the capacity for human suffering, yet not wanting to give up on my personal core belief that better times ahead are possible, given sufficient people sharing that power of hope. Echoing what Sue wrote as a response to yesterday’s post that motivated me to reply, in part, thus:

If there was one sentence of yours that struck me as spot on, it was your declaration that what we think is what we create. Or as I often reflect, we are what we think.

Jean and I last night watched the latest BBC Panorama report about the migrant/refugee crisis in Europe. It was profoundly upsetting for reasons that many will understand.

George Monbiot’s essay that follows shortly is also profoundly upsetting.

But if hope is to be translated into a determination to make a difference, then it demands that we don’t ignore the pain but use our anger to fuel our passion to behave appropriately: We are what we think! Or in the much more eloquent words of Albert Einstein:

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

George Monbiot is to be saluted for his commitment to questioning and I am privileged to have his permission to republish the following.

ooOOoo

Inhospitable Planet

29th September 2015

There may be water on Mars. But is there intelligent life on Earth?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th September 2015

Evidence for flowing water on Mars – this opens up the possibility of life; of wonders we cannot begin to imagine. Its discovery is an astonishing achievement. Meanwhile, Martian scientists continue their search for intelligent life on Earth.

We might be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

In the past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in coverage. In 2014, according to a study at Cardiff University, there were as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeline McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

Think of what would change if we valued terrestrial water as much as we value the possibility of water on Mars. Only three percent of the water on this planet is fresh, and of that two-thirds is frozen. Yet we lay waste to the accessible portion. Sixty percent of the water used in farming is needlessly piddled away by careless irrigation. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are sucked dry, while what remains is often so contaminated that it threatens the lives of those who drink it. In the UK, domestic demand is such that the upper reaches of many rivers disappear during the summer. Yet still we install clunky old toilets and showers that gush like waterfalls.

As for salty water of the kind that enthralls us when apparently detected on Mars, on Earth we express our appreciation with a frenzy of destruction. A new report suggests that fish numbers have halved since 1970. Pacific bluefin tuna, that once roamed the seas in untold millions, have been reduced to an estimated 40,000, yet still they are pursued. Coral reefs are under such pressure that most could be gone by 2050. And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2000 metres. We can only guess at what they might be destroying.

A few hours before the Martian discovery was announced, Shell terminated its Arctic oil prospecting in the Chukchi Sea. For the company’s shareholders, it’s a minor disaster: the loss of $4 billion. For those who love the planet and the life it sustains, it is a stroke of great fortune: it happened only because the company failed to find sufficient reserves. Had Shell succeeded, it would have exposed one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to spills that are almost inevitable, where containment is almost impossible. Are we to leave such matters to chance?

At the beginning of September, two weeks after he granted Shell permission to drill in the Chukchi Sea, Barack Obama travelled to Alaska to warn Americans about the devastating effects that climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, might catalyse in the Arctic. “It’s not enough just to talk the talk”, he told them. “We’ve got to walk the walk.” We should “embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it.” Human ingenuity is on abundant display at Nasa, which released those astounding images. But when it comes to policy, the search for intelligent life goes on.

Let the market decide: this is the way in which governments seek to resolve planetary destruction. Leave it to the conscience of consumers, while that conscience is muted and confused by advertising and corporate lies. In a near-vacuum of information, we are each left to decide what we should take from other species and other people; what we should allocate to ourselves or leave to succeeding generations. Surely there are some resources and some places – such as the Arctic and the deep sea – whose exploitation should simply stop?

All this drilling and digging and trawling and dumping and poisoning – what is it for anyway? Does it enrich human experience, or stifle it? A couple of weeks ago, I launched the hashtag #extremecivilisation, and invited suggestions. They have flooded in. Here are just a few of the products my correspondents have found. All of them, as far as I can tell, are real.

An egg tray for your fridge, that syncs with your phone to let you know how many eggs are left. A gadget for scrambling them – inside the shell. Wigs for babies, to allow “baby girls with little or no hair at all the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic hair style”. The iPotty, that permits toddlers to keep playing on their iPads while toilet training. A £2000 spider-proof shed. A snow sauna, on sale in the United Arab Emirates, in which you can create a winter wonderland with the flick of a switch. A refrigerated watermelon case on wheels: indispensable for picnics. Or perhaps not, as it weighs more than the melon. Anal bleaching cream, for … to be honest, I don’t want to know. An “automatic watch rotator” that saves you the bother of winding your luxury wrist candy. A smart phone for dogs, with which they can take pictures of themselves. Pre-peeled bananas, in polystyrene trays covered in clingfilm. Just peel back the packaging …

Every year, clever new ways of wasting stuff are devised, and every year we become more inured to the pointless consumption of the world’s precious resources. With each subtle intensification, the baseline of normality shifts. It should not be surprising to discover that the richer a country becomes, the less its people care about their impacts on the living planet.

Our alienation from the world of wonders with which we evolved has only intensified since David Bowie described a girl stumbling through a “sunken dream”, on her way to be “hooked to the silver screen”, where a long series of distractions diverts her from life’s great questions. The song, of course, was Life on Mars.

www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

David Bowie’s track Life on Mars from the album Hunky Dory was released in 1971. Courtesy of YouTube, here it is again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v–IqqusnNQ

More than a book review,

a whole new way of looking at you and me, and the rest of humanity.

Back on September 16th, I published the post Of paradoxes, and headaches! It included the fact that I was about 20% of the way through John Zande’s book The Owner of All Infernal Names.

On Tuesday evening of this week, I finished the book and, without doubt, I shall be publishing a review on Amazon books by the end of the week. First, I wanted to share a longer reflection of Zande’s book with all of you dear readers.

ooOOoo

One of the many five-star reviews of this book that has been published on the relevant Amazon page opens simply: “This is a beautifully written, terribly uncomfortable book to read.” I couldn’t better that summary. This is, indeed, a beautifully written book. Yet it is also a book that will forever change the way you think about species: Homo sapiens.

Zande offers a powerful argument that, “Following then the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the observer concludes with a level of argued certainty that a Creator must exist.” Then sets out to demonstrate that this Creator, far from being an expression of universal love, is fundamentally an expression of universal suffering. Reminding the reader that, “This world was never good. It was never peaceful, and never without suffering.”

For the first time in my life, Zande’s words had cause for me to reflect on something that, hitherto, had never dawned on me. That if there is a God, why have I, and countless others, assumed that this God be necessarily benevolent. The evidence presented in Zande’s book is comprehensive: that there was an evil origin to the universe and, more directly, that the deep, and growing, suffering of the pinnacle of evolution, us humans, can be traced back to that evil origin. Better than that, frequently the book is almost scientific. And in the best of scientific traditions, Zande adopts the position of a neutral witness.

Whether or not you are relaxed about that previous paragraph, and I suspect many readers will not, it is impossible not to be in awe of the beauty, the power, and the eloquence of Zande’s words. Take this opening paragraph of Zande’s chapter titled A SIGHTLESS CREATION.

It is a basal vagary, a question that screams for attention and if left unresolved – if left problematic – could invalidate all practicalities of a functioning Creation lorded by a maximally wicked Creator: Would sentient, attentive, self-respecting life choose to live in a world underwritten by evil? Could self-aware life endure a thoroughly hopeless reality?

Whether one is a believer in a religious god or not, it will also be impossible not to have one’s deepest emotions and beliefs about the nature of humankind stirred very deeply around. No-one who reads this book will be left unchanged.

If you have ever pondered about the way the world is heading, or more accurately put, about the way that we humans are managing our existence on Planet Earth, then you need to read this book. Period!

ooOOoo

Reinforcing what I have just written is the latest essay from George Monbiot, that will be published on Learning from Dogs on Friday.

No way to run a world!

Why we have to learn integrity from our dogs, and soon!

After yesterday’s post about the ice dagger poised to fall on the heads of humanity, I was hoping to offer something more cheerful for today. Indeed, I had a guest post ready for publication but then ran into a small technical hitch that stopped it being scheduled for today.

So I turned to this recent article that appeared on The Conversation blogsite that is, unfortunately, another reminder of these mad times. It is republished within the terms of articles that appear on The Conversation.

ooOOoo

How could VW be so dumb? Blame the unethical culture endemic in business.

Author: Edward L Queen, Director of Ethics and Servant Leadership Program, Emory University.

How much can corporate culture explain VW’s deception? Jim Young/Reuters

That far too much of the world’s corporate leadership is driven by moral midgets who have been educated far beyond their capacities for good judgment should be obvious after observing the events of the past week.

The financial industry-led economic collapse of 2008 should have taught us this lesson, but the specificity and clarity of it was brought home by news of price-gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and, even more blatantly, by the announcement that Volkswagen intentionally programmed thousands of its diesel automobiles to cheat emissions testing.

We should be outraged by such behavior and demand appropriate punishments and sanctions as well as restitution and correction. But we should not be shocked. As an ethicist who has looked at the behavior of individuals in business and corporations, I can point to a number of troubling trends that help explain these transgressions.

Impaired moral imaginations

For the past five to six decades, epigones of Milton Friedman have been emphasizing that the only duty of a corporation is return on investment (regularly ignoring his caveat of doing so within the law and social norms).

This lesson, drilled into generations of business school graduates, now drives tsunamis of corporate malfeasance. Data regularly demonstrate that business school students are more likely to cheat on examinations and assignments than their peers, although – and this is of interest for the Volkswagen case – they are closely followed by engineering students.

Are business school teaching the right values? mleiboff/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Additionally, some evidence suggests that not only are business students more impaired in their moral judgments in a broader sense than are those in other majors and professional schools, but that business schools themselves may be responsible.

More disturbing, observational and anecdotal evidence suggests that business students are not only impaired in their moral judgments but that significant percentages of them have severely impaired moral imaginations. By this I mean not only do they make bad ethical decisions, but they actually are incapable of identifying an ethical situation when they are presented with one.

Numerous interviews with business ethics faculty I have had over the past decade suggest that when business students are presented with an ethics case, that is a case where they have been told that there is an ethical problem, 20% to 30% of the students cannot find or identify the ethical issue. This has been borne out by my personal experience when teaching business students.

Unmistakable malfeasance

With regards to the Volkswagen scandal, let us be clear about the nature of the company’s activities. This was not a mistake, an error, an ethical lapse or poor judgment. This was an intentionally designed and executed violation of the law in both its letter and its spirit. It also was an ethical violation of the highest level.

Volkswagen intentionally deceived those to whom it owed a duty of honesty. It fraudulently misrepresented its automobiles to be other than what they were. Most significantly, it intentionally chose to do so and went out of its way to commit the wrong.

This last fact may make it far more difficult for VW to recover from the reputational hit than it perhaps has been for GM or Toyota. Even though the latter’s product defects cost people their lives, they did not intentionally produce such parts.

The sheer brazenness and conniving that went into Volkswagen’s actions are probably what shocked people the most. This was a highly technical and sophisticated operation that basically taught the emissions system how to distinguish between road travel, typical idling and idling while undergoing an emissions test.

No spin can mitigate that fact. There is and can be no claims of confusion or misunderstanding, no failures to communicate. This will erode people’s trust in Volkswagen as a company to a degree that the failures of other companies may not have experienced. In the Volkswagen scandal, just like the story about price gouging in pharmaceuticals that broke the same week, consumers are confronted with the stark reality of corporate malfeasance.

In both instances, the wrongdoing was exacerbated by the responses of the companies’ CEOs. The now former CEO of Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, basically acknowledged his incompetence and failure of leadership by claiming that he was unaware of the actions taken by his employees. Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, in a series of tweets responding to criticisms of its pricing of the drug Daraprim demonstrated a level of knowledge of moral and social norms that can only be described as clueless.

Redefining success

These events – and others – make clear that there is a need to look at the broader cultural realities that drive unethical decisions in business, particularly the perception that the only way of determining value and worth is money.

This situation is not new – as early as 1906 William James wrote in a letter to H G Wells, “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.”

When a person’s worth is determined only by money, only by success as it is and can be monetized, when one has no sense of being without the BMW, the Rolex, the Armani suits, the yacht, etc, the moral flabbiness emerges. Indeed, it engulfs entire organizations and perhaps even entire societies.

ooOOoo

Those last two sentences of that essay need repeating over and over again. This may just be a blog about learning from our beloved dog companions but as my home page spells out, this is not some silly romantic notion:

As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer. Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming, thence the long journey to modern man. But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite. Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.

Dogs know better, much better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!

So there!

The truth about Pit Bull dogs.

Like all dogs, they are beautiful animals.

Previously, I have mentioned the authors’ group AIM, that meets monthly in Grants Pass.

One of the authors is Frank Morin and he and I have a monthly chit-chat lunch together. Not so long ago, Frank posted a link on his Facebook page to the following video that shows the truth about Pit Bull dogs.

We have a Pit Bull here at home. His name is Casey and he is the perfect gentleman. You would never know that he was in a care centre for over a year because no one would give him a home, for there is not an emotional scar on him!

Ruby behind Casey. — Casey, in the foreground, sharing Ruby’s bed as they are great friends.

Please ensure you and your dogs have a great weekend.

Never stop fighting for a better world.

Protecting our right to breathe good, clean air.

Fundamentally, today’s post is not about dogs. But it is about the qualities that we can see in our dogs: trust, honesty, openness, and the core quality that inspires my writings about dogs: integrity.

I’m speaking of the disgusting news that has been headlined in the world’s media in recent days, no better summarised than by this extract from a current (1pm PDT yesterday)) BBC news report:

Volkswagen chief executive Martin Winterkorn has resigned following the revelation that the firm manipulated US diesel car emissions tests.

Mr Winterkorn said he was “shocked” by recent events and that the firm needed a “fresh start”.

He added that he was “not aware of any wrongdoing on my part” but was acting in the interest of the company.

VW has already said that it is setting aside €6.5bn (£4.7bn) to cover the costs of the scandal.

The world’s biggest carmaker admitted last week that it deceived US regulators in exhaust emissions tests by installing a device to give more positive results.

The company said later that it affected 11 million vehicles worldwide.

As ever, the voice of George Monbiot speaks a little clearer than most, and I am referring to his recent essay published both on his blog and in The Guardian newspaper. I am very pleased to have Monbiot’s permission to republish his essay here on Learning from Dogs.

ooOOoo

Smoke and Mirrors

22nd September 2015

Pollution, as scandals on both sides of the Atlantic show, is a physical manifestation of corruption.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23 September 2015

In London, the latest figures suggest, it now kills more people than smoking. Worldwide, a new study estimates, it causes more deaths than malaria and HIV-Aids together. I’m talking about the neglected health crisis of this age, that we seldom discuss or even acknowledge. Air pollution.

Heart attacks, strokes, asthma, lung and bladder cancers, low birth weight, low verbal IQ, poor memory and attention among children, faster cognitive decline in older people and – recent studies suggest – a link with the earlier onset of dementia: all these are among the impacts of a problem that, many still believe, we solved decades ago. The smokestacks may have moved to China, but other sources, whose fumes are less visible, have taken their place. Among the worst are diesel engines, sold, even today, as the eco-friendly option, on the grounds that their greenhouse gas emissions tend to be lower than those of petrol engines. You begin to wonder whether any such claims can still be trusted.

Volkswagen’s rigging of its pollution tests is an assault on our lungs, our hearts, our brains. It is a classic example of externalisation: the dumping of costs that businesses should carry onto other people. The air that should have been filtered by its engines is filtered by our lungs instead. We have become the scrubbing devices it failed to install.

Who knows how many people have paid for this crime already, with their health or with their lives? In the USA, 200,000 deaths a year are attributed to air pollution. For how many of those might Volkswagen be responsible? Where else was the fraud perpetrated? Of what proportion of our health budgets has this company robbed us?

The fraud involves the detection of nitrogen oxides (NOx), of which diesel engines are the major source in many places. This month, for the first time in our history, the UK government estimated the impact of NOx emissions on public health, and discovered that they are likely almost to double the number of deaths from air pollution, adding 23,000 to the 29,000 attributed to particulates (tiny particles of soot).

The government released this discovery, alongside its useless proposals for dealing with the problem, on Saturday 12 September, a few minutes before Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader was announced. How many government press releases are published on a Saturday? How many are published on a Saturday during an event on which everyone is focused? In other words, as a Labour press officer once notoriously advised, this was “a good day to bury bad news”. Not only was the number of deaths buried by this means, but so was the government’s consultation on its feeble plans for reducing this pollution: a consultation to which it evidently wanted as few respondents as possible. Liz Truss, the environment secretary, has some explaining to do.

She has her reasons for keeping us in the dark. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that the UK is in breach of the European air quality directive, and insisted that the government draw up a plan for compliance by the end of this year. Instead, Truss produced a plan to shed responsibility. Local authorities, her consultation suggests, should create clean air zones in at least eight cities, in which diesel engines are restricted or banned. But she has given them neither new money nor new powers. Nor has she offered an explanation of how this non-plan is going to address the issue in the rest of the country, as the ruling demands.

Already, the UK has missed the European deadline by six years. Under Truss’s proposals, some places are likely still to be in breach by 2025: 16 years after the original deadline. I urge you to respond to the consultation she wanted you to miss, which closes on November 6.

The only concrete plan the government has produced so far is to intensify the problem, through a new programme of airport expansion. This means more nitrous oxides, more particulates, more greenhouse gas emissions.

Paradoxically, the Volkswagen scandal may succeed where all else has failed, by obliging the government to take the only action that will make a difference: legislating for a great reduction in the use of diesel engines. By the time this article is published, we might know whether the company’s scam has been perpetrated in Europe as well as North America: new revelations are dripping by the hour. But whether or not this particular deception was deployed here, plenty of others have been.

Last week the Guardian reported that nine out of ten new diesel cars break European limits on nitrous oxides – not by a little but by an average of sevenfold. Every manufacturer whose emissions were tested had cars in breach of the legal limit. They used a number of tricks to hotwire the tests: “stripping components from the car to reduce weight, using special lubricants, over-inflating tyres and using super-smooth test tracks.” In other words, the emissions scandal is not confined to Volkswagen, not confined to a single algorithm and not confined to North America: it looks, in all its clever variants, like a compound global swindle.

There are echoes here of the ploys used by the tobacco industry: grand deceptions smuggled past the public with the help of sophisticated marketing. Volkswagen sites advertising the virtues of “clean diesel” have been dropping offline all day. In 2009, the year in which its scam began, the TDI engine at the centre of the scandal won the Volkswagen Jetta 2.0 the green car of the year award. In 2010, it did the same for the Audi A3.

There’s plenty that’s wrong with corporate regulation in the United States, but at least the fines, when they occur, are big enough to make a corporation pause, and there’s a possibility of guilty executives ending up in prison. Here, where corruption, like pollution, is both omnipresent and invisible, major corporations can commit almost any white-collar crime and get away with it. Schemes of the kind that have scandalised America are, in this country, both commonplace and unremarked. How can such governments be trusted to defend our health?

www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

I found myself having two emotional reactions to Monbiot’s essay. The first was that for many years, when I was living and working in England, I drove diesel-powered cars on the (now false) belief that they were better for the environment.

My second reaction was to Monbiot listing the likely impacts from air pollution,”Heart attacks, strokes, asthma, lung and bladder cancers, low birth weight, low verbal IQ, poor memory and attention among children, faster cognitive decline in older people and – recent studies suggest – a link with the earlier onset of dementia. . . “, for the reason that at the age of 70, I am already noticing the creeping onset of reduced verbal IQ, cognitive decline, and worry about the onset of dementia. To think that my earlier decisions about what cars to drive might be a factor in this is disturbing.

I am going to close this post by highlighting how fighting for what we want is important, critically so. By republishing an item that was posted on AmericaBlog just over a year ago, that fortuitously is a reward for living in the State of Oregon.

ooOOoo

Climate win: Appeals court in Oregon rules state court must decide if atmosphere is a “public trust”

6/16/14 10:00am by Gaius Publius

Two teenagers from Eugene, Ore. filed suit against Governor Kitzhaber and the State of Oregon for failing to protect the “atmosphere, state waters, and coast lines, as required under the public trust doctrine.”

They lost the first round, where the state court said that climate relief was not a judicial matter. But they won on appeal. The case goes back to the original court, which now has orders to decide the case on its merits and not defer to the executive or legislature.

The gist of the appeals court decision:

Their lawsuit asked the State to take action in restoring the atmosphere to 350 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected the defenses raised by the State, finding that the youth could obtain meaningful judicial relief in this case.

That’s quite a nice victory. Here’s the full story, from the Western Environmental Law Center (my emphasis throughout):

In a nationally significant decision in the case Chernaik v. Kitzhaber, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled a trial court must decide whether the atmosphere is a public trust resource that the state of Oregon, as a trustee, has a duty to protect. Two youth plaintiffs were initially told they could not bring the case by the Lane County Circuit Court. The trial court had ruled that climate change should be left only to the legislative and executive branches. Today, the Oregon Court of Appeals overturned that decision.

Two teenagers from Eugene, Kelsey Juliana and Olivia Chernaik, filed the climate change lawsuit against Governor Kitzhaber and the State of Oregon for failing to protect essential natural resources, including the atmosphere, state waters, and coast lines, as required under the public trust doctrine. Their lawsuit asked the State to take action in restoring the atmosphere to 350 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected the defenses raised by the State, finding that the youth could obtain meaningful judicial relief in this case. …

In reversing the Lane County trial court, the Oregon Court of Appeals remanded the case ordering the trial court to make the judicial declaration it previously refused to make as to whether the State, as trustee, has a fiduciary obligation to protect the youth from the impacts of climate change, and if so, what the State must do to protect the atmosphere and other public trust resources.

The implications of this are broad, and similar cases are pending in other states, as the article describes.

Make no mistake; decisions like this matter. It places the court squarely in the mix as a power player in the climate war, the fight for “intergenerational justice” as James Hansen puts it — or the war against intergenerational betrayal, as I put it.

This is a cornerstone decision from the Oregon Court of Appeals in climate change jurisprudence. The court definitively ruled that the question of whether government has an obligation to protect the atmosphere from degradation leading to climate change is a question for the judiciary, and not for the legislative or executive branches. The Court did not opine as to how that question should be answered, only that it should be answered by the judiciary.

We can win this; it’s not over. If we reach 450 ppm and we’re still not stopping with the CO2, then it’s over and I become a novelist full-time. But we’re not there yet, and please don’t surrender as if we were.

The courts are now a powerful tool, as is divestment. James Hansen has a way to restore the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 in time to stop slow feedbacks from kicking in. It’s a doable plan, but we’ll need to use force. Using the courts, as with using divestment campaigns, counts as force. Stay tuned.

(Want to use force at the national level? Find a way to challenge Obama publicly to stop leasing federal land to coal companies. He’s a hypocrite until he stops federal coal from being mined and sold abroad. A simple and obvious challenge for him. You too can be the activist.)

Twitter: @Gaius_Publius
Facebook: Gaius Publi

(Facebook note: To get the most from a Facebook recommendation, be sure to Share what you also Like. Thanks.)

ooOOoo

Never forget that you, me and every other good-minded person on this planet can make a positive difference. Need inspiration? Gain it from our dogs! Let’s use the liberty we enjoy to make a difference.

Please adopt your next dog.

Continuing the message of that special bond between us humans and our dogs.

Yesterday’s post regarding the dog saved from the Texas floods came to mind when earlier today (Tuesday) I was reading the Fall issue of The Bark magazine.

Reading the magazine took me across to The Bark website and from there I ended up reading about dogs being mentioned in people’s obituaries. Here’s a snippet of that article:

Dogs in Obituaries

Included as cherished family members
Karen B. London, PhD | September 18, 2015

It’s been a long time since the majority of people with dogs considered them property, but the inclusion of them in the celebrations and events of life associated with family continues to grow. Birthday parties and gifts for dogs have become increasingly common in recent years, and the number of dogs included in family photos or in signatures on greeting cards is bigger than ever. It’s really old news to say that many people consider dogs to be family members, but interesting studies of the ways in which that’s true continue to be published.

Earlier this year, a study called Companion Animals in Obituaries: An Exploratory Study was published in the journal Anthrozoös. The study illuminated the importance of companion animals, including dogs, based on the frequency and manner in which they were mentioned in obituaries.

Another article in that same issue of The Bark was by photographer Traer Scott. Scott is the author of the book Shelter Dogs and has just launched a new book called Finding Home: shelter dogs & their stories. (Her blogsite is here.) As is detailed on her website:

Traer Scott is an award winning fine art and commercial photographer and author of six books including “Nocturne: Creatures of the Night” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) and her newest release “Finding Home; Shelter Dogs and Their Stories” (Princeton Architectural Press, Fall 2015). Her work has been exhibited in several countries and featured in National Geographic, Life, Vogue, People, O, on the NY Times Lens Blog, “Behold” and dozens of other national and international print and online publications. Her first solo museum show Natural History opens at the University of Maine Museum of Art in October 2015. Traer was the recipient of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts 2010 Photography Fellowship Grant and the 2008 Helen Woodward Humane Award for animal welfare activism. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband, daughter and adopted dogs: a pit bull and a baby basset hound.

A quick mouse-click took me to Amazon and to Scott’s latest book. Where one reads:

Bold, retiring, serious, sparkling, quirky, or lovable—the dogs in Traer Scott’s remarkable photographs regard us with humor, dignity, and an abundance of feeling. Scott began photographing these dogs in 2005 as a volunteer at animal shelters. Her first book, Shelter Dogs, was a runaway success, and in this follow-up, Scott introduces a new collection of canine subjects, each with indomitable character and spirit: Morrissey, a pit bull, who suffered from anxiety related behaviors brought on by shelter life until adopted by a family with four children; Chloe, a young chocolate Lab mix, surrendered to a shelter by a family with allergies; Gabriel and Cody, retired racing greyhounds; and Bingley, a dog who lost his hearing during a drug bust but was brought home by a loving family that has risen to the challenge of living with a deaf dog. Through extended features we become better acquainted with the personalities and life stories of selected dogs and watch as they experience the sometimes rocky and always emotional transition to new homes. The portraits in Finding Home form an eloquent plea for the urgent need for more adoptive families, as well as a tribute to dogs everywhere.

Further down that Amazon page there was a review by The Bark magazine and what they wrote is the perfect way of heading to the close of today’s post. [My emphasis]

“Photographer Traer Scott follows up her groundbreaking book Shelter Dogs with a new work of equal grace and sensitivity. The portraits in Finding Home not only showcase a collection of canines with indomitable character and spirit, they are also an eloquent plea for more adoptive families, and a tribute to all dogs everywhere.” – The Bark

Please, howsoever you can, share the benefits of adopting a dog from your nearest animal care centre.

No avoiding those eyes (and I'm not referring to Jean!). — Proof positive of the love that flows between Jean and our Oliver.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival

Welcome to a New Planet

Climate Change “Tipping Points” and the Fate of the Earth

Tipping Points on the Horizon

Coral Reefs at Risk

Amazonian Dry-Out

Of Tipping Points and Singularities

Share this:

The Gun Show

Share this:

Heteronyms…

Share this:

Words to Share

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

How could VW be so dumb? Blame the unethical culture endemic in business.

Impaired moral imaginations

Unmistakable malfeasance

Redefining success

Share this:

Share this:

Smoke and Mirrors

Climate win: Appeals court in Oregon rules state court must decide if atmosphere is a “public trust”

Share this:

Dogs in Obituaries

Share this: