Archive for July, 2008

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No Solutions to be Found in Japan

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

– Another big global meeting to try to solve the world’s environmental problems and once again it all amounted to nothing.   I can’t think why I might be surprised.

Here are some other notable meetings (yawn): ➡ ➡

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

The G-8 summit in Japan this year seemed more interested in harmony than in making progress on a number of pressing issues. From climate change to world finance, courage was nowhere to be seen.

It was hardly to be expected, but in the end, the G-8 did actually make a bit of progress when it comes to combating climate change. Last year, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel put the issue high up on the agenda for the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, many of her world-leader colleagues were unimpressed. But this year, many of the points she proposed in 2007 were adopted with little opposition. The global warming assessment produced by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, was embraced as was the demand that an international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions must be negotiated under the aegis of the United Nations.

The formulation of the summit’s closing communiqué likewise goes a bit further than one year ago. Whereas last year, G-8 leaders agreed to “seriously consider” halving CO2 emissions by the year 2050, this year, the group agreed to cut emissions by “at least” 50 percent — though no base year was provided against which that cut should be measured.

More… (or less, depending on how you look at it) ➡

Posted in The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Forests to fall for food and fuel

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas.

A companion report documents poor progress in reforming land ownership and governance in developing countries.

Both reports were launched on Monday in UK government offices in London.

Supporters of RRI include the UK’s Department of International Development (DfID) and its equivalents in Sweden and Switzerland.

“Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.

“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”

Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.

But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Biofuels, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Emotional non-negotiables

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

I was reflecting last night on conversations I’d had with two different people recently. The subjects had been the environment, the state of the world, and the likely directions history will take in the near future.

Both my friends clearly understand the situation that we (humanity) are in. They are not denialists in any sense of the word- they really get what’s going on.

But, I noted, they were both emotionally distressed about it. And that their distress was causing them to waffle back and forth between seeing the situation we’re in clearly and then switching around to trying to ameliorate it by saying something like, “Well, humanity has tremendous powers of creativity – surely we’ll think of a way to avoid these problems.”

Watching them squirm got me to thinking about what it was that was making them squirm.

One of my friends has older parents who live in a major metropolitan area and she’s made a commitment to them and to herself to live near them in their closing years. She’s also dependent upon them financially as well. Later, when they’ve passed on, she will be able to live where she wants and how she wants – but for now, she’s made commitments that tie her to this city.

My other friend had been thinking very seriously about immigration to New Zealand as a result of his analysis of the world’s situation. But, after a lot of agonizing and thinking about his extended family here on the U.S., he decided that he couldn’t simply abandon them and go off to save himself. So, he’s decided, out of love of family, to stay here with all of them and face the hard times together.

To me, it looks like both of these folks have the same problem. They’ve both made emotional decisions to stay but at the same time, they are both confronted with convincing reasons why they should go. Cognitive dissonance is the result. And the way that the mind tries to reduce cognitive dissonance in a situation like this is to try to reinterpret the data that suggests they should leave into something less convincing.

It seems to me that their rational mental processes are being distorted by the presence of emotional non-negotiables in the mix.

When this first occurred to me, it seemed like a bit of an epiphany and I spent several hours over the next day or two noodling it over. In the end, I saw that it was no epiphany at all but just something I’ve known about and acknowledged forever. It’s just that I hadn’t quite looked at it from this angle before – especially as it relates to how people see the world’s current situation.

On the web site Al Gore’s put up about his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth“, he has a quote that I’ve admired since I first saw it.

It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

– Upton Sinclair

This captures a lot of what I thought was my epiphany.

When, in the past, I’ve asked myself why people seem so obtuse about seeing the state of the world right in front of their eyes, I’ve assigned the cause to a variety of things like ‘He’s a Republican.‘ or ‘He’s a Libertarian.‘ or ‘He’s a right-wing Christian.‘ or “He has no understanding of science.‘. Or any of a long list of other reasons.

But, amazingly, I’d never seen that all of these folks, just like you and me and everyone else, are encumbered by any number of emotional non-negotiable factors that limit their ability to process the data before them solely on its own merits. We are all twisted by our emotional attachments.

Men who run corporations and have their identities and all of their finances tied up in those endeavors cannot think objectively about the good or ill that corporations do in the world.

People who cannot move away from an area of danger (like my two friends), cannot see the data indicating the danger they are in clearly without cognitive dissonance. And that cognitive dissonance generates stress which the mind will try to lessen how ever it can.

Religious conservatives have staked their faith on the fact that God has everything well under control so how can they objectively view information that shows things are getting badly out of control around them?

Libertarians believe that free markets will find appropriate solutions for all conceivable problems so how can they assimilate the fact that the financial sieves that are multinational corporations and Globalization are steadily increasing the wealth of the very few at the expense of the many.

I’ve had to smile privately at Republican friends of mine as they held forth on the merits of less government and free markets. And then I watched them stress as they tried to explain why all these ‘free’ corporations and ‘free’ markets, which only care about next quarter’s numbers, are sending all of our jobs and manufacturing overseas to the benefit of their bottom lines but to the ultimate degradation of the country and the lives of those who live here.

I recall reading a Buddhist tract a long time ago. It said something like,

“One can only see what one is looking at clearly when one doesn’t care what one sees.“

Yep, that about sums it up. And we, all of us, are emotional creatures who are emotionally bound to certain ideas, creeds, places, points-of-view and whatever. And all of us, therefore, are not clear and rational thinkers to the extent that these emotional non-negotiables warp our rationality.

I don’t think any of this changes my prognosis for the world. I still think it is bleak. Perhaps, even more so given that I now see that many (most, all) of us are incapable of rational perceptions due to our emotional attachments. But, it does, perhaps, make the problem a bit clearer.

Posted in CrashBlogging, Personal, Philosophical, The Perfect Storm | 6 Comments »

The limits of the law and vigilantes

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Recently, in New Zealand, there were reports ➡ and ➡ that Asian people in Auckland were considering banding together and forming vigilante groups to combat crime in their area. Their complaint was that the police were ineffective and that they, the Asian folks, were being targeted by criminal groups.

The fellow, Mr. Peter Low, who was at the center of the effort to organize vigilante defenses, in my opinion, went too far and created a media firestorm when he suggested that Asians could hire Chinese Triads to protect them. Chinese Triads, if you didn’t know, are similar to the Japanese Yakusa or, perhaps, the Italian Mafia. Secret societies with more than a little involvement in criminal activities.

Soon after, many of the people he was trying to defend were disowning him and the entire thing went nuclear in the press and basically melted down.

I found all of this interesting, to a point. I think Mr. Low may have been justified in organizing local people to defend themselves but I think he was clearly over the top to suggest bringing in outside Triad enforcers to defend Asian interests. He might as well have suggested importing the La Cosa Nostra.

So why am I blogging about this? Because it made me reflect on the fact that I, personally, only believe in the law … to a point.

The law is suppose to be a common set of rules we have all basically agreed upon to keep order in our societies. Of course, we could quibble for hours that that’s not how it often works, but that is the basic idea and intent. And that’s good – it benefits us all, when it works well.

But, I’ve often reflected that if the law breaks down and fails to protect my interests, I am not going to passively watch myself or those I love be abused. I have limits and beyond those, I will look out for myself.

Some would have us believe that this sort of thinking is anti-social and that we should always passively rely on society’s systems to look after us – even when they are failing us. They would have us believe that no matter what the justification, taking things into one’s own hands is bad. Personally, I don’t feel that way.

There will always be those who think they are above the law and that they can act with impunity against us because of their age, their associations, their money or their political clout.

Have you never encountered the 16 year old with an attitude? He’s been breaking the laws and causing mayhem since he was 11 and he knows the juvenile courts won’t do anything to him more than a slap on the wrist. His parents either think he’s a saint, no matter what he does, or they are utterly disinterested. In any case, he has no fear, no limits, no self control and no respect for anyone who’s not prepared to do him more violence than he can do them.

Would you think me anti-social and very un-liberal, if I said I think a two by four on a dark night in an alley might help sort him out?

My wife tells me about what it was like in the 50’s and 60’s to grow up in small town Kansas in the American Midwest. Everyone carried guns there. Every pickup truck sported a rifle rack with a rifle in the back window. And folks left their doors unlocked and there was very little serious crime of any sort.

I long ago read most of Ayn Rand‘s books and then outgrew them. But, Rand said one thing that has always stuck with me. She said (paraphrased), “They cannot oppress you unless you consent to it.”

I judge myself as quite liberal in most of my feelings and beliefs but there are definitely some exceptions to this pattern.

Your comments, as always will be appreciated.

Posted in Personal, Philosophical | 2 Comments »

History brewing…

Friday, July 18th, 2008

– Here’s my take on what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment. Like so much going on around us now, it is in almost everyone’s best interests to keep things stable. But, on the other hand, entire forests can be lost to just one careless match.

– I correspond a lot with friends off on the side from this Blog. The following is my half of a recent exchange with a friend of mine who lives in Europe.

– All food for thought in a changing world.

= = = = = = = = = = =

M.,

I share your concerns about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. And I agree that Turkey, Pakistan and Iran are certainly centers of deep concern.

I saw a lot of news a week or so ago on the topic of whether or not Israel might ‘whack’ Iran. And those, plus your E-mails alerting me to your concerns, certainly got my attention.

On the other side, I also saw an article that looked at the probable consequences if the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran, and it concluded that these consequences were so bad, that an attack would be unlikely.

Of course, this latter article had no answer for the longer term conundrum of if Iran is not taken down now, she will have nuclear capabilities later and that will be the worst of all possible outcomes for Israel.

In talking against the likelihood of an attack, the article pointed out that attacking Iran would result in them shutting the Straits of Hormuz and that, in turn, would cut the world’s oil supplies by almost half and the economic chaos would be colossal.

Then there was the likelihood of Iran lofting missiles into the main producing Saudi oil fields, into Israeli cities and into the large US bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are known to be highly concentrated.

And, in the end, the efforts to eradicate Iran’s nuclear facilities might very well fail due to their intentional wide distributions, hiding and hardening.

And, finally, one possibility that none of the articles mentioned but which I think is highly likely: To date, so far as we know, rogue governments with enriched nuclear materials haven’t released such materials into the hands of the suicidal Islamic Jihadists. Such governments would probably prefer not to send such loose canons into the world where their control, thereafter, of how things unfolded would not be under their control.

But, if Iran is attacked, their nuclear ambitions thwarted and much of their nation damaged, just think how easily they could play that card to hurt the west. Think what just one dirty bomb loosed in Washington, D.C. or Manhattan might do to the U.S.

All of this is extremely ugly and I believe that the major players can all see the likely outcomes and all are holding back from acting because one event could trigger huge consequences for everyone. The only ones who want to act immediately are the Jihadists who are eager to pass into paradise. But, the Israelis are also thinking very hard about where their best options lie. And for them, indefinitely inaction could be fatal.

It looks like a fatal embrace to me.

Posted in CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm | 2 Comments »

The Island in the Wind

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

– I like stories like this. They are great examples of what human beings can do. And there are many such stories around, if one looks.

– But, I fear stories like this as well – least they lead us into a false sense that ‘things are coming together‘.

– What matters in the end, is how things are on balance. And for every inspiring story, for every person working for a better world, there are a thousand who don’t care or who are in denial that there is a problem. And that’s the real problem that we need to steel ourselves to look at squarely.

– If you live in a community like the one in this story, if you work for an environmental group and spend your days with folks that live and breath this stuff, or if you live in a community that’s usually on the cutting edge, like Eugene Oregon, then it is easy to be seduced by what’s going on around you and think it represents the whole.

– But just step back and ask yourself what you would see, what you would find, if you simply reached down into the Earth’s population and took any random sample of 1000 people and looked to see how they feel and what they are doing – on balance. That’s where the rubber hits the road.

– This thing that’s happening, which will affect us all, has so far only concerned a few of us deeply and the rest are still living in a dream.

= = = = =

A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions.

Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn’t, but I said yes anyway.

We got into Tranberg’s car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I’d like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh.

Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere.

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

More… ➡

– Research thanks to LA

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

Posted in CounterCurrents, CrashBlogging, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

THE ‘ESTONIAN CARRY’

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

How to Win Your Wife’s Weight in Beer

Every year, the small Finnish town of Sonkajärvi hosts the Wife Carrying World Championships. All men have to do is sprint around an obstacle course while carrying their wives. And the women? They have to hold on tight — which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

It sounds like it could be some primitive Scandinavian skill, dating to when skin-wearing Nordic tribes had to haul their women from burning huts before an onslaught of marauding Vikings (more…) or maybe Huns from the eastern steppes.

As it happens, though, the Wife Carrying World Championships, held every summer in the small Finnish town of Sonkajärvi, isn’t even close to that old. The event, which sets husbands from around the world racing down an obstacle course for the grand prize of the woman’s weight in beer, hasn’t even been around for two decades.

It started as a lark by Sonkajärvi locals in 1992. Four years later it became an “international contest,” and this year 50 couples will compete from 14 countries around the world, including Germany, Sweden, the United States, Australia, China, Kenya and Israel.

More… ➡

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different | No Comments »

Arguments…

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

– I love articles that reveal just how illogical the human mind is, in spite of how logical and rational we human may think we are. Those beliefs are just part of the illusion.

– I’ve written about this before here ➡

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

In today’s excerpt-evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (b. 1943) argues that, consciously or subconsciously, we keep our rationales for our actions and beliefs carefully arrayed near the surface-ready as necessary for our defense:

“The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes … that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, ‘may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves.’

“The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right–and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue.

More… ➡

– Research thanks to Lisa G.

Tags:,
Posted in General, Mental Irrationality | 1 Comment »

The Black Hole in The Cost of Healthcare: Big Pharma and Transparency

Monday, July 7th, 2008

It’s no secret that Big Pharma has been providing doctors with special perks in return for prescribing their products. This has been going on for ages. But to get a better grip on why the costs of healthcare have been increasing dramatically we need to understand about the massive networks that Big Pharma is involved in. Believe it or not, Big Pharma is connected to everything. The AMA, the FDA, the financial markets/big business, the insurance industry, law and politics; these are all affected by Big Pharma.

Recently it was reported that there are more Americans addicted to prescription drugs than illegal drugs. An article in The New York Times stated that “An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.” That’s a pretty hefty number. I know quite a few people who became addicted to prescription drugs. Some said tranquilizers and painkillers were harder to quit than illegal drugs. Prescription pain killers have become the “new heroin”, and are increasingly becoming a major problem in the school system.

Not only are the doctors getting “perks” from the drug companies, but the professors and the research facilities of major universities have been the recipient of “special benefits” as well. Recently “three influential psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School seem to have been caught with their hands in the drug-laced cookie jar, and now they’re in big trouble. Two days after it was alleged that the three doctors failed to report a collective $4.2 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies, Harvard and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into the doctors’ behavior.” Big Pharma = Big Money.

More… ➡

– research thanks to: Bruce S.

Tags:,
Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Culture - How not to do it, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Americans are world’s top drug users: study

Monday, July 7th, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Americans are the world’s top consumers of cannabis and cocaine despite punitive US drug laws, according to an international study published in the online scientific magazine PLoS Medicine.

The study, released Monday, revealed that 16.2 percent of Americans had tried cocaine at least once, and 42.4 percent had used marijuana.

In second-place New Zealand, just 4.3 percent of study participants had used cocaine, and 41.9 percent marijuana.

The research was conducted at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, based on World Health Organization data from 54,068 people in 17 countries.

Rates of participation differed from country to country, and researchers noted uncertainty over how honestly people report their own drug use.

“Nevertheless, the findings present comprehensive data on the patterns of drug use from national samples representing all regions of the world,” a PLoS statement said.

A vast majority of survey participants from the United States, Europe, Japan and New Zealand had consumed alcohol, compared to smaller percentages from the Middle East, Africa and China.

The data also revealed socioeconomic patterns in drug use. Single young adult men with high income had the greatest tendency to regularly use drugs.

Drug use “does not appear to be simply related to drug policy,” the researchers wrote, “since countries with more stringent policies toward illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies.”

In the Netherlands, where drug policy is more liberal than the United States, 1.9 percent of survey participants said they had used cocaine and 19.8 percent marijuana.

More… ➡

– Research thanks to Bruce S.

Posted in General | No Comments »

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