 Four concepts have been spinning around in my mind lately. I instinctively feel that they go together somehow, but until today I wasn’t quite sure how. Now I think I know. The four concepts are:
On every scale, the closer I observe it, the more the creeping realization haunts me: individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries… they all just barely hang in there, between debt and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Any town with mini malls cutting up the landscape and just down the road it’s all white trash with rusty car wrecks in the back yard…Now: I am no longer confident that [continued conformity of the majority to the behaviours needed to sustain our civilization] will continue…Seeing scenes of desperate youths in South American slums watching “Kill Bill” makes me think: this is just oxygen thrown into the fire… The ants will not play along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small fraction of the system is falling apart…
Couple that inane drive for “Super Individualism” with the scarily simple realization of how effective even a small set of desperate people can become… and you have an ugly picture of the long term future…So many curves that grow upwards towards limits, so many statistics that show increases and no way to turn around…While we look at the horizon, it is the very ground beneath us that may be crumbling. Krause is almost apologetic about this “realistic pessimism”, but his point (that I completely missed in my earlier review of responses to the Edge question) is important, perhaps electrifying: Will civilization end, not with a bang but with a whimper, not by terrorist inferno or nuclear or bio-catastrophe or economic collapse, but when people just realize that the intricate software program that is civilization just doesn’t work for them anymore, and rather than fighting it, just walk away? What if en masse our grandchildren just refuse to accept any longer the grossly inequitable private ‘ownership’ of land and resources, or even the concept that humans or anyone owns the land and the life on it? What if, perhaps like many of the homeless people on our affluent nations’ streets today, billions conclude that participating in the horrifically skewed ‘market’ economy, in the broken, mind-numbing education system, in the dysfunctional and privileged political system, as consumers, as citizens, just isn’t worth the stress and effort anymore — that there’s just not enough in it for them? Derrick Jensen talks about “the fear of not having enough” being the anchor that holds us, despite our doubts and misgivings, and its constant disappointments and failures, to this one, global, fragile civilization. What if, as they learn more and more about it, many in the affluent nations decide that that fear is no longer sufficient to keep them supporting an increasingly incompetent, haywire civilization, and, at the same time, many in the struggling nations decide that the never-ending promise of having enough, if they will just stick with civilization a little longer, is a fraud? Imagine an alliance of the informed and the disenfranchised, together, helping each other walk away from civilization, to stop acknowledging the legitimacy of its predatory, ruinous political elites, to stop acknowledging the legitimacy of laws that allow huge, irresponsible corporations to despoil the Earth and steal from the poor and from future generations and which allow the rich to get away with murder and the poor to get away with nothing, to stop acknowledging the value of an economic system that threatens us with starvation and scarcity if we don’t obey its soul-destroying rules of arbitrary hierarchy and wage slavery and which treats every person as a mere consumer to be addicted to the insatiable demand for more and newer stuff? The software program of human civilization was written 30 millennia ago, when we were persuaded by the (then very real) fear of scarcity to trade in our freedom as gatherer-hunters for tedious, grueling lives as malnourished (‘better underfed than dead’) wage slaves stooped in uncooperative and fragile fields of monoculture grain. That program was modified only slightly when, in the most recent millennium, a minority were given back a small say in how their own lives were governed, and the right to ‘own’ a small amount of ‘property’ instead of being property themselves, and more recently still were given some machines to make some of the daily toil of their lives less physically exhausting. But the last century has shown this software to be subject to spectacular failures, and all the furious work to patch it seems merely to have made it more messy and vulnerable and inflexible, kind of like Windows, precisely when huge changes seem to be desperately needed. Is our civilization, this ‘proprietary’ software, the only program we still have available for our 6.5 billion humans, about to crash – a global cultural analogue to the Blue Screen of Death? And, by walking away from civilization soon en masse, might our most informed and most disenfranchised be recognizing this impending crash and looking, hopefully in time, for another, ‘open source’ program, another way to live? I’ve already described a bit what this ‘walking away’ would mean — the rejection of the legitimacy of, and refusal to recognize the authority of, existing political and economic and other systems, laws, rights and claims. Think of it as analogous to the seizure and occupation by its workers of a manufacturing plant previously run by tyrants. The laws giving the tyrants absolute ownership of the plant, and the right to the profits from it, and the right to hire and fire and treat ‘employees’ as they want, would no longer be recognized. The authority of the police to eject the workers would not be recognized, and would be resisted at all costs. The workers would treat the plant as shared property and do whatever they agreed communally to do with it — tear out the machines and make shared housing for their families, sell off or give away its ‘assets’, or operate it as a commons for the benefit of the workers. This is to some extent what happened in Argentina during the recent economic collapse. Now imagine that several billion people agree and announce that they no longer recognize the laws, the rights, or the property of anyone, and consider that everything in the world is a shared resource. It has usually been much easier to walk away from civilizations that had become dysfunctional past the point of no return — there were ‘uninhabited’ frontiers, usually not too far away, where you could ‘restart’ (to continue the software analogy) the society. In fact there’s some interesting new speculation by anthropologists that the Great Wall of China was built not to keep out the ‘Mongol hordes’, but rather to keep in the suffering slaves of the Chinese empire working in horrific poverty and disease and misery in the rice paddies that were the hallmark of our civilization’s early days. To keep them from walking away. We no longer have any habitable frontiers, despite the longing looks at outer space by the technophiles enraptured of the new religion of technology-as-saviour. So even if we were to decide to escape this bankrupt monolithic civilization culture while we could, where would we walk away to? How do you plan a prison break when the whole world is your prison? You can escape into alcohol, drugs, other addictions, mindless violence, insanity, abuse of others and other self-destructive behaviour, and there’s lots of evidence that that’s a pretty popular path these days. But the alternative is, while difficult, still quite simple:
Messy, eh? I’d love to lay out a scenario that was neater, cleaner, less bloody and less difficult, easier to sell, but that’s not how life works on this planet when one species gets wildly out of balance. We fool ourselves when we think that our software programming, our culture, makes us somehow exempt from the rules of nature, and the laws gravity and thermodynamics. We need to get past the “magical thinking” that there is a better, neater, more peaceful way out of our current situation, through the Rapture or technology or social self-transformation or escape to distant planets. We have managed to survive as well as we have since our relatively recent arrival on this planet because of our adaptability, and that is why I believe we will not just plunge headlong the way we are headed now, into the civilizational Blue Screen of Death. At some point we will bail out, messily, in something like the scenario I have laid out above. To me the only question mark is whether the last bullet will play out the way I suggest, or whether instead some set of natural and man-made disasters will sufficiently cull our numbers that we’ll avoid having to face and adjust to this final, grim reality. Looking at the death rates from the worst wars and plagues in the past, would suggest that these would not be enough to do the job for us. But perhaps I underestimate the ability of nature and of human technology to make this part of our job, at least, a little easier. |
January 22, 2006
The End of Civilization as a ‘Software Crash’
January 21, 2006
Links for the Week – Jan. 21/06
 Because of my back injury, I’ve been negligent in my reading this week. Thankfully others have not, and I owe almost all of this week’s links to the diligence of Dale Asberry (‘DA’ in the following paragraphs) and John & Suzanne’s Innovation Weekly (‘IW’ in the following paragraphs). The power of social networks! Thanks! Monday’s Election in Canada:
US Politics & Economics:
Science & Technology:
Business Innovation:
Photos of red foxes taken recently by a neighbour, Sandra Traversy, published in our local newspaper. The foxes are residents of our community, about 2.5 feet long excluding their tails and 1.5 feet tall, weighing only about 10-20 lbs and traveling, mostly nocturnally, at speeds of up to 30 mph. In some ways they behave more like wildcats than wolves, trapping rather than running down their prey (largely field mice in our area), and working alone or in pairs rather than in packs. |
January 20, 2006
What Makes a People Commit Mass Atrocities?
 Over my lifetime I have heard many explanations of why so many Germans were complicit in the atrocities committed during World War II. None of them is credible. Early accounts, during my youth, asserted that the Germans were either duped or unaware of what was happening, and that all the atrocities were committed by a small group of psychopathic leaders. This theory is absurd — no leaders could possibly pull off such a deception of their own people. More recent accounts would have us believe that Germans had been systematically indoctrinated for decades with anti-Semitism and xenophobia, to the point that, like North American slave owners a century earlier, and male patriarchs in most of the Western world a century before that, they couldn’t conceive of these ‘others’ being ‘real’ people at all, entitled to treatment as civilized humans, as peers. Or they would have us believe that the German people, reeling under the collective shame of military failure twenty years earlier and suffering from the terrifying, seemingly endless poverty and misery of the Great Depression, were so overcome with Nazism’s generous sharing of the plunders of foreign imperialism and war, and so terrified by a world seemingly coming apart, that they willingly, gleefully accepted the genocidal consequences of this liberation from poverty, hopelessness, shame and fear. In the last century we saw atrocities committed in even greater numbers by Stalin and Mao in their own countries, resulting in the murder, often under unimaginably cruel circumstances, of 60 million and 80 million people respectively. Go back earlier in history and such atrocities will be found everywhere on the planet. Go forward and the two most extreme examples of the past decade — in the Balkan states of the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda — make clear that this is not something that civilized societies outgrow. In every case there either was obviously (as in Rwanda) or must have been extremely broad acceptance of and complicity in systematic mass murder or genocide, in the ruthless killing of ‘other’ people to the point of extermination. In almost every case mass murder seems to be the product of desperation, of a mass psychosis brought about by the stress of fear, shame, suffering and poverty, sufficient to drive most people to overcome the universal human instinct not to kill a fellow human, to accept any vaguely plausible rationale to turn on each other and shed blood. Once this desperation starts to set in, other psychotic behaviours follow. The first and most obvious of these is denial — which comes in two ‘flavours’: (a) it’s not really that bad, and (b) there is no choice, they’re only doing what’s necessary. Once the psychotic begins to understand that his fellow citizens, and his ‘leaders’, are engaging in immoral and illegal behaviour, denial in one or both of these forms is almost inevitable: it is the only way that the actions can be ‘justified’, rationalized, made sense of. The second of these subsequent psychotic behaviours is willing helplessness and ignorance, which again comes in two ‘flavours’: (a) I don’t know about that (code for I don’t want to know about that), and (b) there’s nothing we can do about that (it’s not our fault/responsibility/within our control). Most of us really know, though we don’t really want to know and don’t want to admit it, that much of the food we eat today comes at a cost of almost unbearable, lifelong confinement and suffering of the animals whose ‘products’ we eat. When animal rights groups point that out, a howling and predictable chorus of It’s not really that bad, There is no other (economic) choice, I don’t know about that and There’s nothing we can do about that immediately ensues. When mounting, nearly-unanimous and compelling evidence is presented by hundreds of Nobel Prize-winning scientists that human activity is altering our climate and producing potentially cataclysmic consequences, the well-paid Lomborgs and other corporatist shills encourage us with their fake science that It’s not really that bad, There is no other (economic) choice, We don’t know about that and There’s nothing we can do about that. When the US president suspends human liberties for Arab minorities and the politically tolerant and progressive elements of US society, destroys and occupies a defenceless country and kills tens of thousands of its citizens on a trumped-up charge against its former dictator, and illegally wiretaps the conversations of ordinary Americans, the chorus goes up again: It’s not really that bad (or even ‘mission accomplished’), There is no other choice, We don’t know about that (plausible deniability, now a high art among politicians) and There’s nothing we (mere citizens, Democrats, law-abiding, freedom-loving people) can do about that. None of this would occur in a healthy world. All that is needed, however, is a widespread sense of fear, shame, suffering and poverty to induce the mass psychosis. Fear comes about when sudden and unappreciated change is foisted upon us: When our daughter comes home hand in hand with someone from another culture, race, or gender than the one we are comfortable with. When we realize that information and technology are so accessible that anyone could kill us or ruin our lives with a gun, a suicide bomb, a disease of overcrowded poultry, a drug, a penis, a home invasion (by legal authorities or strangers), tainted food or water, a nuclear or chemical or biological weapon cooked up in their basement. Or when a small group of spoiled rich lunatics brings down a couple of buildings by crashing airplanes into them. Shame is also in no short supply in our civilization. Ask any German. Ask Romeo Dallaire. Ask yourself, when you cringe and change the station when the commercials and documentaries about the state of the world just outside your door come on, begging you, daring you to look and learn. I can almost hear you, whispering: It’s not really that bad, There is no other (economic) choice, I don’t know about that, There’s nothing we can do about that. As for suffering and poverty, you don’t need to go to Darfur to find it. Many of your neighbours are undoubtedly suffering the trauma of spousal or child abuse, or poverty they are ashamed to admit to (because in its self-deceit our society would have us believe poverty is our own fault), or otherwise in endless physical, emotional or psychological anguish. It’s not really that bad, not in my neighbourhood. Like rats in a cruel experiment of forced overcrowding and scarcity, we are perpetually ripe for the mass psychosis that is the very hallmark of our beloved civilization. And as long as we remain in denial, as long as we keep telling ourselves the madman’s mantra — It’s not really that bad, There is no other choice, I don’t know about that, There’s nothing we can do about that. — it will only get worse. Wait until the End of Oil, when the ability to endlessly steal our children’s legacy of resources runs out and industrial and agricultural production grinds to a halt. Wait until the Mideast suddenly has no revenue to provide even the necessities of life to its quarter of a billion people living on devastated land that can, without oil, support no one. Wait until China runs out of food (its breadbasket is rapidly turning to desert) and water (its water table is dropping by eight feet a year and most of its ‘fresh’ water is poisoned by chemicals, fertilizers and waste), and a bankrupt US can no longer afford to buy its pathetic products. Wait until its one and a half billion people, with nuclear and biological weapons, become as desperate as Germany was in the 1930s. Ladies and gentlemen, you thought the 20th century was bad for mass atrocities, you ain’t seen nothing yet. |
January 19, 2006
Customer-Driven Innovation for Public Sector Organizations
 Last Sunday I presented my Innovation Opportunities Map, and described the process we have recently been using with an entrepreneurial client using this map to help them become a much more innovative company. Several readers have asked me how this process would change if the client were a Public Sector Organization (PSO) — either a governmental or non-governmental not-for-profit organization focused on the provision of public services (education, health care, social services, advocacy etc.). I’ve given this some thought, and I came up with a revised Innovation Opportunities Map for PSOs, above. The principal differences between this map and the one for private sector companies are:
While the mega-processes and innovation opportunities for PSOs are slightly different from those of for-profit companies, the process I would use to help a PSO assess these opportunities would be essentially the same that we have used with our private sector entrepreneur:
My partners and I would, of course, be pleased to help facilitate your organization, for-profit or not, through this process, or, if you’re a consultant yourself, co-facilitate the process with you for your client. If your client is still skeptical, buy them a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy or The Innovator’s Solution and let them read for themselves about the power of innovation, and why so many organizations just aren’t able to generate significant innovation without outside help. |
January 18, 2006
Who Needs Your Gift Now?
 (I’ve had a recurrence of last fall’s back injury, and sitting at the computer brings on spasms — perhaps it is telling me something? — so until that improves this blog’s articles are likely to be short, and hopefully sweet. — Dave)
Two great inspirations in my life recently, Dick Richards’ book Is Your Genius at Work? and David Smith’s book To Be Of Use, have produced a third inspiration that lies at the intersection of Dick’s idea of finding your genius, your specific gift, and Dave’s idea of finding meaning in your work through service to others in need. The inspiration is a simple question: Who Needs Your Gift Now?
Perhaps this is a simpler and more elegant way of suggesting we each need to find or create the job where What We Do Well, What is Needed and What We Love Doing overlap. This, however, would seem to downplay the idea of Following Your Passion, which many self-help books recommend. Or does it? Is it really unduly idealistic or spiritualistic to think that your gift is more than likely to have emerged, presented itself to you, or evolved with activities that you enjoy, in such a way that this gift is also something you love doing? It seems to me more likely that you wouldn’t yet have discovered, even well on in your life, what your genius or passion or purpose is (because the opportunity to discover them has never arisen — most of us live in affluent nations live remarkably narrow, sheltered lives), than that your genius and your passion lie in significantly different directions. So rather than starting by searching for or creating that perfect job, that fulfills our passion the way the one we are doing now can never hope to do, perhaps we should instead set ourselves the simpler task of asking ourselves the question Who Needs Our Gift Now?, and then follow where the answer to that question takes us. |
January 17, 2006
The Economics of Communication and Effective Learning
| A couple of years ago I introduced a ‘decision tree’ on which communications medium to use for which purposes. Since then I’ve concluded that the decision is more complex, and more often than not involves some cost-benefit trade-offs. Also, I recently had a discussion with my Toronto KM “Breakfast at Flo’s” group on structured versus unstructured information and on the challenges of indexing and searching non-textual information.
We talked about a wide variety of different formats for communications, in written, audio, video and live media. The following table is my interpretation of the consensus that emerged. The cost and impact/value of each format is subjective, and relative — feel free to copy and edit the table if you don’t agree. Those formats that we seem to find have the highest value are shaded in light green: The value of books is supported by the fact that, with all the information available on-line, we’re still prepared to pay real money for them. The impact of photos, charts and similar visualizations compared to straight text is indisputable. Structured information, in the form of policy manuals and standard operating procedures, catalogues, directories, tables (like the one below) and spreadsheets must be valuable or businesses wouldn’t spend so much time producing and maintaining them. Conversations, dramatizations and stories in all media have been preferred modes of communications since before the dawn of civilization. And live demos and on-the-job training (“don’t tell me, show me”) are our preferred means of learning. The formats that seem to provide impact or value disproportional to their cost are highlighted in the rightmost ‘cost/benefit’ column in dark green: E-mail, photographs and charts, live and recorded conversations and stories are overwhelmingly the way in which knowledge is transferred from person to person in business and society as a whole, because their value is so compelling. On the other hand, some formats whose cost is disproportional to their impact or value (highlighted in red in the rightmost column) are quickly falling from favour: newspaper articles and radio and TV news are losing audience to blogs, and business reports are losing prevalence, being replaced by interactive oral presentations incorporating single frames and other visualizations. And lectures and bums-on-chairs powerpoint presentations are losing favour to more interactive, participatory, experiential forms of learning. Radio programs and even podcasts are valuable principally because of their convenience to those on-the-go — otherwise an audio recording of someone talking has little to recommend it over an online text transcription of the recording, which is easier and faster to browse and more suitable for search engines to spider. I understand that there are now voice-recognition software ‘bots’ that can ‘read’ and full-text index audio and video recordings with over 80% accuracy. But the indexing challenges remain: how do you put ‘placeholders’ in multimedia streams so that readers can hear/view only the section with the search keywords, in such a way that the context of the surrounding discussion isn’t entirely lost? And what do you do when the real value of the audio or video isn’t in the words themselves, but in the interaction, the images, the media integration itself? As bandwidth cost approaches zero, how much longer will we be satisfied essentially limiting our searches to the written word?
My take-away from all this is these five Principles of Human Learning Preferences:
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January 16, 2006
This Blog’s Readers May Be Liberal But Their Forecasts Are Conservative
 A total of 25 responses were received by the deadline last Friday to my challenge to predict what will happen in 2006. There were only 8 responses to the supplementary questions about Canada, open only to Canadians.
Here are the questions and, in bold, the median answers of respondents. In cases where answers are not numeric, the most popular answer is noted in bold. US and World Events:
Canadian Events: (Canadian respondents only)
The overwhelming sense one gets from these answers is that most people think 2006 will be very much like 2005, with a continuation or a slight slowing of last year’s trends. I had not promised to offer a prize for the most accurate predictor unless I got 50 responses, but I will offer a prize, in January next year, to the person who had the most correct answers to the US and World Events questions. There weren’t enough responses to the Canadian Events questions to offer a prize in that category. The responses from Canadians mostly came after polls showed a surge in Conservative support, so I am surprised these responses still forecast a Liberal minority government. I hope they’re right. A projection of latest poll results suggests the Conservatives will get thirty seats more than our predictors forecast, almost enough for a majority, but still dependent on the separatist Bloc to stay in power. Since I’m not eligible to win, I’ll go on record here with my predictions, as of the day I posted the poll (if you asked me again today I’d reverse my answers to Canadian questions 1. & 2.): US & World Events: 1. (b) 950; 2. (c) 1950; 3. (b) decline of 10%; 4. (d) $9.1 trillion; 5. (e) $920 billion; 6. (e) 9.25%; 7. (d) 5.25%; 8. (b) 92; 9. (b) 50; 10. (a); 11. (b); 12. (b); 13. (d); 14. (b); 15. (b) Pakistan; 16. (b); 17. (d) $78; 18. (a) CIA will overthrow Chavez; 19 (a); 20 (b). Canadian Events: 1. (e) 116; 2. (c) 108; 3. (c) 18; 4. (c) 66; 5. (a); 6. (d); 7. (b); 8. (b); 9. (c); 10. (d) 90 cents; 11. (c); 12. (b) 9500. From time to time during the year I’ll report on how ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is faring, and how my guesses stack up by comparison. |
January 15, 2006
More on Customer-Driven Innovation
 Last month I introduced the Innovation Opportunities Map, an improved version of which is shown above. We have recently been working with an entrepreneurial client using this approach to innovation, drawing on Clay Christensen’s work and also on the ideas in Blue Ocean Strategy. We are now on to the next stage of this project, and it’s turning into quite an interesting story. Our client is quite adamant that the innovations they seek to implement must be highly visible to their customers, so we have been focusing attention on the R&D, Sales & Marketing, Customer Relationship, Product/Service Delivery and Life-Cycle Management megaprocesses shown on the above chart — the five megaprocesses most directly visible to customers. In order to enhance our client’s (and our) understanding of customers’ needs and wants, we have used cultural anthropology extensively on this assignment, and our client is quite delighted with the value of having a cross-sectional team of its people systematically visiting customers, observing the use of their products, and interviewing customers about their perceptions, ideas, needs and wants. The outcome of these ‘visits’, aside from a much better understanding of their customers’ businesses, and of the joys and frustrations customers experience using our client’s (and their competitors’) products, has been a large database of Learnings and Ideas. To oversimplify a bit, here is the process they have employed to date:
The next two steps, now in progress, are:
Our client has distilled hundreds of Learnings and Ideas down into about three dozen Innovation Opportunities, and has now begun aggregating these into Innovative Offerings using the following six-part template:
The Innovation Team is now beginning the process of debating the pros and cons of the different Innovative Offerings the team members have come up with. The plan is that those Offerings that they consider most promising (using the set of criteria established in step 1) will then be evaluated by senior management to evaluate their feasibility, strategic fit etc., and will then be tested using small-scale experiments with selected customers. Only once the Offerings have passed all these hurdles will they be implemented full-scale. Some of the Offerings the team has come up with are quite awesome. They show the power of combining a deep knowledge of customer needs, ‘space’ for creativity and observation, a disciplined assessment process and the ‘wisdom of crowds’. We may just be on to the perfect recipe for entrepreneurial innovation. Stay tuned! |
January 14, 2006
Links for the Week – Jan.14/06
 A long list this week, on four subjects, so I’ll try to keep the natter short: Poverty Photoblogger Opens the Lens on Tajikistan: A remarkable blog, Tajikistan Travels, presents an astonishing portrayal of life in the destitute former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Author Steven Buckley writes the following to accompany the photo above: Nikolai Valentinov, 70 was in World War 2 and was employed on the Chernobyl clean-up operation. He now lives here with his wife Lapina. Due to severe cataracts he is virtually blind and is unable to claim the meagre pension (US$7 a month) to which he is entitled as his documents were stolen. Due to various factors and inability of the state to intervene, they live in a situation of downward spiralling poverty.
Poverty News in One Place: A new blog focuses exclusively on news about the endless war on poverty. The Environment Just Too Many People: British scientist Chris Rapley confirms that our planet can only sustainably support a third of the current population, and that attempts to reduce ecological footprint and impact without reducing human population are futile. Time-Series Views of North America From the Ice Age: I mentioned Pollen Viewer earlier this week. If you didn’t look at it then, check it out now, and realize how fragile our climate really is and how the ‘native’ trees of each area have changed so dramatically over the last 21,000 years. Referenced in this week’s New Yorker as well. Remarkable. Watch how Florida has shrunk as the ice melted and water levels rose, and as its climate has changed from temperate (like that of Maine today) to sub-tropical. Fine Tune Your Boycott List: IdealsWork rates companies that make consumer products on their social and environmental responsibility scores. Quite similar to Responsible Shopper, but using more detailed rating criteria. Two important caveats: There is no detail explaining the one-sun (poor) to five-sun (good) scores, as there is with Responsible Shopper. And look deeper than the misleading overall scores: IdealsWork ‘streteches’ the differences between companies so that in any comparison, the best company gets an overall five-suns and the worse one-sun. This leads to absurd conclusions like in garden supplies Monsanto, with mostly one-sun ratings, getting an overall four-suns because its competitors in that consumer products category are mostly worse. Koch Industries Gets Even Worse: The huge, private, secretive, Bush-loving, environment-destroying conglomerate called Koch Industries just got even bigger and more dangerous by buying (for a mere $21B) Georgia-Pacific. You’ve probably never heard of them, which is how they like it, but as eco-destroyers they rank up there with ExxonMobil and Monsanto. No Cat and Dog Fur: Heather Mills McCartney (yes, that McCartney), long-time champion of a global ban on landmines, is now working to get companies and countries to stop doing business with those (mostly in China) who use cat and dog fur in their products. Don’t visit this site if you’re squeamish. Building Local Communities: A group in Nevada is using the Web to raise local consciousness about the value of community involvement, social and environmental responsibility, and buying local. In Praise of Savages: A hilarious tongue-in-cheek column by Fred speculates on why we use the term ‘savages’ disparagingly. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. The Dickcissel Shows How Agriculture Changes Everything: A recent BBC documentary on birds showed the migration of the dickcissel, of which about 10 million remain, and which relies on air current updrafts, found over land masses only, for its long annual voyage. As a result, flocks of as many as a million birds can be seen over Panama during migration. At one time they went all over South America. But since the introduction of grains and sugar crops in Venezuela, they now cut short their trip and winter instead in massive numbers in small areas of that country, destroying the crops and inciting farmers to spray roosts of up to three million birds with toxic poisons. And a Climate-Change Fungus is Killing Frogs: A fungus highly sensitive to climate change is exploding, and wiping out whole species of frogs in Central and South America in the process. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.
The Arts The Activist Art of Mary Mattingly: Artist Mary Mattingly’s work shows us a different way to see the world, and some possibilities to make it better. The photo above is from her amazing collection New Breeds. The Poetry of Patrick Lane: Canadian poet Patrick Lane has written a wonderful new work about Christmas. Blogging See Your Blog as a Mac User Does: iCapture allows Windows users to see screenshots of how their blog looks to those using the Mac’s Safari browser. Dave’s Colossal Ego: Confirming my critics’ complaints, egoSurf confirms that I have one of the 50 largest egos online. Enter your name and your blog or website URL and see how you rank. Thanks, I think, to Dale Asberry for the link. Talk to Others Reading Your Blog: QuickChat is a new browser plug-in that allows you to see who else is on the same blog or website you’re reading, and chat with them in real time. Quotes for the Week: In disturbing medical news, a new study of 1,000 Americans finds that obesity in the United States has gotten so bad that there actually were, upon closer scrutiny, only 600 Americans involved in the study. – Dave Barry
All of us alive now are the most important human beings who have ever lived, because we’re determining the future, not just for a hundred years, but for a billion years. – Earth First’s Dave Foreman
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January 13, 2006
Think Twice Canadians: Harper Reasserts Plan to Renege on Kyoto and Sabotage Charter of Rights with Insidious Neocon ‘Property Rights’ Clause
 Stephen Harper, the Canadian Conservative leader soaring in the polls due to the staggering ineptness of his three progressive opponents, reasserted Thursday that he would renege on Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto Accord, which he says is ‘unworkable’. He also announced he would renege on aboriginal settlements and cancel child care funding put in place by the current Liberal administration. Even more frightening, he announced a new and sinister plan to entrench ‘property rights’ in the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms. The defence of ‘property rights’ has been successfully used by US corporatists to circumvent and block environmental laws, animal protection laws, logging regulations and other progressive legislation and regulations. Harper’s plan would put the right of property-owners to do whatever they want with their ‘property’ ahead of and out of reach of any legislation restricting such ‘rights’.
A new group of progressive and moderate organizations called Think Twice Canada is sufficiently alarmed about Harper’s policies that they have hastily convened a news conference today (Friday) to inform Canadians about the implications of the Harper platform, because they believe (and I agree) that neither the other parties nor the media is giving voters sufficient information on this matter. The media and the parties seem to have decided that the environment is not an issue in the campaign, and need not be covered in the news. The property rights issue appears too complex for the media to analyze — beyond covering the statements of the party leaders, there has been no discussion of it in any of the media, no editorials, no constitutional analysis. Think twice Canadians! We are this close to falling into the neocon hell that our American counterparts have been suffering under for five years, with policies ruinous to the environment, civil freedoms, the economy and the middle class. Like Harper is doing now, Bush in 2000 soft-pedaled his radical right-wing agenda under the guise of ‘compassionate conservatism’. Like Harper is doing now, Bush exploited a scandal by his political opponents to seize power without being honest about his real political intentions. Like Harper, Bush was heavily supported by Big Oil interests and extreme right-wing groups totally out of touch with, and disinterested in, the desires of the country’s citizens. On January 23, please make sure your vote counts. Don’t let this dangerous man take power in our country. |
