Saturday Links for the Week – June 2, 2007

What’s Important This Week:

Politics as Usual: A discouraging indication at how inept we are at change, as all the important news this week is about not learning from our mistakes:

• With wingnut Wolfowitz disgraced, the mainstream media have been falling all over themselves to applaud his Bush-appointed successor, who is, wait for it — another member of the Project for the New American Century extremist clique. 
• Meanwhile, as global warming starts an accelerated melt of the arctic permafrost, and Northern towns are wracked by crisis, guess what the government’s prepared to do to help these mini-New Orleans disaster areas? Uh, nothing. 
• And Bush has sabotaged the plans for discussing modest global warming targets at the G8: “The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple ‘red lines’ in terms of what we simply cannot agree to”, a US spokesman said. I wonder which ‘we’ he’s talking about?
• And Bush is busy trying to bamboozle the dumb-ass governments of Canada and Mexico into ‘deep integration’ with the US (which basically entails a full political takeover to go along with the economic one, with nothing in return for Canada and Mexico). “The Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America demonstrates that [the NAFTA] model of economic integration has taken on a momentum of its own, unaccountable to legislatures and citizens, and driven by interests that do not represent the public good. Citizens and their representatives need to mount a concerted effort to re-examine these policies, to bring them to light, and to halt movement forward until a strong and informed consensus exists on their value to society.” Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
• And in Canada a systematic disinformation campaign has misled an astonishing 80% of Canadians to think what we’re doing in Afghanistan is peace-keeping, “a vital humanitarian mission”, as Canada’s global reputation tanks and we are more and more (justifiably) branded lackeys of the US neocons (thanks to Rajiv Bhushan for the link)..

Plus Áa change…

Thoughts for the Week, from two gentlemen and working partners decades ahead of themselves; read their thoughts carefully, because these ideas are unintuitive but profoundly important:

“Seek visions, not solutions” – Humberto Maturana (via Andrew Campbell)

“We are loving animals that cultivate aggression in a cultural alienation that may eventually change our biology… we are not yet robots”  – Humberto Maturana (via Hugo Urrestarazu, from Sol)

“Just as conventional biology understood the nervous system as an information-processing system, classic immunology understands immunology in military terms — as a defense system against invaders. I’ve been developing a different view of immunology — namely, that the immune system has its own closure, its own network quality. The emergent identity of this system is the identity of your body, which is not a defensive identity. This is a positive statement, not a negative one, and it changes everything in immunology. In presenting immunology in these terms, I’m creating a conceptual scaffolding. We have to go beyond an information-processing model, in which incoming information is acted upon by the system. The immune system is not spatially fixed, it’s best understood as an emergent network.” – Francesco Varela (via Andrew Campbell, from Edge)