Saturday Links of the Week – June 16, 2007

Posted on June 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard
China slaves
From Agence France-Presse. Some of the slaves freed from years of forced labour in a brickworks owned by a senior Chinese government official

What’s Important This Week:

Yet More Chinese Atrocities: This week brings news of widespread forced slavery in China’s construction trades, mines, and even Olympic trinkets manufacturing. The victims include young children, and are mostly peasants — the poor, powerless and dispossessed. What is surprising is that anyone is surprised, and that we’re buying the Chinese government line that this is just an isolated problem. This, after all, is the country that systematically chains unwanted girl babies in orphanages to their high chairs. This is the country that knowingly poisons its own people, and the world’s, for profit, and kills, tortures and ‘disappears’ anyone who dares to question authority. This is the country that shows the true face of untrammeled corporatism and what the desperation of poverty, resource exhaustion and horrific overpopulation inevitably leads to. And this is the country upon whose ‘economic miracle’ the US economy, and hence the global economy, now depends utterly. Yet our governments and corporations continue to turn away from the truth, and our citizens blithely go on buying their tainted crap and planning to spend their Olympic dollars propping up this nightmare. We will not be able to tell our grandchildren we were not warned. [Thanks to prad for the Olympics link.]

What Would You Like the Inflation Rate to Be: In a masterful con job, US government economists averaged two numbers — huge price increases for food, energy and other consumer staples, and prices in a collapsing housing market that are causing record mortgage defaults, foreclosures and lender bankruptcies — and concluded that, on net, inflation was ‘under control’. Investors cheered and ran up the overpriced stock market even more. How dumb can we get?

Fixing Beach Erosion By Dumping Military Ordnance: While the loss of natural barriers against erosion by the sea, and the rising water levels due to global warming, have made the world’s oceanfront properties hugely vulnerable, the short-range thinking of the US Army Corps of Engineers (the clowns that brought us the Katrina disaster) is to uselessly dump offshore sediment back on the shore — including unexploded World War Two ordnance.

AT&T Elects to Become Digital Rights Watchdog – With Your Files: Consummate corporatist AT&T is working with the paranoid, greedy entertainment industry to intercept all data flowing through its vast networks and block, rightly or wrongly, anything that is copyrighted. Big Brother is watching. David Weinberger says it isn’t right, and it isn’t.

Global Warming, Not Seals or Fishing, Blamed for East Coast Cod Exhaustion: A new Fisheries Society study suggests that environmentalists blaming overfishing, and fishermen blaming seals, for the exhaustion of the Atlantic cod stocks are both wrong. The real culprit is minor changes in ocean temperature, and the resultant major ripple effects on the entire complex ocean ecosystem. We will, alas, never understand what’s happening in complex social and ecological systems until it is too late.

Running Out of Oil Faster Than Expected — And Critical Metals Too: New scientific research reported in the Independent and Business Week suggests that the production fall-off will be sharper than even Peak Oil experts have predicted, because producers and governments are obfuscating the data to prevent panic price run-ups. And the rare metals needed to make PCs and other electronic components and equipment are also running out. Thanks to Charles Hall for the links.

The Future Garbage Crisis Hits Home in Naples: Cities with daily mountains of unrecycled garbage have always had poor rural counties, disenfranchised urban slums, and desperate struggling nations to take their garbage. Naples is showing what can happen when those cheap dumpsites aren’t available anymore. Thanks to Chris Brainerd for the link.

Ideas for the Week:

A magnificent animated short film about origami is really about how we try to address complex problems (“complex” = with interweaves) with complicated solutions (“complicated” = with folds). Enjoy. Thanks to Sven Cahling for the link.

The value of local experiments: Canadian Jason Diceman explains at the grassroots level what Chavez is trying to do to reform the political and economic system in Venezuela, from the bottom up. Obviously inspired by the Cuban experiments of Castro, and likely to be subverted when the CIA assassinates or overthows Chavez, these are important experiments for those thinking ahead to the world post-civilization.

Just for fun department: My daughter sent me this, which has been floating around the Internet:

How To Properly Place New Employees:
  1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.
  2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.
  3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.
  4. Then analyze the situation:
  • If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
  • If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.
  • If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
  • If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
  • If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
  • If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
  • If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.
  • If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.
  • If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
  • If they have already left for the day, put them in Marketing.
  • If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.
  • If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Senior Management.
  • Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that theycan neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Government.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 1 Comment

Vignette #3: Unspoken

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Dave Pollard
raucous & stripe
Neighbourhood blue jays Raucous & Stripe, whom I wrote about here.
Whenever I’m in a restaurant or other public space, I study facial expressions. It’s an astonishing experience. You quickly learn why it is that dogs and cats scan our faces constantly for clues to what we mean, and largely ignore the incoherent gibberish of what we say. Not only are faces able to express an amazing breadth and nuance of emotion and intellectual information, they do so very quickly. Blink, and you’ll miss it.
 
Yesterday morning I arrived for my meeting thirty minutes early, so I stopped in down the street at a sidewalk cafe, grabbed a tea and a muffin, and sat down at a table outside where I could watch the people going by. I started watching body language, especially when two people would approach each other — either intentionally (where observing the different body and facial signals of the two people, and how they often contradicted what was said orally, was so funny I could not help laughing), or unintentionally (where one of the two strangers would have to make way for the other, and a kind of unspoken power game was played to determine which, also hilarious to observe). 
 
When the caffeine from the tea kicked in, I moved my attention up to faces. This can be tricky, because if a stranger catches you looking briefly but purposefully at their face, some socially-programmed autonomous behaviour takes over. First, they will (nine times out of ten) avert their gaze so you cannot continue to do so, or at least so they can justifiably claim not to be aware of you observing them. I would guess this to be necessary behaviour for any species in a horrifically overcrowded environment. In many animals a direct stare is an aggressive act, and glancing away is a simple deferral (“I don’t want to fight”). Animals that do not know each other have a neutral approach etiquette: they approach at an angle, looking sidelong at each other, and then circling until, from olfactory and pheromonal clues, they convey (usually) a simple curiosity to be social with each other. There is usually a tacit signal of authority communicated (“Yes I see this is your home, and I’m just a visitor — hello”). If it’s miscommunicated, or the animal is improperly socialized, it could lead to a more obvious display of dominance and acknowledgement of submission, or even a scuffle.
 
We humans have unlearned to pick up on these signals, and we don’t have the time or inclination to acknowledge and greet, even briefly, every stranger we meet in our congested world. But our bodies and faces don’t unlearn behaviours as quickly as our brains do, so the result is a comical and perplexing mix of modern social/cultural signals and primeval instinctive ones. Two languages ‘we’ speak, with the part of us that speaks each unable to decipher or comprehend the other. No wonder our companion animals find us to hard to figure out.
 
Sometimes, when you’re caught looking, the object of your attention will not look away. You may get a glare (dilated pupils, raised eyebrows), whose meaning is aggressive and clear: “Stop looking at me”. This can be directed at you, or, more slyly, just away from you, sending the message that, not only is your stare unappreciated, it is not even worthy of a direct response (“I’m too busy to stare you down, but you catch my drift”). It can also be an ambiguous move (“I think I mean to put down your stare, but correct me if I know you or if for some other reason that behaviour is inappropriate”). You may get a more coy response — a quick glance down (for propriety’s sake) and then a look back at you, perhaps repeated several times. Then it’s back to you, to assess or explore whether that’s a flirtation, or an expression of shyness (“please don’t be mad at me, but your stare makes me uncomfortable”). Despite our modern ineptness at making these signals, and the complication of social and cultural norms and alternate spoken language signals, it doesn’t take much observation to re-learn exactly what nuance is intended. And all of this communication occurs in a fraction of a second, faster than you could utter two words — and it’s much more precise.
 
One of my favourite exercises is looking and smiling at people who are within eyeshot but safely inaccessible — e.g. people who are on a bus I am walking beside, or who are in the subway car beside mine, moving in the opposite direction. This ‘safety valve’ significantly changes the dynamic of the communication. Now people will look back more directly, and convey their response to your look more honestly. You are far more likely in this situation to get a smile back (or a scowl) in response. And if you then wink at them (still smiling, pleasantly), just as the vehicle moves away, you are likely to get a look of surprise and, quite often, delight.
 
As I was people-watching and thinking about this, a sparrow hopped up onto my table, about arms’ length away from me and my muffin. He looked at me, head cocked (like the blue jay, Raucous, pictured above), and then back at the muffin, and then back at me. There was no misinterpreting his meaning, and I knew he knew my response before my hand moved and before I said “hello there”. He knew this, I am sure, just from reading my facial expression. I tore a piece off the muffin and put it on the ground beside my table (somehow, I knew not to try to offer it directly). The sparrow hopped down, took a first bite, and then, deliberately, kicked the rest under the table, where it could be nibbled without fear of being trampled by half-awake cafe patrons walking between the tables. He came back half a dozen times for the rest, and twice en route had to practice a deft and spare little dance among the tables to avoid being stepped on. When he’d finished, he’d already confirmed that there were no other morsels available (only coffee drinkers at the other tables) and flew off to his next (probably already scouted) destination.
 
A moment later I looked up again and there was a young woman standing at the curb looking at me. I did the glance-down, glance-up thing, and she was still looking at me, with her head cocked exactly the way the sparrow’s was. And then with a kind of half-smile she put her index finger, which was pointed upwards, to her pursed lips, and opened her lips very slightly, and then turned and walked away.

Category: Short Stories
Posted in Creative Works | 6 Comments

Measures That Matter and The Misguided ‘Productivity’ Scorecard

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard

How to Save the World 3
A new report by the Conference Board of Canada laments the country’s lagging productivity, measured by factors such as business and technology literacy, innovation and investment in R&D. To this extent they have a point. However, their prescription for improving the situation is mostly the same tired, discredited and decidedly un-innovative ‘globalization’ techniques:

  • cutting costs to be ‘competitive’ with wage-slave countries, 
  • attracting more foreign investment (read: takeovers), 
  • investing in ‘commercialization’ instead of imagination and creativity (not sure what we would then have to commercialize),
  • writing more scientific articles and registering more patents, 
  • tax cuts for corporations and rich investors (we all know how well this has worked in the US), and 
  • deregulation (so we can have more Enrons, WorldComs, Arthur Andersens, and then knee-jerk Sarbanes-Oxleys when corporate crimes rise in response). 

With ‘ideas’ like this — I’ve debated often with those at the Conference Board, and they’re sloggers, mostly competent but short on imagination and critical thinking — it’s not surprising that we rank low in innovation.

So what should Canada do?

Well, for a start, we should change how we define and measure ‘productivity’. As I’ve explained before, corporatists have (for self-serving reasons) got economists, the media and others (including, alas, the Conference Board) equating productivity with corporate profit margins, or, as they put it, the amount of ‘output’ (revenue) per unit of ‘input’ (salaries and other costs).

By this measure, Canada’s ‘productivity’ is lower that in the US for two important sociological reasons: We work significantly fewer average hours per week, and our participation rate (notably the number of two-income families) is significantly lower. Is this something we should define as a problem? Only, I would suggest, if you’re a corporate shareholder, trying to squeeze more work out of more workers for lower wages.

Take these factors out of the equation, and our ‘productivity’ is directly comparable to that of the US. And this is despite the fact that the 70% of larger Canadian companies that are owned by foreigners invest an average of one third less in infrastructure and R&D in their Canadian subsidiaries than they do in comparable-sized domestic operations. Go into most Canadian ‘branch’ plants and warehouses of companies with US parents and you can see almost immediately how shabby they are. They get the cast-off systems, equipment and software of the foreign parent. They get antiquated, badly laid-out facilities. They get the management rejects from head office, people who frequently make colossally dumb decisions with zero knowledge of the Canadian marketplace.

What’s astonishing is that despite this, they consistently outperform the head office country’s plants in quality — Canadian auto plants, for example, are routinely rated among the best in the world.

I used to think that, for that and other reasons, we should prohibit foreign control over Canadian businesses, and ban foreign ownership of Canadian land and resources. I’m still not sure that wouldn’t be a good idea — it’s tough to make economic decisions in the best interest of Canadians when foreign-owned businesses dominate the Canadian economy (and campaign contributions to Canadian politicians).

But there’s a more effective approach that the Conference Board and other non-thinkers never seem to broach: Supporting Canadian entrepreneurship. Drucker realized that entrepreneurship is the principal driver of innovation, and that innovation (not profit margin) is the driver of real productivity. It’s all about meeting needs more effectively. It’s about making stuff that works, and is durable, not how cheap you can import throwaway crap. Canada has, by global standards, a reasonably entrepreneurial culture, but we’re losing the propaganda war to the corporatists who think cost reduction is more important than quality, sustainability, and enterprise.

Until we can change the language of ‘productivity’ to something that contributes to the well-being of Canadians instead of the size of corporate dividend cheques flowing quickly out of the country to foreign shareholders, the bozos in political office and the media will keep blathering on about this absurd ‘productivity’ and GDP bullshit, and not recognize the urgent need for (and huge potential ROI from) a major public investment in Canadian-owned enterprise. This investment should be focused on three things:

  1. Education: Not MBA courses that purport to teach ‘leadership’ and ‘strategic management’, but down-to-earth, hands-on,continuous education programs in how to research, establish and operate sustainable Canadian enterprises that meet real human needs, give Canadians meaningful work, allow us all to do what we do best, and bring an end to chronic underemployment.
  2. R&D and Infrastructure: Grants, plus tax incentives, specifically for research and for clean, sustainable facilities, equipment and technology, with a catch: the recipients must be 100% Canadian owned and managed, and cannot sell the fruits of this investment to foreign buyers (that’s in violation of the abominable NAFTA, but never mind).
  3. Environmental Sustainability: A major funding and legislative commitment now to create a healthy society and environment. The David Suzuki Foundation has written the blueprint:
    1. Generate genuine wealth: Expand the narrow goal of economic growth to the triple-net objective of genuine wealth and well-being (ecology, economy, and equity).
    2. Improve production eco-effectiveness: Increase the effectiveness of energy and resource use by a factor of four to 10 times.
    3. Shift to clean energy: Replace fossil fuels with clean, low-impact renewable sources of energy.
    4. Reduce waste and pollution: Move from a linear “throw-away” economy to a cyclical “cradle-to-cradle” economy.
    5. Protect and conserve water: Recognize and respect the value of water in our laws, policies, and actions.
    6. Produce healthy food: Ensure food is healthy, and produced in ways that do not compromise our land, water, or biodiversity.
    7. Conserve, protect and restore nature: Take effective steps to stop the decline of biodiversity and revive the health of ecosystems.
    8. Build sustainable cities: End urban sprawl in order to protect agricultural land and wild places, and improve our quality of life.
    9. Promote global sustainability: Increase affluent nations’ contribution to sustainable development in poor countries.
    10. Introduce fiscal reforms: Shift taxes to promote sustainable and to discourage unsustainable production and consumption, and eliminate perverse subsidies that enable unsustainable business practices to be hugely profitable and which discourage innovation and inhibit competition from small enterprises.
    11. Respect all life on Earth: Institute and change laws and regulations to respect all life on our planet as sacred, not treat it as mere human ‘property’.

A Canada that accomplishes the eleven objectives in this sustainability blueprint (Suzuki says it can be done in a generation) will be the envy of the world. How we would measure up by the corporatists’ yardstick of ‘productivity’ if we made all three of the investments above (financed substantially by a tax shift and a reduction in war and ‘defence’ spending) is hard to say. But no one will care, because we’ll be investing in Canadians’ well-being, instead of in a morally and creatively bankrupt and unsustainable economic system. We’re way overdue replacing ‘productivity’ and GDP with measures that matter.

Posted in How the World Really Works | 2 Comments

Slideshare

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
I‘m starting to upload my PowerPoint presentations from various conferences to Slideshare, “the YouTube for PowerPoint”. This site hosts presentations of up to 30MB free of charge, and handles .pdf files as well as .ppt’s. The on-screen display is not crisp, but you can download the presentations to your own machine, and the site also shows all the text from the presentation in a summary view below theslideshow. First up: my presentation Librarians as Knowledge Managers, which I gave last week at the SLA conference in Denver. As I add more you’ll find them here.

Thanks to all the organizers and participants at this remarkable annual event. Librarians are among my favourite people.
Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Christopher’s Story

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Christopher KeyChristopher Key is a former fellow Salon blogger, and a friend. He’s a Vietnam War vet and the descendant of F Scott Key, who wrote the US national anthem. He was so unhappy with Bush he announced plans in 2004 to move to Canada and renounce his US citizenship. This, of course, earned him a fair bit of notoriety. Then we stopped hearing from him, and his blog went silent, and e-mails to him went unanswered. And then about a month ago, he broke the long silence with this astonishing letter to his friends:

An apologia, if you will.  As you may remember, I was a bit of a media star back in 2004.  National media in both Canada and the US were holding a bit of a circle jerk over the patriotic American who was ready to become a traitor to his country. Or so it seemed. I should know better than to announce my plans in public. Every time Iíve ever done that, fate has pulled the rug from under me and I end up with egg on my face. So it was this time.

I was blithely pursuing my plans to flee to Canada when I came down with a mysterious staph infection. Ordinarily, that sort of thing happens when you have been operated on in hospital or have an open wound. I had neither. I woke up one morning with a stiff neck, did some stretching to get rid of it and gave it no more thought. But it kept getting worse. Eventually, I went to the ER three times in excruciating pain, but they could find nothing wrong. I went to chiropractors, acupuncturists and Reiki practitioners, but nothing touched my pain. I was beginning to lose function in my arms and hands and my beloved Reiko had to come down from Canada to help me dress and take a shower.

Meantime, I pretty well disappeared off the map. My application for Canadian citizenship went by the boards. The national publications from which I had only recently begun to receive regular assignments must have been puzzled at my disappearance. Not so puzzled that they bothered to pay me for outstanding invoices, however.

Finally, I managed to convince the medical establishment that there was something seriously wrong. The trouble was, it wasnít showing up on X-rays or MRIs. By that time, the staph infection had pretty well eaten up three of my vertebrae (C5 to T1 for those of you who are medically sophisticated). I was operated on by a neurosurgeon at the local hospital and placed in a ìhalo,î a brace that is actually screwed into your head. I donít remember much of this, but am reconstructing events from what I have been able to discover.

I suddenly took a turn for the worse and the local neurosurgeon realized he was in over his head. It was serious enough that I was helicoptered to Providence Hospital in Seattle, where a surgeon much higher on the medical food chain took over. I had three more operations, resulting in a bone fusion and a lot of titanium hardware being placed in my neck. There were serious doubts as to whether I would survive. If I did, the prevailing medical opinion was that I would never regain the use of my hands and arms due to the extensive neurological damage. Total hospital time: two months.

I learned a lot about the industrial medicine model during this time. Of course, I was on so many drugs that I canít really trust my memories. Most of the time, I was suffering from horrendous hallucinations and couldnít even find the call button that was pinned to my pajamas. I know that I was seriously mishandled several times resulting in unbelievable pain. Once, when I was screaming for relief, a nurse told me to quit whining. The doctor had been notified and would release pain meds in a couple of hours. Those were long hours, my friend.

Once I was on the road to recovery, they took a very cold approach toward pulling me off the heavy meds. They basically strapped me down in a room and let me go through withdrawal on my own. I was shaking uncontrollably, vomiting and nobody responded for hours. Eventually, they took me out of the room, complaining loudly about what a mess I had made.

Finally, I was released from the hospital to an extended care facility. Fortunately, one of my close friends is administrator of such a facility in Bellingham. She and my daughter, who has my power of attorney, made sure I ended up there. I am very blessed in that the care I received there was both professional and compassionate. When I arrived, I had very little movement in my left hand and arm and none in my right. The prognosis was that I would never get it back.

I wasnít having any of that and neither were my therapists. I spent four and a half months in rehab and my therapists insisted on calling me ìThe Miracle Man.î OK, I had a kick-ass attitude about coming back, but it was their skill and enthusiasm that did the trick. In short, I have recovered almost completely. After three months in an assisted living facility and enduring two very nasty neck braces, I am finally out on my own again and living independently.

The medical bills added up to well over half a million dollars. I had insurance, but it didnít pay for everything. My kids sold off everything I owned in order to pay the bills and I am having to start from scratch. No complaints. Iím just happy to be alive and able to play the old keyboard. Of course, Iíve had to battle the state over benefits because I had the nerve to look for work while I was still on disability. Iíve had to retain an attorney in order to keep the state from punishing me because I tried to get off the dole. Go figure. The state will spend more money trying to defend its ridiculous rules than it would if it had just settled out of court. So now I have to defend myself in a hearing over my benefits. If I had just sat on my ass and done nothing, I could have been on the dole until September.

And hereís the kicker. When I started looking for work, I applied for unemployment benefits so I could pay for my car insurance, gas, etc. Some upstanding citizen in the local DSHS office reported me to the unemployment authorities as being unable to work. This despite having been cleared by my neurosurgeon. Government is a wonderful thing. So now, I am having to retain an attorney to represent me at a hearing wherein DSHS will dispute my eligibility for benefits that I told the social worker I didnít need in the first place. And Iím being investigated by the unemployment authorities because someone at DSHS made a false accusation with no basis in truth.

Thatís all irrelevant, however. Itís a continuing miracle that I am able to wake up every morning, take a shower and dress myself without help. I start work tomorrow for a company that allows me to work from home and I have a comfortable apartment where I can live independently. That may seem like a small thing, but I have learned to celebrate the small victories. Like being able to work a keyboard again, or making a fist, or making chords on my guitar.

I have thought of you often during this long recovery and wanted to get back in touch. I have learned some very important lessons: never take your good health for granted, always live life in the moment and never announce your plans in public. Life, at least my life, doesnít work that way. Thanks for listening to this rambling screed and I would love to hear from you. I have no plans to resume blogging since I donít have the time or the energy, but I have been proved wrong too often to predict what might happen. Blessings upon you.

Christopher Key
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

What Will We Need After Civilization’s Gone?

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard
research gardenI‘ve received some interesting responses to my post yesterday wherein I said:
Paradoxically, the less faith I have in the established order and the ability of civilization’s well-intentioned systems to save us from ourselves, the more energized and exhilarated I become.
To which my fluwiki colleague lugon replied:
I’ve had that feeling. And even though I have never attended an Open Space gathering, I guess that’s the feeling people have in such meetings…Released from the bad, bad witch spoonfeeding us. Taller in a way. Note to self: What’s next?
He and David Parkinson and a couple of other readers refer to the feeling of freedom that comes from going into wilderness or otherwise finding yourself outside civilization’s influence, where things aren’t done for you, and where you have the self-confidence and ability to make your own decisions and be fully responsible for your own actions. YOYO (you’re on your own), he concludes. Perhaps a better acronym might be WOOO! ( we’re on our own).
 
The opposite of Learned Helplessness is self-sufficiency and the self-confidence it brings with it. Kal Joffres suggests that faith in something that imprisons you is what we call addiction. Like junkies, our deluded faiths (“I could quit anytime; it just helps me relax”) and our addictions, work together to lock us in — there’s no way out even if we wanted one, which we don’t. What we need is liberation from all five types of faith — economic (“the market will save us”), political (“the opposition party will fix it when they get in”), social (“a great movement of global consciousness is going to occur”), technological (“our ingenuity will save us”), and theological (“a higher being will save us”).
 
Lugon’s closing question “what’s next?” is the point many of us are at now. It’s all well and good to say (as I have) that we need to find people we would love to live with, and love to make a living with, and then establish with them experimental intentional communities that are self-sufficient, self-managed, ‘radically simple‘, and outside of and unaddicted to our unsustainable civilization. Most of us (including me, though I’m getting closer) are not yet ready for that. So, what’s next in the meantime? (Or, to use Getting Things Done jargon, what’s the “first, next action” that will set us on the road to where we want to get to, eventually)?
 
My sense is that it’s more self-change, oriented to prepare us for that bold and independent future. I’ve concluded that my next Let-Self-Change programs should be based on answers to the question: What will we need in the world after civilization?
 
I don’t think our generations (either Boomer or Gen X) will live long enough to see more than the beginning of civilization’s collapse, but answering this question now, and learning what we would need, could be both liberating (freeing us from the addiction to civilization even before we’re ready to walk away from it), and useful training for teaching our grandchildren, who will probably need answers to this question urgently.
 
Here are some of my “what will we need” answers, that are now directing my Let-Self-Change activities and learning:
  • Good food: Nutritious, unprocessed, unpoisoned, organic, balanced, and as much as possible native to the places we live or plan to live in. I’m reading up on native species and permaculture. My goal is to show my granddaughters how to plant a garden that is nutritious and needs no artificial chemicals or protection from the elements to thrive.
  • Durable clothing we can make and fix ourselves: I’d like to invent a computer peripheral that can sew, knit and embroider fabric to keyed-in specifications, that’s as easy to use as a printer. Perhaps we will ultimately need to re-learn to do these things by hand, but this is a step in the right direction, away from imported crap that has us dependent on oil, wage slavery and ‘free’ trade. We may also need to invent ‘wearable home‘ clothing that keeps us warm, or cool, in buildings that can no longer afford the wasteful luxury of heating and air conditioning thousands of cubic feet of leaky space.
  • Warmth and electricity: I’m learning that solar technology is jumping ahead of wind technology, and that the combination of the two, combined with geothermal, can make communities energy-independent at least at a radically simple lifestyle level.

  • Contraception: ‘Uncivilized’ women breastfed for four years, so they ‘naturally’ didn’t conceive again more often than that. We need something different, and the solutions developed so far are either too complicated or too dangerous.
  • Self-managed health: We cannot rely on staggeringly expensive, grossly overpriced drugs and health services from corrupt and inept oligopolies. We need to learn to diagnose and treat ourselves for most conditions (I plan to learn CPR, and basic first aid).
  • Self-powered transportation: Not just the venerable bicycle, but self-powered vehicles that can carry some cargo, and which work in cold weather.
  • Self-managed education: The model of massively-centralized education systems that employs people to stand up in front of bored classes and recite textbooks is hopelessly anachronistic. Community-based education, based on self-directed learning, will, thanks to ubiquitous technology and knowledge resources, not only be easy to introduce, it will be far more effective.
  • Self-managed recreation and entertainment: Jim Kunstler describes the business of Hollywood as “making violent masturbation fantasies for 14-year-olds”. The music oligopoly makes its money pimping nursery rhymes grunted by drug-addled gangsters. We shouldn’t have much trouble learning better, local, sustainable ways to amuse ourselves.

What else will we need? And while we may agree that these are skills we should learn (or re-learn), are we willing to pay people what it would cost (no massive subsidies as rewards for corporate political contributions for us) to show us how to do it, and/or to provide these things to us until we learn to be self-sufficient? These are the types of Natural Enterprise I’d like to create, but I’m not sure there is – yet – a large enough market for them to be viable, and I don’t want to sell only to the rich (and transporting elite goods all over the world kinda defeats the purpose,doesn’t it?)

What do you think? 

Categories: Let-Self-Change and Building a Community-Based Society
Posted in Collapse Watch | 7 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – June 10, 2007

Posted on June 10, 2007 by Dave Pollard
cassie gym
Our younger granddaughter, discovering her gift, her passion, and her purpose

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

What This Blog is About: This weblog began as my vehicle for thinking out loud. It has evolved in part into an expression of my gift and passion (imagining possibilities) and of my purpose (provoking what I have come to call Let-Self-Change, in myself and others). I have had the opportunity to discover that the five most popular reasons for believing our civilization can and will go on as it has are either propaganda or wishful thinking. So some of my recent provocations have focused on disenchanting readers of five persuasions who believe that some human or super-human force will save us from civilizational collapse in this century:

  • Economic salvationists who have faith in the ‘free’ market, and the responsiveness of our economy to the needs and demands of the planet’s citizens,
  • Political salvationists who have faith in the power of democracy, and the responsiveness of the political system to the needs and demands of the planet’s citizens,
  • Social salvationists who have faith in a great and spontaneous social movement of collective realization, understanding, raised consciousness and commensurate change,
  • Technological salvationists who have faith in the unlimited power of human ingenuity, expressed through innovation and technology, and
  • Religious salvationists who have faith we will be rescued, rapturously, by some higher power.

Those readers who no longer believe in any of these five miracles are searching, as I am, for another way forward. The best we have been able to come up with is a new self-managed society built on local, responsible, self-selected communities, living, and making a living, in natural (i.e. in balance with the rest of life on Earth), sustainable ways. It’s a very idealistic vision, one that will have to emerge right in the midst of our fragile, furious, exhausted civilization, based on many local experiments, evolving ‘working models’ that others can copy and adapt to their needs. These communities need to be autonomous and self-sufficient but also connected to learn from each other how to cope, together, with the crises that this century will present to us and the generations that follow.

One reader has called this “grasping at straws”. Perhaps it is, as the people who seem to be most knowledgeable about the state of the world and this community-based vision seem to believe efforts to realize that vision will be in vain, but are worth trying anyway. Our ‘success’ depends largely on recruiting more and more of those disenchanted with the five faiths above, and our ‘walking away together’ to improvise and emerge something completely different, a way of living and making a living that can work, at least for a few million years.

So upcoming articles will continue to provoke readers to let themselves change and learn and free themselves from the delusional faiths that are destroying our world, and to figure out, together, how to move forward.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #3 and #4.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog. I plan to post some monologues first, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium, and perhaps, if I can get a copy of the recording, a podcast of my presentation last week at the SLA in Denver.

Paradoxically, the less faith I have in the established order and the ability of civilization’s well-intentioned systems to save us from ourselves, the more energized and exhilarated I become. How’s your mood? Is the Bush regime’s intransigence, and the Democrats’ equivocation, getting you down? If you’re more upbeat, or more depressed, than you were a yearago, or ten years ago, why?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Saturday Links of the Week – June 9, 2007 – The ‘Danger, Will Robinson’ Edition

Posted on June 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard
live ink sampleWhat’s Important This Week

This week much of the news is about dangers, to our health, our economy, our political and social systems, and our well-being. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media (other than the NYT) are silent on these things, because they get a bigger audience when they cover spoiled celebrities. So here are a dozen things to worry about (as if you needed more):

  • Diseases: An exhaustive new study by the European Community Disease Centre pinpoints five major disease threats to human health in affluent nations. In order they are (the following excerpts are verbatim from the report):
    • Healthcare-associated infections. The most important disease threat is posed by the micro-organisms that have become resistant to antibiotics. Infections with such bacteria are a huge and rapidly growing problem.
    • HIV infection. Still underreported and underfunded, some 30% of those infected do not know they have HIV.
    • Pneumococcal infections, vaccine-preventable, with high death rates especially in young children and the elderly.
    • Influenza (pandemic potential as well as vaccine-preventable annual seasonal epidemics).
    • Tuberculosis continues to rise among vulnerable groups such as migrants and HIV-positive people. Cases of drug-resistant TB, which are very difficult or even impossible to treat, are increasing. (Thanks to my colleague Karen Hay for the link)
  • Collapse of the US Dollar: A new UN report says “In order for current world economic growth rates to continue, it is crucial to keep the United States dollar from falling rapidly while also avoiding a recession.” Thanks to Deconsumption Blog and Dale Asberry for the link.
  • Turkish Invasion of Kurdish Iraq: The Turkish government, worried about independence threats from its own Kurdish provinces, is threatening to invade Northern Iraq, home of the Kurdish state that is likely to result from the partitioning of Iraq once the civil war reaches full steam
  • Corrupt Doctors: Disgraced doctors disbarred from regular medical practice are getting paid by Big Pharma to push dangerous drugs on their unsuspecting patients.
  • DEET Poisoning: The only approved means of protecting us from West Nile carrying mosquitos is DEET. But DEET is a toxic poison with unknown long-term effects. The US NIH says “the most serious and devastating complication of large DEET poisonings is neurologic damage. Patients may have disorientation, clumsiness when walking, seizures, or coma. Death is possible in these cases. DEET is especially dangerous for small children. Seizures may occur in small children that are consistently exposed to DEET on their skin for long periods of time. Care should be taken to only apply lower concentrations of DEET to children for short periods of time.” If you’re slathering this on your body, is this risk commensurate with the risk of West Nile? If not, why do the regulatory authorities continue to pimp it to the public?
  • Real Estate Agents: A comprehensive comparison suggests not only does selling your home on your own save you a big commission, you get a higher price too.
  • US Consumer Spending Crunch: While housing prices are dropping and consumer credit is tightening, US consumer spending continues to grow, greatly outstripping disposable income, and putting citizens deeper and deeper in debt. It’s the only thing keeping the US economy from sliding into a severe recession and starting the dominos falling that will lead to global economic collapse. And it cannot continue much longer.
  • Technophilia: As I wrote about last week, belief that technology will get us out of the looming crises we are facing, or that it is somehow ‘neutral’, is a dangerous delusion; Ran Prieur explains. Thanks to David Emanuel for the link.

Ideas for the Week:

  • Radical Transparency for Corporations: Wired magazine makes the argument that corporations that are open and honest to a fault get reciprocal benefits from customers. I’m not sure shareholders are as appreciative, but given a choice of which to please, it would be nice to think corporations would cater to customers first. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.
  • Herbal Medicine Database: A smartly-designed site lets you see what plants treat each medical condition, and what each herb is good for (besides tasting good). Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link.
  • Reduce Your PC Consumption: A downloadable app can save significant amounts of energy on your machine. Try it, and don’t forget to turn off (not just standby) your PC every time you stop using it. Thanks to Criag De Ruisseau for the link.
  • The End of the Line for the Line of Type?: A fascinating study and new product suggests our reading comprehension could be dramatically increased by using technology to replace long lines of type with shorter, phrase-parsed text displays that more naturally match the way our eyes perceive and capture information. Seeillustration above (from Moby Dick) of a passage that, as this site shows, is much easier to grasp than the same content in linear form. Is this how we should be reading everything online? Thanks to the late great Innovation Weekly for the link.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Improv as Minimally-Structured Play

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Dave Pollard
chelsea snow play
Our beloved Chelsea, being an ‘only dog’, taught me to play. No language was needed. She would just put her front paws and her nose down, lift up her rear, and wag her tail, and that told us it was play time. The preferred game was ‘chase the dog’, wherein I would chase her all over the yard (or the house, including up and down stairs) until I was exhausted, at which point she would stop and wait for me to catch my breath. When I caught her, roughhousing ensued, including gentle play-biting and fierce tummy-rubbing, followed by more chasing. Occasionally I was allowed to be the pursued, and she would chase me, but only for a few seconds. She always initiated this play, and she taught me to get pretty good at it. Many variations were introduced over the years, usually by her. Frisbees were often involved.
Improvisation has been defined as “unrehearsed, synergetic social activity”. To me, it could equally be defined as “minimally structured play”. It involves simultaneously (or iteratively) and spontaneously teaching and learning, collaboratively, with others. It’s demanding work, and, if done properly, great fun. It is how most of us (could) learn best, ahead of reading or listening or even being shown.
It includes conversation, group stand-up (“who’s line is it anyway”), jazz improv , dancing, cooperative games (frisbee again), flirtation, play (with those who have not forgotten how), and perhaps even sex. There are no ‘rules’, although some standards may emerge over time by mutual agreement, but there are competencies, tactics and attributes to good improv.
The competencies include: active listening, paying full attention, inventing, self-expression, reacting quickly, remembering, teaching/helping quickly, learning quickly, letting go and letting come. There is a zen-like state that you can get into if you have, and practice using, these competencies: It’s a combination of extreme alertness and extreme relaxation. That’s only a paradox to the incompetent. Arguably, it is our natural state.
The tactics include building and drawing on others’ actions (“yes, and…” rather than “yes, but…”), exploring, reflecting, complementing, mimicking, and what someone has called “moving with and moving against”.
The attributes include intimacy, engagement, true ‘whole is more than the sum of the parts’ collaboration, and reciprocation.
The paradox of practicing improv is that, if done well, it can make you so good that you’re restless improvising with others who aren’t, yet, if done badly, it can make you worse, entrench habits that are hard to unlearn, and make improv so tedious that you give up on it entirely, so you get no practice at all. As a horrifically bad dancer who still loves to dance, I can attest to this personally. As the Phil Collins song goes: “I can’t dance, I can’t talk, only thing about me is the way I walk” — the confession of an incompetent improviser.
Some people think improvisational ability is instinctive, an inherent talent — you either have it or you never will. While good instincts are probably helpful, I don’t think they’re essential, and most improvisational actions are not instinctive — they are quickly but consciously thought, or perhaps more accurately felt. It is not anticipatory either — if you second-guess what the others in your improv group are going to do you will no longer be paying full attention, you’ll be caught if you guess wrong, and you risk becoming a boring (predictable or competitive) improviser.
I’m far from an expert at improv, but I’m starting to learn, slowly, what works. I think it’s mostly about getting yourself into the right space, and learning the above-mentioned competencies, and not trying too hard. Practice helps, but this is a natural process, and it’s not as important as being ready.
The most important part of getting yourself into the right space is self-awareness, self-confidence, self-comfort. Over the years I’ve delivered speeches and presentations (not an improvisational process, but hear me out) that have varied from word-perfect to full of hesitancies and blank-outs. Lately I’ve learned to pay attention to my state of mind (enthused, animated, and playful, versus full of dread, uninspired, and discouraged) and my state of body (relaxed, healthy, comfortable versus tense, pained, stressed). Those pre-existing states are expressed in, and determine, the quality of my presentations, far more than how well I know or have rehearsed the material. I’m sure the same is true of improv: being ready (i.e. in the right state) is more important than being practiced. Though to the casual observer, the improviser who’s in the right state looks to be doing it instinctively, and looks to be practiced.
My granddaughter does improvisational art. We work with a large (18″ x 24″) whiteboard and those dry-erase coloured markers. We just start drawing, anywhere, together. She responds to what, and how, and when, I draw, and the result is often remarkable, a collaborative work. Just like Chelsea, she teaches me to be better at improvisation.
Now you know all I know about this important subject. Tell me more. Yes, and…?
Category: Collaboration
Posted in Working Smarter | 5 Comments

The Immune ‘Setwork’: Our Body’s Other Brain, and What It’s Telling Us

Posted on June 6, 2007 by Dave Pollard
clonal selection from wikipediaMost of my readers know that, a year ago, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The disease has no known cause or cure, and flares up irregularly, usually provoked by stress. It is one of a large group of chronic diseases, including arthritis, diabetes, lupus, endometriosis, MS, chronic fatigue syndrome, asthma, allergies, and Crohn’s disease, all of which are manifested by recurrent hyperactivity of the immune system, usually producing cell or tissue death and related inflammation, as a ‘storm’ of cytokine messenger proteins urges the body’s T- and B- immune cells to run somewhat amok in an over-response or mis-response to a perceived threat. [Cytokine ‘storms’, interestingly, are also apparently produced by pandemic influenza (both human and poultry forms).]

The treatment for the symptoms of ulcerative colitis generally entails high doses of steroidal or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. More recent treatments include probiotics (live bacteria ingested to replace the deficient ones in the gut), prebiotics (oligosaccharide carbohydrates that encourage growth of gut bacteria a.k.a. ‘colonic flora’), omega-3 (inhibits the body’s production of leukotrienes and prostaglandins implicated in inflammation), and drugs that attempt, clumsily, to regulate the immune system’s (over-)response.

There is some compelling (but, alas, not irrefutable) evidence that this family of diseases, many of them nearing epidemic levels in affluent nations, are caused by chronic exposure to a combination of environmental toxins in our air, water, soil and food. The newest theory implicates the body’s reaction to oxidants contained in preservatives, oils, gasoline, plastics, cosmetics and a host of other man-made products and wastes. This ‘oxidative stress’ is exacerbated by strenuous exercise. This is paradoxic because exercise is the principal means by which sufferers of these diseases manage the emotional stress in their lives, and because these diseases are catalyzed ( i.e. flare-ups brought on) by chronic high levels of emotional stress.

Since our society is incapable and unwilling to deal with environmental toxins (part of what I ranted about in Monday’s post), sufferers must attempt to mitigate the stress in their lives, to reduce the need for their immune system to go into action (and hence, often, overreaction). Easier said than done.

My quote from Varela’s work in my post last Sunday has got me thinking about how the immune system ‘works’ and how it might be malfunctioning in the skyrocketing number of immune system hyperactivity disease sufferers. His point is that the immune ‘system’ is actually a combination of:

  • a relatively simple, mechanistic system (called clonal selection, illustrated at right, by which stem cells form into lymphocytes ready to respond to many types of antigens, and then, when they actually encounter antigens, neutralize them and clone themselves to be ready for reinfection by the same antigen), and
  • a more complex, dynamic network (a learning, evolving, self-regulating network with the intelligence to, as Varela puts it, “know and select what it should pay attention to”)
He calls this a ‘second generation network’, but there should be a name for a combination of a system and a network, integrated together. Since there isn’t one, I’m coining one: a setwork. This is what millions of years of evolution has produced in our bodies, and it makes sense for the same reasons that we have both a system that acts without thinking (instinct) and a network that learns what to pay attention to (intelligence) in our brains — our mental setwork. The two work better than either would work alone.

Now, as Stewart & Cohen explain in Figments of Reality, we are “a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures’ actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not ‘ours’.”

I think it is enormously helpful, in order to ‘get outside yourself’ and see the purpose of setworks, to appreciate that you’re not ‘you’, but merely a reflection of their (the organs in a bag of water that you call your body) evolving survival setworks.

If the purpose of these setworks (mental and immunological) is to protect ‘you’ (in the interests of ‘their’ survival) the next question is: from what? Valera’s and his colleagues’ answer would appear to be, ‘others’, ‘not-them’, based on an evolving collective understanding of who ‘they’ are. This is heavy stuff, but it follows logically from an understanding that setworks, by their nature, have intelligence, and therefore are capable of such understanding (recent studies suggest the immunological setwork is at least as intricate and complex as the mental one). That understanding of ‘other-ness’ informs them, as Varela says “what to pay attention to”. In a very real sense, then, our bodies, through the immunological setwork, have evolved a culture — a code of behaviours that are, and are not, acceptable, the contravention of which is dealt with harshly. This is a culture that we are not even conscious of (because consciousness is part of the other, mental setwork).

Darwinian principles would suggest that this body culture’s ‘reasoning’ (these are strange words to use in this context, eh?) is driven by interests of survival — if it weren’t, it wouldn’t have survived and we (and ‘they’) wouldn’t be around to debate the issue. So then we have to ask: Whose survival? Is it the survival of each individual organ (driven by selfishness), or the survival of the whole organism that is ‘their’ body (altruistic survival)? The answer to this, intuitively, is the same as it is in the culture we are more familiar with (our social culture) — there is a constant tension between both. The interests of both must be balanced, because they are co-dependent. When there is a strong conflict between these interests, it will ultimately be resolved in favour of the survival of the whole. I suspect that the immunological setwork has ‘learned’ and ‘knows’ this and acts accordingly (again, because if it didn’t we’d be extinct).

This got me thinking about Gaia (as organism of all-life-on-Earth). “Nature always bats last”, so just as in ‘our’ bodies, serious conflicts between the culture/interests of the whole organism and the culture/interests of its component ‘organs’ will ultimately be resolved in favour of the greater whole. Is Gaia, then, the immunological setwork of Earth?

So what happens when there is a breakdown in these self-regulatory setworks, when selfish behaviour of constituent organs overpowers the interests of the collective organism? We see this in cancers, in immune system failures, and (I would argue) in civilizations.

The answer to this is obvious and exciting: Such breakdowns are inherently self-defeating and unsustainable. They will ultimately fail. So why do they occur at all? Why after millions of years of painstaking evolution would these costly errors still occur? The answer: They occur deliberately. Setworks learn by trying lots of slightly different experiments to see what works a bit better, and what doesn’t work. This is what evolution is all about. Cancers, immune diseases and civilizations are all learning experiments reacting to stresses that must either be adapted to (if possible) or defeated (if not). What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

These diseases are our setworks’ fire drills, practices in seeing ‘what if’ the organism adapted this way, or this way, or maybe this way. The types of stresses our bodies are used to adapting to are things like being chased by cougars. We developed ‘fight or flight’ responses to such stresses because they worked. Those without them got eaten. Those with them survived and passed them on. Our bodies, I would suggest, are furiously trying things out to see what adaptation might cope with these new environmental stresses: the massive, ubiquitous antibiotics and industrial chemicals we ingest constantly. They’re trying to evolve our bodies so that, no matter how much of these poisons we ingest, our setworks will have a way of dealing with them that will keep the organism healthy.

The problem, of course, is timing. We had millions of years to learn to cope with the stresses of hungry predators (and we have adapted wonderfully to them). But we’ve only had a few hundred, at most a few thousand, years to learn to cope with the modern stresses. The cancers and immune diseases (and perhaps mental illnesses) we get are clearly not the best adaptations, though we won’t know whether they’re on the right track or not until we’ve had a few million years to let them, and other experiments, evolve. That is the natural pace of things. Unfortunately, we don’t have a few million years. These changes are happening way too fast. And when environmental changes occur faster than setworks’ ability to adapt to them, the result is called Extinction.

Perhaps Gaia will learn from the mistake of “letting the apes run the laboratory for awhile”. Perhaps the next evolution, after our extinction, will be a creature with a smaller brain, or at least without an opposable thumb, one that will evolve ‘culturally’ at a pace that its physical evolution can keep pace with. Almost assuredly, this next invention will have a much greater tolerance for chemicals and antibiotics than our maladjusted bodies. Perhaps, before we disappear, we will start to see some signs of what that next invention will be.

Or perhaps it’s already here, flying or buzzing around us, and we’re just too preoccupied with current stresses to recognize it.

Image: Clonal selection, the mechanistic, system component of immunity, from Wikipedia

Categories: Health, and Complexity
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments