Month: May 2007

The causes of our unhappiness
or
How we learned to stop having fun

the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about 400 years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.

makes the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrangements, which is all to the good. But it can also transform the individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else.

The notion of a self hidden behind one’s appearance and portable from one situation to another is usually attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be

Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles.

But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, “the obverse” of the new sense of personal autonomy is “isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it”.

It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self.

Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression – suicide – and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person – potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change”, both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it.

an edited extract from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich,

a person’s desperation for love can be picked up by others in as little as four minutes, an effect that is off-putting to potential dates who want to be made to feel special.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/05/downside-of-having-too-much-love.html

dating is more than either triumph or intimacy.
It is a solitary and modern substitute for dancing in the streets

The United Kingdom is proposing to create their first Constitution.

The first laws to restrain power and increase the authority of a population were

Before the 17th Century, the term farmer was seldom used for anyone working the land.

ancestry.com shows the history and origin to be the name of a tax collector – the word ‘farm’ derived from a ‘firm’ tax collector:

“The term denoted in the first instance a tax farmer, one who undertook the collection of taxes, revenues, paying a fixed (Latin firmus) sum for the proceeds. Old French ferm(i)er (Late Latin firmarius)”

As if to help reveal the point, Wiki states that a farmer follows a “way of life that has been the dominant occupation of human beings since the dawn of civilization.” If this means the dominant had something to do with taxes, you can say that again.

In the 15th century, the fellows looking after the crops held an important position in the nobleman’s property and would be known as a ‘yeoman’ – to attend to various tasks of the sovereign. Wiki shows that yeoman is an ancient word with its roots, no pun intended, in ‘district’ or ‘country’, hence the term, ‘countryman’ or ‘man-of-the-district’.

During the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, the 1890 American Journal of Economics records the first ‘factory’ was built for what we now call a farmer. These factory farms recently harvested, no pun intended, over 75 percent of the cash from our nation’s agriculture. Today, four companies produce 81 percent of cows, 73 percent of sheep, 60 percent of pigs, and 50 percent of chickens.

Finally, there’s another interesting link to influence over money and power found in the more modern phrase ‘to buy the farm‘.

Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage and then buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, the pilot pays for the farm.

It’s clear that the ‘farmer’ has managed to remain especially well connected to government since they’ve been able to convince even the recently deceased to buy their property. It’s clear that what we now call a farmer has been next to the money for a very long time. And next to power.

And today’s ‘farmer’ is moving closer to money and power. They’re growing, no pun intended, toward the lucrative and powerful energy business where they will supply not only our food, but fuel for our electricity, our heat and our transportation as well.

History shows us that the ‘farmer’ has been very shrewd. It’s important for us to recognize how close they’ve been to the money all along. We need to pay attention before we find ourselves crippled under a Corn Cartel.

Ninety percent of the people in Britain believe United States is “dominated by big business.”

Two-thirds said their overall opinion of the United States had worsened in recent years.

Nearly 75% said American society is class divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens anything approaching equality of opportunity.

The poll indicates that “there has probably never been a time when America was held in such low esteem…” July, 2006 at the IHT

Dalton Roberts writes of his mother.

One of the best gifts my mother ever gave me was silence at a time I fully expected a severe lecture. In recent years I think I have gained a little insight into why she held her peace.

From age 14 through 17 I was a terror. I managed to get permanently expelled from school and started sneaking around and drinking. It is hard enough for me to admit these sins of my youth so don’t expect me to tell the whole story of my wild and crazy days.

My first little puppy love was a rough one. I think puppy loves may hurt more than the adult ones because we are at an age of great trust and trying out new realities. We have not learned how to deal with severe emotional pain.

The object of my puppy love had a father who was extremely abusive and no boy was allowed to walk her home from school. I would walk her to a little patch of woods behind her house and steal a good kiss. One Friday she told me she loved me. I walked on air all the way home but my elation ended Monday when her girlfriend told me she had gotten married to a boy home on leave from the service. I guess the poor girl would have done almost anything to get away from that sadistic father.

For days it festered inside me and one night I went to a bootlegger’s shack and got a bottle of moonshine. It was probably made in an old car radiator. It made me so sick I wanted to die. I passed out walking up the sidewalk to our porch and must have been laid out there in the yard for an hour or two. Finally able to walk, I slipped inside quietly and went to bed in a tiny bedroom in the front of our house.

I got real nauseous and had to push out the screen in the window. The cool night air gave me some merciful relief and just as I was settling down to try to sleep, mother eased into the room. The conversation went something like this:

“My boy is drunk, aren’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’re real sick, too, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She went to the bathroom and brought a wet rag and towel, putting the rag on my throat and the towel around my head. Nothing in my entire life has felt better than that wet towel and washrag.

Satisfied I would survive, she kissed me on the forehead and went to bed without another word. The last thought I had before passing out again was, “Boy, I will get both barrels in the morning.”

When I made it to the breakfast table the next morning, no one was in the house but mother and me. She cooked me some toast and scrambled eggs and talked nonchalantly about the weather and birds while I waited for the hammer to come down.

Mother never mentioned the events of that night the rest of her life. It remains in my memory as one of the sweetest gifts she ever gave me. She probably thought I had suffered enough and she was definitely right about that.

I think she knew something had hurt me deeply for me to punish myself so severely. I didn’t unload the contents of my heart on her so she knew it was deeply personal. She could see I was unable to talk about it.

Recently someone sent me an email that said, “Best friends may tell you what to do because that’s what best friends do. Wise friends, however, wouldn’t dream of it. They understand that they will never know the secrets that stir in our hearts and the depth of pain we may be feeling.”

I am so grateful my mother was a wise friend.

Dalton Roberts, the downhome philosopher from downtown Watering Trough, Tennessee, writing in the Chattanooga Free Press. Here’s the link.

Little did John Muir know that he and his little dog Stickeen would share one of his most memorable wilderness experiences.

They were faced with a dilemma.

They could either spend the night without shelter on the glacier and try to find a new route in the morning – or attempt to cross that crevice.

Muir decided to cross.

“Finally he ordered Stickeen to come to him. And for once the dog obeyed. Stickeen inched down the icy steps, barely lifting his feet. He crept across the sliver of ice, somehow holding himself steady in the gusting wind.

“Muir reached down for the dog when Stickeen was just below him, but the dog didn’t wait for a lift. He eyed the notches cut in the wall and came up them in a rush. Stickeen flew past Muir and obviously forgot how tired and hungry he was.

For the next few minutes he could not be stopped as he leapt, ran, rolled, and somersaulted in joy.

Read “John Muir and his dog on an Alaskan adventure”

Humans and dogs may be together because they are the animals of endurance.

When I was young and living near the Cree, a native friend told me a story to define the relationship of humans and the dog.

A man can do many things for a very long time. A cat can run faster, but only for a short time. A buffalo is more fierce but only for a short time. A deer can leap higher but only for a short time. A dog is the only animal that will be with a man at the end of the trail.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature,
they find it attached to the rest of the world. – John Muir

The human body benefits from gratitude and generosity.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070503.wlkarma03/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. – Anna Sewell, author of the classic novel, Black Beauty (1877)

Up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced.

Spiegel Online reveals some of the intelligence money outside of government.

Contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence.

Former CIA chief George Tenet carried on a “deep involvement in the privatization of US intelligence.”

Among several firms, Tenet is now assisting L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation’s biggest player in biometric identification. L-1’s software can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers’ licenses and transportation worker ID cards.

The National Counterterrorism Center is staffed primarily by contractors.

Update:
Frontline at PBS examines how the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program works and the clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections.

Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans.

War is an inside thing “…as government and industry work together to fight terrorism”. We may find that any future peace will reveal that we live in a very different world.

Dr. Phil.
Once “a panacea to a troubled nation too disabused of religion to turn to the gods, yet searching enough to need a sermon on the Mount.”

Dr. Phil.
Once “the afternoon appointment with voyeurism you could feel good about.”

Dr. Phil.
Now “racists and counter-racists, fatists and fatties, homophobes and angry lesbians — up together in a temple of confrontational mental health.”

“And it’s not just the guests that have changed.

“It’s not that these people don’t require help, but the program seems much less about help and more about punishment.

“When did Phil earn the purchase on parading the wicked?

“He is supposedly the voice of middle class whiteys with a faith in science. But though I still fit that demographic, I no longer feel like he speaks for me. And it’s not me who’s changed.” [more]

Kentucky Fried Chicken threatened a lawsuit for trademark infringement against a traditional pub in England, and ordered landlady Tracy Daly to remove the ‘Family Feast’ slogan from her Christmas Day menu at the Tan Hill Inn, saying it infringed the company’s rights.

[story at the Metro.co.uk]

The pub has advertised its “Christmas Day Family Feast“.

The hearty meal starts with soup or Guinness and Stilton pate, followed by roast turkey with Yorkshire puddings, cranberry sauce and vegetables. Punters can choose between Christmas pudding and Strawberry Gateaux for dessert, with coffee or cheese and biscuits to finish.

“They are a multi-million-pound international organisation and I am just a little lady up a mountain.”

The Colonel seems to be bonkers!

The global news source The Telegraph has since reported:
“A spokesperson for KFC GB Ltd said this afternoon: “KFC has to protect its trademarks against those who seek to trade off its brand. KFC has spoken to Mrs. Daly at the Tan Hill Inn and confirmed that it will not take this case any further.

“This means that Mrs Daly can continue to use the phrase “family feast” on the pub’s Christmas menu. It’s an unusual situation that has been blown out of all proportion.”

Trade off its brand?

Why not trademark the term ‘Christmas Day’?

We grant greed too much.

Cold War files on East Germany spying on West Germany ended up in the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany has made strides in having them returned – some 16,250 sacks containing the shredded pieces of 45 million documents that were found and confiscated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989.

Communist East Germany’s international espionage network, the State Security Service known as Stasi, tendered spies that penetrated important positions around the world. Many believe that “The Stasi issue cannot simply be brushed aside as an East German problem, as people in the West tend to do.”

Attempting to blow the cover of former agents, informers and victims, work began on the paper fragments 12 years ago. In that time 24 people have only been able to reassemble the contents of 323 sacks. A narrative time frame can be found here.

After laborious reconstruction of the sacks of shreds using fingers and tape, it was discovered that Stasi agents were sitting “right up front” at the Olympics massacre in Munich in 1972 and had taken “needle-sharp photographs at close range” of the attack on Israel’s Olympic team.

The BBC’s Steve Rosenburg in Berlin has said it has been a desperately slow process which, according to some estimates, could take 600 years to complete.

The BBC report reveals that new computer software is being employed by Berlin’s Frauenhofer Institute to speed up the process.

German scientists now believe they can complete the puzzle in the space of a few years.

This story is sad.

Starving their child unintentionally by adhering to a strictly vegan diet, a vegan couple will serve life in prison.

The baby died six weeks after birth after being fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice.

Their lawyer said the couple did not realize the baby’s life was in danger until it was too late. Their lawyer also revealed the couple did not take their child to a doctor because they feared hospitals were full of germs.

A Georgia jury delivered a murder verdict.

“It takes money to prove this wasn’t a felony – money we don’t have.”

When you stand on your head, blood rushes in until you’re red in the face.

Then why is it that when you stand upright the blood doesn’t run into your feet?

A little boy nearby shouted, “‘Cause your feet aren’t empty.”

Investigating the starter diet for juvenile salmon and trout, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife discovered and confirmed that the Skretting Co. shipped melamine contaminated feed – labeled as Bio-Oregon Bio-Vita Starter – which has been used in the Willamette, Gnat Creek, Big Creek, Cole Rivers, Butte Falls and Leaburg fish hatcheries. Hatchery managers discontinued using any remaining fish feed from the lot in question and notified the FDA. [story]

When feed compounders discovered that raw materials were poisoned, did they seal and withdraw the shipments from the market?

Did feed producers stop distributing contaminated product?

Instead it seems that the contaminated raw material became a quick bargain for increased profit taking.

The FDA’s show of inability and its late, weak response to poisoned animal feed indicates that the fashion of reducing, eliminating or damaging government services leaves us at risk.

The ideology of the so-called ‘free market’ has exceeded common sense.

What’s an ideology?
A comprehensive set of political, economic, and social views or ideas, particularly concerned with the form and role of government. A relatively coherent system of values, beliefs, or ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted as natural or inherently true [link]. A philosophical stance, adopted by an individual, organization or country, which has direct implications on the way of doing business [link]. Literally the study of ideas, the collective knowledge, understandings, opinions, values, preconceptions, experiences and/or memories that informs a culture and its individual people [link].

Certified by the Guiness Book of World Records, the world’s tallest dog is Gibson, a Harlequin Great Dane.

When he stands on his hind legs, the 170-pound Dane is more than 7 feet tall, taller than most NBA basketball players.

Gibson has an overwhelming gentle spirit and unconditional love for all. He loves riding in the “GIB-Mobile”, a 1983 Oldsmobile that has the back seat taken out of it with a big soft bed in its place. [link]

Canis familiaris (the domestic dog) shows extreme diversity in body size, unlike other mammals.

Differences among dogs seems to be regulated by a single variant of one gene which small dogs possess and large dogs lack.

The National Human Genome Research Institute published its findings in the journal Science after having studied DNA samples of over 3,000 dogs and 143 breeds.

dogs in the news has a one page photo essay about the biggest dog, tallest dog, shortest dog & smallest dog in the world.

We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations.

We need a name for those who love people more than products…

We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet…

We need a name for those who collaborate…

Ivan Illich

A department store in England gave its 140 employees the news that they’re going to be out of a job in two weeks by pulling the fire alarm to clear the store of shoppers and to gather staff in one location — the point where they’re supposed to meet in case of fire. [Techdirt]

i used to feel like i was the pinacle of evolution, like all those poor schmucky forefathers of mine only existed to make me happen. today i just feel like a rung any evolved ape can step on during their climb up my dna. – Heather Smioly

It’s Love Canal all over again but the polluters are us.

For example, streams around Portland, Oregon carry the residue of the region’s medicine cabinets and coffee shops. The list of compounds includes Prozac, Tagamet, Benadryl, and Micatin, as well as caffeine.

Studies show fish reproduction is already being disrupted. Antibiotics and other substances could help bacteria and other organisms develop resistance to drugs and pesticides. Sewage plants cannot filter most complex chemicals. [story]

---

I looked up a previous post where the Washington Post published a 2006 story about the Bush administration working to broaden the government’s knowledge of illegal drug use by probing the mysteries of sewage.

Fairfax County agreed to participate in a White House pilot program to analyze wastewater from communities throughout the Potomac River Basin for the urinary byproducts of cocaine.

It is as if Rembrandt and Van Gogh were pulled from the dead to copy each others paintings. – Loose Poodle

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCIyzNISw1Q]

A third of all U.S. stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs. By 2010, that figure will reach 50 percent.

Name it. There are automated trading systems for timing the buying and selling of stock. There are automated trading systems in the futures markets; automated trading systems for crude oil, jet fuel. heating oil, S&P 500, U.S. Treasury Bonds, Dollar, Eurodollar, Gold, Silver, Japanese Yen, Deutschemark, Swiss Franc, British Pound, lumber, animals, animal feed, wheat, corn, ethanol, and soon carbon dioxide.

A computer science professor at Columbia University imagines building an ‘electronic Warren Buffett’ that would be able to answer just about any kind of investing question.

“We want to be able to ask a computer, ‘Tell me about the merger of corporation A and corporation B,’ or ‘Tell me about the impact on the markets of sending more troops to Iraq.'”

Robots in the form of massive “artificial intelligence” routines are replacing human traders. There are many detractors and cynics, and a landscape of broken hearts and bankruptcies over the last years, but researchers have made progress. [story]

Tom Wright, whom I know to be a very good fellow, started his computing career representing IBM during the Apollo launches. He’s built a quantitative analysis firm involved in implementing innovative computer driven, “non-linear, dynamic, adaptive trade timing models using emerging and proven predictive technologies” for world financial markets.

Applied Market Analytics, Inc.
Tom is the chief architect of an advanced exploratory quantitative analysis platform and meta-language for developing computer based trading systems.

There is no evidence that the conservative economic policies begun in the 1980s, from supply-side policies to the current plutonomy of tax cuts for the wealthy, have helped the American economy. Neither Carter nor Reagan had much to do with the economic events that occurred during their terms.

Myth: Carter ruined the economy; Reagan saved it.

Fact: The Federal Reserve Board was responsible for the events of the late 70s and 80s.

Myths about economic history here.

The Republican Party is a clamor looking to revive a compulsion. The high ground it has owned for more than thirty years will require a terrific new leadership to restore.

The vigor in the Republican effort to dismantle excess regulation, bureaucracy and overhead is gone. The vigor to ignite partnership from the marketplace is gone. The stalwart and the articulate defense of individual mobility and private domain is gone.

Today the Republican culture is a balloon of plutocrats lifting a basket of opportunists over battalions of authoritarians each increasingly unable to convince the fundamentalist, the anarchist or the paranoid to remain loyal.

The clumsy ‘War on Terror’ has dwindled our habeas corpus as much as it plucks violence. The clumsy White House graft of autocracy trades civility with mere rank.

I admire the thrust of your post and I admire the conviction of Republicans that use their affiliation as a marque of their principles and hope. And I increasingly admire a Republican courage to admit their vote against a 75 percent gale of disapproval.

But too much of what flows in the basis and creed of the Republican Party is gone. Even their vigor to supply what may trickle down is gone.

Were Lincoln here he would likely speak on behalf of the People not the Party.

This image shows neurons forming a synapse.

How do neurons grow?

Do neurons regenerate when damaged?

Naweed Syed at the University of Calgary studies neurons using state-of-the-art electrophysiological, patchclamp, time-lapse video and fluorescence imaging.

Note:
For Web 5.0 developers looking forward to designing intelligent interface technologies for portable network integrated devices, he also studies the rhythm of neurons when we walk and breathe.

Wiki is weak.

In the paragraph below there are five claims it cannot verify.

The Human Potential Movement arose out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and formed around the concept of cultivating of extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in most people. The movement took as its premise the belief that through the development of “human potential” humans can experience an exceptional quality of life filled with happiness, creativity, and fulfillment. As a corollary, those who begin to unleash this potential often find themselves directing their actions within society towards helping others release their potential. Adherents believe that the net effect of individuals cultivating their potential will bring about “positive” social change at large. [wiki]

Will Wiki try?

These are all unique human endowments; animals don’t possess any of them.

Associated with Habit 1:
Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness, an ability to choose your response (response-ability)…

Associated with Habit 2:
Begin With the End In Mind is the endowment of imagination and conscience…

Associated with Habit 3:
Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower…

Associated with Habit 4:
Think Win-Win is the endowment of an abundance mentality. Why? Because your security comes from principles…

Associated with Habit 5:
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood is the endowment of courage balanced with consideration…

Associated with Habit 6:
Synergize is the endowment of creativity…

Associated with Habit 7:
Sharpen the Saw is the unique endowment of continuous improvement or self-renewal to overcome entropy…”