Author: Brian

Getting in touch with our food is often A DILEMMA

I could not kill a chicken
With feathers, blood and stuff,
‘Cause I would just remember,
Those balls of yellow fluff.

I could not kill a rabbit,
I know they are a pest,
We had a white one and a grey one.
I loved the grey one best.

I simply could not kill a pig
And listen to it wail,
It used to be so soft and pink
With tiny curly tail.

I’d never ever kill a sheep;
I once knew one called Jock;
He was so small and sickly,
He never joined the flock.

Well, I could never kill a calf,
Those eyes and velvet nose.
It surely takes a monster
To murder one of those.

Don’t think it’s right to kill a deer.
So beautiful and strong.
They should be left to run the hills
And glens where they belong.

But now I’ve got a problem,
I don’t know what to do.
I love my steak and onions
And crave a good lamb stew.

Roast chicken is delicious
Roast pork is my desire.
So there is nothing for it
But to shut my eyes and FIRE!!!!!!

In the early 80s I visited a dozen venture and investor offices to seek development assistance for fluorescent antibodies, the building of a nano-scale library of detectors that would form the basis of an important new industrial and medical sector. I’m noticing progress in the field.

Slowly we are creating sensors and more slowly we are connecting them together. In all likelihood, machine networks will exceed human to human voice and data in the near future and become the dominant source of revenue for communications firms.

A microscopic biological sensor that can detect Salmonella bacteria
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2008/081215.htm

traditional microbiological techniques – such as ISO method 6579 – for detecting foodborne pathogens take up to five days to obtain a positive result, including pre-enrichment, selective enrichment and confirmation of colonies, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Another downside of culture methods is that they show poor sensitivity when there is only a low level of contamination in the samples. A number of investigators have used the fluorescent-antibody (FA) technique for Salmonella detection. Although FA procedures offer considerable time savings, a large number of the pathogen needs to be present in samples in order to observe detectable fluorescent signals. This usually meant that enrichment culture techniques were required prior to immunofluorescence microscopy. Consequently, the FA procedure for Salmonella detection has not been in routine use.
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=4963.php

Psychologist Carol Dweck found that praising a child’s effort on a task (“you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (“you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

V.S. Ramachandran

I have known many an eminent theoretical physicist who prays to a personal God; an old guy watching him from somewhere up there in the sky. I might mention that I have long known that prayer was a placebo; but upon learning recently of a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo, I immediately started praying. There are two Ramachandrans—one an arch skeptic and the other a devout believer. Fortunately I enjoy this ambiguous state of mind, unlike Darwin who was tormented by it. It is not unlike my enjoyment of an Escher engraving.

Because it’s “practically everywhere”, will subliminal advertising become as potent as thinking?

A recently published thesis underscores the need for firm rules and oversight.

Marketing statements influence us subliminally more than was ever assumed.

Even when you are not aware of being exposed to advertising material, it can still affect your actions.

As we work toward various charter to manage content, I’ve asked people to think about the domain of their brain, to establish information sovereignty, a natural extension of the rights of property, in order to restrain and manage the pillage of thought.

On global fraud and terrible error:

The world was told that putting its money in the US was a low-risk, high-return investment. But like the victims of the Wall Street trader, now we are all learning the truth.

What comes next? The fallacy is punctured.

Globalization will be seen as what it is — a game with risks that can’t be wished away. And U.S. prosperity will depend on the success or failure of its ability to innovate — not its ability to tell an implausible story to foreign investors…

THE shift of the 21st Century:

The richest 1 percent of households owns nearly half of all individually owned investment assets (stocks and mutual funds, financial securities, business equity, trusts, non-home real estate). The bottom 90 percent of the population owns less than 15 percent; the bottom half of the population — 150 million Americans — own less than 1 percent.

If America’s vast wealth is mainly a gift of our common past, how, specifically, can such disparities be justified?

The Rich Are Hogging Our Common Inheritance
And how we can take it back. Dec 14, 2008

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland.

New York Times – a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight…

Bruce Sterling summing up the future. He’s done it every year for ten years:

There’s no visible other space. There’s no liberated territory. It’s like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so fat and stupid.

…
But dude, this is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully earned the public’s contempt. You can’t “blame the media” for that. Even the media’s broke — ESPECIALLY the media. You can’t pull a Reagan, triple the national debt and pretend that everything’s jolly.

…
I agree that there’s an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years. These problems are not directly responsible for the money panic, but the blatant neglect there has created an atmosphere of crisis.

…
The Iraq War was a harebrained adventure that wrecked the international community. And to what end? The War on Terror is a bust: stateless terror is the new status quo.

…
Huge demographic changes in the world have not been confronted. Why are the victors of World War II still the so-called Security Council? What real security are they providing most living people today?

…
The planet’s population is aging. Contemporary Italy looks like a Florida retirement city. And it’s not just the rich white guys who forgot to have kids — Mexico is also rapidly aging, and China has one-child families. We lack the financial capacity to allow retirement funds to run the world. We can’t have ninety-year-olds who are rich when young people can’t go to college. That doesn’t compute.

…
Then there’s energy. I’m not a Peak Oil guy, but of course wild turbulence in energy prices is gonna put people on edge. How can any person of reasonable prudence invest, plan and build with that kind of uncertainty?

…
Last, and slowest, and worst, there’s the climate. The planet’s entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It’s vast in scope and it’s everywhere.

…
Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we’ve never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.

…
None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast.

This is a frank recognition of the stakes.

It’s aimed at the adults in the room.

Let me put it this way. People don’t have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL they’re solving some of mankind’s many problems. People can’t stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

There’s much discussion about our food system. Not often are the issues summarized.

Professor Tim Lang of the UK’s new Food Council warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing “structural failures”, such as “astronomic” environmental costs. It followed on from the dust bowl in the US, the collapse of food production in Europe and starvation in Asia.

I do want to stress, when we’re saying how terrible things are, that actually there have been huge advances in the 20th century; increased output of food, more people being fed, wider range and availability, people being fed better and life expectancy rocketing in many countries for all sorts of complicated reasons, but within that, diet has been a critical factor.

Lets not forget that.

BUT. The environmental cost has been astronomic. The impact on public health, which is what my colleagues and I work on a lot, is immense.

Diet is now THE single, biggest factor in causing premature death worldwide.

Thirty years on and the world was now facing an even more complex situation

In order to feed a projected nine billion people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity, rather than raiding and pillaging it? We all know that waste is everywhere; it is immoral what is happening in the world of food.

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of “new fundamentals“.

27% of our population, the Net Generation was born between 1977 and 1997.

Eight traits have been identified.

1. they prize freedom;
2. they want to customize things;
3. they enjoy collaboration;
4. they scrutinize everything;
5. they insist on integrity in institutions and corporations;
6. they want to have fun even at school or work;
7. they believe that speed in technology and all else is normal;
8. and they regard constant innovation as a fact of life.

Dear World,

You may be selling the bottles but the poets own the water.

You can manufacture all we say and package and wrap

All you want, more and more,

But unless it springs from the earth

It is not yours.

Grace Cavalieri

“All things change when we do” is the subtitle at Changing Places where I found this poem:

From Sunset to Star Rise, by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer’s unreturning track.

Painting, ‘Nambe Snow’ available from Artist Polly.

New puzzles for 2009.

1. “we are descended from neutrinos”

2. The ‘trick’ of consciousness is that for the most part we are not conscious at all. We don’t consciously operate our heart or our breath. We don’t consciously regulate every aspect of our muscular motion. If that would be the case, life would be unlivable and unbearable. We would have a hard time even making one step with our foot or opening our mouth. So because we are for the most part automatic, we can be conscious.

link

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves–
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well–but ’tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life

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Every reporter that has interviewed me has asked, “Why do you think your story has riveted so many, and such a diverse cross-section of people?”

I think it is because I do what I want and I do what I believe in.

This is not always the easiest route, not always the path of least resistance, but it is the only path I allow myself to take. I have refused to sacrifice my integrity as a person or the integrity of my art to appease anyone, and incidentally, have had story-book success because of it.

I find it a travesty that I am compelling because of this – that it is rare and therefore inspiring to come across stories of success (and I don’t just mean money) from following one’s own road. Such choices should be cultivated, honored, and rewarded wherever and whenever they are made!

Yet instead, our society seems to prefer the oppression of individual spirit; prefers fear-mongering by those in power, whether that power comes in the form of a boss or a military unit or a parent; prefers insecurity masquerading as ‘informed intelligence’ over talent or originality.

It is our right and our duty as individuals to stand up to all that – to stand up as the most honorable and most powerful version of ourselves and LIVE.

Live right, live true, live now, and help anyone and everyone to do this as well, alongside us.

Happy New Year.

President Andrew Jackson warned the American people:

“The bold efforts the present bank has made to control the government, the distress it has wantonly caused, are but premonitions of the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment like it.

“You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the eternal God I will rout you out.

“If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.”

The German people have taken a much more serious and suspicious tack toward the economic crash of 2009.

Dirk Kurbjuweit at Spiegel calls it The Broken Pact with the People:

Trust capitalism and shun government interference we were told.

But irresponsible bankers saw a chance to get rich quick and went for it.

Their failure has become ours — and the promise of a common good has evaporated along with faith in democratic capitalism.

This now routine equivalence between ‘Jew’ and ‘Israeli’.

Local government will see its revenues wither and eventually insolvency will force a radical re-thinking of government revenues, expenses and services.

Soon the wailing of states, cities and towns will be deafening. It’s already begun.

Why have state and local government budgets all climbed by 30%-50% in a mere decade?

We must be very careful.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski offered his expertise on the conflict in Gaza. During the interview he said to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough,

“You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.“

HA!

The video is here. The quote is near the end of the interview.

American economic growth before Bush, the last 135 years.

About today, “the graph offers no information about the bewildering circumstances that contrived this mess.”

Here is a rare piece about meetings in the White House and the emergency session that took place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on the day after the credit markets shut down.

The most important thing to remember is this, says David Lebovitz on the trials and comforts of Paris.

“Whenever you approach someone, realize that you’re bothering them.

“Whenever someone approaches you, act like they’re bothering you.

“It’s a fine line and there’s a little dance you do in shops when you need assistance. First, you have to bother them, so they have to act bothered back.

“Then if they ask you a follow-up question, you need to act bothered back. Most of the time, even more so than they looked when you bothered them. You don’t want them to think you’re more important than they are, do you?

“So then they think that you being bothered by them is more important than them being bothered by you.

“Got that?”

Of course, a “sky-high, billowy Vanilla Soufflé served with a warm pitcher of salted butter caramel” is no bother whatsoever. Seems to be out and out bribery. You think?

Found at Purposive Drift:

If there was a single service that the news media could perform right now, it would be to take a more responsible and balanced approach rather than adopting scare tactics and sensationalist headlines.

The less people live in fear the more they will be able to achieve.

Tony Blair on Obama’s victory:

“I’ve never known an election to create so much interest and transform people’s view of America again in a positive way.”

“Young people out in the middle of nowhere in Palestine have said to me, ‘They wouldn’t really elect a black man to the presidency,’ and I’ve said, ‘Well, I think they would.’ But they’ve been taught for so long that America is … what it actually isn’t. And that’s why this is an enormous moment. It thrills America’s friends and sort of confuses its enemies.”

Yo!

“What matters is what matters to us.”

By the time I left work I had pages upon pages of ideas, notes and references; most of them scribbled down during sleepless nights, idle periods at my desk and on the train travelling to and from London. I also had a very simple idea – something so simple that it just had to be right:

In essence, it means that unless we are able to consciously experience something, then it doesn’t matter. That seems reckless, at best, but there was a mirror to this: because – and it became increasingly clear as I was writing the first part of the book – humans are being adversely affected, directly and indirectly by the actions of humanity.

If it could be made clear that it really was ourselves who matter most of all to us, it would be incontrovertible that we have to do something about the problems we have created.

It would entirely go against what it means to be human if we knowingly ignored what was happening.

In order to make it totally obvious that there was a lot more unsettling stuff going on than most of us realised, I then had to look into all sorts of different areas for evidence of the effects of our activities upon human beings: forget, for a moment, that species are being wiped out every day and that habitats are being destroyed; what was most astonishing of all was that almost everything we were doing was affecting something else at some scale or another, and it was coming back to bite us.

Whatever I read about, at every scale imaginable – bacteria, insects, birds, fish, trees, entire global ecosystems – it kept coming back with the same answer: we were causing our own demise.

The title was born: A Matter Of Scale.