Sketch of Dr House (Hugh Laurie) by Dutch artist Jessie145
What It All Means This Week:
Monbiot's Global Warming Solution is Already Out of Reach: George Monbiot's Heat prescribed
a radical but feasible way to prevent the more catastrophic effects of
global warming, based on years of dedicated research. When I reviewed
the book I praised Monbiot for his imaginative plan, but doubted it
would ever be implemented. Now Monbiot has acknowledged that it won't,
in an editorial full of desperation and despair.
'Psychopathic' Chinese Corporatists Tell It Like It Is: Unlike the deceitful corporatists of affluent nations, Chinese corporations own up to their psychopathy: They put toxic 'protein' in pet food because they can get away with it, and because it's profitable. They know
it kills, and has zero nutritional value. They likewise poison
cosmetics, household products and human foods, including baby foods. That's their job:
make it cheap, maximize profit for shareholders. No conscience
necessary or permitted. In affluent nations, corporatists clamour for
deregulation, and bribe and bully corrupt governments and regulatory
agencies not to enforce existing laws, and to grant them immunity from
prosecution by the public, so that they can do the same. They're just
doing their job. What will it take before the free-market lovers
realize the madness of the modern corporate model?
Why We Don't Act Until It Is Too Late:
Today's NYT has two editorials that merit some reading between the
lines. The first, on the US health care system (available only to
premium readers) argues that as dysfunctional as the US health care
system is, it is human nature not to fix it until it is utterly broken.
The second argues that we can and should take some relatively simple technological steps that will go a long way to addressing global warming, easily and painlessly (the report referred to is here).
Of course, not only is it our human nature to do nothing about global
warming until we see its horrific effects (just as we did nothing to
prevent New Orleans from the inevitable Katrina until it was too late)
-- it is our human nature to do the easy painless stuff and then
convince ourselves (although the report says the opposite) that that is
enough. Such a strange species we are, doing things that are opposed to
our own long-term self-interest (and not doing things that are
essential to it).
Canada's Version of 'Rendition':
The Canadian government justifiably complained when Canadian citizens
like Maher Arar were kidnapped by US Homeland Security and transported
to foreign torture centres. But we're learning that Canadian
authorities' hands are far from clean when it comes to 'rendition'
activities. We've learned that the Canadian RCMP was complicit in the
Arar affair, though the cover-up continues despite a government apology
and payment to Arar (no charges of negligence, incompetence or
malicious prosecution have been laid against the RCMP perps who set up
Arar). And now we learn that Canada's 'peacekeepers' in Afghanistan have been turning their captives over to Afghan torture squads,
with the full knowledge of the Canadian Minister of Defence Gordon
O'Connor and the Canadian chief of defence staff Rick Hillier. This is
a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, and puts Canadian troops
in enormous danger (not to mention blackening the reputation of
Canadian citizens).
The 100 Mile Diet: Don't Tell Me, Show Me:
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has often used her stories to convey an
activist message, and we know how much more powerful a story can be
than an editorial. Now, she's written a non-fiction book on eating
locally, but in her own style, she presents it as a personal story of
her family (and others') struggle to live on locally-raised food alone,
and avoids the tendency to prescribe action for readers. As in her
novels, her way of making her point is by showing what's possible, rather than telling what's necessary.
Environmentally Friendly Tissues: Kleerkut lists the brands of toilet paper (anyone learned the Sheryl Crow 'one square' trick yet?) and tissues that don't come from ravaging old-growth forests. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.
Thought for the Week: There
are some strange synchronicities occurring in my life these days, that
I'll speak more about as they emerge in the next few weeks. But Andrew Campbell has just sent me a passage that he ascribes to Jung that speaks of synchronicity, so it is naturally the thought for the week:
I
am about to publish a little book on one symbolic motif only and you
will find it hair-raising. I had to study not only Chinese and Hindu
but Sanskrit literature and Medieval Latin manuscripts, which are not
even known to specialists, so that one must go to the British Museum to
find the references. Only when you possess that apparatus of
parallelism can you begin to make diagnoses and say that this dream is
organic and that one is not. Until people have acquired that knowledge
I am just a sorcerer. They say it is un tour de passe-passe. They said it the Middle Ages. They said, 'How can you see that Jupiter has
satellites?' If you reply that you have a telescope, what is a telescope to a medieval audience?
I
do not mean to boast about this. I am always perplexed when my
colleagues ask: 'How do you establish such a diagnosis or come to this
conclusion?' I reply: 'I will explain if you will allow me to explain
what you ought to know to be able understand it'. I experienced this
myself when the famous Einstein was Professor at Zurich. I often saw
him, and it was when he was beginning to work on his theory of
relativity. He was often in my house, and I pumped him about his
relativity theory. I am not gifted in mathematics and you should have
seen all the trouble the poor man had to explain relativity to me. He
did not know how to do it. I went fourteen feet deep into the floor and felt quite small when I saw how he was troubled.
But one day he asked me something about psychology. Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage. It leads you in way too far, so that you cannot explain any more.
You might allow me to talk to you about seemingly elementary things,
but if you will accept them I think you will understand why I do reach
such and such conclusions. I am sorry that we do not have more time and
that I cannot tell you everything.
When I come dreams I have to
give myself away and to risk your thinking me a perfect fool, because I
am not able to put before you all the historical evidence which led to
my conclusions. I should have to quote bit after bit from Chinese and
Hindu literature, texts and all the things that you do not know. How
could you? I am working with specialists in other fields of
knowledge
and they help me. There was my late friend Professor Wilhelm the
Sinologist; I worked with him. He had translated a Taoist text, and he
asked me to comment on it, which I did from the psychological side. I
am a terrible novelty to a Sinologist, but what he has to tell us is a
novelty to us...
Psychology can learn no end from old civilizations particularly from India and China. A former President of the British
Anthropological
Society asked me: 'Can you understand that such a highly intelligent
people as the Chinese having no science?' I replied: 'They have a
science, but you do no understand it. It is not based on the principle
of causality. The principle of causality is not the only principle; it
is only relative'.
People may say: What a fool to say causality
is only relative. But look at modern physics! The East bases its
thinking and it evaluation of facts on another principle. We have not
even a word for that principle. The East naturally has a word for it,
but we do not understand it. The Eastern word is Tao.
My
friend McDougal has a Chinese student, and he asked him. - 'What
exactly do you mean by 'Tao?' Typically Western! The Chinese boy
explained what Tao is and he replied: 'I do not understand yet' The
Chinese went out to the balcony and said. 'What do you see?" I see a
street and houses and people walking and tramcar passing'. 'What more?'
'There is a hill'. 'What more?" Trees' 'What more?" The wind is
blowing'. The Chinese threw up his arms and said: 'That is Tao'.
There
you are. Tao can be anything. I use another word to designate it, but
it is poor enough. I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it
looks at an ensemble of facts, accepts the small quantities. You look,
for instance, at this present gathering of people, and you say: 'Where
do they come from? Why should they come together?' The Eastern mind is
not at all interested in that. It says: 'What does it mean that these people are together?'
That
is not a problem for the Western mind. You are interested in what you
come here for and what you are doing here. Not so the Eastern mind; it
is interested in being together. It is like this: you are standing on
the sea-shore and the waves wash up an old hat, an old box, a shoe, a
dead fish, and there they lie on the shore. You say: 'Chance,
nonsense!' The Chinese mind asks: 'What does it mean that these things
are together?' The Chinese mind experiments with that being together
and coming together at the right moment, and it has an experimental
method which is not known in the West, but which plays a large role in
the philosophy of the East. It is a method of forecasting
possibilities. - This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.
When
people ask me "How can you possibly believe that our civilization is in
its last century?" I try to tell them. I point them to my Save the World Reading List to explain what research and study I have done on the subject (my intellectual knowledge). I point them to all my writings, in sequence,
on the environment and the state of the world that let me think out
loud to formulate what I believe (my emotional knowledge). I take them
out for a walk in the forest next door and let them see and feel and
smell and taste and hear what all-life-on-Earth is telling us (my
sensory knowledge). And I confess that instinctively, too, I know this
to be true (though that knowledge cannot be imparted because to do so
would require others to trusts my instincts).
It is the synchronicity of these four types of terrible knowledge, all
converging on the same ghastly truth about our future, that has led me
to this conclusion.
And then I shrug and say that I can't explain it any better than that. I just know. I have been 'led in so far I cannot explain any more'. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
