My photo of a
very young raccoon in our back yard this week. As I watched him dig for
sunflower seeds beneath the bird feeder, a red fox twice his size
suddenly ran up towards him. The raccoon glared at the fox, and then
chased him away. More of my back yard wildlife photos here.
What's Important This Week:
Politics as Usual: A discouraging indication at how inept we are at
change, as all the important news this week is about not learning from
our mistakes:
- With wingnut Wolfowitz disgraced, the mainstream media
have been falling all over themselves to applaud his Bush-appointed
successor, who is, wait for it -- another
member of the Project for the New American Century extremist clique.
- Meanwhile, as global
warming starts an accelerated melt of the arctic permafrost,
and Northern towns are wracked by crisis, guess what the government's
prepared to do to help these mini-New Orleans disaster areas? Uh, nothing.
- And Bush has sabotaged the plans for discussing modest global warming
targets at the G8: "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our
overall position
and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot
agree to", a US spokesman said. I wonder which 'we' he's talking about?
- And Bush is busy trying to bamboozle the dumb-ass governments of Canada
and Mexico into 'deep integration' with the US (which basically entails
a full political takeover to go along with the economic one, with
nothing in return for Canada and Mexico). "The
Security and
Prosperity Partnership for North America demonstrates that [the NAFTA] model
of economic integration has taken on a momentum of its own,
unaccountable to legislatures and citizens, and driven by interests
that do not represent the public good. Citizens and their
representatives need to mount a concerted effort to re-examine these
policies, to bring them to light, and to halt movement forward until a
strong and informed consensus exists on their value to society." Yeah, like that's going to happen.
- And in Canada a systematic disinformation campaign has misled an astonishing 80% of Canadians to think what we're doing in Afghanistan is peace-keeping,
"a vital humanitarian mission", as Canada's global reputation tanks and
we are more and more (justifiably) branded lackeys of the US neocons
(thanks to Rajiv Bhushan for the link)..
Plus ça change...
Thoughts for the
Week, from two gentlemen and working partners decades
ahead of themselves; read their thoughts carefully, because these ideas
are unintuitive but profoundly important:
"Seek visions, not solutions" - Humberto Maturana (via Andrew Campbell)
"We are loving animals that cultivate
aggression in a cultural alienation that may eventually change our
biology... we are not yet
robots" - Humberto Maturana (via Hugo
Urrestarazu, from Sol)
"Just as conventional
biology understood the nervous system as an information-processing
system, classic immunology understands immunology in military
terms -- as a defense system against invaders.
I've been developing a different view of immunology -- namely, that
the immune system has its own closure, its own network quality. The
emergent identity of this system is the identity of your body, which is
not a defensive identity. This is a positive statement, not a negative
one, and it changes everything in immunology. In presenting immunology
in these terms, I'm creating a conceptual scaffolding. We have to go
beyond an information-processing model, in which incoming information
is acted upon by the system. The immune system is not spatially fixed,
it's best understood as an emergent
network." - Francesco Varela (via Andrew Campbell, from Edge)
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7:25:33 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
