The ultimate test of your rock-balancing finesse, via Forum Ouvert (Open Space) practitioner JS Bouchard, who, with his family, were such wonderful hosts to me during my visit yesterday to Québec.
Mainstream Media Finally Pick Up on Ivins-Squalene Connection: The motive of Bruce Ivins to send the anthrax-tainted letters to media and politicians -- to get the US to attack Iraq so
that his vaccine, with the unauthorized and dangerous additive
squalene, could be quickly fast tracked and tested on a guinea pig
military -- has finally been discovered by the NYT, more than a week after I wrote about it. Squalene puts the immune system into overdrive, by generating what has been called a "cytokine storm",
but can also lead as a result to permanent autoimmune hyperactivity
diseases when the immune system never reverts to normal function. The
result is severe inflammation and
irreparable damage to critical healthy cells and tissue, which can be
crippling, agonizing, or fatal, as in arthritis or diabetes or lupus or
endometriosis or MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or asthma or allergies
or inflammatory bowel disease or any of the dozens of other chronic immune system hyperactivity diseases.
Hey, but what's a few lifelong disabilities and deaths when it comes to
testing out a wacky vaccine against bioterror? What's more interesting
is that the people who had the most to gain from provoking an
unjustified war against Iraq so they could test this vaccine, were the
senior Homeland Security and Bush administration officials desperate to
develop such a vaccine. Of course the FBI has its patsy now, and dead
men tell no tales, so we're never likely to find out who really
sent the anthrax letters. Now the mainstream media have made the
Ivins-Squalene connection, will one of them connect Squalene to the
companies and higher-ups who wanted it tested despite its monstrous
side-effects? For example Glenn Greenwald points us to a NYT article (by Judith Miller) written a week before 9/11 on the Pentagon program to develop a vaccine-resistant anthrax for its own biowarfare program. Guess they'd need their own 'special' vaccine for that, huh?
The Coffee Shop as Social Gathering-Place:
Chris Corrigan picks up on an idea in Architect Magazine on how coffee
shops might morph into the business and community gathering places of
the future. I recently predicted the end of offices, and with their
demise will come a need for such f2f gathering spots, equipped with videoconferencing and screensharing and other social tools to allow others who can't attend to be part of the conversation.
Building in Space for Nuance: Amy Lenzo points out Seth Godin's suggestion that, while
design solutions/ideas should be intuitive, they also need to create
space so that those who don't intuitively 'get' the solution/idea (or
some subtle and ingenious facet of it) can ask questions without
feeling foolish or critical. This perhaps ties into the approach of Back of the Napkin, which basically lets you recreate
how you came up with a solution/idea by telling an illustrated story,
one step at a time, with the opportunity for Q&A and collaborative
conversation.
The Disconnect Between the US Election Campaign and the Life of Americans:
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been inviting real American voters
to tell them about the economic problems they're having. The letters are heart-wrenching and show just how irrelevant the election campaign and the media coverage of "the issues" is to them. Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone about this, tells some of the stories and concludes (thanks to Jon Husband for the link):
Our
economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we
like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes.
In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life
can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global
capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China
and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of
the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has
cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export
abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a
service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy
middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and
protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of
these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our
society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were
split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers --
that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its
continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate
between the two major political parties in our country has devolved
into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining
benefits of American middle-class existence -- immediately, if you ask
the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask
the Democrats.
The Virtue of Beauty: A lovely piece of contemplation by Pohangina Pete on our obsession with the utility of things with poetic interjections like this:
The
sun comes and goes, and a cold wind with it. A woman carrying a
surfboard returns from the beach, wringing water from her hair with one
hand, the board clutched under the other arm. She slides it into her
BMW and drives off, leaving the winter beach empty except for the roar
of the surf, the scurrying wind, the arcs and jinks of swallows.
Something splashes in the creek, down among the dry dead raupo, and a
duck calls. Then the rain arrives, drizzle at first then heavier, then
the sun follows, shining through the haze of rain and out at sea a
rainbow forms. Tell me what this is useful for.
The Climate Change Paradox: In
the last few months I've met several climate scientists, and they're
scared. Changes are occurring much faster than they predicted even a
couple of years ago, and accelerating. There's increasing evidence that
some of these changes are self-reinforcing, and pushing past tipping
points that will careen us into out-of-control climate changes. They're
now working to try to recommend steps that will reduce global warming
by 2 degrees celsius this century, while forecasting and trying to
develop adaptation plans for 4 degree changes, because they know the politicians' plans to keep it to 2 degrees have no chance of working. The problem is, a 4 degree change would be catastrophic.
So if they're honest, and admit what is likely to happen and what it
will mean, they'll be ridiculed by the climate change deniers, and
people will just stop trying to deal with the issue. But if they lie
and say that fixing the problem is possible, and if people do what they
suggest and it's still not enough, they'll be accused to saying too
little too late. They can't win. And alas, neither can we.
Why McCain Will Win: I've been predicting a McCain win since I spoke with Joe Bageant and read his book. Now the polls are tipping his way, and others are trying to explain it by blaming the media.
But people don't believe the media much -- they believe their friends,
and the people they see and hear. The 40% who are uneducated, white,
working-class Americans therefore believe McCain when he says the Iraq
war is winnable, and that he cares about their values. That's all they
need to hear. To win, Obama needs 84% of the remainder of voters, an
impossible stretch. And as Elizabeth Kolbert reports, McCain has thrown away all his previous principles
and jumped on the pro-big-business, anti-environment bandwagon to line
up the big right-wing corporatist campaign donors. On top of all that,
says Sara Robinson, Obama supporters are from the Quaker/Puritan cultural heritage who don't fight back, giving advantage to the muckraking and mudslinging McCain supporters from the Scots/Irish/Cavalier heritage. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the Robinson link.
...and Bush Steps Up Iran Invasion Plans to Help Him Win: Sy Hersh has the latest startling news about the Bush regime's covert war on Iran, and plans to provoke violence to justify another all-out war.
Debunking the Hydrogen Economy...Again: European Tribune debunks the irrational hysteria surrounding the MIT announcement of a more efficient way to produce hydrogen.
Once more, for those who missed it: Hydrogen is not a fuel source,
merely a (not very efficient, yet) way to store the fuel once it's
produced.
Borrowings From the Fed, since 1910: A scary curve of desperate borrowings to cover reckless loans. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.
Permaculture Building: A Model for Intentional Community?: The 500sf home above was built using local, healthy, natural materials into a woodland hill in Wales,
is sustainable and energy-efficient, and cost about 1500 hours plus
£3000 ($6000). They're planning on creating whole communities of
similar homes, but are, of course, having problems with zoning
authorities. Imagine a whole Intentional Community of such buildings,
blended together into the natural landscape! Some good links on this
website, BTW. Thanks to Mattbg [OOPS CORRECTION: Thanks to Matthew Jewkes] for the link.
Quotes for the Week:
In response to a question I asked at the IFLA conference in Québec City
yesterday What is the essence of good research?, David Stern of Brown
University replied: "Asking the right questions". And from Justin Kownacki in a Twitter comment: "Social media is populated largely by people who are not good at being social in real life".
Thought for the Week: Looking Away from Beauty: From Orion Magazine, by Rebecca Solnit, to think about if you're watch the tainted Olympics:
Bodies
in peak condition performing with everything they’ve got are an image
of freedom, as are pristine landscapes like Yosemite and the Tetons.
But the reality of freedom only exists when these phenomena aren’t
deployed to cover up other bodies that are cringing, starving,
bleeding, or dying, other places that are clearcut, strip-mined, and
contaminated. Television coverage of the summer Olympics probably won’t
cut away from those sleek athletes to the charred bodies of massacred
villagers and the anguished faces of young gang-rape victims in Darfur,
or the bloodied heads of young monks and uncounted corpses and
prisoners in Burma and Tibet. But the associations between the two are
crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be a part
of a global community. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
