Robert Paterson's Weblog

Al Gore is #2 - Here is the best Video on Global Warming

Here is a school teacher who utterly nails it.

Shows me how regular folks can speak with authority - Shows me why Public TV has to find ways of inviting and then enhancing the views of people like this in their community.

Found at Chris Lehmann via Will Richardson

Greg's YouTube Channel is called Wonderingmind42 and he is an auteur.

Great content is available now from the public - so what about aggregating it and making it easy to find and easy to talk about?

Joy to the world? Stuff?

It's nearly Christmas and most of us are out there buying or feeling guilty that we are not.

We have always had a lot of stuff at Christmas but this year we have called it quits. There is a bit of stuff but not much.

It's not all ideology, maybe we have reached an age where we have everything that we actually need?

But I am starting to wander about my part in a culture where "consumption" is the centrepiece.

My sister in law sent me this amazing video this week that explores Stuff. As it began, I said to myself, "I know all of this" but as the narrator went on, I saw that this was an exceptional and artful piece.

If you have a moment and you too are wondering about all the stuff that you are buying - please have a look.

We are a one car family

How can we save more money and do better for the world - does it hurt a lot to take action?

Well I am finding out. We sold our Honda CRV when it came off lease and now only have one car - the ugly but amazing Echo. We live 5 KM out of town. So how is it going?

It's fine!

If Robin needs the car for long periods, I go to the Commons in town for the day - like today. If I have to go on a trip to say Halifax, I rent. I spent the day in Amherst earlier this week and the rental was $44.00 plus $25 of gas. We were paying $400 a month on the CRV plus gas plus insurance plus maintenance - say about  $650. I normally do this type of travel for business so either my client pays or I write it off as an expense.

I reckon we are saving about $500 a month or $6,000 after tax a year. The give up in convenience is very small so far.

The only other key issue is "Image".  How do you feel when driving an Echo? I have reached the age and stage where I don't care about how others may think - and I feel good. I am doing the best I can.

Will our Titanic get home safe?

Imagine that you are a passenger on the Titanic. Could you possibly imagine that it could sink? It was so big, so comfortable, so well run. It felt like home.

When the lookouts saw the berg they rang the bell to alert the bridge. The officer of the watch tried to miss it by reversing the engines. But the inertia of the ship was too great and she continued on a path that ripped open about 300 feet of her plates.  It was 11.40 pm on April 14 1912.  Hardly a shudder was felt by the passengers. It seemed that nothing had happened.

But at that moment the ship was doomed. No one felt any urgency at first. The first distress call on the radio was not sent until 35 minutes later. 150 minutes later, the bow submerged.

Even then, it still seemed unbelievable to many that the great ship would founder. Many of the men gave up their seats in the boats thinking that there was not much risk really. How could a ship of this size really sink. Many also reasonably thought that on that busy North Atlantic route that rescue would be close at hand.

They were right. Everyone could have been saved if the right message had got out in time and the right action had been taken by those who could have helped.

15 miles away the Rappannhock sailed by but had no radio. The Californian was in sight of the Titanic but her radio operator Cyril Evans had turned off his radio. Before the Titanic had struck, she had asked him to "Shut up!" because his signal was interrupting Titanic's efforts to send routine traffic.  So Evans heard nothing of the Titanic's crisis.

The watch officer of the Californian saw the distress rockets but thought they were signs of a party. After all, who would expect the Titanic could be in trouble?

The Carpathia did get the message. Captain Rostron did his best. Carpathia was only designed for a flank speed of 14.5 kts, but Captain Rostron diverted all steam to the ship’s engines, locking down all auxiliary power, and achieved 17.5 kts for the run-in to Titanic’s reported position, 58 miles distant. When she arrived at 4.15 there were only 705 passengers still alive. 1,500 had died.

So why the History lesson? Because this story feels so much like what is happening to us on PEI.

On PEI it all looks so safe and lovely.

How could our agriculture sink? It all looks so safe. It is well run by hard working people who know what they are doing. Sure we have had a few tough years but good markets will come back. Won't they?

I think that Agriculture is to PEI as the Titanic was the the White Star Line. It is our jewel and it is the face of the Island. It defines us.

Like the Titanic, we have been steaming fast though dangerous waters. All aboard feel that we must in the end be safe - what could sink us?

There have been some warning messages about danger but we still feel that we can find better markets in time.

I think that we may already have struck our own ice berg. Like Titanic, we hardly felt it. The band is still playing and there is no sign of the inevitable sinking that will take us all down, not only farmers but our entire society.

Here is what the first impact of our "Berg" looks like.

The risk is our momentum. We may be moving so fast in the commodity agriculture system that we risk doing so much damage to our soil vitality, to our water quality and to our biosphere that it will be very hard to recover. Once we lose these essential aspects, there is no coming back. The ship has to founder and all on her too.

Only if we slow down and then change course can we save our farmers and save ourselves.

What does this mean? Am I blaming the farmers?

No!

Our farmers are trapped. At the moment, they have no choice. They have to continue to serve their masters - the few big players that control the inputs, the credit, the distribution and the prices in "Big Ag". If they don't, they die. Big Ag sets up the system that drives them into the Ice Field. Who makes all the money in Agriculture? It is not the farmers.

If we change how and where they get their money, they can do this. If we can make farming profitable in a new way, they can do this. If we can make farming essential for society and pay for this, then they can do this.

Join me this weekend in Trusted Space Food as I talk with John MacQuarrie about an important new way of how a community can connect with its farmers that can free them from bondage and align their needs with the needs of their society. Find out how others are becoming free from the trap of Big Ag. Find out how we might miss hitting the berg and all get home safely to port.

Join us as we explore the world of ALUS

Chapter 1 - Can we Change - It's all about Incentives

Appeasement - Munich - Phoney War - Global Warming

This week has seen the end of the debate over whether we have a planetary crisis.

Weeks of a new experience of winter in Europe and in North America have finally alerted the people to the truth - that we live indeed in the most challenging time in our species history. I sense a great awakening as seemed also to have occurred in 1939.

This week the political winds have also caught up with the people's experience as more reports confirm what we all know.

As I thought about this general awakening and the final aha in politics, I could not help but think back to the threat from Hitler in the 1930's and the processes of denial, of awakening, of still doing too little and then the final reckoning that forced us into total war that our grandparent experienced.

I see a direct parallel.
 

The idea of going to war again after WWI was unthinkable in the 1930's. The people and their leaders leadership hoped in the mid thirties that Hitler was not going to force them into another war. They thought that he could be negotiated with. The insisted that he be negotiated with. They could conceive of no event that would make another war possible. They despised people like Churchill who kept saying that the storm clouds were gathering and that war was inevitable. Wake up and deal with the threat now he would thunder from the sidelines. The establishment hoped that he would shut up - they accused him of being a war monger.

By Munich though - many were waking up. Many saw this last gasp of appeasement as immoral.

As Chamberlain offered these words in Parliament, trenches were being dug in Hyde Park.

"After everything that has been said about the German Chancellor today and in the past, I do feel that the House ought to recognise the difficulty for a man in that position to take back such emphatic declarations as he had already made amidst the enthusiastic cheers of his supporters, and to recognise that in consenting, even though it were only at the last moment, to discuss with the representatives of other Powers those things which he had declared he had already decided once for all, was a real and a substantial contribution on his part"

Even when war was finally declared, it took the fall of France and the fall of Chamberlain for the conflict to be seen as it truly was - a desperate and uncertain all out commitment to save Europe from true evil. It took a further tragedy at the close of 1941 to bring America into this conflict.

I see many parallels today.

What is the great challenge that we hoped would somehow go away or be negotiated away?

I think that it is our idea that our happiness is based on a society that depends on endless unsustainable growth of consumer goods and services. We are so convinced that this is the only way to live that we will do anything to stay in its thrall.

We pray that we would not have to make a choice that would mean that we might have to re-evaluate this premise. Give up my car!

We do not even see that we do indeed live in a Matrix. We live in a world that has its norms set by a handful of institutions that control our idea of reality.

We think that they have the same interests as we do. But they don't. Their paramount interest is to maintain the world as it is because that keeps them in control. They will never surrender this control willingly.

So this misconception about the motives and the interests of those that we are dealing with resets the Munich and the Phone War conditions of 1939- 1940. We will do our best to negotiate with organizations that may use all the right words but that are compelled to act in their own interests. They are masters of deception - not the least because they also deceive themselves. We will think that we have got their number but they have ours. We think that we can control them but they control every aspect of the system that keeps us stuck.

You think I exaggerate? Then answer these questions for yourself and then think about who controls whom and why they could ever give their power up without a fight to the death.

Who has been funding the skeptics in the warming debate?

Who has just announced profits of $40 billion?

Who says that energy has to be big and centralized?

Who makes all the money in agriculture?

Who makes and sells all the food that makes us ill?

Who controls the health regulations for food that make it impossible to grow, process and sell locally?

What is the fastest growing sector of the healthcare industry?

Who controls the idea that health can be found in a drug?

Who has been exposed as being the biggest liars in the health care industry?

Who wants to lock up the access to the web?

Who controls access to the mass media?

Who controls the idea that education is a factory system?

Who has the money to make the politicians notice?

If we are to live differently all this has to go away. All of this sets the incentives and sets the environment that tells us every day in every way that we are lost without growth. It is impossible to make a change of how we live unless we change the incentives and we talk back our own power.

So here is my prediction.

I think that the time now is Munich. Our politicians think that they can negotiate with the institutions that really govern us. We hope they can too. After all - who wants to go to all out war.

The institutions, like Hitler, will say all the right things to make us feel better and that we are making progress - "Peace in our Time" - A better environment in our time and all we had to go was to negotiate a few terms. We could let Czechoslovakia go because we knew that this was the price for peace. So we can let the tar sands still run or worse - back Ethanol made from Industrially farmed Corn that costs more to make that it yields.

The a new crisis will emerge, as in the fall of Poland - we will say that we are really going to war. But we wont. We wont give up how we live really and we wont really take on the institutions that govern how we live.

Only after a out and out disaster, as in the fall of France or Pearl Harbor, we will get serious.

Dan Crosbie Canadian Ice Service via the New York Times

Pictures of starving Polar bears will not be enough for us to give up our SUV's. This tragedy is too far away. This is what I fear we have to wait for. Something that affects us directly.

So what can I do? What can you do beyond whine?

As our politicians go into a Green Wash Frenzy - let's help them see the truth.

There was no negotiating with Hitler. There is no negotiating with the institutions that control how we live. Let us use the web to tell the truth about what is really going an and what the interests are of those that claim to own business, food, health and education.

I see no point is just going out and attacking them either. There is a better way of taking on institutional power that has been shown to work in the 20th century. It is moral power. We can be like Gandhi or Vaclav Havel who instead of taking on the powers - build an alternative so that in the end the powers became irrelevant and had no power.

If we are to live differently, then we have to pull away from the Matrix. We have to come together to build alternative ways of living that are more natural and more simple.

It is not beyond us to connect directly to those that grow real food. It is not beyond us to heat our houses differently. It is not beyond us to start traveling differently. I am giving up our second car in April and will rely in the summer on my bike. It is not beyond us to educate our kids and ourselves differently. It is not beyond us to focus on becoming healthy in a whole way.

But as we know in Change or Die - we need support to make big changes. So let's get together and help each other.

Raffi - Cool this Planet Down

An anthem for our time

Want a sex change?

Move to Washington!

Stephane Dion - Hope at last

I loved the convention yesterday - Many have criticized the process as not being democratic enough. I disagree.

A completely open system seems not to work in any field. On the web it attracts trolls. The risks of a completely open system is that it costs too little to be responsible - leads to bad behaviour. Healthy systems have boundaries. Healthy systems have members who have a stake in the process.

Convnetions like this provide a public pressure cooker that is alive. An excessively open system has no life or dynamics. This convention - being alive - drove huge drama as the day unfolded.

The convention was very large - 4,000 voters many with diverging and different beliefs - leading to a good size to drive out the Wisdom of Crowds. We can trust the result

Being public - it was also a test of character. It is clear that there are many good people in the Liberal Party. What was remarkable was that the ego based charisma was not what the convention responded too in the end. The convention's bet - Canada wants substance and character for difficult times.

Being an emotional space it also allowed the heart to arise. It healed the party - there were moments of great generosity - not the least in the speech by Jean Chretien.

In the end - I think a great result for Canada. The convention chose substance and character and chose a clear agenda. When the Liberals are voted back into power again - Canada will move ahead to become a leader in sustainability and Canada will come home to the set of values that until recently stood out as a beacon in the world.

Hope still burns

Global Warming - Proof at last

Finally, proof that we can all see and all understand that Global Warming is occurring - Thanks Alan for advising me to use better graphics

Relationships - Complex Work - Science - Parenting

By chance, as I was looking for more material on Romanian Orphans, I came across this outstanding series on relationships, parenting and the complex outcomes on children of what they experience. It is Called the Science of Mother's day

Apart from the insight that it provides as to why so many kids do so badly at school, the issues related to daycare etc. It also provokes my thoughts about how we are organized for work.

I hear all the time about Stress in the workplace but see little evidence of the tasks themselves being stressful. Compared to say warfare or a dealing room, most jobs are exceptionally routine and require little skill or effort for a well rounded person. But the stress is real and we see its evidence in an ever increasing spiral of health care costs. The workplace drives much of our adult illness today. This slide taken from the Whitehall Study in the link shows that in the British Civil Service that you are 4 times more likely to die early of Heart Disease than the people at the top.

The further down you are in the modern hierarchy, the less long you will live and be healthy.

So here is the link - if you have a workplace where you neglect the needs for real relationship you will get an unhealthy and acting out workforce.

If you have a home life where this is also true, then your kids are in trouble. If there is no loving person in a child's life then later there will be little chance that he will be able to cope with life and little chance that any remedial action will turn this around. What is behind this bold statement?

The connection between neglect and abuse and a primate's ability to thrive or cope is the hormone called Cortisol. Neglect and abuse, drive the production of Cortisol.

High Cortisol levels are at the foundation of the behavioral and health problems of the modern age. What drives them is that we have dropped the ball on the reality that for humans, legitimate relationships are the holy grail for a good life and a healthy society.

I will come back soon to this and point out the dollar costs to the workplace and to the healthcare system. But in the follow on you can see the costs of abuse and neglect on PEI's Children.