Thanks for the kind words, Gary. (01)
I am thinking that, when I say "we", I can only speak, perhaps
appologetically, for those people that are considered my larger tribe,
the Americans, well, more accurately, people in the US of A. We've got
the blues and we've got the reds. Make no mistake about it, before
those labels, there were *those* people. We really are a nation built
out of a distaste for religious persecution, practicing that in a
rather righteous way -- some of us. But, "listen" is recursive. We,
the larger tribe, need to listen carefully to all the other larger
tribes 'out there'. And, here goes the recursion, we need to listen to
the lessor tribes within the larger tribes, including our own. At the
same time, we need to find more elegant ways of speaking when someone
might be listening. Ted Kaczynski may have had something profound to
say, but he certainly picked a distasteful way to say it. People who
are teaching infants to sign are saying those those tiny snappers have
a helluva lot to say, long before they can talk. (02)
Consider this. When I was a kid in the 50's, an advertisement on TV
(imagine! Television. What a concept!) for, say, a Buick, told of its
marvelous transmission, it's 8 cylinders, their compression ratio, gas
mileage (imagine that, when gas was less than a quarter/gallon, but a
daily wage was around $8 and certainly less than $50 for most people).
Today, an advertisement for a car is more about how good you will
feel, what your chances of getting laid in it are, that sort of thing.
We have divorced ourselves from reality, from the very relational and
rational thinking we need to be doing. I think that starts in schools,
where we are more interested in teaching kids how to be good workers
than how to think clearly. Stepford wives on steroids. That sort of
thing. (03)
This thing, what I want to do with kids, is way bigger than me. I
can't do it alone. (04)
Jack (05)
On 8/14/05, Gary Richmond <garyrichmond@rcn.com> wrote:
> Jack,
>
> To supplement this analysis which. however, seems a bit contradictory in
> that moment in which you write that "we are just plain downright selfish,
> mean, and not well adjusted people" who are the "other people we "need to
> start listening to"? But perhaps you were referring to Americans vs the rest
> of the world, but then I think that we ought to listen and learn from you,
> for example, regarding the need for an overhaul of education, your own
> efforts towards this goal being imo exemplary.
>
> In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes of
> what he perceives as a major problem with corporations:
>
> Corporate America has nurtured a cult of chief executives, hailing them as
> geniuses and then excusing their misconduct and megalomania. His piece is
> titled "Announcing an Award for Greed," which immediately made me think of
> Peirce's comment that even in his own day the "Gospel of Greed" had pretty
> much supplanted the "Gospel of Love" in America.
>
> Gary
>
>
>
> Jack Park wrote:
> Most of the fabric of my own being screams out that Henry has nailed
> it. In the end, my view suggests that it's all about tribal behaviors.
> Behaviors that come to light when we go off and slaughter ordinary
> folk in foreign lands to protect "national interests." Behaviors that
> come to light when we don't even listen to what the other side is
> saying. Behaviors that come to light when the president's main hit man
> is found on the front page of the news, so the president tosses out a
> statement about "Intelligent Design", intelligently designed (probably
> by the main hit man) to rouse tribal instincts and take the hit man
> off the front page. We are just plain downright selfish, mean, and not
> well adjusted people. We need to start listening to what other people
> are saying, and a great way to do that is to start listening and stop
> talking. Education, for all its factory-mentality, designed and
> well-tuned to produce tax payers instead of thinkers, is ready for an
> overhaul.
>
> Jack
>
> On 8/14/05, Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Peter.
>
> Thee also exists the idea of a shield in space to control amount of
> solar radiation reaching us. See the links to worldchanging, the article
> on terra-forming.
>
> I believe that although science/technology is still weak in coming to
> grips with natural environmental issues, there is still the untackled
> problem of fostering an informed global civics. Whatever good technology
> may offer, if the issues involved are not globally understood they have
> no chance in hell to be appropriately applied.
>
> Thusfar schools have been used to inculcate religious fervor to
> maintain/defend religious establishments (with military force) and
> plunder from others, schools have been used to maintain/defend
> linguistic and/or genetic nations (with military force) and plunder from
> others; now schools need be used to inculcate benign globalism and do so
> with the force of reason and a willingness to share.
>
> We ABSOLUTELY NEED a global curriculum component emphasizing a global
> civics and I ain't going to see that in my lifetime. But
> science/technology, however great, are not going to save the Earth
> without that!
>
> Henry
>
> On Sun, 2005-08-14 at 11:56 +0100, Peter P. Jones wrote:
>
>
> I posted a comment there about putting dust into the atmosphere to slow
> down global warming (the way volcanoes and nuclear winter scenarios
> work). No idea whether it was picked up, but maybe it will provide some
> hope - maybe through altered aero fuel or something.
>
> Unable to purpleslurple it, as both MattS and I seem to have host issues.
>
> --
> Peter
>
> Jack Park wrote:
>
>
> Here is more than you'll ever want to know about trapped methane.
> Scary thoughts...
> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003283.html
>
> Cheers,
> Jack
>
> On 8/12/05, Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
> Further to previous message, this is what I received. I wish I knew more
> about what efforts are made to prepare/educate human beings to cope with
> (using the title of an Asimov book) our choice of catastrophies. And how
> timely they will be.
>
> Henry
>
>
> I agree that it is very bad news. Contrary to what the bbc article
> implied, I don't think this kind of response is unexpected as people
> have long talked about the warming leading to release of methane from
> these high latitute marshes. Perhaps they meant that it hasn't been
> quantified in terms of contribution to methane concentrations and
> warming.
>
> Turning to the last IPCC report Climate Change 2001 The Scientific
> Basis, see p248 right hand column, first paragraph. My read of that is
> that they just don't know what is likely to happen. They have a bet
> each way there in pointing to the large methane deposits on the one
> hand, and on the other hand, they say that they don't see big methane
> spikes in the ice core record to suggest that the feedback is large. On
> the latter point though, they cite only the past 50,000 years, which may
> not be far enough back to get big enough temperature excursions on the
> warming side to thaw out the tundra sufficiently. All in all, a
> somewhat confused picture and I am surprised they did not go further
> into this. I can only guess it is because they really don't have a clue
> how to quantify this potential feedback and perhaps didn't expect this
> to come up as an issue so quickly.
>
> I'll keep my eyes open for anything more definitive that comes up in
> response. It seems to have caught the community off guard a bit. On a
> related issue, did you see James Hansen's slippery slope paper, which I
> also found very alarming. He thinks we may be quite close to big
> irreversible sea level rise:
>
> Hansen, J.E. 2005. A slippery slope: How much global warming constitutes
> "dangerous anthropogenic interferencerd"? An editorial essay. Clim.
> Change 68, 269-279, doi:10.1007/s10584-005-4135-0.
>
> You can download that from the nass giss web site:
> http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/
> --
> Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca>
>
> --
> This message is archived at:
>
>
>http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=1123865226.3104.22.camel@localhost.localdomain
>
>
>
>
> --
> Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca>
>
> --
> This message is archived at:
>
>
>http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=1124024155.5400.18.camel@localhost.localdomain
>
>
>
>
> (06)
--
This message is archived at: (07)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&iQ79aafa050814105739464185@mail.gmail.com (08)
|