Friday, October 19, 2012

Street Games In Verona, Italy September 2012

We arrived in Verona, Italy to see Leonard Cohen on at the Arena, on September 24 2012. On that weekend was a festival that we didn't know about but had utterly filled Verona with visitors and the reason for all these visitors was a new word to me, Tocati.

It seems this is an event that is held every 2 years, over the past ten years, and is about a three day festival of street games. No batteries allowed, no computer games this is all old school.

Here's what the website described care of Google Translate:

Today, Sunday 23 September, the tenth edition of Tocati, International Festival of street games, organised by Associazione Giochi Antichi in collaboration with the Municipality of Verona, came to its end.

About 300.000 people took part in the more than 40 traditional games that with life filled the city streets and squares (about 220 square meters), for the occasion free from parked cars and traffic.

An atmosphere of harmony characterized and transformed the city into an open-air laboratory with a very high quality of life from the point of view of sustainability.

In this tenth edition, together with the many Italian games, there were the games from the European Countries that helped the Festival reach its success in editions to them dedicated in the past:: Spain (2006), Croatia (2007), Scotland (2008), Greece (2009), Switzerland (2010).

300,000 visitors.
Family event.
Full participation games.
Old school games.

This could be a very good model to use to create an event here in Australia.






Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Asylum Seeker Report Makes It Clear - No Detention!

ABC World Today interview with Paris Aristotle - one of the three members of the Huston Expert Panel on refugees makes it very clear that the strategy is nothing at all like the Coalition's "Pacific Solution". And yet we are hearing claim after claim from members of the LNP that is it. 

And no refutation from the ALP. What is with that? 

It's as if, once again, the Labor Party has no capacity to stand up and prosecute the most basic and straightforward argument. 

Here's the details from the person involved in writing the report. Presumably he has a clue what's in it, even if the media and politicians can't  or won't report the facts. 

SABRA LANE: The Coalition has seized on this, saying that Nauru, Manus Island, that's a return to the policies they advocated - but you've said that you've negotiated extra protections here. What are those extra protections?

PARIS ARISTOTLE: Well first of all we've recommended that an oversight monitoring group be established, an independent one that would have senior officials, experts from the non-government and civil society sectors, participation from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and IOM (International Organization for Migration) - that they would have a responsibility to monitor our adherence to our human rights obligations, to provide reports and feedback about how things are going and whether things needed to be adjusted or changed.

That never existed before. We've made a recommendation that legal assistance be provided to people and a review mechanism be put in place over there. That never existed before. 

There would be a full suite of services - health services, educational services that we recommend be available to people.

We're very clear that it can't be - people can't be detained. Now a number of people have said it's about opening detention centres in the Pacific. The report is very specific. Any transfer arrangement into a regional processing system cannot include arbitrary detention.

So why people are saying it's recommending opening up detention centres is wrong and I suspect it is because they haven't read the report properly.  

---

 So here's what has been stated very clearly...

No detention.
Proper oversight, monitoring and reporting, 
Nauru and Manus Island locations are just a small part of an extensive Regional plan that is to be developed with neighbouring countries. .

These are ALL conditions that never existed under the Howard Government. 
This has never been coalition policy.

The plan can be implemented only after the details that pertain to the opening of these locations is met. 

Lots of work to do before they are suitable for use. 

Posted via email from lindyasimus's posterous

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Golden Holocaust

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to the long-term effects of cigarettes, "If everyone stopped smoking today, there would still be millions of deaths a year for decades to come."

"Low-tar" cigarettes? "Light" cigarettes? Better filters? Forget it, he said. They don't work. Today's cigarettes are deadlier even than those made 60 years ago, gram for gram.

Half the people who smoke will die from their habit. A surprising number will die from stroke and heart attacks, not cancer.

Moreover, he asks, "How many people know that tobacco is a major cause of blindness, baldness and bladder cancer, not to mention cataracts, ankle fractures, early onset menopause, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion and erectile dysfunction?"

Six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year – that's 6,000,000,000,000. Proctor said that's "enough to make a continuous chain from Earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a couple of round trips to Mars."

 

Cigarettes are "the deadliest artifact in the history of civilization" – more than bullets, more than atom bombs, more than traffic accidents or wars or heroin addiction combined. They are also among "the most carefully and most craftily devised small objects on the planet."

"The industry has spent tens of billions designing cigarettes since the 1940s – that's from the industry's own documents," he said.

 

For Proctor, this engagement with Big Tobacco is more than just research: "It's part of my sense of what it means to be an ethical human being, using my expertise to do what's right for humanity on the planet."

Posted via email from lindyasimus's posterous

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Merchants of Doubt - Misrepresenting Science

BOOK REVIEW

Manufactured Ignorance

Robert Proctor

MERCHANTS OF DOUBT: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. x + 355 pp. Bloomsbury Press, 2010. $27.

Read full article here

Historians a thousand years from now may wonder what went wrong: How, after scholars had so thoroughly nailed down the reality of anthropogenic climate change, did so many Americans get fooled into thinking it was all a left-wing hoax?

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway give us some very good—if disturbing—answers in their fascinating, detailed and artfully written new book, Merchants of Doubt. In it they show how a small band of right-wing scholars steeped in Cold War myopia, with substantial financing from powerful corporate polluters, managed to mislead large sections of the American public into thinking that the evidence for human-caused warming was uncertain, unsound, politically tainted and unfit to serve as the basis for any kind of political action.

Their story begins with what they call the “Tobacco Strategy,” the campaign launched in the mid-1950s by cigarette makers to refute and ridicule the evidence linking smoking to mass suffering and death. One might suppose the strategy is connected to global-warming denial purely by analogy—a case of yet another powerful industry trying to stave off regulation by obfuscating—but Oreskes and Conway show that key climate-change denialists actually became masters at doubt-mongering while working for the tobacco industry.

Frederick Seitz, for example, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and ex officio member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, in 1979 was hired by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, makers of Camel cigarettes, to head their Medical Research Committee. A solid-state physicist with Manhattan Project credentials, Seitz was assigned the task of handing out $45 million in research grants to buttress the prestige of tobacco—grants that, as he would later admit, steered clear of anything that might impugn tobacco. “They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,” he said in a 2006 interview. Seitz was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the six years during which he served in this capacity. It was not long thereafter that he and a crew of Cold Warrior colleagues also began denying the reality of human-caused climate change.

Posted via email from lindyasimus's posterous

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Leonard Cohen Live My Video Playlist

Some of the best live videos from 2008 - 2011 tours via YouTube

 

Posted via email from lindyasimus's posterous

Monday, January 30, 2012

Friday, January 13, 2012

Found Objects, Worldviews & High On A Hill

High On A Hill


Couple of things have been on my list of things that I have been
considering posting to the list over the past few days. Some different
topics, some directed to different people, though to the group
generally as well. Because that's how it works, eh.

Generally and specifically.

Concurrently.

Somewhat like, if you will imagine, first and third, with a weather
eye on second position.

Some topics that were generated as responses to posts on list. Some
topics from my day-to-day experiences. Some topics that were bought up
by friends on and off the net as being issues for them in recent
times. So here these subjects float in and around my brain,
occasionally bumping into the mundane activities that needs must be
carried out, and floating out into a wider orbit ... they will be
back, as surely as the sun will rise in the morning. Or so I believe.

In a previous post I mentioned about the people who we meet who can
cause us to focus our attention in a direction that we may never have
reached alone. How we can act as catalysts for noticing the things
that we never noticed until now. These people are rare and precious
and are as Found Objects. Sacred, if you will. And invisible to all
but the few with the eyes to see. The ears to hear. The perception to
Gnow.

Precious indeed.

So from time to time we meet people like this. And what I thought as I
thought about these people who have this ability to let us see what
was hidden...to understand what had teetered just outside our
grasp..to bring together the parts into something that is greater than
that which we could conceive before...is that the defining magic is
held within the worldview of these people. The view of the world that
encompasses a richness that affords a reflected vista that would
forever have remained obscured.

One such person, I had the occasion to discuss some of these issues
with recently. And we talked about the different kinds of worldviews
that abound.

This is a part of the work that she has developed in Leadership
through Values, and that is a whole topic that could take days to
explain in the detail that it deserves. So what are the different
types of world views that are typified by people in different walks of
life? Its a topic that I find to be  fascinating...and so much a part
of the interactions we encounter each and every day, I begin to
realise. Just as NLP gives us the means to recognize the maps that
others inhabit, so this fills in the terrain of those maps, and gives
a topological context that was missing before.

Some examples, I should not wonder, would give you the quickest entree
into the differences of the various worldviews. And so I shall lay
some out for your predilection. Sample the complexities and the
nuances of flavour and see if you recognize anyone you have met or you
know or you have encountered in one forum or another...See if you meet
yourself somewhere...

"I have no control so I must exert it!" I must look after my self
interest; if I don't no-one else will. The world is an alien place and
I must survive.During war survival skills that can lead to
flexibility; commitment.

"My home is my world. It is important to have friends who shelter me
from a sometimes unfriendly or uncaring society" Hospitality and
respect for authority too, are important. Ethical choice is based on
fairness and mutual
respect. You are good when you follow the rules. Childhood experiences
will determine whether behaviour is based on care/nurture or
control/duty.

"The world is a problem and I must cope!" I must belong and succeed to
please those who control my future and hav the time to spend with my
family and friends. Devoted to family and institution; an organization
person;
require and give deep loyalty; organizational profitability. Ethical
choices are based on what the law & government says.

"The world is uncertain...I must find meaning and clarity about my
place in the scheme of things." A clarifier,  supporter and listener
with followers who are also supporters, clarifiers and listeners.
Links world views. A strong concern for how people should be
dignified, listened to and supported.

"The world is a project and I want to participate for organizations to
become more humane and democratic." Independent, charismatic, uses
initiative and power. Clear values focus, creative, imaginative and
system skills are releasing new energy.

"The world is a mystery and I want to serve others with trust and
appropriate intimacy". No autocratic tendency. Wise enabler. Value
co-operation more than competition...adding to others world rather
than ‘survival of the fittest’. Can lead from every world-view with
equal flexibility. Intend to make significant positive impact on the
way the
general populace views and experiences the world.

"The world is a mystery for which I care, we are its co-creators & I
seek to see its wholeness and interrelatedness." Interdependent
governance, global perspective works in and around several systems at
a time. A wise enabler governing with team on value-related goals.

Of course our worldview is not preordained to be a static thing.
Indeed the very act of discovering what we value and what is our view
of the world and our place within it, will change even with the
knowlege of its own existence. There may be hope... There may be
consideration for perhaps the first time, of how truly different the
tune to which we are dancing as individuals is following a different
drum-beat for each of us.

My friend explained that some years ago she and her family went to
Europe to holiday and reveal a bigger world for her children to
experience, that they would know that there was a whole other world
out there, which existed outside the boundaries of their local area.
On one particular day they had planned to go to the top of the
mountain. But it was a grey misery of a
day. The kind of day which seemed to seep into the people who lived
within it. Greying them inside as drab as the day outside. The
temptation to just keep snug and rest inside in the warm, was strong.
Finally her companion insisted and so they set off up the mountain.

After much travel and depressed at the bank of clouds that hung low in
the sky and the drab countenance that the day wore, the train in which
they rode, slowly climbed toward the top of the mountain. Almost at
the peak, the train broke through the layer of cloud. Out of the grey
drabness, and into the most amazing sight of the snowfields,  shiny
white and bathed in golden light, and people laughing and frolicking
in the snow without a care.


It was a remarkable sight to my friend. One which will stay with her
forever. For not only was it the most picture perfect day, it became a
significant metaphor in her life. So many are content to stay down the
mountain. They will never see the sunlight above the cloud-line. And
as we think about it, we came to the realization that not everyone
wants to see above the clouds. They are content in their own way at
the bottom of the mountain. They are comfortable. It is what they
choose. And there comes with it an understanding that it is their
right to choose to go up to the peak, just as it is for them to decide
if they want to stay at the foot of the mountain. Or any place on the
way. I thought it was a lovely metaphor to share with me. All the more
so because it was true and meaningful for her in so many ways. And
natural.

A naturally-occurring metaphor.

A recognition of something that was there all along.

A Noticing.

Precious indeed.

The worldviews? Quite a range of variations. Of course this is but one
aspect of the work that my friend utilizes and the bare descriptions
shown here are of necessity a brief taste of the complexity which
exists within each frame and tells you nothing of the work that
follows on in putting such information to good use. And still it
illustrates, to me at least, that there is another layer of the world,
which has been revealed.

 Makes me wonder of course, how much more there is to know to which we
are oblivious. So much sense that can be made of situations,
situations which people have struggled with for years, trying to
comprehend. All for the want of a suitable context from which to make
sense of things. Nobody told us. How were we to know? All there to
see, if only we knew what it was for which we were looking.

If only we knew what we don't know we don't know.

So many things I thought about posting about in this post. Yet its
grown and grown. Found its own pace I guess. As things are wont to do.
I think it might be Enough For Now.

You may also consider it so.

There is a mountain.
And room for more in the carriage.
Whenever you're ready.

To Break Through the Cloud-line.

Can you taste it yet?
A Noticing.
Found Objects.

When it happens...
Notice it.

I guess the sun is already up for some of you now.

Yodel-ay-ee-hoo

Lindy Asimus
2000


First published NLPTalk-Reserve [2000]

Posted via email from lindyasimus's posterous

Twitter Feed

Contact Lindy Asimus