When Pets Mean More Than People

Dog toy from the RSPCA shop is $6.95

In an ideal world people and the RSPCA might care as much  about human conditions and cruelty as they do about animals already. 

Despite the rapid growth of the Chinese economy in the last decade, more than 482 million people in China – 36% of the population – live on less than $2 a day.

In 2010 the average monthly salary, including overtime, for a migrant worker was CNY 1,690 (US$ 240), insufficient to cover basic needs for workers and their families. In 2009 alone, approximately 1 million workers suffered industrial injuries whilst about 20,000 were victims of occupational disease. (Source)

See more 

Tony Abbott Speeches Hidden But Not Lost.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that some speeches by Tony Abbott - containing his stand on contentious issues have been removed.

During Mr Abbott's 2009 carbon tax speech, in which he described himself as a ''climate change realist'', he said he doubted climate change was man-made, saying ''we can't conclusively say'' man-made carbon dioxide emissions contributed to climate change.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbotts-controversial-speeches-wiped-20131130-2yiez.html#ixzz2mCKPsWEZ

Here is the carbon tax speech, for the record.

A REALIST'S APPROACH TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Monday, 27 July 2009

Source: TONY ABBOTT

It’s an honour to be this year’s David Davies orator and to follow in the distinguished, if sometimes diverging, footsteps of former lecturers such as George Brandis and Santo Santoro. The conservative side of politics doesn’t sufficiently honour its faithful servants. Someone who can bring Queensland’s Liberal factions together, even after his death, deserves to be both commemorated and emulated.
David Davies, it seems, had the gift of being able to take sides without alienating those he disagreed with. Who better, then, to commemorate with some remarks on the politics of climate change – an issue that could benefit from the decency and sense of fair play that David Davies seems to have brought to his political life.

The issue is not whether climate change happens (after all, grapes grew in Britain in Roman times; crops grew in Greenland in the middle ages; and the River Thames froze in winter during the 1600s) but how much of it is man-made and what can realistically be done to tackle it. A rational discussion should focus on facts which can be measured and then considered rather than on people’s beliefs which can too often become a basis for heresy hunting. Every sensible person understands that we have to protect the environment because it’s the only one we have. This is why the debate over climate change shouldn’t be couched in morally loaded terms, such as believers versus deniers.

The scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have concluded that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are probably responsible for climate change which, they think, is likely to result in up to one metre rises in sea levels over the next century, up to six degrees increases in temperatures and more extreme weather. A difficulty for this thesis is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing substantially for at least a hundred years but significant global warming only seems to have occurred in the last quarter of the last century. There may even have been a slight decrease in global temperatures (the measurement data differs on this point) over the past decade despite continued large increases in emissions associated with the rapid economic growth of China and India.

While many scientists, perhaps even a strong numerical majority, think that carbon dioxide is the principal factor in variations in global climate, others question the significance of the role of a naturally occurring trace gas and attribute climate change mainly to variations in solar activity. Obviously, what is a scientific fact should not be determined by a majority vote, even of scientists. That just leads to experts shouting at each other. As the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann has instructively remarked, if we can’t predict the weather a week in advance and can’t accurately forecast next year’s budget deficit, how can we be so sure about climate and its economic consequences in 100 years time?

We can’t conclusively say whether man-made carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to climate change. If they are, we don’t know whether they are exacerbating or counteracting what might otherwise be happening to global climate. Even if they are adding to climatic extremes, humanity may be able to cope with only modest adjustments. Our ability to live well in cities as climatically different as Ottawa and Singapore and to produce an abundance of food in countries as environmentally diverse as Australia and Canada suggests that humans can adapt even to quite significant changes in global temperatures.

What we can say, though, is that we should try to make as little difference as possible to the natural world. As well, prudent people take reasonable precautions against foreseeable contingencies. It’s the insurance principle. The premium we are prepared to pay, though, should relate to the extent of the risk and the magnitude of the possible loss. If carbon dioxide might be contributing to harmful climate change and emissions can effectively be reduced at reasonable cost, it certainly makes sense to do so.

Of course, what we shouldn’t do is embark on a cure that turns out to be worse than the disease.
The self-styled “skeptical environmentalist”, Swedish author Bjorn Lomberg, who thinks that increased carbon dioxide is responsible for climate change, makes the point that it would be simpler and cheaper to adapt to it rather than to try to create a carbon-free economy. He thinks, for instance, that it would be better to re-settle the inhabitants of low lying islands than to try to reengineer the power industry.

The fossil fuel-fired power stations that are the engine of economic growth are also by far the biggest single contributors to global carbon dioxide emissions, followed by motor vehicles and flatulent cows. It’s a little curious that the activists most concerned about climate change are often those most opposed to the one proven way to reduce almost to zero the emissions associated with electricity generation, namely nuclear power. Climate change might be one of the “great moral challenges” of our time but it hasn’t yet shaken many people’s theological opposition to nuclear power. Of course, the imposition of an additional price on carbon could so change the economics of nuclear power that many countries might eventually join France and Japan with most of their electricity coming from that source.

Because Australia produces just over one per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and because global emissions are growing so rapidly largely thanks to economic growth and rising living standards in China and India, any go-it-alone emission reduction scheme could damage the Australian economy without materially helping the global environment. As a good global citizen and on the right issues, Australia should be prepared to take a lead but there are normally limits to unilateral action even in the best of causes.

Then there’s the question of the best mechanism for reducing emissions on which an international agreement might be reached. There is much to be said for an emissions trading scheme. It was, after all, the mechanism for emission reduction ultimately chosen by the Howard government. It enables an increasing market price to be set for carbon through capping volumes of emissions. The allocation of permits should mean that more carbon-efficient businesses have a surplus that can be sold to more carbon-intensive ones. At an international level, an emissions trading scheme could mean that rich, energy intensive countries have to buy permits from poor ones. This could be its great appeal for countries like China and India.

The problem with an emission trading system, though, is that it’s complex, difficult for non-experts to follow, and plagued with uncertainties. The quantum of permits to be offered, to which particular industries and to which businesses within them, is inevitably going to be the subject of fierce lobbying and, perhaps, political favour trading. Then there’s the premium that permits will attract over and above the issue price. As well, there are the issues inherent in the creation of any artificial market that will inevitably involve traders as well users.

These problems may not be insurmountable as the successful operation of emissions trading systems for some polluting gases in the United States demonstrates. Even so, these issues are not easy to resolve as shown by the extreme unhappiness of the Australian energy sector at the Rudd government’s proposed scheme. Before making investment decisions, businesses want to minimise uncertainty. The problem with emissions trading schemes is not just that they impose a price on carbon but that it is an uncertain price because it is subject to a market that government and speculators can manipulate.

It may be instructive to compare the proposed treatment of carbon emissions with the actual treatment of another harmful practice. Would any government decide that, in order to halve smoking within ten years, say, decreasing numbers of permits should be issued to smokers who could then trade those permits among themselves? If such a scheme were adopted, the government would have to decide how many permits each smoker would get and, almost certainly, would decide that it would be unfair not to give heavier smokers more.

Reformed smokers could make a killing by selling their permits to their still-addicted brethren. Potentially, those who had originally been the worst smokers could make the most from their self-destructive habit. Speculators could buy permits when they are relatively cheap to sell them at a much higher price during the policy-induced nicotine drought. They would have to be compensated for their loss of property-in-permits should the government subsequently decide to change the scheme or to abandon it altogether because, say, of public revulsion at a new artificially-created means to exploit people.

It’s highly unlikely that any government would choose to treat smoking this way. Deciding on permit entitlement, managing the disputes with people who thought that they had been unfairly treated, monitoring smoking levels and regulating the subsequent market would be far more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, governments impose heavy taxes on cigarettes to put a price on nicotine and to discourage consumption.

The parallel between smoking and carbon emissions is not perfect. For one thing, there is no doubt whatsoever that smoking is harmful. Still, why should a control system that would be almost laughable if proposed for smoking be almost unquestioned when proposed for emitting?

If Australia is greatly to reduce its carbon emissions, the price of carbon intensive products should rise. The Coalition has always been instinctively cautious about new or increased taxes. That’s one of the reasons why the former government opted for an emissions trading scheme over a straight-forward carbon tax. Still, a new tax would be the intelligent skeptic’s way to deal with minimising emissions because it would be much easier than a property right to reduce or to abolish should the justification for it change.

The former British chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, has long been one of the most intellectually effective critics of what he sees as the “retreat from reason” involved in the “new religion of eco-fundamentalism”. Even Lawson, though, says that “if people are happy to pay a carbon tax, provided it is not at too high a level and the proceeds are used to cut income tax, that would not be a disaster”.

The fact that people don’t really understand what an emissions trading scheme entails is actually its key political benefit. Unlike a tax, which people would instinctively question, it’s easy to accept a trading scheme supported by businesses that see it as a money-making opportunity and environmentalists who assure people that it will help to save the planet. Forget the contested science and the dubious economics, an emissions trading scheme is brilliant, if hardly-honest politics because people have come to think that it’s a cost-less way to avoid climate catastrophe.

The Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme legislation is now before the parliament and the prime minister is ramping up the pressure on the Coalition to pass it. Supporting the legislation will be taken to indicate that the Coalition has no ideas of its own. Opposing it will be taken to indicate that the Coalition is oblivious to the potential dangers of climate change. Amending the legislation is unlikely to make a defective scheme wholly acceptable even if the government were to accept the amendments, which it won’t. The government, after all, is only concerned about climate change but it’s totally committed to its own political success. If the prime minister’s priorities were environmental rather than political, he would be negotiating with the opposition rather than sending tweets to his e-friends about the climate change countdown.

Opposing the legislation in the senate could ultimately make poor policy worse because, if needs be, the government could readily negotiate a deal with the Greens. Alternatively, after several months in which political debate focuses on climate change and opposition obstructionism, the government could call a double dissolution election on the issue of who’s fair dinkum about trying to save the planet.

As a general rule, oppositions should welcome elections but this would make it harder to keep the focus, instead, on the Rudd government’s addiction to borrowing and spending. As long as people are thinking about the possible dangers of climate change, they are unlikely to be worrying about the more imminent and more certain dangers of economic change. Oppositions, after all, can’t save the country from the wrong side of the parliament and can’t be expected to protect people from the consequences of changing the government.

Australia doesn’t need a carbon trading system that will almost certainly cost jobs here without making the slightest difference to global emissions but it needs a drawn out debate with, at this stage, a pre-ordained conclusion even less. Voters are unlikely to be argued into changing their minds. It will be the cost and complexity of emissions trading and the absence of anything much out of the ordinary about climate that will slowly engender second thoughts.


The final version of this speech was revised in the light of discussion with guests at the David Davies memorial dinner



 Another deleted speech by Tony Abbott this one from 2004, now removed from his website included this tasty morsel comparing abortion to 'a matter of the mother's convenience'.

Leonard Cohen on Lyrics Vs Poetry

2006 PBS interview 

LEONARD COHEN: "A poem has a certain -- a different time. For instance, a poem is a very private experience, and it doesn't have a driving tempo. In other words, you know, you can go back and forward; you can come back; you can linger. You know, it's a completely different time reference.

Whereas a song, you know, you've got a tempo. You know, you've got something that is moving swiftly. You can't stop it, you know? And it's designed to move swiftly from, you know, mouth to mouth, heart to heart, where a poem really speaks to something that has no time and that is -- it's a completely different perception.

 Oh, I'm not saying it's not musical; it's just a different tempo. And it's a tempo that migrates, depending on what the mood of the reader is".

Liberal's Steam Powered Broadband

"Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. 

Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that

half a loaf is better than a whole loaf."

~ G. K. Chesterton 

Great announcement today of the Liberal Party Poverty Pack internet alternative to the NBN. 

A poverty pack!   Selling point?   "It's Cheaper...!" - Malcolm Turnbull

Something for us all to look forward to. (Don't tell them that we're all working from home now - don't want to frighten the horses!)

It must be steam powered, surely! 

Maybe we can look forward to sights like these... 

Future Minister for Technology?

Fibre To The Node!

Just hook right up!

But if you need a desktop, you're in luck! Sure to be compatible with your steam-powered broadband!

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.

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. 

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Sheep Spectacular LED Display

Baaa-Stud Project! by drallah

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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."

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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.

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Leonard Cohen Live My Video Playlist

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

 

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Leonard Cohen Soundcheck Ghent 1994

http://www.cobra.be/cm/cobra/cobra-mediaplayer/muziek/1.1037169

Lindy Asimus

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How Do You Know?

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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]

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The Tallest Man On Earth (50 mins Concert)

1Take.TV (Live) Episode 4: The Tallest Man On Earth (50 mins Concert) from 1Take.TV on Vimeo.

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The Essence of Curation

This sums up for me the essence of what curating should be about - but often isn't.

Lindy

"What great curators do is reverse-engineer this dynamic, framing cultural importance first to magnify our motivation to engage with information. Someone who simply shares a link to a beautiful illuminated manuscript from the 13th century might grab your ephemeral attention for a fleeting moment of visual delight, but someone who shares that manuscript in the context of how it relates to today’s ideals and challenges of publishing, to our shared understanding of creative labor and the changing value systems of authorship, will help integrate this archival item with your existing knowledge and interests, bridging your curiosity with your motivations to truly engage with the content."

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/accessibility-vs-access-how-the-rhetoric-of-rare-is-changing-in-the-age-of-information-abundance/

Lindy Asimus
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Poorest Poor 1 in 15 In 2011 USA

http://news.yahoo.com/poorest-poor-us-hits-record-1-15-people-040233161.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America's poorest poor have climbed to a record high — 1 in 15 people — spread widely across metropolitan areas as the housing bust pushed many inner-city poor into suburbs and other outlying places and shriveled jobs and income.

About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the official poverty level. Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.

That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent.

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On Tweakers ... And Steve Jobs

I loved this piece on Tweakers - no not the meth addicts (as the Urban Dictionary points out is the name for these poor unfortunates) but the other kind. The kind who are never satisfied and look to improve even those things that are working.

Annals of Technology

The Tweaker

The real genius of Steve Jobs.

by Malcolm Gladwell November 14, 2011

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1d4HfTPjQ

Excerpt

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1d4HJbIr5

Lindy Asimus
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How Leonard Cohen Found His Song

How I Got My Song, Leonard Cohen's speech at the Oct 21, 2011 Prince of Asturias Awards

 

 

 

 

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Case Study in Social Media: Mayo Clinic

Case Study: Mayo Clinic Supports Patients Via Social Media

"For Mayo Clinic, social media has proven to be an important opportunity to listen and respond to patients’ concerns in a new way.

“People are overwhelmingly positive,” said Aase, “but the negative comments are important because they provide us an opportunity to listen and respond if somebody hasn’t had a good experience.”

Read full article here

Lindy Asimus
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Hold That Smile - The Victorians

When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.

Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.

The Smiling Victorians Gallery

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