Smug Canada is NOT cool

Article by Ms. McLaren in Friday's Globe and Mail

Leah McLaren

Published on Friday, Jan. 15, 2010 2:27PM EST Last updated on Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010 9:05PM EST

Dear Canada:

Who would have thought, a year or two ago, that things would be looking so good for you? It all starts off so innocently, doesn't it? Without really meaning to, you find yourself at the top of the international heap. All the cool kids who used to lord it over you are suddenly at the bottom. Your prim moral certitude and sense of restraint turned out to be your ace. The conservative economic policies that made you seem so boring, so beige, so unerringly moderate, paid off. And then some.

In other words, my dear nation, you are vindicated. And frankly, it feels pretty good. You're a teeny bit chuffed with yourself, and why not? It's nice to be appreciated, for once, especially when you're such a modest wallflower.

And then your success builds on itself. Your ego blooms. You've got a hot date with the Olympics and a health-care system that's the envy of your neighbours to the south. Your biggest city is booming, the real-estate market is in a lather of condo development and bank profits are on the rise. Suddenly you're riding high, while the cool kids of yesteryear are trying to figure out how to fix the mess they've made of their lives. I mean, they've got issues you don't – rising unemployment, decimated markets, bank bailouts to contend with.

But hey, it's not your problem, right? Your consumer confidence is strong, you're beginning to emerge from the cocoon of cultural inferiority that has been your psychological home for too many years to count. In metaphoric terms, you're losing some weight, getting a new haircut and enjoying your smaller, firmer butt. Slowly but surely, you're beginning to believe your own hype.

So you think, why should I bother calling my old friends back? Why should I drive this beat-up car? I'm a star. Don't you hear me? A star! You throw caution to the wind. You decide to take a couple of months off from being a legislative democracy. You need a vacation, after all, to rest up for your other hot date with the G20 in June.

And now it's official, you're smug.

But I have a message for you, Canada: I liked you better before you got successful. Before the superiority set in. Back when The Beaver magazine was called The Beaver, not self-important Canadian History.

Smugness, after all, breeds a false sense of security. It makes politicians ignore the needs of voters and animal trainers think they can feed their snuggly pet tigers by hand. It deludes people into thinking they can raise breast-cancer awareness by posting their bra colour on Facebook and a gang of suburban weekend warriors into believing they can blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange. In short, smugness is breeding a cocky arrogance in this country and I, for one, don't like it.

All things considered, Canada, you were nicer in the early nineties, when there was barely a Conservative Party to speak of and Montreal apartments were cheap and plentiful. You were depressed back then, always wandering around in sweatpants, stroking your greasy mullet and moaning about the collapse of Meech Lake and the impact of the North American free trade agreement. You were a mess, but at least you were honest.

Now you're so up on yourself it's getting obnoxious. I'm all for national pride, but this is ridiculous. Once upon a time, a person got some respect for daring to leave the land of free health care and Tim Hortons iced capps. But not today. If you choose these days to reside outside Canada (as I do most of the year), people look at you like you've chosen to join an unpleasant, money-sucking cult. “Why would you want to live in England when you could be in Toronto?” a friend asked me recently. “The economy's so much better here.”

It's this kind of reductive provincialism that really irks me about you these days. I think it's great that you're feeling good about yourself, but do you really have to be such a jerk about it? Some of us live in places where the economy is in the toilet and we'd rather not be constantly reminded of how the recession left you so “relatively unscathed” that you're building a new wing on the cottage. Didn't your mother ever tell you it's not polite to brag?

The real danger of smugness is the way that it imbues people and nations and, in your case, an increasingly arrogant Prime Minister's Office with a sense of superiority – one that makes them believe they're exempt from the rules. Well, guess what, Canada? You're not so special. Prorogation is not just a failure of democracy but a triumph of self-satisfaction. It is a national embarrassment that, I fear, will be forgotten once people trade in watching figure-skating finals for expressing their outrage on Facebook.

This is, after all, what the smuggies in Ottawa are counting on. Don't let them win, Canada. Let's return to our roots. Be humble, be modest, bring back the inferiority complex. The truth is, you were nicer (and healthier) that way.

May 2010 bring us Peace, Love, and Health

Season's Greetings

To all my Christian friends celebrating the birth of Christ;
To all my Hindu friends who celebrated Siva/Vishnu Deeputsav in early December, and love to celebrate anyway;
To all my Buddhist friends who have this month celebrated Bodhi Day;
To my few Parsi/Zoroastrian friends who have no major festivals this month, but take any opportunity to reflect on “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds”;
To my Canadian and American friends who celebrate Kwanzaa;
To my fellow Natural Pantheists celebrating a vibrant and inclusive Universe;
Let us all go forth into the New Year reflecting and radiating the love that is symbolised by the Season for all of the celebrants. Let us speak out against injustice. Let us thwart evil wherever we find it. Let us build a world in which everyone is a shareholder. Let us work together for Peace and Goodwill.



Greyhavens Toast

Here’s to past and future friends,
to loved ones we hold dear:
here’s to those here with us now,
and those who can’t be here.

Here’s to those who have passed on,
their memories with us still:
here’s to building a better world,
with love, peace, and goodwill.

Season’s Greetings from Jim, Terry, Geoff and Siobhán

This is Your Brain on Capitalism

Saw this today in the Post, and suddenly understood the shape of things to come.
Jim

This is your brain on capitalism

Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Saturday, November 28, 2009



Drugs that reshape our character could become the defining industrial products of the century.

When Theodore Dalrymple practised psychiatry in Britain a few years ago he noticed that many of his indigent female patients lived sad lives, and looked rather sad, but never once complained of sadness. Instead, they told him they were depressed.

They had learned to speak the language. As he explained in one of his excellent magazine articles, his patients knew he had a pill to give them for depression whereas he could do nothing for sadness except suggest they re-organize their lives. In many cases he might have suggested they leave the abusive and neglectful men who were spreading melancholy in all directions. His patients didn't want to hear that.

They wanted pills, which he was able to provide.

In a sense, they understood the future of medicine better than he did. As a therapist, he imagined helping them work through life problems but science, public health services and pharmaceutical corporations were all moving elsewhere, away from talk therapy and toward the blossoming field of psychotropic drugs and the unfolding marvels of neuroscience.

Old-fashioned therapists still find good work to do but neuroscience has usurped the prestige that psychoanalysis and related forms of therapy possessed during the twentieth century. The neuroscientists have -- as C.P. Snow said about scientists in general in a famous lecture 50 years ago -- "the future in their bones." They have taught the world to regard joy as dopamine activity in the brain's reward centres and melancholy as serotonin deficiency.

The implications are large enough to reshape society and create a new economy, "Neurocapitalism." That's the title of a provocative article by Ewa Hess, a Zurich journalist, and Hennric Jokeit, a Zurich University neuropsychologist, in Merkur, a Berlin cultural review (kindly translated for those who don't read German by the excellent online Eurozine).

Psychotropic drugs are moving beyond curing the demonstrably sick. Increasingly, they are used by mainly healthy people to alter "character virtues," such as self-confidence and trust. Hess and Jokeit report that current medical journals go much farther, describing neuroscientific research into "love, hate, envy, Schadenfreude, mourning, altruism and lying." The expectation (and the reason for research funding) is that whatever neuroscientists identify can be modified by pharmaceuticals.

As Hess and Jokeit see it, psychotropic drugs could become the defining industrial products of this century. They choose the term "neurocapitalism" because the new drugs, in theory, answer the need of capitalism for more effective human beings and the need of individuals to make themselves successful in the marketplace.

Researchers are manipulating the nature of the human animal and challenging the very "self " at the core of human life. Almost everyone who touches this field understands that it raises delicate moral issues. Unfortunately, almost no one knows how to draw a line separating legitimate medical needs from purely frivolous desires. Where in the continuum would we place "neuro-enhancers" that propose to add years to a pilot's career or change someone from a B-to an A+ student? Drugs in this category can be rationalized as "compensatory" or "moderate enhancement," comparable to glasses worn to correct eyesight.




Even if medical ethicists could determine which drugs are legitimate and which are not, how would their judgment be enforced? Nation by nation? Through international treaties? It seems unlikely.

Hess and Jokeit, who have their misgivings about neuroscience and show no enthusiasm for capitalism, nevertheless point out that the freedom of individuals (as well as corporations) is involved. Pharmacological intervention expands the autonomy of people "to act in their own best interests or to their own detriment." That may turn out to be the most popular guiding principle; certainly it will have the drug companies behind it. It may be that medical ethics, confronted by unprecedented discoveries, lacking any relevant principles from the past, will never cobble together a moral structure it can apply to this largely unknowable science. Perhaps it is already happening much too fast.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

Corporations, and Serving the Common Weal

I sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of corporate propaganda that makes its way into the various media. The big drive now is to show how publicly minded various corporations are, by presenting them as major donors to community services groups and charities. Smoke and mirrors, folks.

Edward Abbey stated the problem succinctly when he said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
Corporations finance the election of governments, and, in turn, those elected serve not the people, but the corporations.
Corporations have decided to put chemicals in our foods so that the foods last longer, improving their bottom line, but playing havoc with the health of the world.
Corporations, once public outcry demanded it, removed DDT from use in the developed world, only to sell it in vast quantities to the developing world.
Corporations, not permitted to sell asbestos in Canada, still sell tonnes of the stuff to the developing world, and the Canadian government supports it.
Our fish stocks are decimated due to "corporate fishing," and our cattle and milk are so full of hormones that our daughters develop years earlier than previously.
Corporations sell us drugs, fast-tracked through the FDA and the oxymoronic "Health Canada" machine, whose lists of side effects are more dangerous than the ills they cure.
Corporations, using the propaganda machine of corporate television, tell us to consume, consume, consume, and never mind fiscal responsibility.
Corporations have left Canada and the USA to produce offshore (read China) where safety, and content, standards are non-existant, and our governments ignore the end products until public outcry forces them to chide, not the corporations, but the Chinese for permitting it. Corporations monopolise third world farming, forcing GM seed stocks upon farmers whose initial seed stocks were diverse and sustainable, resulting in a crop that needs more pesticides, and more chemicals to add to a depleted soil.

Renewal and sustainability is the way, folks, and yes, it is going to be difficult for us all. We will not be able to continue to live simply as consumers: we are too numerous, resources are too limited or dwindling, and we are taking toxic loads of pollutants into our bodies, through food, air, and water. Consider the following article that I lifted from the Web...google it yourselves. --

"What is the average life expectancy of Americans? For a long time it has been the low seventies for men and upper seventies for women. So it comes as a shock to learn that the average life expectancy for Americans has dropped to 69.3 years, according to the America's Health Rankings report, issued at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting.

This figure is exceeded by 28 other countries, including Britain, France and Germany and is about five years less than the life expectancy in Japan. According to Dr. Reed Tuckson, this dismal number reflects increasing obesity, fewer people quitting smoking (although only 20.8 percent of Americans smoke today, down from almost one-third in 1990), and increasing numbers of people without health insurance.

Officials made no mention of the increasing consumption of processed foods containing refined sweeteners, processed vegetable oils and toxic additives, and certainly did not allow even a whisper about the almost complete absence of nutrient-dense foods such as organ meats, shellfish and butterfat and eggs from grass-fed animals from the American diet."

Sigh! Time for the intellectual revolution, people. The industrial revolution has failed, and is killing us all.
Read the labels!
Follow the corporate money trails!
Time for a government of the people, for the people.

All of this is, of course, in the opinion of one tired old man, who regrets that it has taken him so long to read between the lines, to look beyond the advert, and to recognise that what a government does is not measured by what it says, but by what it does.

End of rant. Must adjust my meds.

A Meditation on Quantum Entanglement

"For almost a century, physicists have had in hand "the" theoretical framework of the known world—quantum mechanics. But whereas the world clearly comprises large complex systems, quantum mechanics is usually associated with the microworld of atoms and elementary particles, and is hardly ever considered as an underlying feature in our daily life.

This is even more pronounced for some of the seemingly weird predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, which asserts that the quantum state of physically separated objects is mutually and inextricably connected". -PhysicsToday.org

"Hinduism rejects the biblical account of divine Creation and instead accept forms of pantheism. Hindus believe that only Brahman exists, and all else is illusion (maya), including all creation. According to Hinduism, there is no start or finish of creation, only continuing successions of life and death. The soul (atman) of man is a "spark" of Brahman trapped in the physical body. Repeated lives or reincarnations (samsara) are required before the soul can be liberated (moksha) from the body. An individual's present life is determined by his efforts in previous lives (the law of karma), and the physical body is ultimately an illusion (maya). Bodies are usually cremated, and the soul goes to an intermediate state of punishment or reward before rebirth into another body. Reincarnations are experienced until karma has been removed and the individual soul is reabsorbed into Brahman. Freedom from infinite being and final self-realization of the truth (moksha) is the goal of existence. Yoga and meditation (especially raja-yoga) taught by a religious teacher (guru) is one way to attain moksha. The other paths for moksha are the way of works (karma marga), the way of knowledge (jnana marga), and the way of love and devotion (bhakti marga). Hinduism's fundamental goal is to escape the cycle of reincarnation, and thereby to erase the illusion of personal existence - eventually becoming one with Brahman".
http://www.allaboutreligion.org/transcendental-meditation.htm

A Meditation on Quantum Entanglement

Aum.
Flowing wisps of Self
dissolve:
egocentricity recedes,
lost in the Cosmic Now.

A vibration,
a pulse,
a profound sense of Balance,
of inclusion:
the arrival of Truth.

Within the peaceful vastness
the growing awareness
of Light:
countless tiny flames
acting as One,
coalescing,
joining,
uniting,
growing.

Awareness
of countless Chakra chimes
vibrating as One,
resonating with the Whole.
Belonging.
Becoming.
Being.
Now.

Darkened Horizon

In cosmology, the Hubble volume, or Hubble sphere, is the region of the Universe surrounding an observer beyond which objects recede from the observer at a rate greater than the speed of light, due to the expansion of the Universe. –Wikipedia

Darkened Horizon

With the hubristic narcissism
typical of our species,
we long considered ourselves
the centre of the universe.

We invented gods,
each of whom
focussed solely
on this cosmic speck.

Wars we fight,
again and again,
slaughtering millions
in each “war to end all wars.”

Some small portion of us
consume, use, and pollute
most of our shrunken resources,
while billions starve and die.

Corporations rule
through callow political surrogates,
while compliant media
tell us all is well.

Common sense, and altruism,
within reach of a younger world,
have fled, receding from our memory,
beyond our Hubble Sphere.

Fractal Universe

-->

In physical cosmology, fractal cosmology is a set of minority cosmological theories which states that the distribution of matter in the Universe, or the structure of universe itself, is fractal. More generally, it relates to the usage or appearance of fractals in the study of the universe and matter. A central issue in this field is the fractal dimension of the Universe or of matter distribution within it, when measured at very large or very small scales.

Fractals are encountered in both observational and theoretical cosmology, make an appearance at both extremes of the range of scale, and have been observed at various ranges in the middle. Similarly the use of fractals to answer questions in cosmology has been employed by a growing number of serious scholars close to the mainstream.... –Wikipedia

Fractal Universe

It is of no consequence
whether our questing focus is within
or without:
Mandelbrot decrees
that the pattern reduces or increases
forever.
Slight variations may occur,
but make no change to mathematical
perfection.

Logical and natural progression
I accept, and seek to find my place
in the Pattern.

A Day in the Life

Part of the "Quantum Shift" series.

"The multiverse (or meta-universe [metaverse]) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered."



"Trans-world identity
A metaphysical issue that crops up in multiverse schema that posit infinite identical copies of any given universe is that of the notion that there can be identical objects in different possible worlds. According to thecounterpart theory of David Lewis, the objects should be regarded as similar rather than identical."



A Day in the Life

The thunderheads, growling down
from the mountains,
put wings to his heels.
The alpine meadow was flat,
with no shelter, no haven.
Deafened by the roar,
he never saw the raw energy
that was his epitaph.

...wings to his heels.
He stopped, relieved to see the storm
pass to the south,
giving his valley a wide birth.
He stopped to drink at the stream,
then paused, puzzled by the rumble
of the flash flood that was his executioner.

...wings to his hooves,
as the slavering beast
halved the distance between them.
The cliffs loomed before him,
and he launched himself into the air,
embraced, and destroyed, by the red breakers
of an angry sea.

...wings to her fins,
as the sheer joy of her passage,
sped her home, through crystal depths,
to her family, pod, and students.
She was old, but others of her kind
lived long and productive years,
after their genetic duties were done.

...wings in his mind,
haunting him, and driving him to heights
of thought, of speculation,
of despair.
Thousands of feathers pounding
their insistence that he break,
and finally rest, covered with their down.

...wings of the rampaging god,
ravenous and eager to accept
the sacrifice of his body.
His tentacles writhed on the black stone alter,
as the fire god screamed acknowledgment.
Fear overcame pride, near the end,
but he did not flinch.

...wings of the seagulls,
gliding on updrafts above his hill.
The wind, from a bay bejewelled by autumn sun,
swept through his pines,
and moved the frost-stiffened grasses.
He sipped his coffee, smiled at the patient dog,
and thought of other realities,
        and peace.

The Observer Effect

“In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. This effect can be observed in many domains of physics....
A common layman misuse of the term refers to quantum mechanics, where, if the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of 'superposition', which is akin to being in all possible states at once. In the famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat, the cat, in a closed box, is supposedly neither alive nor dead until observed. However, most quantum physicists, in resolving Schrödinger's seeming paradox, now understand that the acts of 'observation' and 'measurement' must also be defined in quantum terms before the question makes sense. From this point of view, there is no 'observer effect', only one vastly entangled quantum system.” –Wikipedia

The Observer Effect

We are taught,
from birth, to be aware
of our surroundings;
to be careful before crossing streets;
to beware of strangers bearing candy.

We are conditioned
to set our sights
on a distant horizon
where dawns success,
comfort, and satisfaction.

Our religions demand
we obey the Higher Voice,
made audible by those
who purport to speak for It:
the promise of eternity.

Yet as we age, our linear lives
seek direction;
our focus turns inward,
and our introspection changes us
in ways we could not have imagined.

By virtue of observing ourselves
we transform...
and finally began to understand
that Schrödinger's cat is not important:
it is the nature of the Box
that determines
who we are.