Winter Wonderland

Can you say, White Christmas?

I was gonna get out the bike, but..

The Conspiracy of Ignorance

To govern effectively the mass of people must be kept poor and ignorant - Bernard Mandeville, 1670-1733, paraphrased from The Worldly Philosophers, R. Heilbroner

The dumbing down of America is evidence of cynical men in power conspiring to keep Americans poor and ignorant. The men in Washington don't want educated, intelligent, informed voters. They are too hard to manipulate by fear & greed.
cf. Patriot Act - scare the voters into giving up rights & freedoms so we can make more money selling arms & supplies to the military.
How many Senators & Congressmen send their kids to public schools? Why would they, unless they were trying to fund them, to improve them, to produce educated, intelligent citizens? They are not, so they don't.
Simple really.
Why is military spending so far ahead of education spending in the US? Could it be that there is profit in guns, but none in producing an aware citizenry that can't be fooled so easily into electing self-serving egoists like W?

Every time a school board tries to deny access to ideas by banning ideas from the classroom and substituting propaganda - as when Texas replaced science with theology - we lose.

I should have provided the reference to the Texas School Board: here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

"AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. "

and,


"In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school."


It is done not by revolution, but by erosion. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Today's Care2 newsletter held a brief article by Deepak Chopra on the mind/body issue. My reaction is below. Here is his article:

Quote:
"

The mind has remained a metaphysical riddle for centuries because it inhabits the physical world like a ghost. But that’s a Western perspective based on our bias for solid, tangible things. We insist that the brain must be the source of mind because the brain is a visible object, which is like saying that a radio must be the source of music because it is a visible object from which music emerges.

The Vedic rishis adopted the opposite perspective, insisting that visible objects couldn’t be the source of mind since the physical plane is the least conscious of worlds.

Our Western prejudice against the invisible isn’t easy to overcome. Mind will only be proved to exist outside the brain if it leaves some kind of footprint, a visible sign that is as convincing as the MRIs that provide concrete evidence of neural activity.

Right now you are a bundle of information in mind and body. You have unique memories; your cells have undergone chemical changes shared by no one else in the world. When you die, none of this information will vanish, because it can’t. There is nowhere for plus and minus, positive and negative to go since the field contains nothing but information. Therefore their only alternative is to recombine.

There is growing evidence that in fact we do share the same mind field. The brain belongs to “me,” but if ideas belong to “us,” then we are participating together in a field, sometimes quite mysteriously.

Adapted from Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2006).

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/does-your-mind-control-your-brain.html#ixzz1P5PeAxdl"
End Quote.

Sloppy thinking, poor reasoning, unproved assumptions and ridiculous conclusions like these really get up my nose - especially when people get paid for it.

Some points:
"The mind .. because it inhabits physical world like a ghost" - This is called "begging the question" for it is the mind's existence that is at issue. Here Chopra casually assumes the thing which is to be proved.

Western prejudice against the invisible is not prejudice at all. It is healthy skepticism of things for which there is little or no evidence.

"When you die none of this information will vanish.."
Really? What happens to the words on the Scrabble board when the game is over and the tiles are tipped back into the bag?

"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.."

"There is growing evidence.." - really? Citations please.

What is mysterious is how long charlatans have gotten away with garbage like this.

An Inconvenient Truth: FAIL

Al Gore made a film, established himself as an environmental activist, but in the end it only entertained the liberal-minded, middle-class who already accepted the climate change model he espoused.
The movie was a decent first step but was ultimately useless because the only people who went to see it were already believers. It was preaching to the choir.

I venture to say that no one who had already made up their mind that
"climate is changing as a result of human activity" was bogus, was converted into accepting this as true.

The only thing that will reduce harmful climate change is having fewer people. I see no political will to reduce population voluntarily, thus I suspect that nature will take care of the human over-population problem and it won't be pretty.

Meanwhile, converting to electric cars, recycling plastic bags, etc. doesn't mean a thing while Nigeria and Siberia continue flare off enough useable natural gas to power New York.

At night Nigeria and Siberia are brighter than Paris, London, L.A. put together and there are no large cities in these places.

Look it up:
http://www.earthzine.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/lights_at_night-2.jpg



so, sadly, "every little bit" doesn't help because it lulls people into thinking it is all okay. It isn't

Apart from the gas flaring in these places, on another front, China is building 2 coal-fired electricity generating plants EVERY WEEK

(reference:#22) for the next several years. Don't bother with your personal re-cycling if you aren't going to change Washington's policies on trade with these nations, and know this, 25% of US oil will come from Nigeria by 2025.

These three factors alone outweigh anything individual citizens can do to change matters. This problem was created at a national level and will only be solved at a national level.

Is veganism better for the planet vis-a-vis climate change?

If the argument is about which is better for your health vegan or omnivore, that's one thing, but this thread is about whether producing meat is good for the planet, climate-wise.

If food production produces 18% of the GG problem now - U.N.F.A.O., how much lower do you think it is possible to get it? It won't be zero.

But this is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You have to solve the population problem first before you worry about how many cows there are. If the population gets to 9B by 2050 as the UN says it will, the question of meat vs. veggies will seem small potatoes, if you will pardon the pun.

As for right now, reducing the number of cattle, pigs, etc. is of small concern while Nigeria and Siberia are lit up brighter than Paris or New York by gas flares you can see from space.
They flare off more natural gas each year completely wasted, than most countries and many states consume.

The GG thus produced make the cows issue trivial.

Come on now, let's focus on the correct issues..

Koko Classic Triathlon

Just watched 5-0, they faked a triathlon as a backdrop to the drama.
Bad Five-O! Dissing triathlon by stating that they were blood dopers!
Maybe some long distance triathletes have blood-doped but this fake Koko event was a sprint or Oly at most. There`s no benefit to doping for short distance events. The writers got it wrong. I suppose it was jus`t so they could `find` a fingerprint on the blood bag. AND they had the robbers posing as triathletes doing a hard workout the night before the race!
Idiots.
Anyway, a bunch of real triathletes got some on camera exposure as extras on a primetime show, and that has to be a good thing.

3 inches of snow and minus 10C right now. Sucks.

Ten Rules for Modern Life

I received the following in an e-mail today and have seen it before attributed to someone else. Whoever wrote it has some wisdom.

"Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!
Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did
not and will not learn in school..
He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a
generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them
up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your
self-esteem.. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you
feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You
won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had
a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about
your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are
now... They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and
listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you
save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try
delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life
HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll
give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't
bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and
very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on
your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to
leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.""

Sexual Stupidity & the Afghan War

One would have to admit surprise, initially, when reading of the stupid errors of judgment made by obviously smart men, and women, but we'll get to them later, in matters concerning sex.

John Kerry, Elliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, John Profumo, Marv Albert and men who were perhaps less smart, Tiger Woods, Hugh Grant, Jimmy Swaggert, Edwin Mose, Charlie Sheen, Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson, Steve Garvey, hundreds of priests and other non-famous men. What is it? Hubris?

Why would someone who has a great deal at stake, make such boneheaded errors in judgment? Maybe that should be boner-headed errors. Was it arrogance that made them think they could get away with it?

It may be simply that in matters concerning sex humans universally act irrationally. There is arguably a disconnect between natural sexual urges and the convoluted, sophisticated, social arrangements we make to corral and direct the sexual urges humans universally feel.

Consider a stark contrast, say, the gulf that exists between the adolescent male urge to mate with anything that will hold still long enough. Or the famously documented urges of Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Caligula, henry VIII, and so on. Given the power to obtain access to women, whether legally or illegally, powerful men will rack up as many partners as time permits.

Even when social agreements like marriage, or informal relationships like living together are made moderns will stray. Notwithstanding whatever thrill may come from getting away with it, men will often not think twice when sex is made freely available. So what is this phenomenon? Is it perverse or noramal?

Of course terms like normal and perverse are subjective. Yet, we act surprised when a prominent person is involved in a sex scandal. If we knew our history we ought not to be surprissed, we whould pay it no attention because we expected it. Yet we continue to promote lifetime commitments to fidelity and exclusiveness and enact punitive laws to enforce them. What's going on?

Is it hypocrisy to take marriage vows? Or is it simply futile? When a man stands up in church and vows fidelity in front of God and his congregation is he lying, being self-deluded, simply stupid? Is the woman so desperate, self-deluded, dishonest that she goes through with it?

In other cultures, say, Islam, where it is akin to taking a slave, marriage may be the only way a man can legally have a sex partner, the law exists to enforce the ritual and the institution.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is a good male strategy to have as many breeding partners as possible. Since partnerships are problematical, promiscuity is a sound program to persue. It is in conflict with a female evolutionary perspective that must be centered around child-rearing to ensure projecting her genes into the future. This results in complex social arrangements, including invasion, raping and pillaging, sharia, marriage rituals such as seen in many of the world's religion. It may even be that the whole point of a religion is to regulate and give order to the natural mating urges of men and women.

Organized religious authorities set themselves up in power by creating myths about sex, fertility, sin, and so on. If you want to wield power over the people you must control their natural urges. Create a concept of sin associated with sex, then show people how they can get to exercise their urges legally and without sin, and you have control over them is the strategy devised by the Catholic Church and is copied by others.

But the urge can be stimulated to ennervate the individual to act in contrary manner to rational thought. Many examples exist of men who were seduced by a beautiful woman. Prostitutes are committed to tempting men toi have sex with them. Their task is easy because nothing could be more natural than to have sex with a willing partner. In the balance is loss of various degrees of prestige, moral propriety, and material wealth.

We in the wealthy western world cannot imagine returning to a time when women do not have property rights and defence of law such that they cannot be taken sexually at the will of a more powerful man, as happened centuries ago and still happens in areas of the world where the law is absent such as the Congo where mass rape is common even today.

Take the view of the Taliban in Afghanistan where the US and Foreign troops are regarded as threatening sharia law and the Afghanis rights to control their women. These Afghanis will fight to the death to prevent this. It is as simple as that. Under sharia law a man gets a woman and the right to control her sexually.

"If you want to defend the rights of women in Afghanistan you have to defeat the Taliban, and you have to do it militarily." - Douglas Ross, Professor of Foreign Policy, Simon Fraser U.

Young men & women are most susceptible to acting irrationally, that is to say, based on instinct rather than on reason, because between puberty and say, 40 yrs old, sex hormones are most plentiful in the body.

Denying young men access to sex partners by ssimple admonition or proclamation is almost impossible and in western democracies has consequences of unwanted pregnancy or heartbreak, but in many areas of the world it results in men taking up arms and many deaths are the consequence.

Minister Rich Coleman, Drunk Driving & Cindy Berner

cc: almanac@cbc.ca

Re: Drunk driving, Minister Coleman and Cindy Berner
- Alexa Middelaer, 4, was killed after she was hit by a car driven by Carol Berner.
- Minister Coleman considers telling RCMP to back off a bit in enforcing drunk driving laws
I view it as absurd that on the same news broadcast a woman is being sentenced for killing a 4-year-old girl while driving under the influence, and at the same time, the Minister is contemplating “educating” the public that it’s okay to have two glasses of wine with dinner. So go ahead, go out to dinner, drive to the restaurant, have a few glasses of wine and drive home.
Who is being smart here? The citizens who are staying home to have dinner and enjoy their wine without risking killing some 4 year old child, or, the Liberal Government’s Minister, who is so wishy-washy about enforcing his own laws, that a few restaurant owners whining in his ear can persuade him to back off & he is now prepared to put children at risk on the streets?
We didn’t back off about another drug that was killing people and costing the health system money. Cigarettes. So why back off now over the consumption of alcohol?
The reason for the law in the first place, in both cases: cigarettes and alcohol, is the same, and that is: people die, and those who don’t die, cost us money in terms of health care costs, property damage and thereby in insurance costs.
Do not listen to the lawyer who sounded off about the fewer number of criminal cases relating to drinking & driving. He is just trying to drum up business. We don’t need more people with criminal records. We do need fewer people drinking & driving. The RCMP seem to have got it right this time.

Who needs to be good at Math anyway?

G.V. Ramanathan, wonders if the nation isn't all in a lather about nothing, a professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he suggests the average person doesn't need higher math.

Ann Bibby wrote on Care2 Causes today:
"In a recent article for The Washington Post, Ramanathan questions the frenzied call to arms of the education establishment to try and boast the almost zero interest most Americans have in math beyond the basics. He points out that since the first clarion of concern in 1983's A Nation At Risk a lot of money and time has been devoted to promoting math, but that standardized test scores of American teens have improved not one bit since the 1980's. And despite the angst and alarm this causes politicians and business interests, the fact is that most people aren't required to use advanced math in their daily lives, either at work or personally. Math is less relevant to daily life than literature, history, politics, music and communication skills."

My take:

Sure the average kid can get by without higher math. Is "average" all you want your kid to be?

Math is the gateway skill to the high tech jobs of the future.

The "average person" can be intimidated by just tossing out a few statistics. The competent ones are not afraid of challenging politicians who attempt to hoodwink us by citing dubious stats to get us to panic into supporting lame bailouts that they don't properly understand themselves. Do you imagine W understood the bailout? Unlikely.
His advisors may have, who were likely huge investors in Wallstreet, but they were interested only in their own agenda.
Anyway, hoi polloi let them get away with it and now we have a multi-trillion dollar debt.
If everyone viscerally understood debt and compound interest, we might have burned Keynes at the stake instead of sanctifying him.

Another take, the lottery is just a tax on people who suck at math.

No one is "bad at math" but teaching makes them appear so. Teaching it by a method which relies for its success on short term memory - our weakest mental faculty, instead of say, imagination - children's greatest strength, is barren of ideas and a betrayal of children's potential.

Consider this - traditional math teaching is nothing but the forced memorization of facts, rules, formulae and process.

Where's Understanding supposed to come from?

My point is, if kids aren't learning by the way we are teaching, it is time to teach them in the way they can learn.

"Teaching Math with Manipulatives" - Geoff White
www.geoffwhite.ws

Spelling / Grammar - worth the trouble?

If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to understand the issues. That needs language - unambiguous, CORRECT language.

If you start accepting non-standard uses of language, if sloppy grammar and spelling goes unchallenged, the consequences are dire.

Labor contracts cannot be binding if the wording is ambiguous or wrong.
Worse, if you lack a proper understanding of grammar and accept incorrect substitutes such as "relative" for "relevant," "irregardless" for regardless, your thinking is handicapped and you will find it harder to succeed in this world, or even to survive.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/8-spelling-mistakes-even-smart-people-make.html#ixzz13htII2i2

Gleepix: Storm in a Teacup

Glee is not aimed at tweens as the CBC Radio guest, Prof. Sullivan, said.
It is a nostalgic look at our experiences in our senior year at high school.
Tweens are not buying the products advertised on Glee or in GQ for that matter.

The prudery expressed by Prof. Sullivan when she remarked on Lea Michele sucking on a lollipop shows that she doesn't get the joke. Lea Michele is the antithesis of Rachel Berry. She (Lea) is enormously attractive and would be hugely intimidating to any high school boy but all actors in the show pretend that she is some dowdily dressed, ugly Betty - to borrow a metaphor from another show that casts a beautiful actress as a frump. And yes, it is a legitimate source of humour as it reveals how little we understood ourselves in our teenage years.

Glee holds up a mirror for us, as we try to decide whom we best can identify with from among the stereotypes the cast represents. Reductio ad absurdam.

GQ is not a public magazine as Prof. Sullivan stated. It is a privately-owned business just like the Alberta Report. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But even the Alberta Report can still teach us something. GQ sells to its customers what they want to buy (as does AR) and they are all adults, notwithstanding the mother who claimed last week on CBC news that she was afraid lest GQ end up in the hands of her 8 year old son. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Real high school girls wear less on the beach. Better not let your kid go to the beach, mom.



Glee presents for our consumption, tongue-in-cheek references to truths from our youth that we can all relate to, such as when Puck tells us frankly, what he really wants from his life, unedited by taste or inhibition, when Britney & Santana misbehave like comic book caricatures of teenagers, or when Rachel speaks her mind, and reveals the crass insecurities we all experienced. The upside is we adults can discuss the matters raised because Glee broke the ice,

Thanks to you Glee, GQ and to Michele, Aragon & Monteith and to CBC Radio for giving us food for thought.

"Because I can" doesn't cut it.

Ultimately, I hope we participate in sport for the joy of it. Bruce Kidd, Canadian Olympian said, "Sport is a pleasure of the flesh." It feels good to push our bodies, and competition enables us to push harder than we could on our own.

One of the values of sport is that it can teach us something about ourselves.

Thus, if we find that our competitiveness causes pain to others, it is my hope that we would desist.

By extension if we realized that what we were doing was unfair, unseemly, without grace, that we would stop doing it.

Take my Nina Kraft example, if I am beating Natascha and I know I am doing it because I cheated, I hope that I would feel bad enough about it to stop doing it. Natascha was given the title after Nina was disqualified but Natascha never got to enjoy the win by receiving her acclaim on Alii Drive. Nina knew she was dirty.
Similarly, Oscar Periero never got the acknowledgement on the podium on the Champs Elysees at the finish - Floyd Landis stole that from him, and Floyd knew he was dirty.

The win was meaningless for Nina and Floyd because they were disqualified, all they did was steal the rightful glory from the other kid. I hope for better from our sports heroes.

If you are struggling with this issue, and you should, good. We all should. Fairness is a fundamental concern in sport. Something I emphasized to the rugby and basketball teams I taught as a schoolteacher.

"Just because we can" is a phrase we hear all too often when clear thinking escapes us. Think, "why do you do this?" "Because I can." is a pathetic response. It reflects a lack of understanding about ourselves, and is especially common from pro athletes. Hardly surprising, few of them earned their graduations from high school or college honestly, like the rest of us had to.

"Because I can" has become a de facto excuse for getting away with stuff even though the person concerned knows it's unfair. So my response to your question above is that if "outside help" is understood as being unfair in a triathlon, then an honorable person knows whether "teaming up" is fair or not without being told. Even though it may be impossible to enforce.

A Philosophy of Teaching Mathematics

Meaning

Where does the idea of a philosophy of mathematics come from?
Some of the first questions we ask are: What is there? What can I Know? and What ought I to do? Often philosophy is seen not as a discipline that gives answers, but one that merely hopes to ask better questions. I have a goal in mind, and that is, to do away with an establishment that seeks to bury math in symbolism, literally full of Greek symbols, such as pi and delta, unfamiliar to almost everybody, to demystify the activities that hide behind unexplained processes, such as calculus and algebra, even long division, which have plagued students for more than a century, since the inception of public schools. What I mean to do is to decode this mathematical language into a spatial reality.

After observing the world and the people and things in it we then want to talk about it. For this we employ language, and the first task is to name things: mother, father, pig, tree, antelope, and so on. Then we might want to say something about the scope of the world - how big things are, how far away things are, how many things there are. We employ metaphor: "The buffalo are as many as there are fish in the sea," or, as John Cabot told his King of the fish on the Grand Banks: "They are so plentiful, a man could walk on their backs from Greenland to Nova Scotia." Primitive man had only a few numbers: one, two, three and many. This sufficed for a primitive life. It had survival value up to a point. As long as there were enough buffalo to eat who cares how many there actually are? Need dictates.

When the metaphor breaks down we must resort to counting.

To describe the world, to say what there is, and how many there are, a few wavy hand gestures and holding up some fingers, works up to a point.
"Many buffalo, two days ride, that-a-way!" just about does it, until the population outnumbers the resources, then we need the accountants.

To master bigger numbers than we have fingers for, we employ symbols and right there we lose almost everybody. It is a common complaint to say, "I can't even balance my cheque book!"

What happened at that point was that, by employing symbols, mathematics was removed from the world of the concrete and into the abstract. This is not a necessary transformation. It has, however, been used to separate understanding from practice for most people and resulted in frustration, a sense of powerlessness and exploitation. How many big money earners have been defrauded by managers who knew more about manipulating numbers than their employers? If the math was concrete and available to everyone this wouldn't happen, at least, not so often. It may be that a fool and his money are still parted - eventually.

What I said I wanted to do is to decode the mathematical language into a concrete reality. You see - a key phrase - what has happened is that symbols are introduced into the learning process before the pre-pubertal mind can comprehend them, and therefore, rote and process learning have been substituted for understanding. Instead of understanding numbers, we merely train the processes of manipulating symbols according to rules and formula which must merely be remembered in lieu of understanding. Recitation has taken the place of comprehension.

This program has gone unchallenged for decades, for so long that most people think that there is no alternative, that children must be forced into the memorization of facts, rules, formulae and process, that that is all there is to math. Yet the alternative has been in front of us all along. To what am I referring? Why the very books we use to teach the subject. Open the schoolbooks. The storybooks, the atlases, the geography books about foreign lands and the people who live there, the history books about colonial North America, cook books for HomeEc, shop manuals for woodwork and car mechanics, science books about heat and light and sound. What do you see Pictures. You see a picture and a story below it, saying something about the picture. A picture is worth a thousand words. In the first storybooks we use to teach children there is only a picture of a thing, a boy, a dog, a ball, and the name printed underneath. this is the pattern. Open the math text, what do you see?

Where are the pictures?

What has happened as I said above is that we jumped straight to symbols, 6, +, -, x, etc. leaping from a vision of the world to abstract notation, bypassing the pictures altogether. This has made understanding impossible for almost all children. Piaget explained that the human goes through stages of development from sensori-motor to concrete operational to abstract which takes 10-14 years or more and no amount of coercion can change that. So in order to save children from counting on their fingers for ten years until their cognitive; development renders them capable of grasping abstract concepts, to give them something to do from grade one through grade ten we have resorted to drill and recitation, endless practice of meaningless skills so that when their intellect is ready for algebra, so the thinking goes, they can understand (suddenly) what we have been going on about for the first decade and a half of their lives. The cost in terms of their patience and cooperation has been enormous. Many children resent the boredom of mathematics the seemingly senseless waste of their time doing endless reams of sums for ten years that by the time they get to Grade 10, where there is often an option to drop math or at least to take some practical course like shop math or bookkeeping that may lead to employment is possible.

That in a nutshell is the problem To put it in the form of a question, what is the point of training efficiency and competence in arithmetic for the first ten years of a child's life if the cost is that it puts them off ever wanting to do math again? If they can be persuaded to study, to memorize the facts, rules, formulae and process necessary to achieve competence in math for ten or twelve years of schooling, but at the end they just hope they can remember it long enough to pass the exam and hope they never have to do it again, what really was the point of doing math in the first place?

The solution?

Change the method of presenting and doing math from grade one or two say, up to grade 8 or 9 or 10. Grandma and the pre-school teachers and the grade one teachers are doing just fine. All a child needs to start with they are already getting: the ability to count to nine and to build a rectangle. Although we have something to say about the counting.

If little Johnny can say, "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." Can he count? No. Well, maybe. You see all he has demonstrated is that he has memorized the names of he numbers, as he has memorized his A,B,Cs. But there is more to counting than knowing the names of the symbols 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and 10.

You have to know that 4 is larger than 3. If we assumed that the child would know that 4 was bigger than 3 because it came later in the sequence wouldn't he think that Z was 26 times bigger than A? All we know from the recitation is that he knows the names of the number symbols, just as he knows the names of the letter symbols.

We need to teach to concept of magnitude and nothing is simpler than to substitute a manipulative, a plastic block, say, for the symbols, initially.
Let us use a small cube, a little green block, attractive, non-threatening. Let us hold it up as the child holds his and say, "This is one."
Then let us hold up a small orange block - merely so that it is easily distinguishable from the one by looking, and say, "This is two." The two-block will be the same size as two green "ones" placed together.
Then let us hold up a pink block and say, "This is three." The pink block will be the same size as three ones placed together.
And so on.

We will lay them out on the table and say these are the numbers, one, two, three, etc. and we may write down the symbols below the blocks and say, "These are the names of the numbers."

The point here is to teach counting in concrete terms, rather than with symbols. Piaget has shown that it is pointless to employ abstract teaching concepts before the mind is ready but we can still teach the skills of mathematics. we can teach "kindergarten calculus."

All we do in math is count.

The Acquisition of Meaning

How does a thing acquire meaning?

How does “y = Mx+C” acquire meaning?

How does “the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides” acquire meaning?

How does “6” become meaningful?

One of my lifelong philosophical investigations has been the acquisition of meaning. There is a TV show that ends its credits with a boy pointing at a tree on a hillside and asking, ”What does that mean?” Is that a sensible question? Consider if the tree has meaning, if the tree on a hillside has a meaning, if a tree on a hillside against a cloudless sky has meaning. I think what this line of questioning reveals is that we look for patterns of relationships to elicit meaning. Humans are essentially pattern recognizers. I wrote an undergraduate thesis entitled, Intelligence as the ability to recognize, extend and create patterns.” In it I wrote that a pattern is a relationship between at least two things. For there to be a pattern there must be at least two things. In the case of a dot on an infinite field there is no pattern. But a dot on a field with finite boundaries must have a relation to at least the boundary, or in the more pedestrian case, the dot has a relationship with the edge of the paper. By extrapolation, an isolated event, a “random” event is not a pattern. For an event to have a pattern there must at least exist a context for the event. If there are two such events, then of course, we have a pattern.

One way to investigate the acquisition of meaning is to consider learning a foreign language as an adult. I have taught ESL. One typically begins with some vocabulary, some examples of familiar objects: dog, cat, man, car. This is just re-naming. The meaning for the learner is still the original word/object relationship they discovered growing up. My understanding of cat is not enhanced by learning that, in French, it is called “chat.”

In some languages I am told, there are concepts that do not exist in other languages. If a student should acquire the new concept in the new (for her) language as an adult, then she would be able to tell us something about the acquisition of meaning. Without her we have to introspect a bit more. If I learn a new word in a foreign language, say, in a vocabulary list, such as perro, broma, barato, etc. I may memorize the list and pair them with the equivalent words in my first language but it is a chore and I need many reviews, even then I have to translate the word to English to assign meaning to the object to which the word refers. I think what is missing to give the new Spanish word meaning for me is having the relevant experiences with the object that a native speaker might have when acquiring the object in the quotidian way. This is to say that there are schemas (pre-concepts) and actual physical experiences (sensory experiences) that someone would have in association with learning a word. Take “perro” for example. When a Spanish child first meets a perro his parents might use the word as it licks his face and that experience is what the child recalls when he hears the word subsequently. Also, when he experiences the face-licking again he might utter the word “perro.” Importantly there will be feelings associated inextricably with the use of the word, and vice versa – the word can elicit the feelings.

This is an important feature of meaning acquisition. To put it bluntly, for there to be meaning, there must be feeling. Could there be a rote recall of an equivalent meaning as in vocabulary lists? Yes, of course, but for there to be a visceral understanding of a word or concept, there must be a feeling associated with it.

Therefore when teaching, we must seek to evoke feelings in association with a concept in order to ensure that students acquire meaning viscerally.

A corollary of this is, that if there are no feelings associated with an experience then it is meaningless. An example of this may be when a student witnesses an experiment in science, chemistry, say, perhaps litmus paper turning colour when in contact with an acid or akali, and having no accompanying feeling, she simply shrugs and says, “so what?” In this case I am prepared to admit that it is an appropriate response and we as educators ought to respond positively to it by changing our approach, rather than, say, reproaching the student for having a bad attitude.

Again, to acquire meaning requires that there be feelings present. What kind of feelings? There is an amazing range of possible feelings that could be associated with an experience. Consider dissecting a frog. You can easily imagine the range of feelings this could engender, ickiness, amazement, wonder, fear, disgust, and so on. No doubt all of us remember that experiment vividly. For this query, it is not the one, intended, scientific feeling that I am concerned with. I wish only to observe that with strong feelings comes strong learning. Focusing the learning experience is another project. Thus, in the case of learning math, where meaning is often lacking and the learning is sometimes considered tedious, it is obvious that we must strive to present the opportunity for the students to experience feelings when learning math. One feeling we all would like them to experience is the joy that comes with success.

How shall this be done?

One way is to employ the "explore and discover" principle. In practice this looks a lot like play, but it is directed play.

Exploring and discovering are activities naturally satisfying curiosity. And like attaining understanding, directed play, or exploring and discovering, produces good feelings.

Understanding a concept is usually accompanied by the production of dopamine and endorphins in the brain, in short, pleasure. When that little light goes on, and you finally "get it," it feels good!

Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have shown that understanding of concepts occurs naturally in children if the appropriate sensori-motor experiences can be had. That means the necessary opportunity for exploring and discovering concepts must be provided for the children to learn naturally; in other words, play.

But not just any play, if you want children to learn language you must provide a language-rich environment. If you want children to learn math concepts you must provide a math-rich environment. More on that later, let's get this straight: sensori-motor experiences of the right kind are necessary for the acquisition of schemas - groups of experiences, that can be assimilated and synthesized into concepts or accommodated by the child's mind. This sense of understanding is enjoyable and is all that is needed for successful learning.

It is our mission as teachers and parents to provide the appropriate materials and situations for this to happen, and sometimes just to get out of the way.

While that made me happy, by 1998 the demand on my schedule had become so heavy I knew had to find another way to reach more people. My solution was to record my workshop on video. I willingly sent the tapes to interested parties I couldn't teach in person. The problem with that scheduling solution was no one could ask questions. Extra explanations were missing because I wasn't there in person at the white board. That led me to the development of a handbook.

I'll tell you more about that in a minute. You probably want to know more about the Mortensen Math system first.

MORTENSON MORE THAN MATH employs manipulatives to enhance the child's ability to visualize math concepts, to decode the mathematical language into spatial reality.

The best way I know to explain the Mortensen Math system is to talk about memory first. How good is your short-term memory? More importantly, how good is your short-term memory with numbers? Suppose I gave you 12 numbers, each of them seven digits long. Do you think you could remember them for an hour? Five minutes? Do you think you could remember them long enough to write them down, even right after I told you?

Not likely. That's because you've been taught like everyone else to memorize the hard way. The hard way is how most students are taught math as well.

The truth is the entire math curriculum used in traditional teaching situations, employing textbooks, relies on memorizing nothing but FACTS, RULES, FORMULAE AND PROCESS!

Our job as educators is to decode this mathematical language of symbols into a concrete reality. This is what the method does.

Learn more at my webpages: Geoff White - Teaching Math with Manipulatives using the Mortensen Method

Transcendent Writing

Mysticism Today

I am seeing many examples these days of an undue fascination with mysticism and wonder for its own sake.

It's one thing to have an open mind, to consider carefully, to explore unique ideas as they come to you, and quite another to seek out notions merely because they are unlike any other, to live on the fringe.

Being on the cutting edge of knowledge is not the same as hovering at the limit of sensibility.

While I have no quarrel with those who are deluded through genetic flaw, driven to it by social pressures or personal demons, to the point where they are unable to distinguish between fact and fancy, I take issue with those who deliberately look for the quirky and controversial with full knowledge that the material will amuse the gullible and the untrained.

An example or two might serve to clarify what is bothering me.

I was recently invited to attend a seminar on guided, or transcendent writing which is purported to be, or simply described as “words that flow from the heart and pierce the heart at the same time”
Sounds innocent doesn't it?

Fuji (planchette writing), guided writing or spirit writing, has a long history in Chinese folklore and appears in other cultures in various forms. It arises out of superstition and strong emotionality surrounding loss of loved ones, a belief in a life after this one, supporting a desire for communication with the dead, and is absolutely unsupported by any testable evidence. Likely it is fostered by the exploitation of of the superstitious for fame or profit.

Simple observation of the act is seldom possible because the writer will commonly testify that some negative spirit among the observers is blocking communication with the spirit realm as if skepticism is more powerful than the supposed spirits will to communicate, as if negative beliefs are inherently more powerful or the spirits have a lot of ego and refuse to show themselves except to true believers. Writing done in isolation of course is abundant from the self-declared practitioner and will be accompanied by wonderful tales of extreme emotion and experience.

I ask why, when I feel inspired and have a fruitful day of writing, it is not seen as guided by a beneficient spirit and is something other-worldly to behold, and not merely the product of industriousness?

So the claims made by these persons of having produced writing guided by some spurious connection with another ethereal realm amounts to nothing more than, "Hey, look what I did! Yeah, I know its weird, but that's spirits for ya."

"Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics." - wikipedia
"Edgar Allan Poe had a deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its followers "Frogpondians" after the pond on Boston Common.[6] He ridiculed their writings by calling them "metaphor-run," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake."[7] One of his short stories, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", is a clear attack on transcendentalism, which the narrator calls a "disease". The story specifically mentions the movement and its flagship journal The Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific targets.[8]" - wikipedia.

"The term transcendentalism sometimes serves as shorthand for "transcendental idealism", which is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German Idealist philosophers."
- ibid.

"Immanuel Kant had called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects." The transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human." - ibid.

"The practical aims of the transcendentalists were varied; some among the group linked it with utopian social change; Brownson connected it with early socialism, while others considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice:" - ibid.

While Emerson may have waxed lyrical about it (transcendentalism), procliming the wonderful experiences to be had while in conjugation with nature, let your spirits run free, etc.:

"So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit." - Emerson, quoted in wiki article.

he used a different tone when pressed as to its veracity:
"In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice:
You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a transcendental party; that there is no pure transcendentalist; that we know of no one but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. ... Shall we say, then, that transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish." - ibid.

The phrase above, "not falsifiable by sensuous experience" is telling. While the transcendentalists wanted to borrow the credibility of someone like Kant by describing their position as transcendentalist, they did not understand what that entailed. It just sounded good and was likely to baffle their 19thC peers who were just as ignorant, they wanted also to avoid "falsifiability by sensuous experience." To put it plainly they wanted to avoid having anyone observe them doing what they claimed to do which is have that connection with the non-material world, the spirit realm. Lockean empiricism insisted that knowledge could only come from the senses. If you couldn't tuch, see, smell, taste or hear it, it didn't exist, in the sense it was not real.

Kant tried to prove that you could have knowledge that was transcendent of experience, but he was talking about things like mathematical truths as exemplied by the Euclideam maxim, "the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees," and two parallel lines do not intersect. The problem with that "knowledge" was not truth, it was that while it was true (by definition) it was not knowledge of the world. In the real world two lines were never parallel, they didn't exist.

The falsifiable part meant that for a claim to be knowledge it ahd to be falsfifiable by Lockean standards. You had to be able to observe it, through the senses. Or else it wasn't knowledge. It might be true in a Platonic sense, but that was mere tautology: it was true by definition.

Descriptions of trancendent writing abound with fluffy ambiguities that forbid clear, concise definition, enabling all manner of misunderstandings which result in no one being able to say exactly what it is, or what counts as an example of it, thereby avoiding exactly the kind of falsifiability that was wished for by its original practitioners. Unfortunately for them this also means TW defies verifiability. If you can't examine it you cannot refute it but you cannot prove it either. For fluffy ambiguity see the following.

"Transcendent states are those which take the mind out of the envelope of personal or at times, even transpersonal awareness and into a pure field of infinite silence. Here, the subject/object process no longer resides. In this state, the reciprocity between what we know as the "I" in its singularity melts and the internal wisdom that is easily manifest can render a complete elucidation of knowing in its totality.
further: "The contemplative manifestation, which is characterized by one's ability to enter a state of clarity to the point of arising in consciousness, is capable of meeting the transcendent at its depth. Here, the ability to witness the > field of pure consciousness and the point of recognition of the underlying state out of which thought emerges becomes self-evident."
- Re:[FairfieldLife] Transcendent Writing, a yahoo group

The above is a description of the transcendent state, not an example of TW.
As such it fails to say, coherently, what it is.
What the rules of grammar, and accepted word useage give us, is intelligible meaning. The above breaks both rules in numerous ways. It is also redundant in many cases, the very definition of double-speak.

"infinite silence" - infinity refers to something without limits as in describing something capable of degrees. Silence on the other hand is not something capable of degrees, the slightest sound ends it. There cannot be a little bit of silence, or a lot of silence, or by extension, an inifinity of silence.

Similarly, transcendence is a bi-value state, either a thing transcends experience, or it does not. It cannot therefore have depth, which is a matter of degree.
Other examples of bafflegab - simple linguistic error, exist throughout. there is not a single clear, concise sentence in the two paragraphs. Therefore the above example lacks any meaning. It is unintelligible gibberish.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this example, one: nothing can be learned from the offered descriptions, and two: no argument with TW can be mounted. It is hard to refute ambiguous rubbish.

Fight Against Cancer: not a good idea?

We have just seen a national event, "Stand Up For Cancer" ontv, seen Cops For Cancer begin a 1,000 kilometre bicycle ride in a group of 25 riders. On the eve of 9/11, when almost everyone's mind is on the events of 2001 on this date, I wonder what would be the result of winning the fight against Cancer.
To put it bluntly, what if we won the battle against cancer, what then? And let us here let cancer, stand for all disease. The major disease killers are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Apparently nobody dies of old age anymore. Do we even know what death by old age is now? So if we defeated these 3 major killers, what then?

There would still be death by accident and natural disaster. But these causes barely put a dent in population growth. If we ended death by the big 3 causes, would not our population skyrocket?

If it did there must surely come a time when massive death by famines would occur. No matter that technology proposes to supply food endlessly. For even if finite resources could be extended by technology with cloning meat substances in a vat, or farming algae in the seas, whatever, there is still the logistics of transport to overcome. We have seen many famines in the world in the last 50 years, too many to mention, yet, even knowing in advance where and when they would occur, and that they would occur, we have still failed to get the food there, and millions have died.

In addition to the, as yet unsolved, logistical problems of food distribution, we have the insuperable problems of overcoming the lack of political will to feed everybody. Recently, the tragedy of Darfur has showed us that there is no unanimous belief that all people should be saved from starvation. In Sudan, Chinese oil interests trumped the death of thousands by starvation as they used their Security Council veto to prevent the tragedy when tons of food & supplies stood ready to be delivered to the beleagured population, and they died before our eyes.

East Timor is another example of political disinterest allowing the death of thousands. It is foolish to think that we would save everybody, merely by providing food, even if we could overcome the logistical problems.

There are the further battles with birth control and eugenics issues, for how else could we stem the tide of humanity that threatens to overwhelm our ability to feed the masses. UN figures show that by 2050 world population will reach 9 billion people, fifty per cent more than lived at the turn of the millennium. Dare anyone say massive death by disease or malnutrition is not certain.

So, why try to stop heart disease, cancer or stroke.

Clearly, the personal motive is to spare us the loss of loved ones or even personal demise, no one wants their life ended prematurely by a named cause.
The public motive behind the battle against heart disease, cancer, stroke is profit.
Pharmaceutical companies seek treatments, not cures. Fund raisers, like the Cancer Society, the Heart & Stroke Foundation, are run by people who depend on their fund-raising for their livlihood.
Not that there is anything wrong with that per se. There is a market for the drugs and a need for money to pay for them, but neither group is looking long term. Big pharma does not want an end to the diseases and they would lament the discovery of a cure because it would put an end to that profit stream.
Of course, they would simply move on to some other ailment, there is no shortage, and they are very creative when it comes to finding new income streams, even inventing problems that seemingly did not exist before. Prozac comes to mind. But to stay on topic, even though big pharma does not want an end to the big killers, neither do we.

And, by extension, we do not want fund raisers to continue either.

In reality, death by disease, a sudden heart attack, or stroke, a short final struggle with inoperable cancer, ameliorated by powerful pain killers, seems preferable, to me at least, to a long, slow, pointless, painful, death by starvation, with awful wasting away of the flesh in desperate wishing for something to eat, watching family members growth weaker, scrawnier, day by day until they finally succumb to wasting away as skin covered skeletons.

A theory of culture

I have formulated a theory of culture as an assemblage of values shared among a group of people.
These values are such that they each describe a good or its negative equivalent a bad.
An example may serve to illustrate. It is a good thing that mothers instinctively care for their children. It is a bad thing to cause harm to others without reason, such as self-defense. To love your neighbour as you love yourself is good.
The culture should be teachable for otherwise it would die out. It would be transmitted to the youngsters of the culture much as language is passed on from mother to child. Demonstrably, language is a huge part of a culture for many values can only be transmitted as part of language, such as good poetry or other aesthetically pleasing language forms: plays, speeches, essays and the like.
It is observable as this is actually done, that many values become condensed as aphorisms.
Use of language in particular ways can signal differences in culture that is differences in the shared values.
After Wittgenstein, "the meaning of a word is its use," or the way it is used in a particular language game.
Values thus must be meaningful or the culture is without point.
Language differences between people can signal a difference of culture.
People discourse to detect these differences.
Personal safety may be an issue, where variance in language use can signify a danger of association with the person.
This gives sense in having a discussion in order to get to know someone. In this case what is being sought is the presence of shared values, which may give credence to the possibility of a "meaningful relationship" being formed.
Thus it is that many sociologists regard culture as, " The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought."

For many to speak of culture is to speak only of the Arts: music, painting sculpture, crafts, etc. While it is useful for purposes of that discussion, it is nonetheless true that a person can be "of a culture" and that that culture may have identifiable artistic forms associated exclusively with that culture and indeed, that that culture may be identified by those arts, eg. Eskimo culture.
A culture must have a set of beliefs, for it makes no sense to speak of goods" if it is not also "believed" by a member of that culture that a thing is a good. Thus a culture necessarily has a belief structure, or equivalently a structure of non-beliefs.

UC Berkeley Classics Professor Tony Long says that "Epictetus scarcely needs updating as an analyst of the psyche's strengths or weaknesses, and as a spokesman for human dignity, autonomy, and integrity." The central Stoic thesis, says Long, is that our God-given reason and ability to self-reflect give us the power to shape our own lives. As Shakespeare put it: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so."

Epictetus thinks of being human as a profession.

A profession?

We think of professionals as having technical skills, and Epictetus uses the word in exactly that kind of way. So what is the profession of being a human being? It's acknowledging your irreducible social identity--that you are positioned in the world with a certain set of relationships--family, work, community, all kinds of relationships. And therefore your profession, as a human being, is to fulfill those relationships in the best possible way. This seems to me an extraordinarily different way of thinking about our identity from our usual idea of the "real me."
On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five."
—H. L. Mencken

If you already have your mind made up, why do you need to read about it?

On Writers and Company on CBC radio today there is an interview with an author, a philosopher by trade, who has a book out "26 Arguments for the Existence of God."

My first response is that it is a commercial work pandering to the doubts and anxieties of the great unwashed who may actually buy this book.

Of course, you can define "God" in many ways and therefore you can discuss the existence of such an entity or spirit or whatever in a number of ways. In the end though, nothing conclusive can be said, for there is no evidence whatsoever to support the contention. I can hear the protests already. What about this, or that, they will say? It must inevitably regress to a discussion about what shall count as "evidence."

Evidence

All such discussions require some discussion of this sort. How can you proceed, except with an agreement about what is going to count as evidence of something, anything?

The difference between something actually existing and, say, someone testifying that they have a "feeling" that something exists, or perhaps, reporting that they have had some experience that leads them to believe something exists, is precisely in the evidence that is on offer. If it involves feelings, or sensory experiences, supposedly had by someone, but which cannot be experienced by anyone else, or which cannot be observed independently, at any given time, say, is that, while that may be enough for the person who claims to have had the experience, it must leave others wondering at best, and at least, merely shrugging and moving on.

Bertrand Russell said, "We ought not to believe anything for which there is no evidence whatsoever."
If this seems materialistic, it is. The claim is about existence. A claim of existence requires material evidence, or what does existence possibly mean?

There need be no doubt if someone says, "I had a feeling." We need only reply, "That's nice" or "How sad," whatever is appropriate.
Their feelings don't alter the world of material things like medium-sized dry goods: people, cars, houses, rocks, etc On the other hand, evidence of "God," of a "God" in the ordinary sense of "God" - an all powerful being with will, personality, an agenda, etc., would alter the world as we know it and must therefore be taken notice of. So the discussion of evidence must be undertaken, lest the discussion dissolve into bickering and the disharmony of claims, counterclaims, skepticism and emotional outbursts.

Proof

That someone may make a statement of their beliefs is harmless, unless that requires something of others - that they refrain from doing something, say. If someone says, for example, pork should not be consumed, and as a result, pigs for food are made illegal then a response is necessary because a conflict has occurred. And what has been contentious in the past, has been when someone says, "I believe that it is contrary to God's law that x," and that claim has ramifications on others. That case seems to require some proof that there is a God. And that requires evidence of a material existence.

In addition, for reasonable people, some agreement about what constitutes "proof" is necessary also. Without that, disagreement can result in violent dispute, as has often occurred.

Now, any University course in Philosophy typically deals with concepts of proof and evidence and proper, valid arguments.

That some institutions, in an apparent attempt at undermining the process of reason, have arbitrarily made requirement of standards of evidence superfluous is a matter of history. Oral Roberts U, Brigham Young U., any Catholic university, or any religious sectarian university of any kind whatsoever, anywhere in the world, pre-empts unbiased skepticism by pre-supposing the texts of various works to be above examination, eg. the Qu'uran, the St. James Bible, the Talmud.

In practice the questioning of anything in these works is proscribed.
In practice, the discussion of the existence of God with any of the faithful is a complete waste of time, because the issue for them is already decided. No further discussion is possible,

Petroleum Gate: the real slick in the Gulf

May 6th, 2010, I wrote the following passage in response to news of the oil rig blowout in the Gulf. I posted it at www.everyauthor.com Yesterday the BP CEO was reported to have made remarks confirming the suspicions I raised in the passage I wrote over a mont6h ago, to wit: we aren't responsible and here's $50M towards cleanup costs to show what good guys we are at BP. Keith Kohl of Energy & Capital has raised the possibility that BP won't survive this mishap.


Petroleum Gate


Peter Johns-Houghton toyed with his English Breakfast tea, then sipped it delicately. Then he spoke. His voice was even, but his expression was deadly serious.

"Our government is chagrined by BP's response. Their actions reflect on us of course. Many of the Board are close friends with Cabinet Ministers and we enjoy a good chunk of taxes from them as well as the employment of many of our voters, but, I fear this will end badly," he said.

"How so?" I asked innocently. I had my suspicions of where this was leading but I wanted to get him on record.

"The drilling company running the rig when it exploded is a sacrificial lamb, nothing more," he replied.

"But its market cap is a hundred million easily. Pounds," I observed.

"Yes, and BP will spend another 50 million washing seabirds and otters as a PR campaign. That’s petty cash. You have to understand that the oil corporations have the best lawyers money can buy, and their primary purpose is to protect the Corporation. These people are a great deal sharper than the lawyers the government can afford. The Deep Horizon rig was funded by BP, but it is owned by the drilling company. It was set up that way as a buffer to protect BP from greater liability. They own the oil of course, but their liability stops there."

"Then who..?" I blurted, shocked to hear this revelation from his lips, though I suspected as much. It had the ring of truth about it.

"The US taxpayer will pay, of course. Obama has already come out and said they will clean it up. Perhaps he, or his advisors, have already checked with Legal on it, but they know what BP knows - they aren't going down over a bunch of herring and some whooping cranes. Of course the shrimp industry is gone, but it was doomed the day they anchored the first offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It's amazing it has lasted this long really."

"But Obama has been, albeit reluctantly, telling us that he will support offshore drilling to sever US dependence on Middle East Oil!"

"Ironic isn't it." Peter beckoned the waiter and indicated he wanted more hot water. “The price dropped precipitously after last summer's peak at $147 per barrel. You'd think they would have moved to take advantage. Look I don't know if I want to tell you this.."

The waiter interrupted and Peter paused until he was out of earshot. I was dry mouthed in anticipation of what he might say next.

"I'm not really into conspiracy theories but what I'm going to tell you might seem like that. This must be off the record. If it got out that I told you this I may be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but I'll have to take that risk. I’m getting out of politics anyway, should have retired five years ago. The stakes are too high. None of this is confirmed officially but it may come out anyway. Some things are too big to hide."

"What are you getting at?"

“The Deep Horizon explosion may have been an act of terrorism," he said. His tea steamed until it cooled as I digested the implications of his words.
The dominoes fell rapidly as I followed the sequence of his thinking as I imagined it.
If offshore drilling went ahead and US oil independence was assured, OPEC would still sell their oil in Europe and to China, so they had no interest in a Gulf Coast disaster, except for the Islamic Jihad, but no one had claimed responsibility.

"Who?"

"CIA?" whispered Peter, looking around nervously.

"Why?" I queried disingenuously.

"Remember Dole pineapple and the Dulles brothers?" he asked.

I took that as rhetorical. I leaned in to hear more.

"Who else knows you're meeting with me today?" he said quietly.

"My Editor. My secretary, maybe my wife, if she listens to me anymore." Things with Gloria had deteriorated since I began following the Peak Oil crisis last year."

Peter pointed at the TV over the bar. CNN was running a banner that the DOW was down 900 points initially this morning, but had recovered to only 400 points down in the last hour.

"There is a play going on. Two actually. Big money is playing the Euro. betting the Greek-Portugal-Spain situation is going to explode. And Oil speculators are trying to push oil over a hundred again. Too much money was tied up in new operations last year when it went to $147, and they need it to get there again or they will lose big. Plus, Interests in the Canadian fields in Saskatchewan and Alberta want oil over a $100 again too."

I could fill in the blank.

"And stopping offshore oil exploration is a good way to push it over the threshold." I said.

"Exactly," said Peter.

My guts had turned to water as we watched the stock market ticker in silence and I fought back nausea. I knew I had a huge story here but it was classic conspiracy theory. No one would go on record and I had no proof that CIA had blown up a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, but damn, it made a cruel sort of sense. If they would let their own Trade Towers go down, would they balk at a few sea gulls and Louisiana shrimp? Then an inkling of an idea grew in the back of my mind.

The Sane Mind Cannot Contradict Itself

The human mind cannot hold two mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously.

Today I heard on the radio of a group that were beginning a running program. Their goal is to run 5kms after about 8 weeks, They are all still smokers. Of those who succeed in running 5kms in two months only 30% will still be smokers, or so I'm told. I can understand that. August 28, 2003 I paid $550 to enter the Ironman Canada Triathlon. I was a smoker.

I quit smoking Christmas Eve 2002 and I haven't touched a cigarette since, nor have I missed it.

Eight months later to the day, August 24, 2003, I finished my first Ironman Canada.Triathlon.

I have done it six times since then. August 29th 2010 will see my seventh Ironman Canada finish.

The key for me was simply deciding that I was not a smoker. It was inconsistent: smoking and running marathons, so I said: "I am not a smoker any longer." Either you are or you aren't.

To those who think it is more complicated or too difficult, I say, "You just haven't decided yet whether you are a smoker or not. If you can't make up your mind, then you are still a smoker. If you say to yourself that I want to quit but it's too hard, then you are confused. You cannot say "I want to quit" and then light up a smoke. Lighting up, says "I want to smoke." It's that simple."

My first run was about two blocks, then it became four blocks, then a kilometre, then 2K, soon it was, "how long could I run measured in half hours."

I'm not saying it was easy, just that it was simple, and simple because it was clear:
"I am not a smoker, therefore I do not smoke." No ambiguity.

I continue to run, bike and swim because it is fun and I want to be healthy. My ability to run a 10k at the drop of a hat or ride for two hours then do a day's work and ride home again, or go down to the lake and swim to the other side any day I feel inclined is my measure of good health. Try it. Do it. Enjoy it.

btw, I am 58 years old.

Top 10 Countries Killing the Planet

Top 10 Countries Killing the Planet


Care2.com recently, May 11th, ran an article by Melissa Breyer called Top ten countries ruining the planet, wherein she stated that a country's wealth is the key factor in determining their threat to the planet. Makes sense. To generate wealth a country must exploit its resources, at least that has proven to be the case historically. Maybe in the future it could change but based on what I understand of human nature, I don't see that happening. When we have wealth we seek a "better" way of life, in terms of our enjoyment. We want better shelter, better food, water, air and of course, more security.

Only poverty seems to force us to accept a poorer quality of existence. We may speak (if we do) of having a more eco-friendly way of life, saving the whales, preserving bio-diversity, but it's human nature to want more food, better food, more leisure, more enjoyable leisure, more toys, more exciting entertainment.

The faint hope is that technology will help us do it. But the economic reality is that that's not what we want to spend our wealth on. The market determines what we spend our money on and market forces determine what governments will do. Governments exist to serve the dominant class in society, which according to John Ralston Saul is the Corporate Class. But that is not the core of my essay today.

“The environmental crises currently gripping the planet are the corollary of excessive human consumption of natural resources. There is considerable and mounting evidence that elevated degradation and loss of habitats and species are compromising ecosystems that sustain the quality of life for billions of people worldwide,” says Corey Bradshaw, leader of a new study by the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute in Australia that has ranked most of the world’s countries for their environmental impact."

quotes Melissa Breyer in her article.

The top ten countries endangering the planet are doing it by clearing forests, mining whole mountains, polluting air and water and destroying bio-diversity by endangering animal species.

They do all of this, not as a national program, but by the collective hand of its business interests, and this is of course in the interest of making a profit. No profit, no environmental impact. The corollary is: no market, no profit.

At the basis of this environmental exploitation is the market. The market is at it's simplest: people. There are nearly 7 billion people on the planet. In the first two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution market growth was achieved by colonizing. There were new countries to mine, harvest and to sell to. In the 20th century there were still new markets to sell to as Coca-Cola found out as they expanded into other countries. then followed MacDonald's Restaurants and every other corporation. Now in the 21st century as every country in the world has the internet and tv and is reached by any corporate interest that perceives them as a potential customer, new customers are achieved by birth.

Perhaps that's why there is no (or very little) discussion of population control. It may sound like a good idea for parlor room discussions but when dinner is served it is forgotten, yet as Paul Ehrlich warned in 1968 with his book The Population Bomb, everything else mentioned above depends on growth in human population. Stop population growth and you begin to limit environmental damage, species endangerment and climate change, also you begin to limit profits. Allow those 7 billion to become 9 billion by 2050 as predicted by the UN and the damage goes unabated.

There may be interest in the discussion, but could it happen at governmental level? The Canadian government is reluctant to include funding for abortions in their foreign aid budget because they are afraid of the contentious subject derailing their term in office and threatening their continued reign in subsequent elections. The foreign aid initiative concerns the perinatal care of third world mothers many of whom die in child birth. It is clear that they cannot accept that medical care professionals in third world countries, where women are routinely raped and may want abortions to save their lives, not to mention being saved the hardship of trying to raise and feed an unwanted infant in a war torn country whose netire population has struggled to survive below the poverty line for generations, may decide to terminate a pregnancy with the foreign-aid dollars. And if the Canadian Government cannot even entertain this discussion then there is little hope that they could survive the discussion of reducing environmental exploitation, including mines, forests, fisheries, and watersheds (where fertilizer pollution threatens our fresh water and food sources,) in the face of resistance from corporations who like their profits, and citizens who like their lifestyles.

Petroleum Gate

[i]This started as a Morning Electroshock piece but it rapidly got out of hand. heh.[/i]

******

[b]Petroleum Gate[/b]


Peter Johns-Houghton toyed with his English Breakfast tea, then sipped it delicately. Then he spoke. His voice was even, but his expression was deadly serious.

"Our government is chagrined by BP's response. Their actions reflect on us of course. Many of the Board are close friends with Cabinet Ministers and we enjoy a good chunk of taxes from them as well as the employment of many of our voters, but, I fear this will end badly," he said.

"How so?" I asked innocently. I had my suspicions of where this was leading but I wanted to get him on record.

"The drilling company running the rig when it exploded is a sacrificial lamb, nothing more," he replied.

"But its market cap is a hundred million easily. Pounds," I observed.

"Yes, and BP will spend another 50 million washing seabirds and otters as a PR campaign. That’s petty cash. You have to understand that the oil corporations have the best lawyers money can buy, and their primary purpose is to protect the Corporation. These people are a great deal sharper than the lawyers the government can afford. The Deep Horizon rig was funded by BP, but it is owned by the drilling company. It was set up that way as a buffer to protect BP from greater liability. They own the oil of course, but their liability stops there."

"Then who..?" I blurted, shocked to hear this revelation from his lips, though I suspected as much. It had the ring of truth about it.

"The US taxpayer will pay, of course. Obama has already come out and said they will clean it up. Perhaps he, or his advisors, have already checked with Legal on it, but they know what BP knows - they aren't going down over a bunch of herring and some whooping cranes. Of course the shrimp industry is gone, but it was doomed the day they anchored the first offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It's amazing it has lasted this long really."

"But Obama has been, albeit reluctantly, telling us that he will support offshore drilling to sever US dependence on Middle East Oil!"

"Ironic isn't it." Peter beckoned the waiter and indicated he wanted more hot water. “The price dropped precipitously after last summer's peak at $147 per barrel. You'd think they would have moved to take advantage. Look I don't know if I want to tell you this.."

The waiter interrupted and Peter paused until he was out of earshot. I was dry mouthed in anticipation of what he might say next.

"I'm not really into conspiracy theories but what I'm going to tell you might seem like that. This must be off the record. If it got out that I told you this I may be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but I'll have to take that risk. I’m getting out of politics anyway, should have retired five years ago. The stakes are too high. None of this is confirmed officially but it may come out anyway. Some things are too big to hide."

"What are you getting at?"

“The Deep Horizon explosion may have been an act of terrorism," he said. His tea steamed until it cooled as I digested the implications of his words.
The dominoes fell rapidly as I followed the sequence of his thinking as I imagined it.
If offshore drilling went ahead and US oil independence was assured, OPEC would still sell their oil in Europe and to China, so they had no interest in a Gulf Coast disaster, except for the Islamic Jihad, but no one had claimed responsibility.

"Who?"

"CIA?" whispered Peter, looking around nervously.

"Why?" I queried disingenuously.

"Remember Dole pineapple and the Dulles brothers?" he asked.

I took that as rhetorical. I leaned in to hear more.

"Who else knows you're meeting with me today?" he said quietly.

"My Editor. My secretary, maybe my wife, if she listens to me anymore." Things with Gloria had deteriorated since I began following the Peak Oil crisis last year."

Peter pointed at the TV over the bar. CNN was running a banner that the DOW was down 900 points initially this morning, but had recovered to only 400 points down in the last hour.

"There is a play going on. Two actually. Big money is playing the Euro. betting the Greek-Portugal-Spain situation is going to explode. And Oil speculators are trying to push oil over a hundred again. Too much money was tied up in new operations last year when it went to $147, and they need it to get there again or they will lose big. Plus, Interests in the Canadian fields in Saskatchewan and Alberta want oil over a $100 again too."

I could fill in the blank.

"And stopping offshore oil exploration is a good way to push it over the threshold." I said.

"Exactly," said Peter.

My guts had turned to water as we watched the stock market ticker in silence and I fought back nausea. I knew I had a huge story here but it was classic conspiracy theory. No one would go on record and I had no proof that CIA had blown up a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, but damn, it made a cruel sort of sense. If they would let their own Trade Towers go down, would they balk at a few sea gulls and Louisiana shrimp? Then an inkling of an idea grew in the back of my mind.

***

Ann Coulter shies away from University audience.

Ann Coulter, who deserves no further attention nor notoriety for her extreme right wing views, has backed out of a speaking engagement at the University of Ottawa. She had received a letter from the Vice-President of the University, apparently to advise her that we have stronger laws regarding the dissemination of hate messages, discriminatory speech against minorities, etc. and she puckered and ran away.

I think this was an error though. We ought not to doubt the ability of intellects of University students and their professors - the intended audience of her talk, to decide for themselves what ideas are valid.
Censorship in any form is abhorent. If bureaucrats are entitled to muzzle anyone, then they may well muzzle just anyone who doesn't meet their approval. That is one very slippery slope. And it doesn't always come in the form of a ban.

Undoubtedly, the university lecture hall is the one arena best equipped in this country to hear new ideas, new arguments. No harm will come to educated and enlightened people merely listening to radical ideas in that arena. Indeed it is the one arena where radical ideas are most welcome lest a society stagnate. Nothing is decided there, unlike say, parliament. Weak-minded folks, susceptible perhaps to unpleasant ideas, are unlikely to be in attendance.

Better to have an open airing of ideas where they may be scrutinized by the country's best minds, than to drive them underground where they may fester. Crazies, sociopaths and their ilk undoubtedly exist and will have their ideas, let's have them out in the open where they may be identified.

Then we can get help for them, or at least immunize ourselves against their poison.
Out in the open, in the sunshine of the enlightened minds we need not fear Ann Coulter, if indeed, she is even worthy of fear.

"Ann Coulter is to political thinking what Peanuts is to high literature."
- John Cruikshank, Publisher of the Toronto Star, March 25th, 2010.

vox populi

If anything should have taught us that we need a more universal understanding of our financial world it is the recent crisis from which we are now supposedly recovering. I'm referring to that which was precipitated by the sub-prime loan scandal.

Whether the current financial catastrophe in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain is a ripple effect of the same thing is hard to know. It is possible that GOldman-Sachs induced the problems in the Greek economy by selling credit default swaps, effectively hiding $400 Billion of Greek debt and enabling them to qualify for entry into the EU.

If the world economic crisis is an unforseen accident resulting from governments getting overextended by wars, speculation or mis-guided economic policies or a latent effect of some big players exploiting weaknesses in the system, it is clear that we need a better understanding of how it works.

Alternatively, if the global meltdown is a consequence of manipulation by some elite mega-concerns as in the type of conspiracy typified by cliques like the Bilderberg society, we need a better understanding of how it works.

And, broadly speaking, this is my theme today, we need a better understanding of how our world works financially. We may not all be involved in the mechanisms that make it function, or malfunction, but we are all affected by it.

Evidence of our inattention is abundant. It operates at a local level as well as internationally. For example, my vote in a federal election can determine who gets on a committee to enact legislation governing the tarsands which affects how energy needs are met and how the carbon cycle affects the climate, which affects where wars are fought and what parts of the world are habitable for any number of reasons.

The world is run more or less democratically, that is to say, that at any level some body of people are going to vote on an action that affects many people. Corporate boards vote on whether to develop the Niger delta for oil & gas. Nations vote on whether to allow human rights violations in North Korea, China, or Darfur. I am not looking at how effective they are in making their resolutions happen at this juncture.

Informed consent is the least we hope for in these cases, as opposed to coerced voting, or blindly hoping that we guessed right when we cast our ballot. But what is informed consent?

Informed consent of measures like the emergency funding of employment benefits for 30 days that Senator Jim Bunning held up in the Senate this week is not possible at the level of the general electorate of 250 million people. It is logistically impossible for one thing. In addition, many could not grasp the concepts involved. That is, in part, why we have representational forms of government. But it is possible for an electorate to be more capable than they are presently.

When you examine what capabilities the common citizen must have to be able to inform herself about an issue it starts with being literate. If newspapers are the chosen media for informing the voters what the government is doing then the voters must be able to read.

In Rome, as pre-technological society, the Senate's edicts were given to the people by a speaker in the town square, a town-crier, if you will. Then it was passed by word of mouth among the plebians and the elite alike. Until 1440 when the printing press was invented this was the method. Soon there were pamphlets and newspapers. Word of mouth was still relied upon until public education was widespread. Today newspapers are being supplanted by TV and the internet. Now we have soundbytes not the Gettysburg address.

Today, even as various newspapers and television networks are owned by individuals with special interests - newspapers are unduly influenced by the advertisers who make them rich or merely keep them afloat, there are magazines like The Economist and the Alberta Report which can serve as sources for the details of issues that affect us. Not all issues can be reduced to simple terms like whether we allow elective abortions or not. Some issues are complex or can be made complex by the lawmakers who seek to promote their own agendas as when they concede support for a bill saving hundreds of thousands from suffering and death by attaching an amendment giving them what they want. For example, a bill to relieve the Katrina victims might have an amendment about water use in Colorado as a condition of voting support by Senators with big business supporters out west.

For centuries, for millennia, governments have controlled not only the flow of information to the people but also the means by which the people could assimilate and understand that information.

In 529 AD the Emperor Justinian shut down the Academy of Plato and like-schools everywhere. He thus rid himself, and subsequent rulers, of people who could understand the workings of the world and the agendas of tyrants, by denying them access to training that would enable them to do so. He thus kept the intelligentia from discussing the issues, and by the trickle-down effect - word-of-mouth, he denied the masses too. It worked for a thousand years. It is being done today.

Today we need not only the literacy to understand and interpret the rhetoric that spews from the mouths of the politicians but also the numeracy to understand and criticize the economic policies as well. As Justinian thought, it is difficult to control the masses if they know as much or more than you do. So how do you control the knowledge and the mental abilities of the masses? How do you limit the voters literacy and their numeracy?

Since the BNA Act education has been controlled in Canada by the Provincial government (PG). It determines what schools will be chartered, how school boards are to be elected and funded, what curricula will be taught. Often this is seen as a positive thing. New curricula are initiated by the PG, and speeches are made about positive expected outcomes. Seldom do the results match expectations.

The ways in which the PG can influence the education system are sufficient to achieve trhe PG's aims. They ultimately control funding by the distribution of tax dollars. By taxing and regulation they control media. By dissemination of information they control the content of the news media. This is not only about content but about the order in which it is disseminated. Ordering events can influence the minds of the voters and the impressions they form about the PG and by extension the supporters of the PG. Arguably, corporate interests hold powerful sway over the PG.

Recently, the math curriculum has seen proposed changes. These changes will be enacted in a years time. Three paths to passing secondary mathematics are being offered to students. Each will result in them receiving a piece of paper. Theoretically it will be possible for everyone to get a piece of paper denoting some kind of math success when they end their Grade Twelve year. This will give everyone something to be happy about. The student will have something to show his parents and his prospective employer. The teachers will have something to point to as indication that they too have succeeded in educating the students. The school's administrators will be able to point to positive results - at least the kids got something out of their time here. And most importantly, the PG will be able to show the voters that they got something for their rax dollars. At least no one wil be able to discuss the one third of students who failed to graduate with mathematics of any kind at grade twelve that currently pass through the secondary schools with nothing to show for it. At least that embarrassment will go away.

But did anything really change? Will those students be better able to understand the math required by their prospective employers? Will they be better able to see how their employers and their PG manipulates their lives by influencing them into jobs that they really don't want, but which, by default, are the only ones they can get? Will they be able to understand enough economics to see what is wrong with a system that has changed since their grandfathers were able to support their families without grandma having to take a job? And will they be able to understand enough economics to avoid being preyed on by banks and corporations that exploit them daily by keeping them ignorant about the ravages of such simple concepts as compound interest?

Current and past events prove the postulate - to govern effectively, a passive, ignorant, electorate is required.

If the people are too well informed, too knowledgeable, they will not allow to government to pursue its corrupt corporate-influenced agenda.

To govern effectively the mass of people must be kept poor and ignorant.

In short..
If poor, the people will be more motivated to seek their next meal than to meddle with the agendas of their self-appointed superiors.

If ignorant, they will be easily influenced by smoke and mirrors, the tools of the well-oiled propaganda machine that is rolled out by corporate funded parties when elections are called.

Can Poetry survive Rap?

Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker and current executive director of the Poetry Society of America, said this morning on a National Arts Program on CBC, "I think rap has helped poetry .. by presenting it to young people."


Is she misguided? Is poetry in such "dire straits" that it needs the publicity afforded by semi-educated, forced-rhymers, who rely on cliché and abstraction, as well as absurdly forced rhyme for their success, for its survival?

Or is poetry robust enough still, in the early 21st century, to resist and overcome the exigencies of the personal communication device and the erosion of language skills, cf. Twitter, textspeak, et al?

Can poetry survive the slings and errors of egregious media, or must it beg alms to persist against a sea of rubes on Facebook and Twitter?

Would Shakespeare last ten minutes on Lavalife?

Does anybody but me care?

Personally, I think rap-as-poetry is an abomination. I don't mind if it persists as a separate art form, as a form of protest, social change, entertainment, etc., but I'd rather not think of it as anything but flawed verse.