On Shame, Honour, and Vulnerability

I was forwarded this 47 minute podcast with Brené Brown on 1A, and some of the ideas she has are remarkably similar to Timothy Snyder's views in On Tyranny (e.g. connect with others in real life, speak truth to bullshit), so I bought her newest book, Braving the Wilderness. I was sorrily disappointed. She has done a bit of useful research, but it's written in such a self-helpy way that makes it all seem so dubious: anecdotes from childhood, some forced acronyms, lots of repetition of ideas, a slightly bigger font than most books, the sort of thing that feels questionable but likeable. She's very popular. She's a TED Talker, which can also boost popularity but detract from credibility in equal measure (see here, here, and here). Luckily, I found her original research (but just that one journal article), which is a much better starting point.

I'm interested in her findings but also concerned with some ideas left out of her analysis. Granted I haven't read all her books, but I think I get the gist of her ideas.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

I finally got to this pocket-sized book, which is full of the kind of lessons that were passed down from my folks and that I've been saying for decades and of some others that I'm hearing over and over in the past year. The behaviours are nothing new, and it is good to be reminded, but it's the background that's missing from my summary: Snyder's (no relation) clear link between pre-holocaust behaviour and now, what helped and what hindered. From a thorough understanding of history, Snyder gleaned twenty tips to help us avoid global catastrophe or at least preserve some semblance of freedom for ourselves in the coming years:

"The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why" (11).

I merged them all down to five to better remember them all:

Some Implications of Boycotting Art

And another thing...  Here are two more issues I have with implication surrounding how we're treating the sexual harassment and assault cases further to my concerns previously discussed and further provoked by an article "Now What Do We Do with Their Work?".


ART AS A VITAL COMMODITY

If Alexander Fleming were found out to be horrific man, we wouldn't stop using penicillin. And if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were nightmares, we'd still buy computers. That goes without saying. It's only in the arts that people valiantly claim to refuse to ever partake in any creation. When it comes to film and television production, that boycott or sudden shut down can punish far more people than just the accused. It harms the entire cast and crew. But more to the point, boycotting art suggests it's a convenience we can take or leave. People will make more and different art. It's a dime a dozen.

Except it's not.

Art provokes and enlightens and sparks further ideas. I have Picassos on my wall, Heidegger in my bookshelf, and Hitchcock online. These were not good men, but these were men capable of creating things that affect me, images and ideas that nobody else could possibly create quite the same way. Artists are one in a million, and destroying their work or denying their ability to create, just denies society access to one more chance to be woken up from our zoned out existence. Art is individual. We're each affected by particular and specific ideas, which are often rare, revealing themselves far too infrequently to toss aside in hopes that they will be taken up later by someone with better behaviour. 


BOYCOTTS AS PUNISHMENT

I wish people would express this same intense moral indignation when it comes to child workers, slavery, sweatshops, and environmental destruction. Imagine if this many people every day refused to ever again buy clothes, chocolate, coffee, or any product that wasn't produced with clear assurance of fair labour practices along the manufacturing and distribution line. Children are stolen from their parents and beaten as they work in cacao plantations, but that hasn't put a dent in the chocolate industry. A massive boycott could actually turn these types of business practices around. But we just don't care as much about those children.

The prospect of sudden job loss means the talented and celebrated cannot so easily get away with abusive behaviours, absolutely. When Weinstein got fired from his own company, that sent a clear message: People don't want to be subjected to sexual abuse and harassment on the job. Who would be so brazen or stupid to try something now, knowing companies will go so far as to pull you from your contract and actually re-film all your scenes with a less lecherous actor! 

But watching older films give the artists no financial benefit. I recently showed the film Inequality for All in my class and noticed it was produced by Weinstein. Whether I show it or not has zero impact on Weinstein's profits. It does, however, maintain his legacy.

It's curious that we didn't have the same reaction when Jian Ghomeshi was fired from the CBC. We didn't care about his job; we wanted him prosecuted in a court of law. Nobody mentioned destroying all their Moxy Fruvous CDs or cassette tapes; we wanted the creep in jail. I think it's partly because he was never big enough to become legendary. The band and the little Canadian show won't outlive him in history. We don't want future generations to ever like these guys again. We don't want them on their deathbeds happy that they will be fondly remembered. But I think we're putting our energy in the wrong direction.

The giant celebrity status of some of these perverts has distracted us from what happens next. The assault and indecent exposure accusation have to go to trial. And we have to make sure the court system will actually prosecute or else we have to be prepared to raise hell. But for other less physical cases, there has to be a mediation process like any other infraction in a workplace. The consequences have to be enough to remind the masses that this type of behaviour will not be tolerated. If mediation is ineffective, then termination is the next step - of the position, not the person.

The goal is to stop this kind of behaviour. The goal is not to deprive specific perpetrators of a livelihood or legacy in perpetuity, to obliterate them from existence. They need a means to be able to atone for wrongdoings. Once someone does their time, once they fulfill their sentence obligations, they have a right to come back into society and get a job. Let them create independently or, if accepted into a production, let them come along sheepishly and with great humility and a constant all-encompassing awareness of their every comment and gesture. Or else.

So NOW What? On Power, Sexual Abuse and the Culture of Celebrity

A little over year ago, when I first heard about Louis CK's abuse of power, I was going to write a post suggesting he might actually be the guy able to fess up, apologize sincerely, and lead the way for other men to admit to their abusive behaviours. I'm a big fan, and he sometimes has just the right tone that he might be able to manage something of that calibre. But I didn't finish anything because how I feel is just all too complicated. At the time I only got this far,

He's right out there about difficult issues, dark issues, presented in a light way. He seems to care enough about ethics to go deep into some harsh topics. He already has bits about pleasing women and sexual boundaries in his act. Just imagine if he came clean and actually talked about it, honestly, and with humour, as only he can. Imagine how quickly he could change everything if he apologized. Live. Imagine if he were brave enough to do the right thing and turned himself in and, after the typical slap on the wrist, or maybe even a brief stint in jail, he actually added that experience to his next special as a cautionary tale about his abuse of power. 

Imagine if he openly acknowledged the childishness of suggesting, because they just laughed when he asked if he could pull his dick out, that it was in any way a consensual act. Imagine if he explored his own power and revealed that he did it because he could, because he's in a place where he's become untouchable, so he is living without restraints on any behaviour. So he can do exactly what he like; and this is what he likes. And how dangerous that place is to be because lots of people like to do some weird stuff that couldn't happen without a power imbalance.

And then I watched in disbelief, for over a year, as he seemed completely unencumbered by the weight of his transgressions. He could have carved a path through it all, one that others could follow, but he maintained his course of denial. It didn't go away; instead it just festered around him. Now, even though Weinstein is so much worse by all accounts, his actions and his company's reactions and the many women who have come forward have been game-changers. The camel's back has finally broken.

On Aronofsky and Climate Change

An article that mixes philosophy, film, and climate change - three of my favourite topics of discussion! Nolan Gear writes about Aronofky's film mother!

"What could it mean for this story to be one of abundant refuge rather than home invasion? How must we reinvent hospitality now that rates of homelessness, landlessness, will only continue to rise exponentially in the wake of climate devastation? [...] Tsing insists that “staying alive — for every species — requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination.” This contamination is both transformation and loss: according to Tsing, we must risk our integrity and self-possession if we wish to live.[...]This mutual undoing is where hospitality begins: not despite or instead of but through disorientation and loss. What’s certain is that we need films that cook up collaborative contaminations — not xenophobic paranoia."

What do we need to see in our culture, in our films and music and art and media, that will actually help us eke out a few more decades of life? Mother! is a warning cry that comes way too late in the game and would have been completely ignored if it had come any earlier. What does it look like to develop a narrative, a social imaginary, that allows for collaborative contaminations?

On Anxiety

I just finished John Green's Turtles All the Way Down, which I read because he claimed it was his way of trying to put words around what it's like to live with profound anxiety, and then I saw this article asking "Why are more American teens than ever suffering from severe anxiety?". I was raised with most my sibs affected by some kind of mental illness or disorder, and now my children are in the same boat. Somehow, I've made it this far relatively unscathed by the ravages of anxiety, so I'm ever eager to really get my head around what it feels like from the inside.

Green's book is just what I was hoping for. There's nothing to read below the surface here, which might deny it any book awards, but it does an excellent job of giving us a clear and straightforward  first-hand glimpse of the inner thoughts that drive anxious behaviours. Like David Sedaris's Naked, a collection of hilarious personal essays about OCD, it can help the reader really get why anyone would do or think those things and then begin to empathize with that curious drive that all but obliterates their free will.

On Betsy DeVos in Ontario

Betsy DeVos is coming to talk to the Minister of Education, apparently to learn about our schools. Let's hope the meeting just goes in that direction.

When she was first appointed by Trump, OSSTF warned,

DeVos has been a strong advocate for the creation of more charter schools in her home state of Michigan, as well as expansion of school choice and the voucher system in education. She has also been a strong advocate for right-to-work legislation and has contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Party in Michigan. The expansion of charter schools in Michigan has led to about half of all students in the city of Detroit attending one of these schools. While most charter schools in the United States are “not-for-profit,” Michigan’s charter school law allows for-profit charters to be established. What has resulted in Detroit is intense competition for students between public and charter schools. Thanks to DeVos’s efforts to promote choice and charter schools, a multitude of new schools were established in Detroit, even though overall enrollment was in decline. As a result, schools have engaged in “bidding wars” to draw kids, and the money that they bring with them, into their buildings These campaigns have included the offer of incentives to students, such as iPads, gift cards and bicycles.

Yesterday, Harvey Bischof, President of OSSTF said,

Ms. DeVos is a vocal proponent of programs that divert government funding away from public education and into private hands, to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. [...It's] alarming, and frankly an affront to our members, that Ontario would allow someone who openly promotes a corporate assault on public education to visit schools in our province. The Ministry of Education should reconsider this visit and send a strong, clear message to Ms. DeVos and other proponents of privatization that public education in Ontario is not for sale.

I fear that we're already headed for privatization, and she's just here to show us all the way down the rabbit's hole. All the celebration over e-learning and the virtual high school is the first step in ditching real live teachers for automation and outsourcing. There's a huge downside to tech that we ignore at our peril when we get too excited about the next new thing.

We need educated professionals in classrooms, face-to-face with a limited number of kids, to most effectively impart an education. Only an in-person educator can connect with students and guide them through critical thinking problems with a real time back and forth of ideas. Only when we're there can we gauge the faces of students for confusion or enlightenment. Yup, there's some boredom mixed in there too sometimes, and it's important to see it and be able to switch gears enough to keep them on track.

And education must be fully public and accessible by everyone everywhere. We've seen the mess Charter schools can make. Ontario all too quickly follows on in the path of each new American plan just as the U.S. starts to realize their plan isn't working. Remember whole language?? I really hope we're strong enough and smart enough to listen politely to DeVos and then do our own research before making another inane decision. This one could devastate our education system, not just for one generation of kids, but for many who follow.

Action is the One Miracle-Working Faculty of Man

This piece by Wen Stephenson is a beautifully written comparison between Hannah Arendt's Nazi analysis and the pivotal issues of our time. I'm also afraid, not so much about what will happen to our species in a century from now, but about what will happen to us in the next few decades. Abridged with some of the best bits here:

What I fear most is what we’re capable of doing to each other, and of not doing for each other, when, as Hannah Arendt would say, the chips are down — when it’s dark outside, and we let the darkness in. Because, let there be no doubt, it’s getting very dark....What was once unthinkable destruction is now all but guaranteed, first and foremost among the world’s poorest people, the majority of the human population....With the victory of the carbon-industrial machine, it is now clear, we confront corporate and political forces not only racist in ideology but totalitarian in mindset and ambition, if not as yet in methods. Unless, as to methods, it can be argued that to ensure the suffering and death of countless innocent millions, by means of lies and the obstruction of urgent life-saving measures, marks some kind of epochal advance in the art of administrative mass murder....

The opening lines of Hannah Arendt’s short, bracing preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, capture a moment and the mood of a generation that had lived through two cataclysmic World Wars, experienced economic collapse, revolutions, and “homelessness on an unprecedented scale,” and now faced the prospect of an all-destroying third world war. The mood is one of exhaustion, uncertainty, a dull and ever-present fear. “This moment of anticipation,” she writes, is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. […] Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries....

Central to Arendt’s analysis is her acute observation that totalitarian movements, and later fully realized regimes, require the construction of a “fictitious world,” as seen in their “conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality.”...With nothing to fall back on, no recognizable standards by which to comprehend and judge, anything can happen, anything might be justified, in the future. All bets are off. What comprehensible motive could there be for poisoning the well from which one’s own children must drink, much less the atmosphere itself? What kind of mindset makes one’s own children and grandchildren, and everyone else’s, indeed all future generations, superfluous?

The world finds nothing sacred in the mere existence of a Syrian refugee washed up on a beach; in the prayerful faces and freezing bodies at Standing Rock; in the undocumented persons, “illegals,” mothers and fathers and children, jailed and deported....The question: What kind of resistance is possible against a world without mercy? And even as I form those words, the familiar voice in my head: Who am I to judge? Who the hell do I think I am? Am I not complicit — aren’t we all — even sitting in jail?

“There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’” Arendt writes in the manuscript of a 1964 address. Rather, she notes there, “behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.” As soon as anyone raises moral issues, she observes sharply, the one who raises them is met “with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.”...

In the closing pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), where she addresses him posthumously, she writes, “[You said] that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.” Or as she puts it in that 1968 lecture, in the case of postwar Germans who indulged in what she called the “phony sentimentality” of collective guilt, “the cry ‘We are all guilty’ is actually a declaration of solidarity with the wrongdoers.”... If Arendt is right — and if her words have any applicability beyond the specific historical context in which she wrote — then my own jail-cell guilt trip was another form of phony sentimentality, in which I sought cover and refuge, some sort of perverse comfort, in a collective guilt spread so thin that it evaporates into air and disappears; an escape, in which I sought to be unburdened of the responsibility to judge, and of the responsibility such judgment would place on me....And yet the question remains why this matters to us now — whether the satisfactions of judging, smug or otherwise, sitting in a jail cell or in an armchair, are all we have left at this late hour.

Or as she puts it in a 1971 lecture: “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good.” The kind of thinking, of making up one’s mind, that Arendt is talking about here, the internal dialogue with oneself that allows for questioning and judging, is a capacity shared by all, she goes on to suggest, not only an elite (who fail to exercise it as often as anyone, perhaps more). Nevertheless, such thinking “remains a marginal affair for society at large except in emergencies.” At moments of crisis, she writes, “those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.”...Indeed action, Arendt writes, is “the one miracle-working faculty of man.”

Out of the Wreckage Teaser

Monbiot's new book looks to be most similar to his Manifesto, which came out just over a decade ago. I love when he gets all revolutionary and inspirational. Here's an excerpt of his excerpt:

"Is it reasonable to hope for a better world? Study the cruelty and indifference of governments, the disarray of opposition parties, the apparently inexorable slide towards climate breakdown, the renewed threat of nuclear war, and the answer appears to be no....[But] political failure is, in essence, a failure of imagination....Those who tell the stories run the world....Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. We could call it the Restoration Story....the reason why, despite its multiple and manifest failures, we appear to be stuck with neoliberalism is that we have failed to produce a new narrative with which to replace it....[Humans] possess an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others....We have been induced by politicians, economists and journalists to accept a vicious ideology of extreme competition and individualism that pits us against each other, encourages us to fear and mistrust each other and weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living....Where we find ourselves crushed between market and state, we will develop a new economics that treats both people and planet with respect. We will build it around a great, neglected economic sphere: the commons....We know that if we can mobilise such silent majorities, there is nothing this small minority can do to stop us. But because we have failed to understand what is possible, and above all failed to replace our tired political stories with a compelling narrative of transformation and restoration, we have failed to realise this potential. As we rekindle our imagination, we discover our power to act. And that is the point at which we become unstoppable."

On Antifa Methods

It's not just Tina Fey who's getting lambasted for promoting this position,

"I really want to say, to encourage all good sane Americans, to treat these rallies this weekend like the opening of a thoughtful movie with two female leads: Don't show up. Let these morons scream into the empty air."

Now it's Chomsky and Hedges as well. We can pretty quickly write-off a comedian's suggestion, but it should give one pause when bigger thinkers repeat the idea. It should, I think. It's not for some, though, who insist Chomsky and Hedges are no longer on the left or are no longer liberal or are finally showing their true liberalism, and they toss them aside in favour of more agreeable opinions on the matter. I'm so confused about what 'left' and 'liberal' mean these days that I'm just going to leave that bit alone to look at their arguments.

Matt Sedillo argues,

"The threat is real, so must the resistance be. If we are to transform society more work than this need be done. If we are to prevent self deputizing death squads from roaming the street they must fear public gathering. There is no way around this and there is no reason to think of this work as mutually exclusive. Liberalism by definition is counterrevolutionary. In times of crisis it calls for the pacification of struggle and the return to normalcy. It posits that both right wing calls for ethnic cleansing and the resistance to that as equally menacing to the liberal order of society....Chris Hedges gave “many sides, many sides” presentation of much of the 20th century in order to attack the idea of revolution from below....False equivalencies spread confusion. Confusion strengthens the fascists. Liberalism is a death cult. Chris Hedges is a public menace."

On Memes and Theft

The Guardian has an article about memes, this one in particular, and I love their choice of cover photo:

Because it's not remotely important relative to everything else going on, yet it's still in the mix - one more thing to consider.

Belam writes,

"Guillem has a warning for people liberally spreading the picture across the net to put their copy of Photoshop down: “It’s not allowed to use any image without purchasing the proper licence in any possible way, so each one of the people that use the images without the licence are doing it illegally. What really worries us and we are not going to allow it, taking the appropriate legal measures, is the use of the images in a pejorative, offensive or any way that can harm the models or me." 

On Freud and Einstein's Correspondence

Lately people have been talking more of the rise and fall of Freud's psychotherapy and his philosophies. Some write him off completely because many of his psychoanalytical claims have been discounted through a more rigorous scientific method than Freud employed, but it's not good philosophy to discount an entire person for some incorrect claims. If we did that, we'd lose many of the old guys to misogyny or worse. We have to consider the merits of each idea. It doesn't matter if Freud is a genius or a hack; it matters if there's a seed of an interesting concept in anything he wrote. Others claim that he shouldn't be considered because he wasn't the first to write about many of the ideas he discusses, but if that's our criterion for our reading list, shouldn't we toss all those "footnotes to Plato"?

On the Absurdist Victory: All is Well

A while back I wrote about a video comparing Stoicism and Existentialism. The video also touched on different psychology principles developed from each philosophy. Stoicism is easily seen in CBT and REBT, which all start with the premise that when we're upset it's because of our perception of things, not the things in themselves, and we often have an irrational view. Through reality testing and viewing the situation in a detached way we can be less emotionally affected by anxiety around events. It's been very effective in reducing anxiety levels in a good 70-80% of patients.

Existential psychoanalysis took a different path:

"The basic thrust of existential psychoanalysis, if it aspires to be at all existential, must in turn be rooted in the sensibilities of existential philosophy. That sensibility may be characterized by two principal themes: a) all human knowledge is rooted in personal experience; b) the weight of experience is so exasperating that we seek to escape it through self-deception....Every one of us employs deceptions for the same reason. Whenever we're thwarted in our endeavors we feel disappointment and frustration. We may fear that we won't get our way by being honest and resort to guile and manipulation - the principal source of neurotic guilt....On a deeper level it entails the patient's willingness to plumb the depths of experience while accepting responsibility for whatever comes to light, for better or worse."

Instead of our view of externals provoking upset, tumults are from the struggle for people to accept the truth about themselves and recognize their various attempts to escape it. Instead of looking at individual daily triggers, existentialists look at that big one: We search for meaning and purpose in life, but the reality has to be faced - that there simply isn't any. We've been thrown here randomly, and it's up to each of us to make the best of things. The "curative power lay in the patient's capacity for honesty." Upsetting experiences are useful for taking us outside ourselves and possibly provoking a transformation of consciousness that leads to maturation. No pain, no gain. Suppression of experiences is the problem: not an inaccurate assessment, but a refusal to actually see what's there. We need to give voice to our darkest truths, no matter how ugly. From an early age, we devise pleasant fantasies to override potential traumas as slight as disappointment, and then we become anxious that there's something deep within that we don't really want to know. Self-deception and deception by others (as they might help us remain in denial) are part of every issue. We're all inherently devious and deceive one another as a matter of course. The solution is acknowledging our radical freedom, digging past the deceptions to find our authentic selves, and recognizing the absurdity of it all.

On Fascist Movements and Free Speech

Some people are upset because Ryerson cancelled a panel discussion featuring Faith Goldy, of Rebel Media, who openly expresses the belief that Muslims are a problem in our country. A Ryerson spokesperson said,

"After a thorough security review, the University has concluded that Ryerson is not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward. In light of recent events, Ryerson University is prioritizing campus safety."

I don't blame them. I wouldn't give her the platform to speak in the first place. I think free speech is important, but it's particularly important because we need the right to criticize people in positions of power and to question legislation. It's not important that everyone can say everything they think to as many people as possible. Her right to free speech isn't eroded since she's still free to talk on the internet and in her own media venues. [ETA - Even Rebel Media doesn't want her anymore.] She just wasn't given the right to speak at that one location.

I'm a fan of our anti-hate speech here in Canada. I don't believe in free speech at any cost when we see how many people can be influenced by a charismatic speaker with a warped agenda. Intelligent debate is the ideal, of course, but the reality is that some of these speakers can make the worst atrocities sound necessary. Get enough people worried about the economy, and it's too easy to pick a group of people to blame and then run them out of town - or worse. (I say way more about free speech here.)

Inconceivable! His Dinner with Chomsky

Wallace Shawn sat down for a chat with Noam Chomsky (video link here), and here's what they talked about - slightly abridged and loosely quoted (for clarification purposes) with links. It's a great recharge for activists!


Shawn - Many people are shocked to see the president is now a cruel, brutal, greedy type of a man, and this is now the face of America, but I'm not shocked because this has been the face of the United States for decades. What do you think is not new, and what do you think actually IS new?  [For more on this, check out Cenk Uygur's interview with John Cusack. It's pre-election, and the president he's criticizing at the beginning is Obama.]

Chomsky - My wife is from Brazil, and she predicted the Trump win before the primaries. From the outside, there's much that is not new. Recently the U.S. demanded that Cambodia pay back a debt incurred when the U.S. was destroying their country. There was secret bombing. It seems probably hundreds of thousands were killed. The Khmer Rouge was a small group, but ended up become a mass army of peasants starving and driven off the land by American bombing. The U.S. offered aid to get them to purchase American agricultural produce, and now they want payback. The American ambassador to Cambodia couldn't understand why Cambodians often make anti-American comments, but that's the America plenty of people see all over the world.

What is new, and dramatically new, is the U.S. withdrawal from the rest of the world on the issue of greatest significance for the prospect of human survival: climate change. The Washington Post had images of receding glaciers that will raise sea levels by many feet and pretty much drive tens of millions off land. A good part of organized life in coastal cities will be devastated. Every country in the world with the exception of the United States is committed to at least some actions on this issue. The US alone is not only refusing to participate, but is actually moving in a dedicated fashion in the opposite direction: trying to maximize the damage.

On Slippery Arguments and Equity at Google

You can read most of the infamous Google memo here, and for the record, I don't think opening up this discussion should be a fireable offence, but I'm just concerned with this one piece of the puzzle right now:

"the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

David Brooks calls this "championing scientific research."

But consider this analogy. Walk into an art gallery full of art by Picasso, Monet, Dali, Van Gogh...  It is the case that men and women have some inherent differences on average; that claim has some validity. There are certainly more differences among the groups that between them, but there's still a difference however slight. BUT it doesn't follow that that's why we don't see equal representation in an art gallery. It's clearly not the case that women inherently, evolutionarily, don't prefer the arts and don't have any artistic talent. We can see that so clearly and easily because we are well aware that over the past centuries few women were allowed near a book much less a paintbrush.

We're far enough away from that museum scenario to really shake our head at the blatant injustices that produced such disparate results. However, as a society, we're apparently not quite able to step back and recognize the profound level of inequity that has created current gender distribution in the world of high tech.

On Community, Again

I just read local author Paul Born’s Deepening Community. In places, it’s very close to what I’ve written about in terms of ensuring that we’re kind to one another at the very end. He doesn’t skirt around the issue that we’re in dire straights and that we can choose how to behave when push comes to shove. (But I think he should have called the book, The Born Community.)













I've written about community before, and I'm going to say much of the same thing here but in many, many more words!  There are pictures and video clips to break it up. (I included headings for clarity and page numbers throughout - where I remembered.)   I aim to critique Born's book while trying to get to the bottom of what can be done to foster a cohesive sense of belonging and caring spanning the globe.  I'm using Born's book as as starting point, but I don't have all the solutions.  I'm ever in the process of seeking.

Prevention as an Ounce of Cure

Here's an update on what I've learned about lymphedema after an ALND. It's way less scary now that I know how to manage it, but it's still a drag. It takes about an hour away from me every day. I'm just in the earliest stages, and it possible to stay here forever, but not without a bit of effort - something breast cancer surgeons should make sure patients understand. It's all about retraining the lymph flow to take a different path through the body. Lymph nodes collect and clean out toxins (infection, etc.) from segments of the body. The body's divided into 'watersheds' which all get sucked to the closest lymph nodes, but, with some missing, some areas have to be redirected. Here's what's working for me right now, and what I wished I had known straight out of the hospital - just ten things!:

On Having the Lowest Graduation Rates

This recent article in my local paper tells us that our region is lowest in the province for graduation rates.

ON FIFTH YEAR RATES

They worry that "Students who did graduate also took longer to do so than almost anywhere else." The graphic shows 68% finish after 4 years, and 81% after a fifth year (so, 13% stay for a victory lap). I share their concern that almost 20% aren't graduating, but not their concern about taking a fifth year. I commented there that I don't support that particular focus:

"I encouraged all my kids to do a fifth year of school - it's the last chance for a free education, and it gives them more time to take electives. I've always seen the drive to have kids finish in four years as just a cost-savings method at the expense of a well-rounded education. What's the educational benefit of pushing kids to finish faster?"

They claim,

"The board is reluctant to more strongly dissuade Grade 9 students from choosing academic studies over applied studies, even as students who start high school with unrealistic expectations fail to keep up and must later switch streams." 

They say that like it's a bad thing. Sure, it can be a challenge to work with students on material far outside their capabilities, but a public education is there for everyone to find, not just their talents, but also their limitations. Every student should have a right to try to stretch themselves to do work that's difficult because some actually make it after a few attempts at the higher levels. Nothing should dissuade them from trying all their options at this point in life.

The Plight of the Millennials

Further explanation here. 

First, a bit about statistical norms and the normal distribution. In social sciences, for something to be considered a statistically significant characteristic of a group, it just needs to be present in about 68% of the population, or one standard deviation from the norm. There's tons of variation in the other 32%, so all the generalizations below might not apply to the people in your life. But, according to researchers, they apply to most people in each group, so we can still look at trends. I remember studies in my day showing a clear correlation between violent movie viewing and violent teens, yet I loved slasher flicks and still lean towards more gruesome films despite the stats. And, more to the point, nobody stopped making those movies. This recent article is unlikely to change a thing, but we're still wise to consider it.

The article in question is The Atlantic article, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" which adds to a running list of problems with kids today caused by technology. It hits home from some of the trends I've noticed anecdotally in my classroom over the past 26 years: that phones are distracting, lead to unrealistic idealization and familial alienation, and affect sleep habits. But the writer misses any discussion that phones also drive constant change, consumerism, and cognizance of tragedies, and the significance of other factors affecting trends in this demographic. Here's a chart I sometimes use in class for an overview of demographics by year of birth. We've moved way beyond the boom, bust, and echo labels.

On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism

This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed. As they say in the video, Massimo Pigliucci (MP) on Stoicism and Skye Cleary (SC) on Existentialism, both are philosophies that offer a way to live instead of just a way to think about the world. I'm putting it all together here with quotes (names linked to sources) to sort it out for myself. I'm just thinking out loud here. This is too long for any normal person to want to read.

These are both philosophies that allow surveyors to pick and choose from variations on a theme as neither has one authoritative dude overriding all others, and, it would appear, few of the big guns cared to adopt either label anyway. For the Stoics, defining yourself as one is avoided because it's pretentious. In The Role Ethics of Epictetus, it's clarified that we are simultaneously different things, and how we play each role is more important than what our roles are. The roles are often not our choice, but how we do them are, i.e. whether or not we're a virtuous son, mother, teacher, or waiter (MP). For Existentialists, we can't be defined by the roles we take on because we're more than the mere facts about ourselves (SC), so labels become meaningless.

Arendt on Revolution and the Necessity of Eradicating Poverty

Hannah Arendt's essay, "Thoughts on Poverty, Misery, and the Great Revolutions of History," written in the 1960s, was apparently just recently published for the first time. It continues to be relevant in our increasingly weird times with a tyrant who would rather dominate than excel in case after case:

"For the will to power as such, regardless of any passion for distinction (in which power is not a means but an end), is characteristic of the tyrant and is no longer even a political vice. It is rather the quality that tends to destroy all political life, its vices no less than its virtues. It is precisely because the tyrant has no desire to excel and lacks all passion for distinction that he finds it so pleasant to dominate, thereby excluding himself from the company of others; conversely, it is the desire to excel which makes men love the company of their peers and spurs them on into the public realm." 

She explains that the goal of revolution from a tyrant isn't just that people are treated well, which any benevolent dictator would do, but that people have access to the decision-making process that determines how they will be treated:

Chest Tattoo with a Side of Lymphedema

As a means of healing and prettying up my mastectomy scars, I looked forward to a chest tattoo. I envisioned never wearing a bathing suit top again! After my mastectomy, I asked my surgeon about it. His only concern was that it wouldn't look good when I finally gave in and got reconstruction. But, if I'm absolutely sure I don't want recon work done, then I could get the tattoo as early as six weeks after surgery. That would have been done in December, but we were just about to go to Costa Rica, so I postponed it for after the trip. And then I found out I needed more surgery, so I postponed again. I asked the second surgeon if he had any concerns about a chest tattoo, and he said the same thing, just to wait six weeks post-op. He didn't even have concerns about me tattooing my arm if I were so inclined. He said women regularly get nipple tattoos after surgery, which are perfectly safe.

So I had an artist friend draw up this amazing sketch for me based on a pile of random ideas I threw at her:

On Regret

I've taken many questionable risks in my life. I lean toward leading a life that's lived fully over a safe and secure existence. Most I bounced back from easily from typical childhood falling from trees when I've climbed too high to dropping out of high school and somehow ending up with a Masters. Sometimes it's gone extraordinarily well for me. When an elderly woman next door to me died, I went deep into debt to buy and flip her crumbling house only to find it packed with cash. People thought I was crazy for my efforts to save my school from the chopping block until it all worked, and I'm still there. People were adamant that I can't possibly hold my head high as a teacher and unwed mother back a few decades when premarital sex was shameful, but I ignored them all with the most delightful results. And when my third pregnancy was fraught with complications, and doctors strongly advised me to terminate because of a high risk of Edwards syndrome, I, still single, took a chance and have another healthy daughter to show for it. I've been very very lucky over the years.

But then there are the times that didn't go as well. That time I was convinced I was overinsured and cancelled the insurance on a property, then it promptly went up in flames. That time I got scared of my debt load and hastily sold the slightly charred land - 24 acres with 2000' of waterfront, then soon realized there's nothing else like it out there in my price range. And that time I was convinced by a couple doctors, in opposition to others doctors, equally educated, to get an auxiliary lymph node dissection (ALND), and only afterwards found out about, and succumbed to, the risks of lymphedema.

Like most people, I imagine, I have an easy time ignoring my luck and a really hard time coping when my decisions don't pan out as well. Regret is a bugger.

So I wrote to Stoic advice columnist, Massimo Pigliucci, explaining my surgery situation in very general terms so it could be applied to and/or understood by more people, and I made it sound worse than it is to get a response to the worst case scenario. In general I asked "How were the Stoics so able to get on top of these types of thoughts so well?"

On Wasting Time

I had a brief Facebook conversation with Massimo Pigliucci about my decision to fritter away a morning watching the rain and petting my cat. He said, "It's up to you to determine whether your morning was wasted or not. But from a Stoic perspective the good use of time comes when one is doing something virtuous." And I started wondering further about what specifically counts as wasted time. So I turned to a thorough re-reading of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. Here are the bits that stood out to me with chapters noted after each quotation:

Seneca points out that people complain about the cruelty of nature because life is short, even Aristotle did, but it's not short, it's just that we waste much of it (1). Then he lists many examples of what a waste of time looks like:

"soft and careless living...no worthwhile pursuit....held in the grip of voracious avarice....diligence that busies itself with pointless enterprises....sodden with wine....slack with idleness....tired out by political ambition, which always hangs on the judgment of others....desire for trading...in hope of profit....passion for soldiering....striving after other people's wealth....thrown...by a fickleness that is shifting" (2).

Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Policy

In the news, Caroline Lucas, in The Guardian says one good policy isn't enough; we need a paradigm shift:

"Rather than simply looking for one headline-grabbing policy, the government should be embarking on a paradigm shift when it comes to how we get about in this country. ...Ultimately we need a green transport revolution, not another tinker with a transport system that’s creaking. Let’s aim for towns and cities that are easily navigable by foot and bike, a fully electric and publicly owned train system that covers the country, and local public transport that’s a joy to use – rather than the overpriced, unreliable service that’s currently on offer in so many places."

And Brad Plumer, in the NYTimes, says California is making that shift:

"The state plans to rethink every corner of its economy, from urban planning to dairy farms....If California prevails, it could provide a model for other policy makers, even as President Trump scales back the federal government’s efforts on climate change. The state may also develop new technologies that the rest of the world can use to cut emissions....The state’s emissions are nearly back to 1990 levels... and it has installed as many solar panels as the rest of the country combined....The board envisioned the number of electric cars and other zero-emissions vehicles on California’s roads rising to 4.2 million by 2030 from 250,000 today. Freight trucks would have to become more efficient or electrified, while cities would need to adopt far-reaching strategies to promote mass transit, biking and walking."

I love that they both mention cycling. I'm not convinced cap and trade will save us, as Plumer suggests, but it's all a start. We're not at that paradigm moment yet, but at least our heads are turned in the right direction:

"There may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing, the conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not to put the power of sight into the soul's eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be." - Plato's Republic, book 7
 

Climate Comedies

I caught Al Franken and David Letterman's Funny or Die series on climate change: Boiling the Frog. It's vaguely informative and not particularly funny, but fans of either guy might be willing to check it out. They focus on what their children and grandchildren will have to live with, and how they'll answer when asked what they did about it all, which I think is a fairly relatable tactic. And at about three minutes each, it's easy to watch an episode while you're waiting for the kids to get their shoes on. It's great for a populous with short attention spans, but it's hard to find a funny angle to talk about the dangers we're facing.

One episode referred to the show Years of Living Dangerously, which I hadn't heard about despite being three years old. It's a star-studded series (including Letterman in one episode) exploring climate change with lots of dramatic shots and music, but, based on the premiere only, it's not walking the walk. The very first scene has Harrison Ford excited to be flying a jet to visit with climate scientists. In one of the Boiling the Frog episodes, Franken asked Letterman, couldn't he just read about India's coal problem without travelling there? It's an important question. We have lots and lots of movies about climate change already. I'd put DiCaprio's film at the top of the list for clarity and persuasiveness. So it's been done. We need to stop flying film crews all over the world so Ford can say, ominously, "I'm going there to find out more!". I'm all about this stuff, and it got excellent reviews, but I won't be watching past the dramatic premiere.

The information is all out there in multiple genres and media already. Maybe it's got to move out of the documentary arena and into the HBO dramas for people to start paying attention. We need a risk-taking coming-out show like Ellen had when her character admitted to being gay. It's a similar risk to start talking about environmental destruction on a popular show in that sponsors might pull their ads, but, if it's done well, it could raise ratings enough that sponsors will come back. Then all other shows will scramble for a token environmentalist on their show! Right?

Somehow, of course, even despite religious protests at the time, two women kissing has a bigger draw than people choosing bikes over cars or overtly recycling or refusing to fly anywhere for ethical reasons. And it has a way bigger draw than famous people flying place to place to look at desolate and destroyed areas of the world.

On Hedges' Veganism Claims

Chris Hedges' recent article, "Eating Our Way to Disease," largely just advertises the new doc What the Health:

"Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn—whose documentary Cowspiracy, about the environmental impact of the animal agriculture industry, led me to become a vegan—recently released a new film, What the Health, which looks at how highly processed animal products are largely responsible for the increase of chronic and lethal diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer in the United States and many other countries."

Eating vegan is more ethical from an animal rights point of view. I believe it's healthier for the body to eat way more vegetables than meat and that it's much more efficient for people to eat grains than to feed grains to cattle and then eat the cows. From a moral, nutritional, and environmental perspective, I support the shift to veganism or at least vegetarianism, or, at the very least, reducetarianism. Absolutely.

BUT...

I wrote about some concerns with Hedges' praise of Cowpiracy before:

"The documentary Cowspiracy claims that 51% of GHG emissions are from agriculture (scrutinized here). Every other report on emissions has much lower numbers, including the IPCC, which puts it at 24%.... It's still up there, and it's definitely something we should act on by eating way less meat, but that 51% number seems to be seriously questionable. Documentaries need fact-checking too....But then Chris Hedges started praising the documentary and citing that number as fact. Yes, even the great Chris Hedges doesn't have time to fact-check everything he sees, and his bullshit meter must have been subdued from all the footage of suffering animals. When facts are reported inaccurately, but they help the cause, it's harder to be motivated to correct them. But it doesn't make them any less inaccurate."

Those last two lines linger.

First of all, we need to acknowledge the three-dimensional nature of all of us, neither demonizing nor glorifying anyone. I tend to think of Hedges as a bit of a hero, and he's clearly intelligent, but it appears that that doesn't stop him from being a little sloppy around some facts. Others have raised concerns around plagiarism, and his response there is perplexing. Well, it's only perplexing if we think of him as better than the rest of us fallible souls.

But secondly, if these shocking claims encourage people to eat less meat, which will have a positive effect on the environment (not quite as much as claimed, though), then should we just let it go? A Lund University study shows that eating a plant-based diet is one of the four most important activities individuals should do to affect climate change. The amount of meat we eat is definitely a problem. Should we let people think meat-eating is as bad as these films suggest? I think not. I fear it runs the risk of a Reefer Madness backlash. Once teens realize that their health teacher's tales of people jumping off a building after one toke from a marijuana cigarette are total bullshit, then they stop believing anything else from them. They need to know the real problems with smoking pot, and there are some, in order to make an informed choice. If Hedges supports claims that are a little bullshitty, then people might stop listening to any of it and continue to eat meat several times a day despite some real problems with that.

And then he boasts that the companion book to the new movie was written by his wife.

Her book's reviews on Amazon are mostly glowing, some reviewers suggesting they're using the book in their high-school classrooms (which feels more like a pitch than a review), but the criticisms there addresses specific concerns, many with solid backing:

"This is nothing but fear mongering at its best. You simply cannot say that processed meats cause as many deaths as tobacco, it's factually impossible! There are 34,000 deaths per year on average (W.H.O estimates) from processed AND red meats. There are over 8,000,000 deaths from tobacco every year. This is no way, shape, or form comparable to processed meats."

Here and elsewhere people are taking to task another claim from the book and film that beef is toxic because pollution gets in the cows when they eat grass, since it's obvious that the same pollution would get into vegetables and grains that we eat. Denise Minger does a thorough take-down of claims from Dr. Garth Davis, one of the experts from the film. And the Skeptical Cardiologist questions some claims from another expert, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, as does Minger.

I don't have any interest in seeing the film or reading the book, but I skimmed the Amazon "look inside" pages, and this bit caught my attention (page 75):

"People who ate 68 grams (about a cup) of broccoli sprouts significantly inhibited the bloodstream levels of an enzyme linked to cancerous tumor development (24), only three hours after eating the sprouts. The broccoli sprout snack was just as effective, or even more so, than the chemotherapy agent specifically concocted to lower that enzyme (25). Broccoli sprouts or chemo? Hard decision." 

Hold the phone - so broccoli can replace chemo?? I linked the studies cited to show the problem with this claim. The second study (25) found that the spouts briefly inhibited the epigenetic markers for cancer. But it makes it very clear that the study was  an attempt to prevent one specific provocation, not a therapy for cancer that exists. The three (three!) participants tested were all perfectly healthy at the time. And, as Wong says elsewhere, genetic markers cause only a small percentages of cancerous tumours anyway. The first study cited (24) explains the idea, but doesn't actually discuss the broccoli sprout study specifically as one would expect given the location of the citation in the passage. If it were a student's essay, I'd call that padding. Regardless, the original study's finding is in its initial stages and, more importantly, doesn't remotely suggest broccoli sprouts could replace chemotherapy in the least. Wong conflated concepts in a very misleading way.

I'm not going to fact check the many claims in the book, but one error of this type and magnitude is enough to throw into question other claims. And this passage is particularly dangerous if people take Wong, a classically trained actor, as a medical expert because the claim is published in a book about health and nutrition. I questioned the qualifications of the publisher and, lo and behold, it's a self-publishing company, Xlibris, so it's possible that nobody's fact-checked the material. Unfortunately, because it's in a paper form, it feels that much more legit. Caveat emptor and all, but this is troubling.

It's more important than ever that people understand how publishing works, what a peer-reviewed journal entails, and what is and is not peer-reviewed. But it's also important that we all understand some basics of the scientific method if we're expected to understand any of these studies. Or, at least, it would be nice if authors of nutritional books and films were able to use a basic scientific knowledge to understand their research more thoroughly. You don't have to have a medical degree to assimilate studies and form a conclusion, but you do have to read past the abstract.

ETA: Time Magazine also criticized the film.

ETA: I was sent two links by email that might suggest Hedges' claims are accurate. The first one says, "The greenhouse gas footprint of animal agriculture rivals that that of every car, truck, bus, ship, airplane, and rocket ship combined," but when I checked the link they provide (which is dead, but it can be deduced from the address that it's from chapter 8 of the IPCC report), the only place that specifically discusses animal agriculture is in section 8.7.4, where it says,

"A single year’s worth of current global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors have the largest contributions to warming after 100 years (see Figure 8.34a). Household fossil fuel and biofuel, biomass burning and on-road transportation are also relatively large contributors to warming over 100-year time scales. Those same sectors, along with sectors that emit large amounts of CH4 (animal husbandry, waste/ landfills and agriculture), are most important over shorter time horizons (about 20 years; see Figure 8.34b)" (p 720). 

This isn't quite the same thing as the first link claims, and I'm not sure how they arrived at their conclusion.

The second link refers to a study on reducing the impact of food production: "our findings support an approach where producers monitor their own impacts, flexibly meet environmental targets by choosing from multiple practices, and communicate their impacts to consumers." They don't suggest that people go vegan, but that farming practices change towards using natural pastures instead of deforested land. The article says, specifically, that "cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce an individual's carbon footprint from food by up to 73 per cent." Again, that's not the same as concluding that animal agriculture produces more GHGs than fossil fuels.

Sooner Than You Think

Yesterday's NYTimes has a lengthy article, "The Uninhabitable Earth," subtitled, "What Climate Change Could Wreak - Sooner Than You Think."

In a nutshell:

"...the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming ... that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand....Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.... we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up....the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history." 

We'll have issues with death by heat, drought and flood induced food shortages, plagues of insects and bacteria that won't die off, suffocating air, constant war, economic collapse, and poisoned oceans.

Why are we so blind to all of this?

"The dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate."

At least, at the very least, this is major mainstream news now. People are starting to listen. But will it make them more closed in with fear, even more flippant and careless, or actually more motivated to change??

On the Year that Kicked My Ass, and That Time My Ass Kicked Back

Well, it's starting to kick back, ever so slowly.

I went on another Wild Women adventure, this time to Georgian Bay to try my hand at kayaking for a change. I was with a whole new group of women, our ages spanning three decades and from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds (and photographic skills - all the pics here are from them). It's always a treat to be on the water surrounded by the giant slabs of rock and tall trees rooted in the tiniest crevices with people concerned for the health and well being of the water, air, and land. We wash on the ground well away from the lake, compost as we go, forgo campfires, and practice no-trace camping. Meetup groups aren't always as environmentally minded. The guides on the trips are exceptional, well practiced in both tripping and diplomacy, and the food is better than anything I typically eat at home.

Wearing the exact same clothes as last time!

On the last trip, I went in order to challenge myself to solo a canoe through the portages so I could travel alone. I've been on my own for almost a decade, and I'll need at least to be able to take the lead if I hope to ever get any of my not-so-canoe-y friends on board. In order to do the things I most enjoy, all by myself became a bit of a mantra.

And then this year of surgeries happened.

Total independence is no longer my goal - can no longer be my goal. I have to work towards working with others in order to get anywhere. This trip came just when I needed it as I teetered precariously on the brink of succumbing to self-pity. My dad, who also left me this year, always saw my quest for independence as a barrier and encouraged me to "let other people shine" by asking for help and sharing the load. I tried to asked for help, and for things forgotten, and for time for a break without feeling sheepish or ashamed of my blunders and inabilities. Interdependence is a hard one for me. And, through it all, I was still pushing myself, able to feel just enough muscle strain at the end of the day.

"Purely physical fatigue, provided it is not excessive, tends if anything to be a cause of happiness; it leads to sound sleep and a good appetite, and gives zest to the pleasures that are possible on holidays." ~ Bertrand Russell

A Referral for a Referral for a Referral

I'm curious: what must have happened to provoke the powers that be to make the health care system so inanely bureaucratic that wait times for life-saving surgeries are dramatically increased because of all the referrals for referrals required? Who could it possibly benefit?

I've written before about the system. After seeing an oncologist, to get a second visit to arrange to get a referral to a surgeon requires another referral to the oncologist from a family doctor. The same is true of many specialists.

It makes sense to have the family doctor as a first step to point people in the right direction. Some people might call an oncologist direct because they have a headache and think it's a brain tumour. I get that level of primary intervention. But how many mistakenly call their oncologist for a follow-up appointment?? That just doesn't make sense.

Imagine the savings to the health care costs if, on the first visit to the oncologist, you were given your options WITH the names and numbers of various doctors to see depending on the decision you make, and then you were allowed to actually call them all by yourself! So once you decide to go with the hysterectomy before the mastectomy, then you DIRECTLY call the gynecologist!!  That would be amazing!!  But instead, it's a bizarre, circuitous route from the family doctor to the oncologist to the family doctor to the oncologist (who says this should have been done months ago) and finally to whatever surgeon you need to save your own life.

AND the support staff of the family doctor and the necessary specialist set up an appointment time without having a clue about your schedule, so sometimes you end up having to change it, which pushes it all back even further. My daughter has a weird skin thing going on, nothing life threatening, but it's a similar set-up. Months ago, the family doctor said she should see a dermatologist. Just last week we got a call out of the blue from the dermatologist with a reminder for an appointment time for this week. I don't know who slipped up and didn't call me about the appointment in the first place, but it's not the first time that's happened. These receptionists are crazy busy! This week is way too late in the term for me to take a day off, so I asked for another appointment time. Next November is the best they can do.

Here's the thing. Sure it's a problem that some doctors can't see patients for six months. It will cost a fortune to get more doctors in the system, so I see why that could take some time and political wrangling to change. But it could actually SAVE money if patients could be allowed to make some of these appointments directly instead of having a separate appointment that prompts support staff to make arrangements on their behalf that end up not working for them anyway.

I recognize that if patients can call specialists directly, the problem would become how to differentiate the patients that are allowed to call directly from the ones that still need to be assessed by the family doctor. That will be tricky. But the question is, then, would the increase in the number of patients who slip through and directly call a specialist unnecessarily cost more than is saved by the decrease in the number of doctor visits set up just to be allowed to get permission to see the specialist that's actually needed? How many people would actually call a surgeon directly because they have a headache? And how many people have two or three extra doctor visits that are solely to get permission to see the doctor they need to see?

There should never be an appointment with a family doctor that's just to get them to sign off on a referral without the patient actually needing an examination or assessment to figure out which specialist is needed. In other words, if the doctor's specific skills aren't being used, then that appointment is a waste of the taxpayers' money. When an oncologist tells me to come back with a decision so we can get started with surgery, then it's a sham to force patients to make three different appointments with three different doctors before getting to the actual surgeon.
    

On Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness

Some  Russell quotations have been floating around lately, so I read The Conquest of Happiness, first published in 1930, and, boy, did I need this right now! The main ideas and some bits I liked are below by chapter. The book is really just a mix of Stoicism and Epicureanism, so you could just read that instead, but they're not nearly as palatable. This summary is really long, but not nearly as long as the book!


Part I: Causes of Unhappiness

1: What Makes People Unhappy? 

This chapter has some racist bit, but I imagine he was still more progressive than most at the time. We won't throw the baby out with the bathwater at any rate. He raises his thesis here: we can only be happy by being prudent with desires and by focusing outward. 

Lymphedema: A Research Study Overview

I'm cancer free, but very anxious about lymphedema. It's become a bit of an obsession, so, for anyone googling it, here are all the studies that I really should have researched before consenting to the Axilliary Lymph Node Dissection (ALND) surgery that half my doctors told me I didn't need, and the other half convinced me I should have had done months ago. In all that back-and-forth discussion, nobody gave me the harsh facts about lymphedema. They were all too focused on the cancer, so much so, that I really wasn't able to give informed consent based on their cheery consolations: "We don't see that so much; I wouldn't worry about it." The risk is small, but it's about as small as having cancer in my lymph nodes to begin with (somewhere between 15-30%). And the potential effect on my life is enormous. As far as I can tell, I basically agreed to risk being permanently disabled in order to have peace of mind that my cancer won't spread. Writing about it at least will briefly keep me from insanely measuring the circumference of my arms over and over.

My surgeon has taken a very Epicurean approach. He's quite convinced that there's no rhyme or reason as to why some people get it, so I should just live my life, without a compression garment, and not worry about it unless it becomes a problem. I asked about booking a kayaking trip eight-weeks post surgery, and he gave me his blessing. However, while it's true that there are risk factors beyond my control, there are also some things I can do to prevent this condition - things that patients should be told to do to decrease the risk. I believe he's negligent in not sharing the latest research. All of these doctors were. It shouldn't be up to patients to seek out studies to determine how to proceed. That's why they get the big bucks!!

Nader Interview with Chomsky on the Requiem for the American Dream

Ralph Nader interviewed Noam Chomsky last Saturday about Chomsky's new book Requiem for the American Dream and film of the same title currently on Netflix. He's trying every type of media to spread this understanding of history, to "throw fact against myth."

I saw the film back in December and outlined his ten-point plan then. The interview followed that format as well, so I'll just summarize the key points here as succinctly as possible. The following is all made of direct or close to direct quotations from Chomsky with bits of Nader included. Check out the transcript if you want the whole thing verbatim to mine for quotes. This is just the idea.


After the uprisings of the 60s, both the political elites of the left and right were affected by the notorious Powell Memorandum of 1971, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's memo to the Chamber of Commerce. Powell leaned to the right and saw an attack beginning from left-wing extremists like Herbert Marcuse and Ralph Nader who were out to undermine the free-enterprise system. His conclusion was that businessmen really own the country and should fight back. But the liberals at the same time, affected by Samuel Huntington's Crisis of Democracy, came to a similar conclusion, albeit more muted: There's too much democracy, and passive parts of the public are starting to enter the political arena. It's creating too much pressure on the state; the pressure from the corporate sector is never mentioned, though. That's comparing national interests to special interests: the young, old, farmers, workers, women, etc. Those special interest groups need to be made to go back to being passive. Huntington called on schools and churches to better indoctrinate the young.

Coming from both sides, it couldn't avoid having an effect, and neo-liberal policies were formed starting late in the Carter administration but peaking during Reagan's time. In an effort to reduce the role of the public, they reduced the role of government and transferred it all to the market where the public doesn't have any power. The de-regulated industries and banks grew dramatically and, instead of just loaning money as needed, they started to get into predatory activities, like speculating with other people's money. The worldwide effect was a sharp increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, which led to more power, which led to more concentration until we have a fraction of the 1% in charge of almost everything. This marked a sharp decline in democracy as 70% of the population is disenfranchised since their own representatives will pay no attention to their opinions. Now, under Trump, the people appointed to head the departments of state are the very people whose record has been to stifle those very agencies they've been appointed to run. These cabinet appointments would be comical if their effects weren't so awful.

We see all this is the trend towards populism: a framework of the people set against the elite. There's tremendous anger and contempt for institutions now, and some are collapsing. We could see it in the last election with Sanders rising up despite no support from the wealthy or media, and Trump becoming unstoppable. And in France we just saw an election in which the two major parties were wiped out, and two from the edges, a neo-fascist and a neo-liberal, were the popular choices. Worldwide there's disillusionment reflecting the fact that policies are in place with the explicit objective of undermining democratic participation.

The more savage fringe of the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, is undermining workers' rights, safety rights, and health programs, and increasing big tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the most vulnerable parts of the population. Industry is subsidized by the public at $80 billion per year, which is nothing compare to the subsidies to energy and agribusiness. All talk of a free market is a joke. Tax payers are forced to subsidize their own oppression. 

The focus on the people's problems is a ruse to atomize society - to pit factions against one another so they'll all be more easily controlled. It's divide and rule: people turn against one another rather than focus on the government: they argue about reproductive rights, gun control, and same-sex marriage, instead of cracking down on corporate crime. This is how it worked with Senator Inhofe who believes climate change is a hoax. He was asked how to win elections: "God, gays, and guns." Divide and rule distracts people from the most frightening issues.

Manufactured consent has a media system that deceives the people. People undermined by political decisions are voting in favour of candidates undermining them, like was explained in Strangers in Their Own Land. They have been turned against their own interests through an offer of narrow choices. Courts have persuaded the majority that there are too many frivolous lawsuits clogging up the system, but less than 2% of wrongful injuries get into the courts in the first place.

The image that comes up is of people standing in a line. Behind us are our parents and grandparents who worked hard to get the American dream. They got ahead, so they moved along in the line, but now the line has stalled or declined. Ahead of us, people are flying into the stratosphere. That doesn't bother us, though, because that's the American dream. What worries them is the people behind them. This is where scapegoating occurs. Reagan talked about welfare mothers driving in limos to the welfare office. That story. People behind us are worthless and lazy. The federal government role is to help the worthless behind us to get ahead of us with food stamps, affirmative actions, etc. So we end up hating the government for helping the poor instead of hating corporate interests. It's a very effective way to control people. Trump's promises, to bring jobs back, etc., won't be realized. The working class, many who voted for Obama before but were disillusioned, then voted for the enemy. What happens when they realize the promises' delusion again? The ruling powers will be forced to turn to more extreme scapegoating. Who's the someone else? The most vulnerable parts: foreigners, etc. It could turn out to be pretty ugly. 

This is the moment to act constructively. Sanders was remarkable. Thanks to Fox News, the most popular political figure in the country right now is Sanders. This indicates available opportunities to turn the tide.

Historically, labour unions provided the means where people could get together, act in concert, and carry forward progressive steps towards freedom and democracy. The strikes of the 1930s ushered in the New Deal, which had a beneficial effect into the 1950s. So unions are being attacked for their ability to build solidarity. People are the enemy of concentrated power, so we have to marginalize them somehow, and break up any institution that joins them together. Common beliefs are essential. Raising taxes on the rich has been a popular demand for forty year. At the polls, there's general support for having national health care. It's horrible, a pay or die situation. Drugs are more expensive in the U.S. than anywhere in the world. That goes back to the end of Reagan when 70% of people thought the right to health care should be in the constitution. The government is forbidden by law to negotiate drug prices. A poll found 85% are opposed to that, but it doesn't enter debate in congress.

Many Trump and Sanders voters have similar concerns. There's a real possibility of putting together a progressive coalition around jobs, health care, and taxing the rich, but there's an enormous struggle to prevent it from happening. By fostering extreme consumerism to drive into their heads the only thing that matters is the number of commodities they have - it takes a huge effort to create this imagery. But there are huge areas of support for civil liberties, changing the war on drugs, the corporate tax system, wars of aggression, climate change. Everyone wants their own children to have access to a good school, water, air, food - that's what we need a cutting age movement for. If it hits 75% of people, it will be politically unstoppable.

The effectiveness of a protest, like a hunger strike, is measured by the moral and cultural level of the outside population. If it's ignored (because the culture and morals are low), then it's ineffective. If it's high, and people can appreciate the reasons for the action, then it can have a huge effect. It's effective if the population appreciates the reasons and comes to support and perceive it. But, for example, there's very little reported on the current Palestinian hunger strike. The U.S. has a large share of responsibility of deprivation and suffering: We provide aid and ideological support for the pursuit of Israeli policies in occupied areas, which are brutal. The hunger strike is directed at us. The question is, do we perceive it and do we react. This is the fourth week, and it's still not in the mass media. There's a black out.

So far, Trump has been a kind of a charade at two levels. Trump makes one outrageous claim after another, then the media go after him, after the latest crazy thing. Meanwhile he uses that to strengthen his base by saying the liberals are attacking him. Support for him increases as the people see themselves attacked by the liberal elites. Meanwhile, at another level, Paul Ryan is pushing through legislation of the most extreme. But attention is focused on other things, and the Democrats are to blame for that. Maybe that outrageousness will implode on him, but so far it's working very well.

I just takes 1% in each district to be connected in order to take back congress. "We the people" is what begins the constitution. If we can band together to turn the situation around, an emerging left-right alliance would be unstoppable.