Revenge, violence, fear and risk

From the New Yorker

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.

See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.

I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.

Food crisis

From the NYT

- Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger:

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

and

The Poor Eat Mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

At Der Spiegel

- The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis, we have another part of the story.

Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.

The Chicago Board of Trade is the nerve center for global futures contracts.
But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.

Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.

“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”

He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”

Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.

Capitalism is literally consuming itself.

The Onion, plastic surgery, the law and seeking abortion

Every couple of weeks or so, the Onion strikes gold:

Oprah Launches Own Reality

(CHICAGO)—Calling it the next logical step in her celebrated career, and a groundbreaking achievement in applied quantum field theory, media giant Oprah Winfrey unveiled her latest project Monday: a completely separate realm of existence, known as OpraH, which she will control on the subatomic level.

“Now, Oprah’s always on!” Winfrey said through an interspatial image of herself broadcast between her world and ours. “I’ve created a place where anyone can come to share and laugh and feel totally free from the conventional laws of the physical universe.”

“I invite you all to be guests in my new reality,” she added.

This latest addition to Winfrey’s empire—which already includes her flagship talk show, a reality TV program, an influential book club, O magazine, the thoughts and emotions of millions of viewers, and two television networks—is Oprah’s first foray into large-scale nucleosynthesis. Developed over the past three years by the theoretical physics wing of her company, Harpo Productions, >OpraH was reportedly created by tearing a small hole in the fabric of known reality. The talk-show host then went about restructuring an infinite number of never-before-seen particles to produce a separate dimension, which is currently oscillating around Chicago.

According to her aides, Winfrey was personally involved in the most minute details of planning, from the type of coffee served in the green room of her new studio facility to the genetic makeup of every organism she deemed worthy of receiving life.

Plastic surgery book

Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a renowned plastic surgeon, wrote My Beautiful Mommy to help patients explain their transformation to their children. The story guides children through Mommy’s surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way.

This has been news here and there in the blogosphere: yes, I suppose why not have a book explaining what could be a confusing time but its been pointed out that there is no questioning of the procedure itself. Nothing wrong with a nip and tuck for mommy but there just might be cause for concern if its passed off as either necessary or as anything but cosmetic. “And now you have even a better mommy” sort of talk.

Oregon: our laws are copyrighted and you can’t publish them

This is rather insane. As I understand it, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Kind of get you coming and going then. You’d think if you want people to abide by laws which supposedly are devised to make society run more smoothly and equitably that you would let people know what those laws actually are.

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.”

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

Won’t let you know the laws, and won’t give you information; only in China you say?

Art and politics

From Is modern art a left wing conspiracy:

Although the political compass is changing, so-called radical artists usually stick to what’s comfortable. It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. He once tried to ‘raise awareness’ about pollution in Britain’s rivers by publicising the fact that he was going to dump a tonne of waste in the Thames. On another occasion, he announced he would leave a tap running in his London gallery to raise awareness of wasted water. On cue, green protesters arrived to try to turn it off. Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?

As many critics would accept, it’s a tough challenge to bring politics into art without losing some subtlety. It is a very rare thing for artists to hit the right political note without their work looking like a simplistic didactic message. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) is a rare example of a painting that succeeds as propaganda and art – telling the world about the Luftwaffe bombing of the Spanish town, while also screaming out the existential misery of twentieth-century warfare.

But, as the art historian Simon Schama notes in his book The Power of Art, much of Picasso’s work and politics afterwards was too closely aligned to Stalinism to achieve the same effect again. The radicalism of an artist in his art does not necessarily correlate to his politics. Salvador Dali, possibly the most subversive artist of the twentieth century, supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

Which is why it is hard not to feel a sense of relief when fine artists today avoid bringing politics into their work, especially when you know how bad their politics can be. Thank god for a bit of apolitical postmodernism, one might say.

Oh the bastards….part 2

George Montbiot has a great article called Car-nage. An affirmed cyclist and journalist-activist, he’s been on about these issues for ages. The article details the effects on the non-vehicular population by the increasing number of automobiles in third world countries. Pedestians, cyclists, rickshaw drivers, and oxcarts are being forced off the roads in favour of the car. And people are being hurt.

The point he has been making for a long time about automobiles is that the risks are not shared by those who get the benefits. The car-nage, or accidents, are offloaded to the health care system, if there is one, and the industry does not have to account for the damage due to the use of its product. Now risk is also unfair if it is assumed by only one part of the population, in this case the disadvantaged classes. The rich are happy because they finally get to drive, and the poor are the ones who get to be driven over.

This sort of thing was never quite the issue here because of lower population density. However, the increasing ubiquity of the vehicle and the greater density of the population does eventually lead to similar issues. Those who can’t afford cars are second class citizens though no one will actually say so. Their lives are being circumscribed so that drivers can merrily race up and down the roads without a worry.

Of course, most of us are fit into all these categories. I drive, and I walk (or jaywalk). And when I drive, my armor and sense of entitlement, transforms me into someone antagonistic to pedestrians. I try to fight this but I feel it there all the time.

I have no good answer to the issue. Neither side should have absolute rights however the issue for me is that my rights are being abrogated even when there are no drivers about. My behavior, which is characterized as foolhardy and dangerous in the presence of vehicles, and otherwise would be indistinguishable from walking from any place to another, is a criminal act. Its like saying you cannot move a knife back and forth in the air even if there is no one near you. I know that I can legally shoot a bullet toward a target as long as no one is standing in between me and the target. Seems to me like you should have the possibility of harm (or being harmed) before you start constraining people’s actions.

I have posted the following before, but it is a classic. This is traffic both chaotic and poetic.

Oh the bastards….

Most people in my neck of the woods hate magpies. Even the vegans among us are quick to take up arms against this bird. I kind of like them (the magpies that is).

Now I’m not saying they haven’t caused me grief from time to time. They pestered my last husky when she was a pup and then through the good years she actually caught a few of them, and then they had their revenge in her last few weak years. They would arrive in groups of three to five, and some would distract her while the others emptied her food bowl. And they can be noisier than a nightclub.

But I like the looks of them, and their obvious intelligence and resourcefulness. They are part of the jay family (we get blue jays around here too; just as noisy and an even finer looking bird) which brings me to the topic at hand….jaywalking.

Yesterday evening when I picked up the phone I was asked and I agreed to do a survey regarding jaywalking. They wanted to know my general attitudes toward jaywalking, whether I knew about the new fine hikes, and whether it would affect my behavior, and whether I knew about the jaywalkers who had died in the previous year.

The fine for jaywalking in this city is increasing to $250. I’m not sure how this compares to other bylaw penalties but the jump is from a previous $40.

I let the people know that I jaywalked each and every day, I would continue to do so but with a greater lookout for police, and that I considered it ridiculous. One of the questions was how many times a week I was inconvenienced by a jaywalker and I said never though I was often inconvenienced by people who without warning started across crosswalks without even looking. This was particularly bad in winter when icy conditions might make it difficult to stop. To me, crosswalks were a greater danger than people who were actively working around my vehicle.

By the time I hung up the phone I was incensed, and within the hour I was livid. Oddly enough, more than world hunger or fossil fuels or walmart, this was the issue that might galvanize my political soul. This is one that would get me onto the streets and up onto the ramparts. This struck to my very soul, this imposition on my pedestrianism, this imperialistic disregard of my rights in favour of the omnipresent automobile. The bastards!!

I went online to check out the bylaws and what constituted jaywalking and where. It seems everywhere you cross not at the end of a street or a designated crosswalk was jaywalking. In other words, I could hypothetically at three in the morning visit a neighbor who lives across the street on our shared cul de sac. No traffic even heard but the cop who lives between us and dislikes me could give me a ticket for not walking to the end of the block, crossing there and walking back.

Now that is an extreme. Quite frankly, I think I should have the right to cross the road anywhere I wish, in mainstream traffic if I wish, and let me determine if it is safe or not. I am happy to pay for my failure if I run in front of a car. The thing is, I think that though traffic should flow, people who happen to clothe themselves in an automobile should not automatically be guaranteed rights they did not have before.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I hate worse than a pedestrian who does not appreciate the killing power of a vehicle, one who steps out without looking (even a green walk at the light). What this bylaw is communicating to me is that I don’t have the brains to cross a road. That I cannot make the required calculations to avoid traffic and stay alive. It is also rather fascist in that it is telling me where I can and cannot walk, in the same city I pay my taxes.

Yes, people died jaywalking last year. And they will die this year. And people died falling off balconies too….should going out on your balcony be illegal? Odds are the people who died off the balconies and some of those on the roads were not paying attention, were a little oblivious to the fact that life requires attention.

Life needs a few reminders of what it is. It is not numb wandering in utter safety. There should be some danger in this world and there should certainly be some room for people who don’t mind a little of it. Those who worry about cars can walk to the end of the street and cross there. I won’t stop them from doing so. All I ask is the same courtesy.

Appreciating George Bush

Ok, this is very interesting. The man so many of us despise may actually have done more good than most American presidents.

In a recent Time Magazine article, entitled Geldof and Bush: Diary from the Road, Bob Geldof writes about how Bush has been more active on the issue of Africa than his predecessors. As he writes:

He is also, I feel, an emotional man. But sometimes he’s a sentimentalist, and that’s different. He is in love with America. Not the idea of America, but rather an inchoate notion of a space — a glorious metaphysical entity. But it is clear that since its mendacious beginnings, this war has thrown up a series of abuses that disgrace the U.S.’s central proposition. In the need to find morally neutralizing euphemisms to describe torture and abuse, the language itself became tortured and abused. Rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib — all are codes for what America is not. America has mortally compromised its own essential values of civil liberty while imposing its own idea of freedom on others who may not want it. The Bush regime has been divisive — but not in Africa. I read it has been incompetent — but not in Africa. It has created bitterness — but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives.

The article portrays a thoughtful, warm and funny man, a man well aware of how disinterested the media in general are interested in Africa. And, despite all the things many of us have had issues with -the war in Iraq, the creep of fundamentalism into politics, the troglodytic approach to the drug war and sex education, all this may be dwarfed, not ever in perception, but in reality by his work on Africa’s behalf. One would hope for more consistency, a little more love on the home front but nonetheless, it is tragic that he might be forever castigated without the tempering of the knowledge of this initiative.

Credit should be given where credit is due, even if you are George Bush.

Clearing out the back 40..

1. I ran across this blog some time ago but for some reason I forgot about it but what fun. Check out Stuff White People Like. Here is an example:

One of the more interesting things about White people is that they love singing comedians.

This style of humor involves a person or group singing a song but rather than singing about something serious, it has funny lyrics. It’s not any more complicated than that, but white people can’t get enough of it. Weird Al Yankovich, Tenacious D, Sarah Silverman (sometimes),
Flight of the Conchords, Dennis Leary, and Adam Sandler are all excellent examples of the genre.

It’s a pretty good idea because when you have jokes that aren’t that great and music that isn’t that great, you can mix them together and create something that will entertain white people.

or

Water seems like a fairly simple concept. You turn on the tap, put glass underneath, and drink. Sadly, it is not this simple for white people.

On the whole, they are unable to put a glass under a tap and just drink. In fact, this is such a strange concept that the city of New York had to launch a rather large PR campaign to show white people that it was possible to actually drink the water that comes out of the tap!

2. And courtesy of Daily Dose of Architecture is this picture which is part of a series of Tokyo buildings photographed by viggio.

3. And there is Elliot Spitzer. Now I was originally going to avoid spending precious brain cells contemplating the fortunes of a man I would not let through my front door but there have been a couple of interesting views of this thing. I had previously defended the slithery Larry Craig on the entrapment aspect of things but I never quite put the boots to him for the hypocrasy.

What gets me about these scandals is not that people engage in these activities but that they have so badly mismanaged their own lives. As Melissa Hughes suggested in this weekend’s Globe and Mail in an aptly titled article Duh, What were they thinking maybe our leaders are just stupid. Perhaps they really aren’t as smart as everyone thought.

And then there was David Brooks at the New York Times who chronicles the rise of typical alpha gorilla charmers suddenly facing a middle age crisis of the inner soul and being unable to attend to it gracefully because they lack the skills. The whole article is worth reading; but here, a few choice words therein:

I don’t know if you’ve seen a successful politician or business tycoon get drunk and make a pass at a woman. It’s like watching a St. Bernard try to French kiss. It’s all overbearing, slobbering, desperate wanting. There’s no self-control, no dignity.

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

Ultimately though one wonders why it is most often those campaigning on platforms of law and order, or moral hygiene, that end up in these disturbing situations. Not only because they appear to be doing exactly what they are publicly fighting against but also it indicates a massive lack of accountability. Whether or not they personally felt that way, many people voted them in on those ideas, and handed over controls of funding, and paid their salaries expressly because they represented something. Spitzer’s apology was pathetic; he said that the incident “violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong”; there is no acknowledgment of the crime against his constituency. He likes to think it is a private matter. It’s not.

The upside of these events is that maybe the right wing law and order types will start making the laws a little more humane because they seem to be the ones having the trouble staying on the straight and narrow.

Hunting for a reason

Maybe its just me but isn’t conservation about preserving life?

The following is excerpted from an article in my local paper entitled:
Female hunters shouldn’t settle for hand-me-downs:

Kelly Semple, 42, has been awarded an Order of the Bighorn by the Alberta government. The awards recognize outstanding contributions to fish and wildlife conservation.

She has spent more than 20 years as an advocate for conservation, hunter education and the wise stewardship of Alberta’s natural resources.

Semple’s role in a youth mentor program run by the Hunting for Tomorrow Foundation taught her that women can be easily turned off the activity if they start out improperly equipped.

Often, when women start off in traditionally male activities they don’t show up at the sporting goods store and ask to be fitted with good equipment, Semple said.

Instead, they’ll use hand-me downs from a male influence in their life. So, often the equipment doesn’t fit right or is oversized and “too much bow or too much rifle.”

Now it’s one of the things Semple insists on with the female youth she mentors.

“If you don’t have equipment that fits, you it really takes away from the overall experience and it can turn a lot of people off very, very quickly.”

Another challenge she encounters more each year is the plethora of video games and entertainment tools that desensitize people to the reality of life and death.

“A lot of the video games that the kids play are really quite graphic. The unfortunate part of that is it creates a layer between understanding the life and death cycle and understanding that when you kill something you, and it, are forever changed. It’s not as easy as just flicking a switch and picking up the game again.”

So this award winner for conservation is concerned that potential hunters will be turned off by the experience and may not want to kill more animals. Or that somehow it is a pure experience because it teaches you that death is final.

Kind of go by the philosophy that if I want to show my appreciation of life and death, the most meaningful way is to not kill because I have a pretty good idea that killing leads to death. (And by the way, on the government’s Sustainable Resources website the award is described as being given to champions of fish and wildlife -kind of makes you hope that these people never become your champions).

Somehow ties in with a recent wolf kill being proposed here because elk are threatened (in other words, there are not enough for hunters to meaningfully understand life and death).

How about culling the hunter population instead (and no, I don’t mean killing them, just stopping them). Meanwhile on another coast they are having a big deer hunt because there are too many. Too many for whom? Nature tends to work these things out eventually without bullets or red vests.

Bill C-10: Taking Artistic Licence

The Harper government is at it again and now wishes to constrain film funding using the words “community values”. Seem to recall a quaint little group in Germany called the National Socialists who had similar concern about art reflecting community values.

When I first heard of this I wasn’t sure what to think. It came out couched in terms of restricting hate materials and pornography but as someone pointed out in the Globe and Mail this weekend, don’t we already have laws dealing with that? I don’t mind the idea of having hoops to jump through for federal funding, after all its my money we are discussing here and I don’t want some talentless jerkoff being able to lift it with less effort that I put out to earn my pittance, but I want those hoops to be hoops of artistry, of talent, not of political correctness.

The artist’s job is not to reflect community values but to question them. Our community values may be just fine (especially if they are self critical) but we can only know that if we explore alternatives, and a fairly pain free way of doing that is through the arts.

Nicholas Campbell of DaVinci’s Inquest was recently on The Hour, and like the character he portrayed, he is very forthcoming about everything and he talked about the fragility of the Canadian film industry. Funding is difficult enough that you kind of skate the edge without these issues but if you had to worry that after you make the film, because this bullshit boom drops after they see what you did, you suddenly lose your house because people here do have their houses riding on these projects.

What is so utterly demoralizing about this is that our own government is sabotaging our industry. It won’t be able to interfere with non domestic product so that will still be on our screens but without our own for a paltry bit of Canadian culture. In this case the government is on board with a lot of the public which somehow has gotten the impression that Canadian television and film are substandard. Shows can die here even faster than in the cutthroat American market. The odd thing is the worst crap on Canadian television is when timorous execs try to imitate American successes. When like any other culture, they go regional, it stands out, its unique, it tends to be good, and it tends to get noticed. If it makes it as far as being viewed, and bill C-10 is placing a very big hurdle in front of any Canadian production, even relatively conservative ones, and especially innovative ones which might be aiming at the edgy indie film festival crowd.

I think the Conservatives would be happy with family friendly home movies. God forbid, we have to think or be challenged, or compete on the world stage. It is just another case where this particular government, and I have said all along, that this is unusual in this country, where this government has no love for the country. This government thinks that to make it, they have to go American.