VF, thank you for this, it was truly a gift.

Best....Jeff

The Take (Film) ~ by Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

The Take is a Canadian documentary film released in 2004 by the wife and husband team of Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. It tells the story of workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina who reclaim control of a closed Forja auto plant where they once worked and turn it into a worker cooperative, or as could be argued, a working model of anarcho-syndicalism.

Are much the same things happening inside the USA at this time ... ?

Fire The Boss: Workers Take Over Factories (Klien/Lewis - 1/5

Part 2 ~ Part 3 ~ Part 4 ~ Part 5

~ VF ~ 

The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy ~ by Douglas Adams

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1979), the characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home to the now-collapsed planet-building industry, and meet Slartibartfast, a planetary coastline designer who was responsible for the fjords of Norway. Through archival recordings, he relates the story of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was revealed to be 42, Deep Thought had predicted that another computer, more powerful than itself would be made and designed by it to calculate the question for the answer. (Later on, referencing this, Adams would create the 42 Puzzle, a puzzle which could be approached in multiple ways, all yielding the answer 42.)

The computer, often mistaken for a planet (because of its size and use of biological components), was the Earth, and was destroyed by Vogons to make way for a hyperspatial express route, five minutes before the conclusion of its 10-million-year program. Two of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who commissioned the Earth in the first place, disguise themselves as Trillian's mice, and want to dissect Arthur's brain to help reconstruct the question, since he was part of the Earth's matrix moments before it was destroyed, and so he is likely to have part of the question buried in his brain. Trillian is also human but had left Earth six months previously with Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy. The protagonists escape, setting course for "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". The mice, in Arthur's absence, create a phony question since it is too troublesome for them to wait 10 million years again just to cash in on a lucrative deal. Their new question was "How many roads must a man walk down?"

~ VF ~

[quote=]

Dave Foreman ~ a Dialogue with Derrick Jensen

For more than twenty years, Dave Foreman has been at the forefront of the conservation movement, working where political activism intersects with ecological philosophy. In the 1970s, believing that the best way to preserve wilderness was to work within the system, he became the Southwest regional representative of The Wilderness Society. In 1980, disillusioned by the inability of mainstream conservation organizations to halt the destructive forces within our culture, he cofounded Earth First! The goal of Earth First! was to help develop a biocentric worldview and to translate that philosophy into action by fighting with uncompromising passion for the Earth.

More recently Dave Foreman helped to found The Wildlands Project, an effort bringing together grassroots activists and conservation biologists to design and establish linked areas of wilderness extensive enough to support large mammals. In addition to being chair of The Wildlands Project, he is executive editor of Wild Earth magazine and author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and The Big Outside (with Howie Wolke)." -- Derrick Jensen

For more than twenty years, Dave Foreman has been at the forefront of the conservation movement, working where political activism intersects with ecological philosophy. In the 1970s, believing that the best way to preserve wilderness was to work within the system, he became the Southwest regional representative of The Wilderness Society. In 1980, disillusioned by the inability of mainstream conservation organizations to halt the destructive forces within our culture, he cofounded Earth First! The goal of Earth First! was to help develop a biocentric worldview and to translate that philosophy into action by fighting with uncompromising passion for the Earth.

More recently Dave Foreman helped to found The Wildlands Project, an effort bringing together grassroots activists and conservation biologists to design and establish linked areas of wilderness extensive enough to support large mammals. In addition to being chair of The Wildlands Project, he is executive editor of Wild Earth magazine and author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and The Big Outside (with Howie Wolke)." -- Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen: You've written that the defense of the Earth is not "Lord Man protecting something less than himself. Rather, it is a humble joining with Earth, becoming the rain forest, the desert, the mountain, the wilderness in defense of itself."

Dave Foreman: Our desire to protect wilderness comes from passion, from an emotional identification with wilderness. It's a sense of expanding the concept of the self to include the landscape around us and identifying with that landscape.

This may seem an alien concept on first blush, but for somebody who knows a place, who can sit in the desert, watch it and accept it for what it is, who does not need to experience it on a dirt bike, or for somebody who can go into an old-growth forest and sit underneath a five-hundred-year-old tree and try to pick up some wisdom from it, I don't think it is alien. We are place. We are connected to everything, and we are open to the world around us.

Aldo Leopold wrote that there are those who love wild things and sunsets, and those who do not. I think we all fundamentally and early on love wild things and sunsets, but some of us have it socialized out of us. We forget that love. There might be a point you can't turn back from. I feel sorry for people who don't have that identification with nature, because they're living half a life.

DJ: When are you happiest?

DF: When I'm not thinking abstractly. When I am being fully an animal, when I'm in the middle of a rapid on the river and having to respond to the river.

I'm happiest when I experience the moment entirely for what it is. I'm happiest when I'm bird-watching, or when I'm walking down a trail in the wilderness and the internal dialogue finally ceases -- I'm just there in the place. Our physical adaptation is for running or moving through wild country. That's when we're truly human and truly alive.

I am a large mammal, a child of the Pleistocene, the age of large mammals. It's natural to want to see other large mammals. I recently had the joy of my life when I came in contact with a Jaguar on the Monkey River in Belize. Rationality ceased, abstraction ceased. We ignore the fact that we need wilderness around us to be mentally healthy.

DJ: Let's talk about abstraction. Elsewhere you've said that while deep ecology is your ethic, it's still an abstraction.

DF: All ethics are abstractions. The map is not the territory. The Western intellectual tradition really began, I believe, when Socrates told Phaedrus, "I am a man who loves learning, and trees and open spaces can't teach me a thing, whereas men in town do." We've been on the wrong path ever since, and deep ecology is an attempt by those of us from that tradition to try to get back to a more fundamental wisdom. This means it's going to be an abstraction for a while, until we are able to somehow reinhabit the Earth in some kind of future primitive.

How that's going to happen, I don't know. My job, which I do with The Wildlands Project, is to conceptualize a new kind of reserve system that does deep ecology on the ground, because deep ecology isn't deep ecology when it's just academic intellectual masturbation. Deep ecology becomes something real when it motivates our day-to-day actions, and there is no more honorable thing any of us can do with our lives than to work to put part of the world off-limits to the activities of human beings.

DJ: Why?

DF: Right now human beings are agents of biodiversity destruction on the order of an extraterrestrial comet. Leading biologists tell us we may lose one-third of all species on Earth in the next forty years. Michael Soulé, the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology, says for all practical purposes vertebrate evolution is at an end, and that the only large mammals left in another decade or two will be those we consciously choose to allow to exist. We are destroying the building blocks of nature that have been building for nearly four billion years.

In this country, wilderness preservation has focused on scenic rocks and ice above timberline, while giving up more important lower elevation forests. We've ignored grassland areas, river bottoms, places that might not be as spectacular or as suited for recreation but that are more important from a biodiversity standpoint.

The result is that the national parks and wilderness areas have failed to protect the biological and natural heritage of North America. W. D. Newmark, in his study of national parks about ten years ago, found that even Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding area was too small to maintain viable populations of Grizzly Bears or Gray Wolves.

Because we might not have any places big enough for large predators except in Alaska or northern Canada, Reed Noss and other conservation biologists have begun working with metapopulations. That involves preserving corridors which link, for example, the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem with the Glacier/Bob Marshall ecosystem and the central Idaho ecosystem, as well as the Canadian Rockies. In the East, we want a connected chain of wilderness areas from the Everglades to northern Maine and into Canada, so the Eastern Cougar and the Florida Panther will be once again connected. And then of course we need east-west corridors.

We need to preserve more than little outdoor museums, snapshots in time. The Wildlands Project is fundamentally about protecting the evolutionary process, the potentiality for future speciation. For that we need areas large enough to have stochastic events, like forest fires or the hurricane that went across the Everglades.

DJ: You seem to focus on large predators.

DF: If there isn't room for large predators -- for Wolves and Bears and Saltwater Crocodiles and Harpy Eagles -- human beings have clearly exceeded local carrying capacity. Educated people in the world today nearly all accept evolution as a scientific fact. But very few people have accepted the social implications of Darwinian natural selection -- that we are animals. You get cornucopians of the right and the left, whether they take their economic theories from Adam Smith or Karl Marx, that refuse any notion of limits, or the idea of carrying capacity, as it's applied to human beings. The Wildlands Project is a way to come to terms with that. And if we can protect viable populations of large predators, we can figure 90 percent of all biodiversity is being protected.

DJ: Why protect biodiversity?

DF: For its own sake. We have no right to destroy the biodiversity of this planet. These other species and ecosystems exist for their own sakes. When I saw that Jaguar in Belize, she did not consider herself watchable wildlife, or a source of joy for me. She has a life just as full of meaning and joy to her as mine is to me.

All this goes to the heart of what kind of people we are. I can't imagine the legacy of destroying large mammals on this Earth, destroying coral reef ecosystems, songbirds, amphibians. It's a burden I can't bear. We need to come to terms with what we're doing, and we need to think about our legacy.

If you want to put it in somewhat religious terms, fighting to save biodiversity, the process of evolution, is a way for us to save our souls.

DJ: How will The Wildlands Project be implemented?

DF: The first thing is to talk about it, prepare a draft proposal for the entire North American continent with lines on maps and throw it on the table. That will be helpful because it will expand the terms of the debate, expand the possible.

On a practical basis, we start with what we have: The Klamath Forest Alliance has proposed corridors between wilderness areas in northwestern California and has filed lawsuits and appeals to protect those corridors from Forest Service timber sales. Folks with the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project are mapping all 

remaining old growth in Colorado and figuring how to connect it into a single linked reserve system.

When we're constantly wrapped up in brushfires, it's hard to look at the big picture. Tying local battles into a continental wilderness recovery network will help frontline conservation activists determine their priorities. And it gives folks a vision, encourages them, gives them more energy.

It also helps us do things like look at northern Maine, where 10 million uninhabited acres are owned by paper companies. That land is available for two hundred dollars or less an acre. Ten million acres essentially for the price of a Stealth bomber. By putting it in the context of this continental system, we can argue better for the money to acquire it. If we acquired it, we could have an Alaska-size wilderness wildlife refuge in New England, and in twenty years there would be Wolves and Caribou and Lynx and Eastern Cougar there.

The Wildlands Project is audacious. It's big not only in terms of space but also in terms of time. If we identify, say, a private ranch in Montana that's between two wilderness reserves, and we feel that fifty years from now it will be necessary as a corridor for Wolves to go from one area to another, we can say to the rancher, "We don't want you to give up your ranch now. But let us put a conservation easement on it. Let's work out the tax details so you can donate it in your will to this reserve system." When it's needed as a corridor, it will be there.

DJ: How does the possibility of a socio-industrial crash impact your conservation strategies?

DF: I've tried to develop a strategy where it doesn't matter. I personally believe there's going to be a crash. I don't know when or how it will take place, whether it will be a pandemic, a massive economic crash, a clash of centralized state governments, a massive famine, or whatever, but I do know industrial civilization cannot go on. The anthropologist Marvin Harris talks about the industrial bubble. As this bubble expands its skin becomes thinner. It is going to pop.

From that perspective, The Wildlands Project is trying to protect as much land as possible, and to protect breeding stocks of all species, so that after industrialism collapses there will be enough building blocks of natural diversity to recolonize the world.

On the other hand, if we come to our senses, build some kind of sustainable society, control overpopulation and see a steady decrease in human population, develop a steady-state economics, develop the kind of agriculture Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and others are working on, the kind of forestry Orville Camp is working on, and reinhabitory communities like folks in northern California or the Oregon backwoods are trying to create, the results are the same. This kind of North American wilderness recovery strategy becomes a key element in that new society, and becomes sacred space where the new people will fully become human beings.

DJ: Where does fun fit into this?

DF: There's incredible fun in working with people you connect with and feel close to. Fun comes from going into the wilderness and experiencing it on its own terms. Fun comes from learning humility and respect. My friend Doug Peacock says we need Grizzly Bears to teach us humility, and he jokes that while he might think about packing a pistol in a city, he never would when he's in Bear country. You need to go without a gun so you aren't on top of the food chain.

Fun comes from the privilege of being born into this blue-green living planet, no matter how bad the situation gets. Fun has to motivate it all, or as I prefer to say, joy. Joy in living. Joy in fighting the good fight. Even sometimes joy in saying, "Today is a good day to die," and going for it.

And joy has to motivate your activism. We need to walk in respect on the earth, not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of joy. A couple of years ago Wendell Berry said to me that deep ecology needs to be careful not to just establish rules. It needs to be something that wells up from within. By respecting the land you walk softly on it.

DJ: You were one of the founders of Earth First! and helped make famous the phrase, "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth."

DF: I'm all for compromise. It's just that our opportunity for compromise passed about one hundred years ago. We're down to the last 5 percent of old-growth forest. We could have compromised at 50 percent, but we didn't. We've got to save all that's left and begin to restore some. Paul Sears, one of the great botanists of America back in the thirties, forties, and fifties, said we needed to protect 25 percent of the United Stares in inviolate condition. Conservation biologists today are saying it's more like 50 percent, if we are going to have the whole range and diversity of species. When we're down to the last four percent of the redwood forests, we're way beyond that kind of compromise.

What we can do is be concerned about the poor bastards who all alone have been misled by the logging companies. We can try to retrain them. We can do something for community stability. The timber-dependent communities in the Pacific Northwest have been destroyed by the timber companies. The people have been exploited, and they continue to be exploited. Bernard DeVoto, editor of Harper's, saw that nearly fifty years ago when he said that the West, for all its emphasis on individualism, is the part of America most dominated by outside economic interests [1948 Across the Wide Missouri, Pulitzer Prize winner]. The rugged individualists of the West, whether they're cowboys or loggers or miners or farmers, have always been more than ready to sell themselves to the corporate bidder with the most money and then to blame somebody else when the corporation cuts and runs.

Let's face it, the loggers of the Pacific Northwest have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the Let's face it, the loggers of the Pacific Northwest have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the corporations, and in their natural frustration and rage at having seen their lifestyle and communities destroyed, are lashing out at the handiest scapegoat, be it conservationist or Spotted Owl. If they would quit beating us up and quit killing Spotted Owls, maybe they would realize that conservationists who are working to create a sustainable economy in the Pacific Northwest are their best friends.

DJ: Do you see any way either to reform or get rid of the idea of corporations?

DF: The whole notion of corporations has to be radically redefined. Big corporations must have a deeper community interest, something beyond making a profit for their stockholders.

I get pissed off at the so-called conservatives today who prattle on about property rights -- rights this and rights that -- without any sense of responsibility. With rights come responsibilities and accountability. The only time they want to talk about responsibility is when Dan Quayle goes after some poor, uneducated, trodden-down teenage mother in a Saint Louis slum. I want to talk about the responsibility of Armand Hammer for murdering people at Love Canal, I want to talk about the responsibility of Harry Merle and other timber company barons for destroying communities and the land base on the Pacific Coast.

Our priorities are insane. When I went to Washington, D.C., fifteen years ago to be a lobbyist for The Wilderness Society, a senator took me aside. He told me to put my heart in a safe-deposit box and replace my brain with a pocket calculator. He told me to quote only economists and engineers and said if I was ever emotional I would lose my credibility.

But damn it, I am emotional. I'm an animal, and I'm proud of it, Descartes was wrong when he said, "I think, therefore I am." Our consciousness, our being, is not all up here in the skullbox. It's our whole body we think with, and it goes beyond that. David Brower tells us that you can't take a California Condor out of the wild and put it in the L.A. zoo and still have a Condor, because the being of the Condor does not end at those black feathers at the tips of its wings. It's the rising thermals over the Coast Range. It's the rocky crag where she lays her egg. It's the carrion she feeds on. The Condor is place, and as we were talking about earlier, we are place, too.

DJ: What will it take for us to survive?

DF: Courage. In my speeches I talk about what Aldo Leopold called green fire. When Aldo Leopold was young he used to shoot any Wolf he saw, and years later, in A Sand County Almanac, he wrote how the death of one of those Wolves changed his life. He said, "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes -- something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."

We need that green fire in our eyes. Somehow we've got to remember how to think like a mountain, and somehow we have to speak for Wolf.

Each of us is an animal, and a child of this earth. Each of us has responsibility to all other animals and plants and to the process of evolution that created us. All of us alive now are members of the most important generation of human beings who have ever lived, because we're determining the future, not just for a hundred years, but for a billion years. When we cut a huge limb off the tree of natural diversity, we're forever halting the evolutionary potential of that branch of life. That's what if fundamentally comes down to.

Nobody has ever lived who is more important.

A reporter once asked me what I thought my nephew's and niece's children would think of me. Would they consider their great-uncle an ecoterrorist, a radical, a lunatic conservationist? I said, "No. They're going to ask, 'Why the hell didn't you fight harder? Why weren't you more radical? Why weren't you more militant? Why didn't you save more forests?' "

That's what I ask, too. Goddamnit, where are the 70 million Bison, where are the Passenger Pigeons, where are the Carolina Parakeets? Where's the Sea Mink, the Labrador Duck, the Heath Hen? Where's the tallgrass prairie?

The conservation movement has failed to challenge people with an ethical mandate. We seem to have gotten the notion we have to make it palatable for people, make it easy for them. "Oh, you can have your cars and your freeways, and we can protect nice scenic national parks too.

A new vision must be articulated. Martin Luther King saying "I have a dream" energized the country. People responded to that dream. But since that dream was institutionalized, sort of, in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the dream has never been explicitly stated again. That's really sad, and that's why even though the civil rights movement has had great successes, there have been great failures.

By the same token, I think conservationists had a wonderful dream with the Wilderness Act, but then we fell into the comfortable reaction.

DJ: The Wildlands Project then essentially the articulation of a new dream?

DF: Absolutely. A totally audacious dream.

My Very Best To You V,

~ VF ~

A short documentary, made in Germany, on GMO foods, which concerns approximately 65% of daily food intake in America.

Genetic Conspiracy

Eric,

That was fantastic!!! It's rare that you get a combination of goose bumps while laughing with tears in your eyes. Ken Robinson did just that when he talked of Gillian Lynne in the 1930's, and the empathic doctor who set her life on the creative path that would have been missed if ...

I enjoyed it so much and could well have missed it if I hadn't clicked your small link, and that would have been a terrible crime. So, I've done a little googling about and ...

[quote=]

Transcript

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the

whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.

There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which

are relevant to what I want to talk about.

One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that

We’ve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.

The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to

happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in

education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you

say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you

work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's

strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What

do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their

face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But

if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of

those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and

other things.

I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested

interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that

we can't grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has

a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the

world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really

extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean,

Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's

exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood.

What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.

And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty

ruthlessly.

So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is

that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with

the same status. [applause] Thank you.

That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was

born ...

I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing

www.SchoolsKillCreativity.com

lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little

girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was

fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the

girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows

what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."

When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if

we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the

nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel

Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of

Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts.

We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!"

He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They

come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really

happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we

talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah,

why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three

boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these

boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring

you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know,

they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What

we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything

original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults,

most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're

now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can

make.

And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to

remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into

creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford

to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we

lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where

Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't

think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of

Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I

mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How

annoying would that be? "Must try harder."

Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to

William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's

confusing everybody."

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word

about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21

now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he

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3

had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a

month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when

you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find

another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she

was the main reason we were leaving the country.

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around

the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects.

Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't.

At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are

the arts. Everywhere on earth.

And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and

music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There

isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the

way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I

think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're

allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?

Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them

progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to

one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I

think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this,

who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the

winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education

throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people

who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university

professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all

human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather

curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them,

not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to

one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for

their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along

to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the

final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably,

off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's

a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public

systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet

the needs of industrialism.

So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects

for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at

school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never

get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician;

don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly

mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of

intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think

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of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process

of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant,

creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school

wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that

way.

In the next 30 years. according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating

through education than since the beginning of history. [12:27] More people, and it's

the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its

transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in

population.

Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you

had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one.

And I didn't want one, frankly.

But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games,

because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a

PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole

structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our

view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world

in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think

kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly,

intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard

yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The

brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process

of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through

the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally

-- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the

corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I

think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't

you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know,

she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's

dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling,

she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids

are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please,

I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical

thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old

chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a

forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")

And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the

moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about

how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's

really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most

people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some

have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and

Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet,

in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian,

how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at

school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and

www.SchoolsKillCreativity.com

5

said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was

fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the

1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition.

People weren't aware they could have that.

Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there

with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her

hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems

Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing

people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the

doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things

that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here,

we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.

But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk,

and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her."

And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the

music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said,

"Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

I said, "What happened?"

She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and

it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to

think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did

modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet

School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she

eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company,

the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.

She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions

in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.

Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other

night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe

our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in

which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our

education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a

particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to

disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human

beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."

And he's right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now

that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked

about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the

richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is

to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not

see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank

you very much.

~ VF ~

Tragedy & Hope ~ by Carroll Quigley

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

Carroll Quigley (November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977) was a noted historian, polymath, and theorist of the evolution of civilizations.

In 1966, Quigley published a one-volume history of the twentieth century entitled Tragedy and Hope. At several points in this book, the history of the Milner group is discussed. Moreover, Quigley states that he has recently been in direct contact with this organization, whose nature he contrasts to certain right-wing conspiracy theories:

This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements.... This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

According to Quigley, the leaders of this group were Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner from 1891 until Rhodes’ death in 1902, Milner alone until his own death in 1925, Lionel Curtis from 1925 to 1955, Robert H. (Baron) Brand from 1955 to 1963, and Adam D. Marris from 1963 until the time Quigley wrote his book. This organization also functioned through certain loosely affiliated “front groups”, including the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. After 1963 the organization’s activities were “greatly reduced.”

In addition, other secret societies are briefly discussed in Tragedy and Hope, including a consortium of the leaders of the central banks of several countries, who formed the Bank for International Settlements with the intent to “create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”

~ VF ~

The Evolution Of Civilizations ~ by Carroll Quigley

[quote=]

A review by Elmer Louis Kayser in Courier, October 1961

A work of the importance of The Evolution of Civilizations deserves much more than the hurried first reading that a deadline has imposed. Reading Professor Quigley's volume is a pleasant, but rather exacting exercise. He demonstrates Toynbeean erudition and non-Tonybeean brevity.

It is fortunate that a brief review is expected, for a truly critical review would have to be longer than the book itself. A vast time span, a tremendous area, and an amazing diversity of fields are involved. A high degree of selectivity must be exercised in determining what material is to be presented. The sector is small within which anyone could claim the competence of a specialist. The work of others must be used and judgments made. A detailed criticism under these circumstances becomes a race between author and critic to see who has read the latest monograph or special study and made the soundest evaluation of it. Toynbee, in reconsidering the first ten volumes of The Study of History in the recent twelfth volume, found that there had been new writing while he was publishing which made it desirable that he make changes. The blurb (author unknown) on the jacket of the latest Toynbee volume goes so far as to assert that, during the publication of the First Decade of Toynbee, new discoveries in some fields "have changed the picture almost out of recognition."

The present reviewer accepts the historical data which Professor Quigley uses as what a competent scholar selected at the time of writing as valid supports for the ideas that he presents. The reviewer makes no attempt to examine these individually and critically. His interest is in what the author was trying to do, in the patterns of thinking that he sets up.

The author is thinking of aggregates of human beings as they constitute themselves in social groups and various types of society: parasitic societies, producing societies, and civilizations, depending upon whether the members have the major portion of their relationships outside the group or within it. He finds "two dozen civilizations," living and dead, within the last ten millenia and suggests various groupings. Before discussing historical change, he considers methods of analyzing the evolution of a society, the resultant of development and morphology. Civilizations pass through "seven stages": mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay, and invasion, which he offers as a convenient way of breaking into segments an intricate historical process.

A very interesting chapter devoted to the physical setting of the earliest civilizations is followed by a detailed discussion of Mesopotamia, Canaanite and Minoan, Classical and Western Civilizations. These discussions of the civilizations which relate directly to the stream of Western Civilization through historic time occupy the major portion of the study. In a final word of conclusion, Professor Quigley states his belief that six points have emerged from his study. The first three, he points out, merely underscore well-recognized and long accepted points of view. The last three, he feels, represent a real contribution. They are: 1) the "seven stages" (which proves, as Toynbee's [stages do] not, a basis for an analysis of the whole course of the evolution of a civilization, including the earliest phases), 2) an improved nomenclature and 3) techniques for dealing with historical problems.

Professor Quigley's indebtedness to his predecessors is obvious and acknowledged. While he lacks the Wagnerian tone of Spengler and the severely classical attitudes of Toynbee, he does have the more direct approach of the social scientist. His heavy emphasis on scientific method in the first chapter, even though he concludes by pointing out the difference between the natural and social sciences in the subjective factor, leads us to expect a much more rigorous method than the one applied. In the case, we notice such statements as "To be sure there are difficulties, but in some cases, at least these can be explained away." You wonder again at the grading system applied to Western society in the chart on page 81. The reviewer is not sure just how it is determined when a civilization reaches "its peak of achievement" and how this is related to the seven stages of development.

All of these are matters of detail. The important fact is that the author has distilled from a vast store of historical knowledge a highly suggestive approach for the systematic study of major historical movements. The real review will probably have to wait until that traveler from New Zealand in the midst of a vast solitude, standing on a broken arch of London Bridge, has finished his sketch of the ruins of St. Paul's.

~ VF ~

Deggleton,

Thankyou so much for posting this wonderful book!

I've read the online version and have so much praise for author Viktor Frankl, I've already ordered a copy. Finding people have posted books of such caliber makes compiling this thread a real pleasure ...

Man's Search For Meaning ~ by Victor Frankl

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

Viktor Frankl's 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, the book intends to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" Part One constitutes Frankl's analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory of logotherapy.

According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in [the United States]." (New York Times, November 20, 1991). At the time of the author's death in 1997, the book had sold 10 million copies in twenty-four languages.

Experience's In Concentration Camps

Frankl identifies three psychological reactions experienced by all inmates to one degree or another: (1) shock during the initial admission phase to the camp, (2) apathy after becoming accustomed to camp existence, in which the inmate values only that which helps himself and his friends survive, and (3) reactions of depersonalization, moral deformity, bitterness, and disillusionment if he survives and is liberated.

Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. In a group therapy session during a mass fast inflicted on the camp's inmates trying to protect an anonymous fellow inmate from fatal retribution by authorities, Frankl offered the thought that for everyone in a dire condition there is someone looking down, a friend, family member, or even God, who would expect not to be disappointed. Frankl concludes from his experience that a prisoner's psychological reactions are not solely the result of the conditions of his life, but also from the freedom of choice he always has even in severe suffering. The inner hold a prisoner has on his spiritual self relies on having a faith in the future, and that once a prisoner loses that faith, he is doomed.

An example of Frankl's idea of finding meaning in the midst of extreme suffering is found in his account of an experience he had while working in the harsh conditions of the Auschwitz concentration camp:

... We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way  – an honorable way  – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." ^[1]

Frankl also concludes that there are only two races of men, decent men and indecent. No society is free of either of them, and thus there were "decent" Nazi guards and "indecent" prisoners, most notably the kapo who would torture and abuse their fellow prisoners for personal gain.

His concluding passage in Part One describes the psychological reaction of the inmates to their liberation, which he separates into three stages. The first is depersonalization—a period of readjustment, in which a prisoner gradually returns to the world. Initially, the liberated prisoners are so numb that they are unable to understand what freedom means, or to emotionally respond to it. Part of them believes that it is an illusion or a dream that will be taken away from them. In their first foray outside their former prison, the prisoners realized that they could not comprehend pleasure. Flowers and the reality of the freedom they had dreamed about for years were all surreal, unable to be grasped in their depersonalization.

The body is the first element to break out of this stage, responding by voracious eating and sleeping. Only after the partial replenishing of the body is the mind finally able to respond, as “feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it” (111).

This begins the second stage, in which there is a danger of deformation. As the intense pressure on the mind is released, mental health can be endangered. Frankl uses the analogy of a diver suddenly released from his pressure chamber. He recounts the story of a decent friend who became immediately obsessed with dispensing the same violence in judgment of his abusers that they had inflicted on him.

Upon returning home, the prisoners had to struggle with two fundamental experiences which could also damage their mental health: bitterness and disillusionment. The last stage is bitterness at the lack of responsiveness of the world outside—a “superficiality and lack of feeling...so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more” (113). Worse was disillusionment, which was the discovery that suffering does not end, that the longed-for happiness will not come. This was the experience of those who – like Frankl – returned home to discover that no one awaited them. The hope that had sustained them throughout their time in the concentration camp was now gone. Frankl cites this experience as the most difficult to overcome.

As time passed, however, the prisoner's experience in a concentration camp finally became nothing but a remembered nightmare. What is more, he knows that he has nothing left to fear any more, "except his God" (115).

Frankl's meaning in life is to help others find theirs.

Interview With Dr. Viktor Frankl

Part 2 ~ Part 3

~ VF ~

VF

I really have a problem with the anthropogenic global warming stuff... I lived in the 70's when they were declaring that the earth was gonna turn into an ice ball.... guess what...? It didn't happen. Then several years later the same people were saying the earth is warming. From all my research I have done I'm convinced we are back in a cooling trend and that the climate is changing, but it is always changing. It is cyclical. What I do think is true is the collapse of our complex society. I don't think we'll need global warming for that to happen.

Hi Eric,

I'm very pleased you've enjoyed Ken Robinson and also that this thread is gaining decent traffic, with the counter on the bottom right of the first post here showing over 6000 hits since I started posting 'read online' books. However, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that you 'can' post films from You Tube and Google quite easily, without being a payed member. Here's how to do it: -

Find this symbol on your keyboard ...

[

Then write the word video immediately after that, followed by ...

:

So that would be

 [ video : 

Now you need to go to You Tube or Google, find a film you desire and copy and paste the url from the top of its page ... like this : -

Go to the right hand end of url, and back space once so that it stops glowing blue and becomes flat black writing. This is important as the whole operation won't work unless you do this ...

Finally, put this symbol onto the end of all of that: -

]

Now, the program I'm writing to you with will recognise all of those icons symbols and the url and make them into a film, so I've had to seperate them up so as to explain to you. Basically, it will be, and without any gaps : -

With the end result being :-

To give yourself some practice, use the preview comment button below left and next to post comment so you can get it right and it comes easy to you before you post ...

One thing to note. I couldn't figure out how to copy the actual TED video from TED itself, so I found a copy of it on You Tube that I knew that I could ...

I hope this has been a help to you and to others at CM.com ...

My Best,

~ VF ~

I never heard of it.  Sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation Greg.

P.S.  Thanks for posting that recent Gerald Celente video as well.  That video was effective in grabbing the attention of several friends.

The Sorrows of Empire ~ by Chalmers A Johnson

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

Chalmers Ashby Johnson is an American author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Koreanwar, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967–1973, and led the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years.  He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

The Blowback Trilogy

Johnson sees that the enforcement of American hegemony over the world constitutes a new form of global empire. Whereas traditional empires maintained control over subject peoples via colonies, since World War II the US has developed a vast system of hundreds of military bases around the world where it has strategic interests. A long-time Cold War, he applauded the collapse of the Soviet Union: I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so^. But at the same time he experienced a political awakening after the USSR 1989 collapse, noting that instead of demobilizing its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political. The result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is more terrorism against the US and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home, and an eventual disaster for the American economy. The books of the trilogy are:

• Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
• The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
• Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

~ VF ~

Games People Play ~ by Eric Berne

[quote=]

Wikipedia Review

Games People Play (subtitle: The Psychology of Human Relationships) is a famous 1964 book by psychiatrist Eric Berne. Since its publication it has sold more than five million copies. The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

In the first half of the book, Berne introduces transactional analysis as a way of interpreting social interactions. He describes three roles or ego-states, the Child, the Parent, and the Adult, and postulates that many negative behaviors can be traced to switching or confusion of these ego-states. He discusses procedures, rituals, and pastimes in social behavior, in light of this method of analysis. For example, a boss who talks to his staff as a controlling parent will often engender self-abased obedience, tantrums, or other childlike responses from his employees.

The second half of the book catalogues a series of mind games, in which people interact through a patterned and predictable series of "transactions" which are superficially plausible (that is, they may appear normal to bystanders or even to the people involved), but which actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved, and lead to a well-defined predictable outcome, usually counterproductive. The book uses “Boy, has he got your number” and other casual phrases as a way of briefly describing each game. Often, the "winner" of a mind game is the person that returns to the Adult ego-state first.

Not all interactions or transactions are part of a game. Specifically, if both parties in a one-on-one conversation remain in an Adult ego-state, it is unlikely that a game is being played.

~ VF ~