'Out of touch'

He said trials in countries such as Portugal showed decriminalisation of some drugs could prove "useful and efficient".

"As a drug addict, the legal status (of a drug) is an irrelevance," he told MPs. "At best it is an inconvenience."

He added: "There is a degree of cowardice and wilful ignorance about this condition. There needs to be honesty and authenticity on this issue so Parliament does not look out of touch."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17823272

New Leaf Cospace 2012 Benefit Dinner Album New photos by Chantal Plank

Greenmore Gardens honcho - sat at my table, and mentioned growing the greens for the salad. One of the speakers as well.

New Leaf honchos Spud and Eric.

EcoVent honcho Erin

The three main New Leaf guys, Spud, Eric, Christian.

The telesmatic house model. A symbol of community ownership of the project.

Oh LUCKY LUCKY Pennsylvania!

We get to have a bunch of rich out-of-state mutherfrackers buy ads on the local stations and tell us what to think and who to vote for - surprise surprise, it's vote for the RICH GUYS!

Let the rich out-of-state guys with their secret money superpacs and their advertisements tell us what to do - yeah, thats the ticket, i'll jump right on that.

Karl Rove, Koch Brothers, Australian Billionaire Rupert Murdoch and creepy Roger Ailes - you think you can buy this election, and who knows, maybe you can.

Funny thing - I personally do not like Obama. I know, I'm not supposed to say that, but I don't care for him. I knew we were in for a corporate presidency when he selected Tim Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury. Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse!

But when I see these secretive Rovian and Koch-Murdochian attack ads with all their dirty Citizens United money, well, I'm tempted to vote for Obama just to say, "Frak you Karl Rove". 

I just be grabbing the links from a flickr feed... photog got it set to no perms, so, you gotta click to see. Maybe later I got some photos I can embed. (Note photog gave me permission to paste from her facebook, so pasted pics added.

I was there, nice piece of work. I liked the space, got to remember it, be great for fancy events - especially if I can get some design-minded folk like teh new leaf crew to decorate, they did it up proper - General Potter Farm.

Photos by Sarah Hanson 

Here's the link to the flickr set, click this for an easy way to view them all:

New Leaf Dinner Photos - Flickr by Sarah Hanson

And here's a few sample photos...

I'm constantly interested in rhetoric, the language of persuasion. This pdf had a lot of good but demanding points about how to get people espousing factually untrue climate denial myths to become able to actually look at the science.

Hint - it aint easy.

"Once people receive misinformation, it’s quite difficult to remove its influence. This was demonstrated in a 1994 experiment where people were exposed to misinformation about a fictitious warehouse fire, then given a correction clarifying the parts of the story that were incorrect.3 Despite remembering and accepting the correction, people still showed a lingering effect, referring to the misinformation when answering questions about the story.

Is it possible to completely eliminate the influence of misinformation? The evidence indicates that no matter how vigorously and repeatedly we correct the misinformation, for example by repeating the correction over and over again, the influence remains detectable.4 The old saying got it right - mud sticks.

There is also an added complication. Not only is misinformation difficult to remove, debunking a myth can actually strengthen it in people’s minds. Several different “backfire effects” have been observed, arising from making myths more familiar, from providing too many arguments, or from providing evidence that threatens one’s worldview. 

The last thing you want to do when debunking misinformation is blunder in and make matters worse. So this handbook has a specific focus - providing practical tips to effectively debunk misinformation and avoid the various backfire effects. "

Really, this award could not have gone to a more deserving wanker.

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/one-true-wanker-of-decade.html

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.

When I was younger, and an even more radical (and hopeless lol) activist type, I was really into ideas of intentional community projects. One of the things I was involved with was a series of houses here in State College, houses that were rented and filled with activist/artist/philosopher types, which were meant to be incubators of activism and art and action and the like.

For what they were, they worked okay. They never lasted all that long, but some interesting stuff happened.

I gather this is basically the idea behind The Co Space,
which is the New Leaf Initiative's new project.

Basically, houses in which students interested in sustainability live with mentors with experience in sustainability. Sustainability-living student housing. Shared houses. Incubators for sustainability action and art and entreprenuership.

Sounds cool.

Here's The Co Space Welcome pdf - it's too big, but pretty. (I am forcing it to load in an iframe below, it will load in the background, so when you do click the link above it will appear nicely fast. Well, faster than it otherwise would, lol.)

The New Leaf's Co Space website is one of those designs that makes a web guy like me cringe - all pretty, almost no function, no links out, all flash and css so effectively invisible to search spiders. A graphic students wet dream, a web businesses bad dream. Oh well. Enjoy the pretty, because it is pretty.

What do you know - a doctor who isn't afraid. Why are the doctors being so meek and silent? Do you know? What is going on in the minds of our healers?

Where Is The Physician Outrage?

... it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.

Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.

1) Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.

I've written before about Umair Haque - one of teh modern independent progressive thinkers, brilliant guy I think. he's got a new piece...

Worth a read, if you are independent progressive, or interested in leadership.

The Builders' Manifesto

Here's the problem in a nutshell. What leaders "lead" are yesterday's organizations. But yesterday's organizations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself — are broken. Today's biggest human challenge isn't leading broken organizations slightly better. It's building better organizations in the first place. It isn't about leadership: it's about "buildership", or what I often refer to as Constructivism.

Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions. Like artistic Constructivism rejected "art for art's sake," so economic Constructivism rejects leadership for the organization's sake — instead of for society's.

Builders forge better building blocks to construct economies, polities, and societies. They're the true prime movers, the fundamental causes of prosperity. They build the institutions that create new kinds of leaders — as well as managers, workers, and customers.

Who's a Builder — and who's just a leader? Here are some Builders contrasted with mere leaders:

Well, it's a nice show if you like that kind of thing - you cant miss it really, in the southwest to west, from sundown to about 10 or later. Venus is a little higher in the sky, to the westward, and blazing bright - so bright it makes jupiter, also bright, seem  much duller by comparison, altho they still both blaze out as planets, much brighter than any nearby stars, shining thru haze and almost certainly thru town lights.

Oh - and check this - at the same time, Mars is in the east to southeast, high up in the sky, a clearly reddish point of light brighter than any nearer stars. So the three planets closest to us, are all visible in the night sky at the same time.

That's not something you can see every night. Take a minute, go outside, look up - it's cool.

I love Haidt, and his model of moral universes and the moral differences between the liberal brain and the conservative brain - if there is going to be a path that does not lead to the equivalent of civil war, I suspect it will be Haidt's models which will show us the way...

-----------------------------------------------------------

from the transcript...

BILL MOYERS: Let me get some clarity on one of your basic foundations here. Your research in the book, you and your associates, organizes morality into six moral foundations or concerns. Sketch them briefly and tell me how liberals and conservatives differ on each of them.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So, if you imagine each of our righteous minds as being, like an audio equalizer with six slider switches, and the first one is care, compassion, those sorts of issues, liberals have it turned up to 11. And we have this on a lot of different surveys. Liberals really feel. When they see an animal being mistreated, they're more likely to feel something than conservatives, and especially than libertarians, who are very, very low on this one.

JONATHAN HAIDT: The next two, liberty and fairness, when liberty and fairness conflict with care, are you going to punish someone, or are you going to be compassionate? Liberals are more likely to go with care.

Chances are you won't watch this video, which is too bad, because it may be one of the most important media commentaries that you will read this year.

"Who wants to hear the truth - when (instead) they can hear that they are right?".

Or...

PIZZA TASTES BETTER THAN BROCCOLI!

http://informationdiet.com Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, and director of engagement for Expert Labs. He was the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama's online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O'Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week's Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011.

Johnson's combination of experience as a developer, working in politics, entrepreneurism, and non-profit work gives him a unique perspective on media and culture. His life is dedicated to giving people greater access to the truth about what's going on in their communities, their cities and their governments. He still claims that he learned all he needs to know from a two year tour as the late-shift waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, GA.

This was a talk given at the TOC - Tools of Change for Publishing

Here's a keyword for you:

Charles Dumas For Congresss 5th District Pennsylvania

Report from the team:

"Yes we filed today. She stopped counting at 26 petitions with 1039 signatures and there were 88 petitions total. Do not have total signature tally but we think around 1700 from seven counties in PA 5th District."

A darn good article with useful advice for people just entering what we euphimistically call the "workplace".

Click the link and read the article - it's worth it. Especially the bit about the boot in the face, at the end.

When people ask you about them, tell the truth. Practice saying "They're useless and horrible." Practice saying "They're soulless careerists who don't care about anything or believe in anything and they're just using us all to get ahead at any cost." Practice telling the truth. They can't stand the exposure in the light of day. They can't keep stepping on people if their previous steppings-on are known. You'll all be happier in the long run.

Some Advice for Young People

From time to time I am asked by young people for advice in matters of work and life, generally by people who have mistaken my age for seniority. I don't really have any advice, though, is the problem, beyond some basics and also "don't do what I did," but usually it goes like:

1. Why don't you think about that over the weekend and if you still feel that way on Monday, you can totally send that email, okay?

2. Yes, you should not worry too much about the consequences and you should definitely quit your job that you hate and it'll probably all work out great. Job quitters are the happiest people around.

3. Pretty much the rest boils down to which moles people should get looked at and why Maalox is the best and how quarterly taxes are a necessary evil.