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Monday, April 29, 2013

The Social Brain

The following is an excellent, informative piece on Autism and Asperger's from All in the Mind, RN’s weekly exploration of all things mental. The second part is supposed to be in week.

The Social Brain

Sunday 28 April 2013 5:00PM
For most people the ability to interact and communicate with each other seems almost second naturebut for those with a condition on the autism spectrum social skills can be difficult to grasp and challenging. We hear from the pioneering autism researcher from the UK Uta Frith and neuroscientist Chris Frith about what autism and Asperger's Syndrome can teach us about our Social Brain. 


Transcript

Thomas Kuzma:  Hi, my name is Thomas Kuzma. I am 22 and I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I also like long walks on the beach.

Lynne Malcolm:  And I’m Lynne Malcolm with All in the Mind. Today, the intricacies of the social brain and what autism can teach us about how we interact and communicate with each other.
Benison O’Reilly remembers only too well when her son was diagnosed with autism.

Benison O’Reilly: When he was about two I took him to swimming lessons and I think that’s when I realised that not only did he not speak very much, but he really didn’t understand what the instructor was saying. He’d started saying a few words but when I took him back at three, the paediatrician changed his diagnosis to autism. Still that day is sort of seared in my memory. I sort of walked out of that room, and it, it’s just like a car crash, the thing that’s hit you, and I was quite depressed there for a couple of months and cried a lot and didn’t do an awful lot, I have to say.

He always had some connection with you. He was not aloof, in the sense that he was quite a cuddly boy. And he did look you in the eye. It’s more about the appropriateness of the eye contact; it’s about sharing experiences with you rather than just looking at you. So a typical childhood, they’d show you a toy and make sure you were looking at them and things like that.

And he didn’t really play with other children. He’d play near them but not with them. And imaginative play obviously is a huge social thing when you’re flying planes, or when you’re imagining you’re a plane, or pushing a train around, you know, he would line the trains up rather than actually push them round a track.
So he still doesn’t have a friend in a typical sense; like, he has people he calls his friends and he hangs around with them at school a little bit, but they don’t come round to our place to play and all that sort of thing.

Lynne Malcolm:  Benison O’Reilly is co-author with Kathryn Wicks of The Australian Autism Handbook.  Autism is a condition which affects neural development and its symptoms and severity vary widely. It has a strong genetic basis, but more precise detail about its causes has remained a mystery since pioneering researcher Uta Frith became interested in it in the early 1960s.

Uta Frith: In those days, people knew that there were different types of mental disability, learning disability, but amongst those were also those autistic people. And people began to see them, when first they seemed to be quite invisible.

Lynne Malcolm: Uta Frith is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London and visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of autism led her to be given the title of Dame in the British honours system last year. While working at the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital in London, she first recognised that autism is a condition of the brain rather than the result of so-called cold parenting.

Utah Frith: And that seemed to me such an interesting subject to go into and I was very fortunate that some really pioneering psychologists, Beate Hermelin and Neil O'Connor, were at the Institute of Psychiatry at that time and were the first people, I think, in the world to apply proper experimental psychology methods to say something about the nature of the difficulties that these children had.

Lynne Malcolm: Thomas Kuzma, now in his twenties, first became aware he had Asperger’s Syndrome when he was in Year 10 at high school.

Thomas Kuzma: I was in the middle of being heavily bullied in my dark years, you could say.

Lynne Malcolm:  You call them your ‘dark years’, why do you call them your dark years?

Thomas Kuzma: Because those were the years where I felt most alone.

Lynne Malcolm:  How were the kids teasing you, what were they saying to you?

Thomas Kuzma: I’ve always been the smiley happy guy, jolly and all, and the cool kids, they saw that and they realised that I was at the time gullible, because I always felt whenever someone was talking to me they were not, I could say, serious. They played on the fact that I thought whatever I thought they were saying was the, you know, the bees knees or whatever. Because I didn’t understand things like sarcasm, they managed to wield that in a way where they got me to do some somewhat humiliating things.
The problem was I didn’t even understand why they were making fun of me. You know, I just wanted friends, that’s all, and I was being turned into a scapegoat and into a plaything you could say.

Lynne Malcolm:  Autism was first described more than 60 years ago by Dr Leo Kanner and at the same time Dr Hans Asperger described what was viewed as a milder form, known as Asperger's Syndrome.
In the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM V, which is about to be published in May, Asperger’s Syndrome won’t have a separate category but will be considered as part of the Spectrum of Autism Disorders. This is a controversial change, which we’ll discuss further next week. But in the 1960s when Uta Frith first became interested in Asperger’s, the thinking was very different.

Uta Firth:  What actually drove the interest in my case in Asperger’s Syndrome was the recognition that perhaps the very narrow clinical picture that was described by Kanner in the first place, the kind of children that we started out studying, yes, they were there, but there were other children too at the margins that seemed to be just not quite conforming to this initial very, very narrow kind of category. So we saw children who actually were socially very, very inept, in this way that they couldn’t understand mental states and so on, but their language was good, their intelligence was very high, and in many ways people thought there might not be so much wrong with them. And with other people of course that’s not the case; they also suffer and they also need to learn a lot about how to negotiate this complicated social life.

Now, it’s really pushing apart the boundaries that drove my interest in Asperger’s Syndrome. And it was really a time where people realised that we couldn’t just forget about all these other cases, these other children and particularly adults who hadn’t even been diagnosed when they were children but who had these real problems in social interaction, which you just have to say they are just very typically autistic.

And that was how I think the concept got much more popularised. Many people really loved the idea that they could have a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, because it seemed sort of more interesting, more hopeful, more respectful to use that label than to use the label ‘autism’. Autism had this kind of very bleak picture associated with it and Asperger’s Syndrome I think gave a somewhat different idea about what perhaps a grown-up person could be like who actually has very many skills even though they can’t function very well in a neurotypical society.

Lynne Malcolm:  The condition of autism various enormously.  Some people are very withdrawn; they don’t speak at all and have debilitating repetitive behaviour and hypersensitivity. Others can be highly articulate and gifted. So it’s very difficult to categorise, but Uta Frith and her husband Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London, are collaborating to try and capture the nature of the autistic mind, particularly the social aspects.

Uta Frith:  What we have concentrated on is this core problem of social interaction, reciprocal communication; that seems to be at the heart of the nature of autism. Even in these very extreme cases, we can see there is something in common in the way that they don’t quite integrate into the social world as we all do. This reciprocal interaction, that seems to be missing. It’s not whether they are uninterested and withdrawn, or in some sense aloof —no, that’s not the problem, because we find many who are not aloof—the problem is not understanding about social behaviour.

Now, we understand there’s an incredibly intuitive way. For us it’s completely obvious that we explain how somebody behaves in terms of their motivations; you know, their psychological attitudes, their beliefs. Now, that’s completely different from how we interpret the non-social world; you know, we can understand cause and effect in physical terms and we can interpret it in a completely different way. You know, the rock falls down and if something is in the way it will hit it—that’s a kind of cause and effect explanation.

Now, the interesting thing is this: the case of autism has shown us that these two worlds are really different. So there is always this understanding, really right from the beginning, that actually autistic children and adults could understand physical cause and effect perfectly well, but they couldn’t really cope with this social cause and effect stuff, which is different. It’s an innate kind of ability that we have this propensity to think of the social world in different terms, process it in a way that makes sense to us. So we would say, well, somebody has just seen an event, so obviously he knows about that event. If he hasn’t seen the event, then we might actually give him some false information; we can do all these things, we can lie, because we are constantly thinking of what’s going on in their mind. We’re not just taking into account what is actually the physical state of affairs.

Lynne Malcolm:  So, just to explain a little bit further about the nature of the social difficulties that children with autism have, I know you’ve done a number of experiments on this. For example, they may have difficulty with pretence, with lying; they don’t understand irony.

Uta Frith:  Well, one of the first clues that really stuck out when autistic children were studied was that unlike other really quite learning disabled children and very young ordinary children, they didn’t seem to understand make-believe play, pretend play. And then later on many parents said they can’t lie, they are so very honest, which of course is one of their really endearing qualities. And they don’t understand why people should lie.

So one of the experiments that I think really shows how different may be the understanding in the autistic mind is of a social situation where deception plays a role is an experiment I did long ago where we contrasted a situation we called ‘sabotage’ and a situation we called ‘deception’.

Now, sabotage is where you prevent somebody else from, say, getting into a box physically, because you lock the box. Absolutely cause and effect—the autistic children were totally able to do this. The contrast condition in this experiment we called ‘deception’. So there was no key, there was no lock to do this. They said ‘Wow, this is very difficult.’ You still don’t want the thief to get at that box, you can lie to the thief; you can say the box is locked, because of the thief can’t actually see that.

Now, very young children and also learning disabled children who are not autistic seem to immediately latch on to this and say to the thief the box is locked when it isn’t. Now, we found that autistic children had real, real problems with this and they really didn’t do that, although they were perfectly able to prevent the thief when they had a lock and key. So the sabotage was fine but the deception was not.

Lynne Malcolm:  And you use a theory to explain the way individuals with autism interact socially and that’s what’s known as ‘the theory of mind’.  Can you explain the theory of mind?

Uta Frith:  Well, the theory of mind is a nickname and it’s very misleading, actually, because you immediately think that must be sort of some highfaluting thing that you know is like a philosophy, like having a theory of mind. Actually what it means is that we have this ability to automatically and spontaneously attribute mental states to other people and predict what they will do as a result of that.

So we actually coined the word ‘mentalising’ for this. So we say we ‘mentalise’ when we automatically think that somebody is, for example, behaving according to their particular knowledge or their particular intentions. And that is the basis of the theory, that we think this kind of mechanism that is somehow an innate predisposition in the mind, in the brain, is not functioning well in autism.

Lynne Malcolm:  But then how do you explain the other superior abilities that many people with autism have? They can have extreme focus, they can be very creative, and show characteristics of real genius.

Uta Frith:  Absolutely. This is the real amazing thing about autism, that we do have these sharp contrasts and they really show us that yes, we can separate social processes in the mind and non-social processes in the mind. Otherwise we wouldn’t have got this idea. We would have thought there are sort of all-purpose general thinking processes and you apply them to the social world, you apply them to the physical world, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Autism teaches us that you can be very good in one and not at all good in the other. Actually I think Chris just wanted to say something that would probably just modify what I said myself.

Chris Frith: No, I think one possible explanation for the striking abilities of some autistic people is precisely that they are not stuck like the rest of us so much in the social world, so they can break out of the sorts of conformities that we have. And they are not so much influenced by what everybody else is doing and they can really do something different. And this is one aspect of creativity, of course.

Lynne Malcolm:  Chris and Uta Frith, both from University College London.

You’re with All in the Mind on RN, Radio Australia and online, I’m Lynne Malcolm.
Today we’re exploring autism and what it can tell us about our social brain. Chris Frith specialises in researching the biological basis of the brain using imaging technologies. So what actually happens in the brain of an autistic person?

Chris Frith:  Oh, that’s a very difficult question. It was because of the demonstration by Uta and others that autistic people seemed to have this particular circumscribed problem in social understanding and not in other kinds of understanding that we were beginning to think that maybe social understanding depends on special networks in the brain. And indeed over the last 20 years or so this has been confirmed. There is a relatively small number of brain regions that seem to be particularly active whenever we’re engaged in mentalising or social interactions, and we are beginning to understand to some extent what some of these regions are more precisely doing.

When we look at the autistic brain, I think what we tend to see is that these same areas are simply less active. It’s as if they are not able to, or choose not to use these kinds of computations, as I would call them, for dealing with the social world. But we’re very much at the beginning, so it would be very difficult for me to say, ‘This is what the autistic brain looks like,’ and it certainly can’t be used, for example, for diagnosis.

Lynne Malcolm: So caution has to be taken in terms of interpreting what you can see in brain scans into the actual experience of somebody.

Chris Frith:  Right, that is correct. I mean, another theory which again you can use brain imaging to look at to some extent is the idea that for most of us, social interactions are very rewarding, simply being with people is rewarding and looking at smiling faces is rewarding. I mean, that’s fairly well established now there are particular bits of the brain that are interested in reward, whatever form it takes—whether it’s money, or food, or people saying you’re a good chap. So you can then explore whether there’s something going wrong with this system in autistic people. Are they simply not interested in the social world and that’s why they don’t learn about it? And at the moment I would say the jury is out, but this is the sort of thing you can explore with these techniques.

Lynne Malcolm:  With Uta Frith’s pioneering work in autism research and Chris Frith’s expertise in the neural basis of the brain, they’re trying to get a better understanding of how we communicate and share representations of the world.

Uta Frith: Yes, we are embedded in the social world; for example, most of our learning is through other people. It’s not that we just go along and try things out and make our own mistakes; we actually observe what other people do, we copy them all the time. So there might be very special circuits in the brain that can also be part of the social brain that, you know, are sort of particularly watchful about what other people are doing—where they are looking, for example—and makes us copy them.

So that’s a very, very interesting aspect of our social nature and it’s also an aspect that makes us on the whole pro-social. We like to be where other people are, we like to do what other people do, we have quite a lot of pressure to conform.

Lynne Malcolm: So what are some other examples of the way we use interaction to communicate and to learn?

Chris Frith: Well, for example, when children are growing up they have to learn all sorts of things very rapidly. And, for example, they have to learn the words of their native language; I mean, a huge amount is being learned. But what is interesting is that this depends very much on an interaction. So, for example, they don’t simply observe adults talking about things; it’s mostly done because the adult actually points to a thing and names it.

And the child knows perfectly well when it’s being told that this is the name of an object and when this is purely an accident. So, for example, if the mother drops the saucepan on the floor and says ‘bother’ the child doesn’t learn to call saucepans ‘bother’, because they are very well aware of the nature of this interaction because it’s not directed at them. And, interestingly, there are at least anecdotes about autistic children not showing this effect so that they might forever afterwards call saucepans ‘bother’.
So that would be an example of the kind of interaction which is critical for our learning about the world. There is also something called ‘social referencing’, where when where a child is confronted with a new object they will typically look round at their mother and if she smiles they will approach it, and if she frowns they will not approach it. So again this is an example of an interaction being intimately concerned with how we learn about the world.

Lynne Malcolm: And there are some interactions and mechanisms that come naturally and spontaneously but there are other intentional mechanisms, aren’t there, that we learn?

Uta Frith: Well, for example, you could say that we have this tendency to form in-groups and out-groups and if you become aware of this, you can actually counteract it. So these are things that we learn until we can really manage all these tendencies given to us by millions of years of evolution which have to do with, you know, just survival in possibly small tribal groups that had to really fight to have enough resources, that kind of thing. Of course, things have changed now and we can actually think much more about these things and therefore also change them.

I think one interesting example also in our social interaction is empathy. And people often think that, ‘Oh, this must surely be part of mentalising,’ but we actually think it can be quite a separate brain mechanism and cognitive mechanism. So to feel empathy is really something where you turn off your self and you are completely feeling what another person feels. It’s like having some contagion. So if somebody cries, you know, you feel like crying. You may not actually go and break out in tears—you might if you are a young child—but you know you can inhibit that, but you are so influenced by this. That’s sort of like a really basic form of empathy.

And we think, for example, that in most autistic people we know, this is perfectly there; there are many examples of this kind of empathy. But then there are other forms of empathy which really have to do with mentalising and they have to do with saying ‘Oh, I must show a cheerful face when I actually know my friend is desperately sad, but if I’m sad too it will be worse for him.’ So these are forms of social interaction also governed by our brain but sort of in some sense by modifying other things that are there. So a lot of what the brain does is actually stopping and starting and enhancing and suppressing, perhaps, other kinds of mechanisms that just go into action automatically whether we like it or not.

Chris Frith:  One of the big impetuses for developing ideas about the social brain was the discovery of the so-called mirror neurons, which again were found about 20-odd years ago. And these are neurons originally shown in the monkey, where the same neuron is active when the monkey makes an action like picking up a peanut and also when the monkey sees the experimenter picking up a peanut. So in that sense they are mirroring what you do and what you see other people doing seems to activate the same region of the brain.
And this in a sense is interesting because it shows that the brain has solved the problem of how you make the connection between what you do and what you see other people doing, which is quite an interesting computational problem. And this seems to be the basis of the sort of empathy or contagion that Uta was talking about. So you see similar responses, at least in people, that when I am in pain the particular bit of my brain lights up and when I see my friend in pain the same bit of the brain lights up.

So you get all this mirroring. This is happening all the time when we interact with people, although we’re probably mostly unaware of it. So in that sense there we’re very embedded in the social world, we are constantly being influenced by the emotions and behaviour of the person we are interacting with. And this is probably extremely helpful for the interaction to take place and to understand each other, because we will understand each other better the more similar we become.

Lynne Malcolm:  So to what extent does Uta Frith believe that people with autistic conditions can learn to change the way they interact socially?

Uta Frith: They can learn enormously well. They are absolutely wonderful in the way they can also learn about mental states and what they mean. They can use them, but I believe they use them in a different way. So they can overcome many of the basic problems that perhaps they had when they were children. But it is, I think, in the end an effortful process for them. It is something that you should, you know, always say if an autistic person surprises you by their amazing insight, also by their use of mental states, that this may have come at a great cost to them.

So compensation is not cheap. It can be done, but you really also need all the resources you can possibly get. And they are not just from inside the person—you know, like this amazing intelligence that many of them have—but also from the outside: lots of support, lots of teaching, all of these things are incredibly important, but they can make a big difference.
(Music)
Autism I think gives us a unique insight into the human condition, into the mind. It’s always, I think, through some kind of unexpected behaviour that we suddenly become aware of the things that we otherwise completely take for granted, that seem completely automatic to us, we think nothing of. So autism has really made us much more aware of the complicated processes and computations that are necessary to function as social beings.

Chris Frith:  I think that’s a very interesting point, because indeed we never really thought about mentalising and social interactions. I mean, before people started talking about autism in the social brain, it was striking that studies of people with brain lesions looked at all sorts of abilities but virtually never looked at their ability to interact socially.

And it’s only, in a sense, since the discovery of autism that people have started to ask, well, in dementia are there particular problems in social interactions. On the other side of this, of course, as Uta was hinting at, is that we hadn’t really thought about how social interactions work. And people like me who are interested in computers and robots and so on are now wondering about can you actually write computer algorithms that would enable computers or robots to interact with people and to make inferences about their mental states. And people are beginning to try and do this,  but this is very early days and of course slightly worrying.

Lynne Malcolm: Emeritus Professors Chris and Uta Frith from University College London.

For more details on what you’ve heard today go to the All in the Mind website, where you’ll also find transcripts and audio of all the programs. While you’re there, leave a comment on the site or visit us on Facebook.

And do join me next week when you can hear more about the experience and treatment of people with an autism spectrum condition.

Today’s sound engineer is Steven Tilley. I’m Lynne Malcolm.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

The GNP of Neoliberalism - Inequality

Inequality is poison to democracies,  the most successful product of the neoliberal economic disaster that has been forced down own throats, by those who fund parties on the right and left, for the past thirty or more years.

However, I disagree with what is said here about capitalism beating socialism. It beat communism, in a perverse tyrannical oligarchical form, not socialism, which is ticking along just dandy in most Scandinavian countries while capitalism creates massive inequality, misery and is in an existential crises right now.

The fact that the NDP is abandoning it just shows that they are abandoning their ideals in pursuit for power, what I feared Mulcair would do. He's too much a back-room power broker. Without its socialist heart, the NDP are the Liberals, the party who seeks to uniote the sides from the centre. If the Liberals can return to this idea of unity from the centre, they have my vote back and the NDP cease to be relevant. The NDP should stand to the left and look to the centre, not try and chase the right right across centre line. To use my only sports metaphor, Mulcair is offside.

Th following is from the CBC's Sunday Edition.

Listen

Jerry Muller discusses economic inequality






Capitalism, while building prosperity, is also creating a widening economic gap. Photo: CP/Ryan Remiorz
Capitalism, while building prosperity, is also creating a widening economic gap. 
Photo: CP/Ryan Remiorz
In the battle between capitalism and socialism, we can safely say capitalism won. Even the membership of the federal NDP voted overwhelmingly to remove references to socialism from the party's constitution two weeks ago.

Not to mention the fact that the ostensibly communist redoubt of China has loosed the reins on a particularly energetic form of capitalism. 

But while few would argue anymore that capitalism is not the best way to build prosperity, the steadily worsening side effect of capitalism unbound is economic inequality. The gap between the rich and everyone else has gaped ever wider over the past three decades. 

The effect is perhaps most pronounced in the US, where capitalism is an article of faith of the republic.
 
The Pew Research Center in Washington reported last Tuesday that between 2009 and 2011, the top seven percent of Americans had their net worth increase by 28 percent. Meanwhile, the other 93 percent saw their wealth actually go down.

It's happening in Canada, too. Over the past 30 years, according to Conference Board of Canada, the top 10 percent of Canadians have enjoyed a 34 percent increase in average income, compared to a meagre 11 percent rise for the bottom 10 percent.

Economists like the Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz and global bodies like the World Bank warn of the dangers of inequality to social and economic stability.
 
The left responds to the widening chasm between the rich and the poor with outrage. Elements of the right respond with something more akin to a shrug. 

But Michael's guest, Jerry Muller suggests that neither the right nor the left really know how to respond effectively to inequality. 

Jerry Muller is a Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, and his books include The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought and  the author of the lead essay in the current issue of "Foreign Affairs", Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong.

Good News is Ignored - Scandinavian Solutions III -Prisoner Rehabilitation

There are reasons why the northernmost countries of the world tend toward socialism, it works. They are consistantly ranked as the best places to live, work, be eduacated, grow old, suffer setbacks, and even break the law. We don't hear about this because sucess doesn't make for high news ratings. Collapse and suffering is where the money is. So we hear nothing about Eurpose's economic disasters, products of raw, unrestrained capitalism, and nothing about the socialist successes. Those who benefit from the chaos don't what us knowing there are alternatives that work. People fear the gigh taxes in these countries but they get what they pay for and require less of their income personally. More of what they retain is disposable so the economy thrives. The society takes care of an encourages the individual and the the individual pays the society back gratefully.

As the Norwegians show, there are even better ways to run a legal system. Humane prisons focused on true rehabilitation produce productive humans instead of better trained and more damaged criminals.

For god's sake don't pay attention to what the north does! Your country might end up as a top place to live.

The following is from the Sunday Edition on CBC.

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Comfortable Norway prisons give inmates a new lease on life





While some people call the prisons in Norway
While some people call the prisons in Norway "cushy", they seem to be working.
A new breed of prisons in Norway is making some people shake their heads with bafflement - or outrage.

A wave of journalists from around the western world have descended on prisons like Bastoy, or Halden - Norway's new, $140 million prison - and filed incredulous stories about the well-appointed and cheerful lodgings of the criminals living there. 

Halden's interiors are sleek, stylish and beautifully designed. Cells are furnished with flat screen TVs, private toilets and clean, comfortable linens. 

Bastoy Prison looks like a tranquil, scenic, alpine island retreat ... for murderers, rapists and perpetrators of an assortment of violent and non-violent crimes. The guards are unarmed and there are no impregnable walls and fences. Instead, the inmates live together in neat cottages, prepare two meals a day for themselves and work for a modest paycheque.

Rather than simply feeling they're doing time, many of the prisoners seem to feel their incarceration has given them a new lease on life. 

In descriptions of Bastoy and Halden, phrases like "holiday resort," "luxury hotel" and "coddled criminals" inevitably come up, along with a certain mild astonishment that criminals would be treated by penal institutions, prison guards and each other as normal human beings.

Marianne_Vollan-200.jpg
Marianne Vollan
It does seem to run counter to the tough-on-crime rhetoric and policies that dominate in North America at the moment. But the Norwegian system does seem to work. Its rates of re-offending are the lowest in Europe and much lower than the rates in Canada and Europe.

Marianne Vollan, the Director General of Correctional Services of Norway, spoke with Michael about how and why Norway's penal system seems to be working.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Irony - America's Biggest Export

I find it highly ironic that America, perhaps the nation most responsible for overthrowing the Divine Right of Kings, has long used her power to keep kings, and other dictators, in place.

Can we say hypocritical?

Hey, Republicans, and Democrats, what do you think Jesus would say about that? He forgives all who0 seek it but had no kind word for those he found to be hypocrites. Less for pederasts, but that's another rant.

Which kings am I referring to? A good chunk of the Middle East - Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, and even Dubai. They have the oil. Kings control America's lifeblood. No wonder America sacrifices her young, and principles, so readily to keep them in place.Who runs America? Seems like some foreign kings to me. There is no representation on OPEC who determine the oil tax we all end up paying.

Why does America, especially those who claim the  word "republican" not only put up with but encourage such? Most are conservative to the point that they miss feudalism, of course picturing themselves as nobility. Each thinks that if there are kings, then it may be remotely possible for him to become one. Of course, people usually became kings through violence, they even built walls to keep invaders out. You have to be well armed or you're nothing but a serf and deserve it. It's the Divine Right in action. For there to be nobility, there must be slaves, serfs, peasants, untouchables, somewhere to do the work.

Not that similar lunacy doesn't pervade most western countries as well as many other parts of the world, including Canada. America is a special case though, so blatant and massive as to be the champion. Thanks to their media, the rest of the world is beat over the head with how good and just America is, while America is supporting kings with blood and technology. The juxtaposition is mind-blowing.

No one does irony better than America.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Desperate Profits

Why is poverty - the greatest source of crime, strife, illness, and chaos - still tolerated in the world, when we could eliminate it for far less than the cost of a single war.

Poverty is very profitable.

When our predecessors fought, risking poverty and health, for a living wage and reasonable working conditions, the profiteer went offshore. There was too little poverty here and too little easy profit. Too hard to exploit people with rights. The evil of the sweatshop was outsourced to people poor enough that they kill themselves at work (some literally) just to barely survive. No unions, enforced regulation, or rights. Those things get in the way of huge profit.

Poor people can't afford anything but cheap goods. Of course if you sell them a lot, your make profit.

Consumers are also to blame for the continuation of poverty. We are willing to put others though things we would never put up with ourselves so we can buy cheap junk, and each year's version of cheap junk. Walmart thrives. Apple thrives. The clothing industry thrives. Good for the economy. For the workers, not so much. We have their blood on our hands.

 We wouldn't want to pay what it takes to give the maker a living wage, despite that we demand such ourselves. If they got wages equal to the western standard, there would be less incentive for companies to go offshore. It would be down to quality not quantity. You pay more for a shirt, but it last years longer.

But that would be at the expense of our greed.

Aren't easy profit and cheap, disposable products worth a little poverty? Or better yet, a lot.

Of course, then the world weld be an even playing field.

Can't have that. Desperation feeds the beast.

If we don't help lift those in poverty up, they'll pull us all down.

But, that's good for the economy. The Market, in its infinite wisdom, will approve.


The following is from the CBC.

How can you tell if your shirt was made in a sweatshop?

Bangladeshi factory collapse renews questions about 'ethical fashion'

Posted: Apr 26, 2013 5:04 AM ET

Last Updated: Apr 26, 2013 4:04 PM ET

The collapse of a garment building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 24 has raised concern about the safety of those who produce clothing for western retailers such as Wal-mart, Sears and Canada's Joe Fresh.

The collapse of a garment building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 24 has raised concern about the safety of those who produce clothing for western retailers such as Wal-mart, Sears and Canada's Joe Fresh. (Andrew Biraj/Reuters)
 




The death of more than 300 people in a garment building collapse in Bangladesh has renewed concerns about the conditions of workers who make clothing for some of the biggest brands in the Western world, including Canada’s Joe Fresh.

But analysts say the supply chain of the modern garment industry makes it hard for consumers to determine whether the shirt or pair of pants they bought was the product of sweatshop labour.

“As a consumer, it’s really difficult to learn what were the conditions of the production of a specific garment,” says Adriana Villasenor, a senior advisor at the retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group.

In recent years, major brands such as Wal-Mart, the Gap and Canada’s Joe Fresh have outsourced the manufacture of clothing to cheap labour markets such as Bangladesh, where the national minimum wage stands at $38 US a month. According to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, Bangladesh has the lowest labour costs in the world.
'It would be very unfair to describe all of the manufacturers in Bangladesh as having the same bad conditions for workers. There are very good manufacturers there that fall into compliance.'—Adriana Villasenor, retail advisor
But there are concerns that in satisfying the demands for low prices from Western consumers, factory owners in Bangladesh are compromising the health and safety of workers.

More than 300 people died when the garment building collapsed in Savar, a suburb of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka. Officials said Thursday that police ordered the building evacuated on April 23 after discovering deep cracks in the structure.

Many factories in the building ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working on April 24, which is when the collapse occurred.

It is considered the deadliest incident for Bangladesh’s clothing industry, surpassing a fire in November that killed 112 people.

What consumers should look for

The issue for consumers who want to buy goods without exploiting foreign workers is that it's often very difficult to figure out where a piece of clothing came from and how it was made.

Buying a major brand or shopping at a well-known store chain, for example, is no guarantee that the item wasn't made under questionable working conditions.

Villasenor says large retailers such as Wal-mart or Sears either work with a distributor, which in turn finds manufacturers to produce an item, or else they deal with the manufacturer directly. Working with a distributor could mean less oversight of conditions on the factory floor.
 
A strikingly low price on an item of clothing might suggest that it’s the product of sweatshop labour, but it’s not a precise indicator, says Villasenor. She says there are “many, many conditions” that could lead a store to settle on a sale price.

“It really depends on the margins the retailer decided to put on that garment,” she says.
Consumers worried about sweatshop labour should inspect the name of the country printed on the label, says Cheryl Hotchkiss, senior manager of advocacy and public engagement at World Vision Canada.
If the name of a country such as Bangladesh appears on the label, “I think you have reason to be concerned,” says Hotchkiss.

But Villasenor points out that this, too, is an imperfect gauge. A label will only specify the country of origin, but not whether the product may have involved an unscrupulous factory owner or distributor.

“It would be very unfair to describe all of the manufacturers in Bangladesh as having the same bad conditions for workers,” Villasenor says. “There are very good manufacturers there that fall into compliance.”

Last night, Julija Hunter, a spokesperson for Joe Fresh's parent company, Loblaws, released a statement saying that it "has robust vendor standards designed to ensure that products are manufactured in a socially responsible way, ensuring a safe and sustainable work environment. We engage international auditing firms to inspect against these standards. We will not work with vendors who do not meet our standards."

Establishing international standards

Osmud Rahman, a professor at the Ryerson School of Fashion with an expertise in consumer behaviour, says that the average person doesn’t have enough information at hand about where, and how, their clothing is made.

He proposes a system like the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, for the garment industry. The ISO establishes standards for a wide range of consumer products and services, and Rahman says a similar system for clothing would help ethically minded consumers decide what to buy.

The death of 112 people in a garment factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 2012 led to labour protests in the streets. T
The death of 112 people in a garment factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 2012 led to labour protests in the streets. (Ashraful Alam Tito/AP)
 “We could say, if [a manufacturer] passes that standard, then we’ll give them a rubber stamp,” says Rahman. “Then, they could indicate that on the label of the garment. It would give the consumer more information, so they can make a better judgment.”

Despite the lack of such a classification, Hotchkiss says consumers are becoming increasingly aware “that the supply chain, which they may be implicated in, is causing damage to other people.”

A 2012 survey commissioned by World Vision and conducted by Ipsos-Reid found 79 per cent of Canadians want to “make an effort to ensure they know how and where things they purchase are made.”
One organization that reflects this awareness of ethical manufacturing is Ten Thousand Villages, the largest non-profit fair trade organization in North America.

Ten Thousand Villages, which has 34 stores in Canada, sources and sells accessories, home décor and gift items from artisans around the globe. According to general manager Ryan Jacobs, Ten Thousand Villages is committed to “direct trade,” which means no middleman.

“We know the people who produce the products,” says Jacobs.

He adds that the organization regularly travels to the regions where its suppliers live to confirm the safety and fair treatment of staff in their workshops.

Hotchkiss says the best bet for consumers concerned about ethical fashion is consulting a site such as GoodGuide.com, where you can look up specific products and the labour practices of the companies that make them.

“If it’s really important to [consumers] to ensure that they’re using their money wisely and make sure they're buying an ethical product, it’s best to do your research ahead of time,” says Hotchkiss.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Essential Imperfection

Imperfection lies at the heart of reality. If the unlimited expanse of the Void were perfect, empty, there would be nothing else existent. If space-time were perfect it would be infinite and could never expand as there would be no emptiness in which to do so.  

If Chaos was perfect there could be no predictability, no rules, and no linear time (because everything tries to happen at once).  Perfect Order allows no novelty, no alteration, and no inspiration. Both would be perfectly stagnant.  Perfect Good would be unable to make tough decisions involving necessary sacrifices beyond its own, a grower unable to prune.  Perfect Evil would be unable to form communities because its selfishness encourages only the individual. Order forms from Chaos and Chaos explodes from Order. Good intentions can produce Evil and Evil can inspire Good to heroism. 

Perfection is unattainable and could never be maintained. It is a horizon to travel toward, not a destination. There is always farther you can go. The concept of perfect does, however, function as an ideal for comparison and progress.  It is Evil that claims and values perfection – the perfect race, the perfect bloodline; the perfect ideology. That is apparent from history. 

Biblically, perfection is not expected in this life. That is why the concept of repentance exists. We are expected to reach for the ideals, to keep walking toward the horizon so we don’t stay where we are or turn backwards.  We are expected to try, not succeed, and learn in the process while our mistakes our limited to one planet.

Even those we call gods are imperfect. Otherwise life would be perfect, with no soul lost. If that was possible, it would be reality. Instead, we are told that there was a war in "Heaven", so "Heaven" can’t be perfect. Eden wasn’t perfect because it included the serpent and the divine knowledge of Good and Evil, without which there could be no progress. It could not be maintained without limiting us all. I believe god did not forbid eating from the Tree of Knowledge, he just told them what the consequences of such knowledge, adult knowledge, would be. I hear it more as the warning of a parent of the way reality works than the first commandment that was disobeyed. Of course, the very act of disobeying what they though was a law gave them that knowledge and activated their consciences.  Without the knowledge of Good and Evil there is no conscience.  Without a conscience, as well as the pain of childbirth and the responsibilities of work and survival, there is no adulthood or progress. 

I believe those who we call gods to be “more perfected” than us, more highly evolved physically and spiritually. My church teaches that we are gods in fetal form, not yet born to our real lives.  Heavenly Father was once like us and we may one day become like him. Of course he’ll still be far ahead.  He is not something truly alien to us, as orthodoxy would have us believe.  We are indeed in his image.  He is only omniscient and omnipotent in comparison to us. 

“Heaven” is not ultimately perfect, thank god, just perfect in comparison to our present phase of existence.  It allows room for progress. The gods don’t offer us a perfect path, just a better one, that they have traveled ahead of us.  If “Heaven” was perfect there would be no point to existence. Instead, the point seems to be progress through the active balancing of Chaos, Order, Good and Evil. We, including the gods, are all part of a reality which is developing and exploring itself, like the many cells and microscopic species making up our bodies. We are brain stem cells, gods are mature neurons.  

Perfection offers no potential or room for growth.  It is often the mistakes that end up being of most value genetically, cosmically, and personally.  Small imperfections in the early universe allowed matter to survive and collect to form stars and us. Small genetic mistakes enabled some species to adapt and survive what more “perfect” genetic examples could not, leading to the unstoppable common cold, and us. And, it is commonly said that you learn more from mistakes than success. Reality seems to agree.

No, imperfection isn’t a disease to be stamped out by the pure, by the perfect. Imperfection is essential.

Economics Based on Error

For years governments have been following several disastrous economic theories. The worst of these is neoliberalism, but the other two have helped contribute to the current financial crises abd nmake it worse.The first was the idea that a corporation's primary responsibility is to profit for its shareholders, regardless the cost. This has led to deregulation and to a culture of corruption and exploitation that is rampant world-wide. The second is the idea that government austerity in times of recession is the way to go when it actually puts an increased drag on economies, lengthening the problem and making the situation worse for more people.

Recently a grad student exposed errors in a highly influential paper on austerityand debtload for countries related to economic growth. This paper has been the centre of the austerity movement.

The following is an interview from CBC's As It Happens with the student in which he explains what he discovered.

AUSTERITY STUDENTDuration: 00:07:47

In Economics, "Growth in a Time of Debt' is a famous work used to support the case for austerity measures. But now questions are being raised about the paper's research.
In January 2010, Harvard Professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff presented the paper in Atlanta. And in that study, the two economists argue that a country's economic growth slows dramatically when debt rises above 90% of GDP.
Well, some US and European pro-austerity politicians have used that conclusion to back introducing cuts -- rather than injecting more borrowed money into an economy. But now holes have been found in the paper's research. Not by a pre-eminent economist… well he's not yet… But by a grad student working on a routine assignment.
Thomas Herndon is said student, and we reached him at the University of Massuchusetts Amherst, in Amherst.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

The Two Greatest Democratic Duties



Although nothing is perfect democracy provides a system for the law and electing leaders that we have to work with while pushing for needed reform. We are given the constitutional right, and responsibility, to participate as full members in these systems for our own good, the good of others, and the good of the nation. Jury duty and voting are both civil responsibilities requiring the exercise of freewill to choose the outcome that affects our lives and futures in very direct ways. Both are essential to a functioning democracy. Both are duties and should be treated as such. Both should have the same level of mandatory participation a required of those chosen to serve as jurists now. It’s not anti-democratic, it’s central to a healthy democracy, as many around the world already know and demonstrate. 

Perhaps, if you threatened people with contempt charges and fines for not showing up, you might get a higher percentage of voters participating than the roughly half who show up now. Many might spoil their ballots, but at least this would get counted, they would have their say not fume in silence. Many might actually decide that because they are forced to show up anyway, they might as well exercise their right to choose those who will rule over them. They may even decide to try and make an informed choice, paying perhaps a little more attention to what’s happening in the real world than on “Reality” TV.  They might realize which one actually affects their own lives. 

Maybe then people might realize that you have to work with what you have while striving for something better and that most lasting change is slow but can suddenly break loose if one is patient and persistent. One can become proud of oneself for trying to be part of the solution rather than a complaining part of the problem. Things might even change for the better. 

Jury duty is based on the recognition that sometimes people need a prod to make them do the right thing. It forces the citizen past inertia and a self-centered life for a moment to make adult decisions about the nature of the world. Ideally decisions based on informed reason.   Mandatory voting is not a limit on free-will but a push to use it. Voting and jury duty are the two most key things a citizen can do to directly affect the country and the future. They are far from futile, placing genuine power in the hands of the average citizen. They are fundamental rights and responsibilities for a modern democracy. 

It’s tragic that it seems to take the threat of punishment to get people moving and engaged in their own rights and lives. Almost half seem continent to place these things in the hands of the very politicians they don’t trust with nothing but mild complaint. You can only determine your own fate and that of your country if you participate in the decisions involved. Otherwise you trust the judgement of others. 

Bound by more duties and trust than most of us, soldiers do their part for the country every day. Staying aware of the world beyond your immediate life and taking time to vote takes far less of our time, effort, and possible sacrifice. We aren’t asked to die, just choose responsibly and maturely.   

Lack of participation starves democracy, allowing it to be overwhelmed by the active minority.  Perception is everything in politics. If you believe you are powerless, then you are.  Juries and voting give us a voice, a chance to force those who would rule us to obey instead. That is why democracy was invented.   You often have to speak loudly to get the attention and action of those who would lead.

Jury duty and voting aren’t everything, but they are safeguards, the minimum that should be required of all who benefit from being a citizen of our country.  They are the bases upon which other forms of peaceful citizen action should be built.