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Thursday, August 21, 2003
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 Barry Carter writes: When we look at the underlying norms and thinking that employment and our entire Industrial Age systems rest upon, we find a win/lose norm. The controlled economy and other Industrial Age systems were not the start of win/lose norms and systems. Serfdom, slavery and monarchy of the Agricultural Age were also based upon win/lose norms and prior to this so to was tribal life and customs. Controlled economies are merely the latest in a series of perhaps progressively improving win/lose systems. The inherent win/lose nature of slavery and serfdom is self-evident, however, how is a controlled economy inherently a win/lose system? Any economy that must be controlled to maintain order is one based upon fear not love. The former Soviet Union controlled its economy because it feared what free humans would do without control, likewise so do companies. Only systems and actions that come from a love paradigm can be win-win. Actions and systems from an authoritarian control or fear paradigm are inherently based upon win/lose and scarcity. The heart of the controlled economy is its win/lose compensation system. Controlled economies operate based upon standardized compensation – salaries and wages. Regardless of the value one adds the controlled economy pays the same within a relatively narrow range. With standardized compensation the more you make the less the organization makes and vise-versa. I must lose in order for you to win and vise-versa. The controlled economy is based upon adversarial human relationships. At a tangible level we see a win/lose system as CEO's salaries explode while they layoff record numbers of people. Managers and the company makes more by holding down wages and salaries; the more the employee makes the less the company makes and vise-versa. The more vacation and benefits the employee gets the more it cost the company. There is also win/lose competition for limited positions. The primary job of most managers is to get more work out of people for less money. Unions who represent employees (a check and balance bureaucracy) have the job of getting more money and benefits for employee at the owner’s expense. Externally controlled economies compete with other controlled economies for survival, customers, growth, resources and prestige. Most of the rest of society is geared towards socializing people to survive in this win/lose system. Wealth creation is at the center and all other institutions must evolve to match it because it is the system that produces the stuff (food, shelter, money, etc) that allows us to survive. It, therefore, takes top priority. With our scarcity paradigm of finite wealth and our win/lose wealth creation system virtually all of our social systems, as well as thinking, support this win/lose norm. (08/21/03)
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 Craig Russell writes: As modern members of the Twenty-first Century, however, we no longer believe in morality. We call ourselves enlightened, intelligent, scientific and progressive. We believe in matter, not spirit – in technology, not God. Indeed, we sneer knowingly, condescendingly, at the very mention of God and of morality. We consider ourselves beyond it, superior to it, rejecting in our supreme arrogance anything that even threatens to limit us in any possible way – in dress, in speech, in conduct – as a threat to our personal, individual freedom. Others, we think, especially those in government, should have boundaries and restrictions, but never us! We no longer believe in the very existence of right and wrong. But our impulses, our desires, our hungers, our lives, have to come under some form of control, and we all know this. To say you have the right to do whatever you want whenever you want only disrespects others. We need some kind of rules of conduct in order to live together. Right and wrong do exist just as surely as life and death. But how do we determine right and wrong? What rules should we have? Who should determine them? Who should enforce them, and how? We must have some kind of discipline. But does it come from within or from without? We must realize that if we don’t discipline ourselves, someone else will do it for us. In rejecting morality, we inevitably choose law – and don’t for a second think that the State has no awareness or understanding of this.The last 40 years have seen a disastrous decay, a terrible decline in both public and private morality. We no longer as individuals have either the strength or the desire to limit or to control ourselves in any way, large or small. We live like greedy, half-wit children, totally without regard for others. We weave in and out of traffic, risking the lives of ourselves and others in our desperation to beat the other guy to the next red light. We pick our noses and fart in public without a shred of embarrassment. We burp without excusing ourselves. We dress like total slobs. Obscenities pour from our mouths and litter what little reading we’re still capable of. We become grotesquely fat by consuming everything in sight with no regard for, or even any comprehension of, the life it once possessed – of the Power it once had that we have now appropriated for our own. We buy bigger televisions, faster computers, and require more and bigger explosions at the movies. We divorce and we breed almost indiscriminately without any regard to what it might do to the children or to society as a whole. We either ignore or excuse the mass murder we euphemistically call “abortion.” We know next to nothing about anything at all and then we laugh at our ignorance. Meanwhile, we worry about the war, about taxes, about money and “the economy,” mostly because we fear something might interrupt or interfere with our mindless, insatiable consumption of everything we can get our fat grubby little hands on. We complain about and criticize the government and blame it for everything that’s wrong in our world. “If only we could get rid of it,” we tell ourselves, “if only we were free again . . . .” Well, we won’t be free again until each of us finds the courage and makes the effort to look life and reality objectively in the eye and see it plain and simple. We won’t be free again until we accept total, unwavering responsibility for ourselves and our actions. We won’t be free again until we realize that the dishonest, the immoral, can never live outside, or without, the law. The question, in the end, comes down to a choice between morality or law: will control over your life come from within you, or from without you? (08/21/03)
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  L. A. Daily News -- Air pollution from cars and trucks in Los Angeles costs roughly $1.8 billion a year in public health costs, according to a report released Tuesday by a national transportation reform group. Public health officials said the price tag isn't surprising considering the number of emergency room visits, hospital stays and deaths associated with the pollutants pouring out of tailpipes. "Millions come to the emergency department because of asthma and other respiratory problems. We are facing a public health epidemic because the number of Americans with asthma continues to rise," said Dr. Carlos Camargo, an asthma researcher and member of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Camargo was one of several medical specialists who spoke at a news conference, calling for federal officials to allocate more funding for public transit, bikeways and pedestrian projects to get people out of cars and reduce the symptoms of transportation-created pollution. "Think of it conceptually as a public health investment, not just transportation investment, and act accordingly," said Howard Frumkin, associate professor at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and a member of American Public Health Association. The report, called Clearing the Air, was produced by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based transportation reform group. The goal of the report is to draw a link between air pollution generated from vehicle travel and the public health cost of living with dirty air. Nationwide, childhood asthma rates have doubled in the last two decades and the public health cost of pollution from cars and trucks is estimated to be $40 billion to $65 billion a year, according to the report. (08/21/03)
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 BBC Science -- Scientists believe they may be able to explain why people hiccup. Researchers in France have suggested that it may be linked to evolution and the fact that our ancient ancestors lived in the sea. They believe it may be a throwback to a time when our ancestors had gills to help them breathe. ... Hiccups are sudden contractions of the muscles used for breathing in. Just after the muscles start to move, the glottis shuts off the windpipe to produce the characteristic "hic" sound. Ultrasound scans show that two-month-old babies hiccup in the womb, before any breathing movements appear. One theory is that the contractions prepare the unborn baby's respiratory muscles for breathing after birth. Another is that they stop amniotic fluid entering the lungs. But neither of these ideas fully stands up. For instance, if hiccups were supposed to keep fluid out of the lungs, it would make more sense for them to involve a cough-like response, not a breath inwards. This latest theory, originally published in the journal BioEssays and reported in New Scientist magazine, says the key to hiccupping lies in a group of animals for whom combining closure of the glottis and contraction of the "breathing in" muscles does serve a clear purpose. They are the primitive air breathers, such as lungfish, gar and many amphibians that still possess gills. These creatures push water across their gills by squeezing their mouth cavity while closing the glottis to stop water getting into their lungs. A group of scientists led by Christian Straus, at Pitie-Saltpetriere Hospital in Paris believes the brain circuitry controlling gill ventilation has persisted into modern mammals, including humans. The researchers point to many similarities between hiccupping and gill ventilation in animals such as tadpoles. (08/21/03)
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 BBC Science -- A humble sea-sponge is showing scientists how to make better fibre-optic cables, used in modern telecommunications. According to new research published in the journal Nature, one type of sea sponge makes fibres which have significant advantages over those produced in human factories. Fibre-optic cables are the backbone of modern telecommunications, carrying telephone and computer signals in the form of light from one side of the world to the other. Even the best of human ingenuity cannot make these materials as well as the deep-sea sponge Euplectella, commonly known as the Venus Flower-Basket however. Joanna Aizenberg leads the team of scientists who have been studying them at Bell Laboratories near New York, and she says their main advantage is strength. "We can even tie a knot from these biological fibres and they don't break. While we know that in commercial fibres, the major failure mode is fracture that results from crack growth." So the sponge's fibres are stronger and they conduct light just as well. They may also show scientists the route to better manufacturing processes, because somehow the sponge makes its fibres at low temperatures, rather than the high temperatures needed in industry. It's all the more extraordinary because the Venus Flower-Basket lives hundreds of metres down in the ocean where light is scarce. It's thought the creature uses its fibres to transmit what light it can gather - perhaps from bio-luminescent organisms - and attract food. (08/21/03)
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 BBC Science -- This brainless mud worm is a long-lost relative of human beings, scientists have discovered. It appears the slug-like creature found living at the bottom of a Swedish lake shares its ancestry with people. It does not have a brain or even sex organs and scientists are baffled about how the Xenoturbella procreates. However, researchers at Cambridge University are convinced it shares DNA with humans. The Xenoturbella was originally thought to be related to bivalve molluscs, such as mussels and oysters. Dr Max Telford, from Cambridge University, who led the British and Dutch team, said: "We found this hard to believe as it looks nothing like a bivalve mollusc. "We have now been able to show that, amongst all of the invertebrates that exist, Xenoturbella is one of our very closest relatives. "It is fascinating to think that whatever long-dead animal this simple worm evolved from, so did we." The new research, reported in the journal Nature, puts humans and the Xenoturbella - whose Latin name means "strange flatworm" - together in the deuterostomes group of species, which contains the vertebrates, as well as starfish, sea urchins and certain marine worms. (08/21/03)
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9:28:21 AM 
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2003
Timothy Wilken.
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