February/March 2006
1. Comprehensive, balanced Wikipedia article on the cartoons, itself subject to vandalism. For an amusing contrast, the movie 'The Life of Brian' was subject to accusations of blasphemy. Here a brief history of 'free speech': 399BC Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you"' and concluding with 2005 The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act bans protest without permit within 1km of the British Parliament.
One German paper published the cartoons on grounds of 'Europe-wide solidarity', yet it is hard to see how the Continent benefits from Europeans insulting each other. German Muslims are Europeans, too. If we came to this debate having put effort into understanding the systematic alienation and deprivation experienced by minority groups throughout Europe, we would be better placed to argue for our convictions about press freedom. It is a bit rich to lecture a minority community which feels it has no voice about the primacy of freedom of speech.
2. Mindhacks still my favourite psychology blog
3. The toxic heated swimming pool story: Chlorine plus sweat, urine, saliva plus heat and poor ventilation (air changed six times per hour is good ventilation) equals toxic protein levels in children as high as for an adult smoker. Greatest risk is for under two years of age as lungs still developing. Unacceptable risk at any age for asthma/eczema predisposed.
'The Belgian study looked at the association between indoor pool use and asthma in three different ways. First, the researchers tested the blood of 226 healthy children who regularly swim in indoor pools for the presence of certain proteins that indicate damage to the lining of the lungs. The researchers found higher than normal levels of these proteins in these children, which would make them prone to asthma attacks. Of all possible sources of the proteins (including exercise and mould), the number of hours spent in indoor pools was the most consistent predictor of lung damage. Kids who frequently swim in indoor pools were found to have injury to the lungs equal to that of smokers. In another part of the study, the researchers tested 16 children and 13 adults for the same proteins just before and just after they sat near or used an indoor pool. They found that the mean level of protein increased significantly after sitting near or using an indoor pool. Finally, the researchers looked at data from a survey of 1,881 children (ages 7–14) that was conducted from 1996 to 1999. The survey included questions about the children's health status, respiratory symptoms, and lifestyle variables, including exposure to pets, environmental tobacco smoke (ETS, or second-hand smoke), and pool attendance. The children were also screened for asthma. From this data, the researchers found that pool attendance was the only variable that was significantly correlated with screening positive for asthma.'
Source journal article: oem.bmjjournals.com and also erj.ersjournals.com
4. It's very glamorous to talk about (antiviral drug) Tamiflu and vaccines, but actually, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you sneeze, then wash your hands. It is really basic, bird flu is a bug that spreads like any other bug. Sian Griffiths, SARS expert and director of Hong Kong's School of Public Health.
The most common means of infection is not from sneezing or coughing, or walking barefoot in the rain, but from hand-to-hand contact.
Most viruses like bird flu enter our bodies from contact between our hands and fingernails and the mucous membranes of ears, eyes, nose and mouth. Hygiene habits or the lack of them are incredibly resistant to change. Just consider one example: the hospital or health centre drama of getting Doctors to wash their hands between patients. Lack of proper hand washing remains the number one source of infections acquired in hospitals (Annals of Internal Medicine, 1999;130(2):126--130)
Here are six hygiene basics and one home remedy:
- We touch our face with our hands frequently and unconsciously. DON'T. If you don't touch your face with your fingernails or hands you are more likely to stop a virus entering your body through the mucous membranes of ears, eyes, nose or mouth. You will then inhibit its spread to other people. Example 1, two students of a group of 30 studying health and safety in the food/hospitality industry had marking dust placed in the palm of their hands. By the end of the three hour session, all 30 had traces of the dust on their clothing, hands and faces. Example 2, each medical practitioner entering an infectious diseases conference room had invisible ink placed on their index finger tips. After the initial papers were presented, house lights were turned off and blue UV lights turned on. Everyone had spots of blue paint on their faces.
- US Navy research with submarine crews on a tour of duty has shown 45% reduction in gastric and respiratory infections in half the crew who hand washed five times a day compared to the other half who washed as usual.
- Wash and dry your hands thoroughly with soap (preferably not anti-bacterial soaps unless medical scrubbing) and warm water every time you go to the toilet; before meals; before and after preparing meals (and during preparation if handling raw meat and then, for example, fresh fruit or dairy and change latex gloves) and any time you handle live birds, raw poultry or uncooked eggs.
- Fresh fruit displays and fruit sample trays at food markets are put on display often without gloves or hand washing and directly after retrieving the merchandise from the trucks that delivered it. They are then handled by passers by who have even less reason to wash their hands before selecting their purchase. Wash the fruit when you get home.
- Launder and then microwave kitchen sponges and dishcloths for two minutes in order to kill the bacteria they are notorious for harbouring. Because of the microfibres, even strong chemical disinfectants often aren't enough to disinfect dishcloths (Journal of Applied Bacteriology, 1990;68(3):279--283).
- In public toilets use paper towels (or carry your own wipes) to enter and leave both the cubicle and the room and to turn on and off taps. Toilet seats had fewer germs than any other surface tested (Journal of Applied Microbiology, 1998;85(5):19--28). Door handles, elevator buttons and escalator grips in public buildings and shopping centres are generally filthy.
- Apply the same hand washing rigour after visiting other high risk places such as play structures at fast food outlets; day care centres; medical surgeries and shopping malls. If you can't wash your hands because of lack of equipment or time to do so (especially when travelling) always carry alcohol based Instant Hand Sanitizers that require no water or drying to complete the job.
- Consider cleaning nasal passages and gargling with salt water regularly, especially during a flu outbreak. It will inactivate and wash virus cells out of nasal passageways and throat. Saline solution (0.9% salinity made dissolving half a teaspoon non-iodised salt to every quarter litre or 8 fluid ounces drinking water) is always useful when traveling. I carry a nasal atomiser of it on long haul plane trips. I recommend unbleached sea salt like Salt of the Earth Celtic brand and a plastic Neti pot.
- Home remedy: A quarter to half a teaspoon of Celtic salt dissolved in a cup of warm water in the morning (and maybe evening) throughout a viral infection will speed recovery, as well as practicing reduced breathing to increase CO2 in the blood, which is the natural ph balancer (when sick we tend to become acidic, hence fresh lemon juice is used to alkalise, but reduced breathing will do that and more); elevating upper body as you sleep; fasting for half or all of the first day of illness and whilst you are sick, ceasing intake of any food known to cause you even mild gastric or respiratory irritation; lemon and ginger tea if neither irritate your body.
An extensive look at the politics of pandemic propaganda. The Royal Society for Protection of Birds .... seriously it exists and has Hygiene advice.
April/May/June 2006
1. I have been busy writing a how to mend a relationship page. In the process I collected 161 ideas for spending quality time with your partner, here on site. They put a smile on my face.
2. And an article on family, which also covers functional and dysfunctional family.
3. I'm experimenting with google ads like that below and with their search box above. In 6 months these have earned $us19.13 from 96 clicks of 10,910 page impressions. Google doesn't send a cheque until earnings reach $us100. Google experienced a 700% increase in third quarter 2006 profits mostly due to big companies shifting their ad budget from newspapers and TV onto the internet. Its revenue in the quarter is based on billions of these clicks on ads.
4. Please take children's computers out of their bedroom and put it out into the main part of the house. Australia-wide survey of 13,000 girls found that 42 per cent of respondents had experienced some form of cyber-bullying. Spokesman for the National Coalition Against Bullying Michael Carr-Gregg said a "whole new lexicon" of bullying had evolved with the shift into cyberspace, with terms such as "masquerading" - where one student steals another's passwords and sends out inflammatory messages under their name - and "flaming" - where students send streams of abuse in a public, online arena - now common. Parents are typically ignorant of these potentially devastating new bullying methods.
5. The national male suicide toll exceeds the road toll. Of 2000 suicides last year 80% were the guys. Every day in Australia five men die by suicide. Relationships for men are substantial, and even if they appear to give the opposite impression, they are central issues. Source
This observation is not entirely unrelated to the movement in values toward Individuality and Survival observed in Americans indicated below On Freedom. If you compare values in the Fulfillment half to values in the Survival half I reckon there is increasing likelihood of male suicide as a guy's values descend to the bottom right hand corner.
Significantly, this movement of values is away from both sides of the political spectrum here in Australia as they are in USA. So who represents these voters in Australia. Who are the stake holders in this movement toward crude materialism, ostentatious consumption and acceptance of violence. I don't think we can reverse the tragedy of male suicide without dealing with those stake holders who have a powerful influence on our economy, national wealth and foreign policy.
To put it cynically, male suicide is part of the waste in this environmentally disastrous way of life. $aus9 billion of food put in garbage bins each year, 8 million prescriptions of anti-depressants and so on. What's a few more lives thrown in the bins. Life is cheap in the military industrial complex.
Contrast that movement of values with the directions Canadians and Europeans are taking in the second diagram below. They are moving toward flexible families, brand apathy, flexible gender identity and rejection of authority. It seems to me those values would include many more of the marginalized people that go onto to suicide or suicide bombing than the direction we as a nation are taking.
6. Classics in the history of psychology - on line texts developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Canada where you will find Maslow's Theory of Human Motivation.
7. Letter to a friend, Dear X
I couldn't help but think about what you revealed about your health on Sunday. I am sorry about this intrusion, but sharing even as much as you did involves me, and then I have a duty, which I can only release myself from by writing to you. I wonder, have you invited all of them to family counselling and have they undermined or rebuffed you?
I figure it would take a few attempts to get them there and at least 7 sessions with all four of you present to begin to relieve the stresses in your household. All of you are bearing it as if bunkered in for the duration. Family counselling would at least open a door and allow everyone to move around a bit if they wished to.
I couldn't help but feel my lungs reaching for fresh air when I heard and saw you and Y messaging each other about picking up your eldest from music, and I then remembered the feeling of tension inside the house when I was chatting with the two of them the previous day in your lounge room.
Both were completely relaxed with me, as were you (and thank you for that fine cuppa) but the tension was palpable. Like there had been a death in the house and no one was talking about it. In fact, as if not talking about the death was keeping everyone frozen in places they had occupied long ago but no longer fitted, and each too afraid to move as if it would break the spell or betray the silence of grief.
No wonder you want to get out and breathe and LIVE. And no one is to blame. We all just do our best in these situations and it ends up suffocating each of us. I speak from experience.
peter
On Freedom
1. Values Quadrants
Canadian Pollster Michael Adams has accumulated an exhaustive set of data from detailed interviews with thousands of Americans over twelve years. He digs for the underlying values, not the surface manifestations, and looks for significant trends and demographic differences. A growing proportion of Americans (are) disengaged, disenchanted, and fatalistic, but this small plurality is especially pronounced in young Americans of all stripes, races, regions and economic backgrounds, and is growing among older Americans.
The values of the politically disengaged lack any sign of idealism: These Americans seem to reject both the Republican (traditional religion and values, father-led home, obedience to authority) and Democratic (gender equality, inclusion, tolerance, and personal spirituality) visions of the good life and the ideal community. Source of quote. US increasing trends in bold.
2. In my work, I witness widespread fear of freedom (eleutherophobia). It was a subject of Erich Fromm's writing as he thought about the rise of fascism. He concluded:
Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the difference in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process.
The most decisive moment in history is the identification of "self" as opposed to "nature". At this point people become responsible for their own fate and they become afraid. The "fear of freedom" begins at the point of recognizing ones own responsibility for one's own fate. (Chapter 2: The Emergence of the Individual and the Ambiguity of Freedom). Fromm 1942
In other words, at the moment of realisation that we have a choice begins the fear of that freedom to choose. From that moment solutions to avoid and embrace choice begin to shape character.
3. Depending on where you are in the quadrants above at item 1. 'freedom' will lead to very different actions. I can't imagine introspection is an option in the bottom right hand corner! Democracy loves the word 'freedom' but we are not the only one's who do not link it to responsibility, duty, ethics or even religiosity. I do not think a christian fundamentalist believes they have the freedom to choose their religion.
The Korah comes to my aid here. I am currently reading the 3 volume anthology 'Wisdom of the Zohar' translated by David Goldstein 1989. This kabbala would pair freedom with each of the seven emotional attributes: Kindness, Restraint, Harmony, Ambition, Humility, Connection and Receptiveness. Like the Chinese ying yang system, each of the seven attributes contain elements of all seven - i.e., "Kindness in Kindness", "Restraint in Kindness", "Harmony in Kindness", etc. - making for a total of forty-nine traits.
A freedom that is chosen with kindness, restraint, harmony, ambition, humility, connection and compassion would be one that truly great leadership would be proud to talk and walk.
4. Swami Satyananda says:
Freedom is your birthright. Freedom is immortality. Freedom is knowledge, peace and bliss. Consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or unwittingly, everyone is trying to find this freedom, whether it is nations fighting on the battlefield or a thief after freedom from want. Every movement of your feet is towards freedom. There is an innate urge in everyone to become to become independent. No one likes to be guided by the wishes of others. You have such a feeling and desire because you are the immortal soul or atman, which has no rival, which is the inner ruler, which is the support for the whole universe. In reality you are this atman.
July/August 2006
1. First rule of a thinking environment: pay unbelievable beautiful attention to the Thinker, even if you don't agree with them or like them. An on-line assessment of your time to think.
2. Here a report on listening in general medical practice, which you will notice describe communication problems in marriage, in bold.
- doctors frequently interrupted patients before they had completed their opening statement — after a mean time of only 18 seconds!
- only 23% of patients completed their opening statement
- in only one of 51 interrupted statements was the patient allowed to complete their opening statement later
- 94% of all interruptions concluded with the doctor obtaining the floor
- the longer the doctor waited before interruption, the more complaints were elicited
- allowing the patient to complete the opening statement led to a significant reduction in late-arising problems
- clarifying or closed questions were the most frequent cause of interruption but any utterance by the doctor that
- specifically encouraged the patient to give further information about any one problem could also cause disruption: this, perhaps surprisingly, included echoing of the patient’s words
- in 34 our of 51 visits, the doctor interrupted the patient after the initial concern, apparently assuming that the first complaint was the chief one
- the serial order in which the patients presented their problems was not related to their clinical importance
- most patients who were allowed to complete their opening statement without interruption took less that 60 seconds and none took longer the 150 seconds, even when encouraged to continue.
3. 'People Pleasers are often the unwitting contributors to family dysfunction, although they are far from being the only culprit in a dysfunctional family. People Pleasers tend to have Injustice Collector counterparts: the Injustice Collector in the family remembers every slight, real or imagined, and throws it back in the People Pleaser's face, while the People Pleaser scurries to set things right with the angry Injustice Collector. The cycle will repeat indefinitely, because the particular dysfunctions of the People Pleaser and the Injustice Collector are a perfect fit with one another: Injustice Collectors feel entitled and People Pleasers feel that everyone ELSE is entitled.
The unfortunate outcome in the dysfunctional family is that either the People Pleaser has to become progressively more crippled and entrenched in their subservient role in the family, or else they become healthier and stronger and ultimately are accused of breaking up the family.'
Note these reciprocal roles nationally and internationally.
4. Can there be healing without intimacy? The whole of this website is in a sense an exploration of this singular question.
I am reading 'Michelangelo and The Reinvention of the Human body' by James Hall. He explores the ice maiden theme, which Michelangelo reprises from Dante and his Beatrice. He asks how could a mother, herself divine and 'knowing' her child's fate allow him to go to his destiny. Michelangelo challenges the sweetness and light of the then and now prevailing, Madonna iconography (often reflected in the contemporary construction of marriage - wife the Madonna, lover the whore) by presenting her as having held herself up and at a distance with a self-sacrificing nobility and yet with her tenderness unavailable to the viewer. Could you imagine the Madonna of the Pieter indulging in baby talk?
Her vulnerability only begins to show in the moment captured by this Pieter of 1498-9. Here she has not appeared to age. It is Rabbi Jesus whose age has been distorted by Michelangelo. In his earlier pieces taken as a whole, he has been catapulted from a newborn to a muscular suckling and then into adulthood and on to the cross quite suddenly. No childhood or adolescence at all.
It seems Michelangelo's Madonna must have had some source of self-sustaining intimacy from the outset. No doubt about her value as the Mother nor any disconnection from that knowing. The utter exposure and vulnerability of that limp saviour in her arms is a heart breaking truth. It is also a moment that is available in marriage - a healing without that burden of messiah, crucifixion or gender. It's not safe to be so utterly exposed and vulnerable to a person who holds themselves at that kind of distance until you're dead. But guess what, it happens in marriage.
September/October 2006
1. My daughter and partner just returned from 6 months in Asia. This postcard says it all.
I loved the slowness of Laos - people completed tasks with no sense of urgency - everything was slow and deliberate. To me, there seemed to me to be a real interconnectedness with people to their land. The people were part of their environment rather than an encroachment on it. I'm not too sure how to describe it really, but maybe one way to illustrate is in a place called Mong Noi Neua. It's a small village located by a river and surrounded by mountains. The only way to get to the village is by boat and the livelihood of the people is dependent on the riches form the river. J and I would lie in our hammocks overlooking the river and watch the daily activities of the locals - fisherman and casting off their nets, old women rowing long boats up the river, kids swimming in the early hours of the morning, women washing their clothes in the edges of the river ,,, As we watched, an elderly woman walked fully clothed into the river (which had a very strong current) chest deep to have a chat to a fisherman. She then returned to shore soaking wet and continued her gardening. The river was the lifeblood of the village and the people just seemed to be very much a part of it.
I found the people in Laos have such a wonderfully friendly and happy nature and the slowness of the place just added to the people's charm. In restaurants, it would sometimes take an hour or more to get food once ordered, even if we were the only people in the place. It's not that the people were lazy, there was just a completely different sense of time in Laos. Patience is very important in Laos as well as a total abandonment of western time.
J and I also volunteered while in Laos. We were staying in a town called Vang Vieng - another beautiful town and also well known for its happy food. We volunteered in a village about 4 kms from town. So, in the morning we would get on our rented bicycles and cycle to the village where we were worked in a community library that needed some serious organising and then in the evenings we would teach english when the kids and teenagers returned from school. Afterwards, we'd cycle back to town and stop by the market on the way to pick up some delicious fresh fruit. Then we'd hang out in one of the many restaurants, watch a flick while eating some happy food.
2. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. Rumi
3. There is a golden hour following a traumatic accident severe enough to have killed outright. People who live on, report near death experiences: a choice point sometimes on a hill looking down on one's whole life flashing passed; angels; revisits by dead friends and relatives; an incredible peace, as if passing over to another realm where the rules of the old life are gone. In this hour the body's designs for survival kick in; its wisdom and the habits of a life time come into play, and help at hand often of strangers who make the difference. Many come out of this with a decision, as if granted a second chance - they now know how to live.
I was recently reminded of this by two clients with breathing habits associated with stress patterns at work and home - one who holds her breath when listening and thinking and one who takes an alarming, sharp in-breath as she moves onto the next subject. The first was crushed by a car, had profuse internal bleeding, which should have killed her. She was conscious and held her breath, thus increasing carbon dioxide concentration in her blood, which relaxes all the smooth muscles lowers blood pressure and increases uptake of oxygen in every cell.
In part as a result of her habitual calm response to crisis, a huge blood clot formed over the ruptured organ and the bleeding stopped. If she had panicked and hyperventilated the effect would have been opposite and likely terminal. The second had a drowning accident as a child and when reaching the water's surface gasped for breath, fearing death. She held her breath underwater long enough to survive. Both are now stuck with habitual breath holding when they don't need it and not breath reduction when they do.
To bring both into calm quiet breathing required mindfulness awareness practices on the breath, not with the intention of controlling the breath but simply of becoming aware of the pattern and its effects in their bodies and on people at work and home. The next stage is Buteyko breathing.
4. It seems to me that preparing for marriage, starting or managing a business and planning for retirement have many relational similarities. The average duration of marriage and retirement are about the same - 20 to 25 years. They are of equal importance to health, happiness, contentment and creativity. Both depend on the clarity of thinking that goes into them. THAT thinking and the success of the venture itself depend on the vibrancy of our relationships and in our social networks.
The quality of our thinking depends on the quality of attention another gives in listening to our thinking. Yet very few couples considering marriage, retirement or a business venture consult relationship experts. Most use property and finance experts.
One of the founders of the UK Relationship Foundation recently visited Australia and put this quote on the web site, Relationships are the missing piece of the political puzzle. As we struggle to adapt to the domination of the bottom line, the factor invariably omitted from the equation is relationships. LINDSAY TANNER, SHADOW MINISTER FOR FINANCE, AUSTRALIA.
Similarly, 'At the risk of stating the obvious, human interaction and relationships are the bases of everything we do in business – or at least they should be. This is not another comment on relationship marketing; it is rather a clarion call for business leaders to adopt a relational philosophy to guide all the decisions they make' Source
A tragic example of the consequences of poor listening occurred in the George Bush's White House, January 2003. Reported by Bob Woodward in his book 'State of Denial' and extracted here.
5. Audio file .mp3 of my speaking own promo on 92.7 artsound fm
6. The bulk of water consumed in our house is not from the shower, laundry, toilet and watering the garden but in growing the food we eat. For example,the two kilos of meat we eat weekly represents about 20,000 litres of water sitting in our refrigerator. Staggering to think how much is on supermarket shelves.
Average personal use water consumption for one person per day in the developing world is 10 litres, less than one flush of an average developed country lavatory cistern.
A calorie of food takes roughly 1 litre (0.2200 Imp gallons) of water to produce. A kilo of grain needs between 500 and 4,000 litres while a kilo of industrially produced meat takes 10,000 litres. Amount of water to grow the food in a quarter pound hamburger - 11,000 litres.
The calorie measure the amount of heat (and therefore energy) a particular food will provide. One gram of fat provides 9 calories. One gram of protein provides 4 calories. One gram of carbohydrate provides 4 calories. To produce one calorie of food takes between 3 to 5 calories of carbon fuel.
Frozen peas require 150% more energy than fresh peas due to packaging and refrigeration. In the U.S., the average prepared meal includes ingredients produced in at least 5 other countries. Transporting 1 lb of asparagus from Chile to New York uses 73 lbs of fuel energy and releases 4.7 lbs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Sources: Sustainable Table; The Calorie Fallacy; World Water Week Report and the Guardian Unlimited water special. More on IPCC's Climate change 2001 chapter on Hydrology and Water Resources.
What can I do? Buy foods grown locally - this saves energy by eliminating the need for lengthy food transport. Buy unprocessed foods with minimal packaging - healthier and use less energy to make the food and the package. Reduce meat consumption. Water my rose garden and flush toilet with bath and laundry water. And controversially, eat fat and grow thinner - obesity may be regarded as a compensatory overgrowth of the fatty tissues providing for an increased use of fat by a body incapable of using carbohydrate properly.
Comment by a reader: the numbers are right for US grain fed beef. found one stat that each kg of california grain fed beef needed 22,000 of water and about 5 litres of fuel to produce (my guess is that fuel or carbon is an underestimate) then there's the veggies, bun and bright lights of the fast food chain, not to mention driving there and back and disposing of the wrappers and poo and getting incinerated 10 years before your time and everyone driving to the funeral..
7. "We are in a tribal society in Basra and we [the British army] are in effect one of these tribes," said Lt. Col Simon Brown, commander of the 2nd Battalion. "As long as we are here the others will attack us because we are the most influential tribe. We cramp their style." Guardian
8. Black dog emerges as drought's companion but no farmers' friend - article SMH
EVERYBODY has a breaking point. For Graham Brown there have been almost too many to mention. The forced slaughter of thousands of young sheep, the suicide of his long-time farm colleague, the bush fire that wiped out a decade of land regeneration on his family's property, the idea of just scraping through another drought.
NSW Rural Mental Health support line 1800 201 123
Lifeline 13 11 14 Beyondblue 1300 22 46 36
9. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total, eventual costs of the Iraq war, "including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion" - that's $2,000,000,000,000. That would be $2,000 a head for each of the world's poorest billion people, who live (and die) on less than $1 a day. Guardian
10. Australia's 20 million people face greater regulatory diversity, overlap, duplication and barriers to movement than Europe's 457 million people. Government leaders agreed on national water reform in 1994 but most of the changes have yet to be implemented. Recommendations for national uniformity in occupational health and safety and workers compensation date back to 1995 but Australia still has 10 schemes in each area. One of the Business Council's goals is a common market in Australia, by removing the barriers to employees moving interstate or businesses operating across borders. The price of "being lazy" in this area was growing exponentially as more and more activities took place across state borders. You cannot find an example anywhere else in the world where three major commercial centres like Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne are artificially on different time zones for large parts of the year. BCA Report and reported in the Australian
November/December 2006
1. Each tonne of CO2 we emit causes damages worth at least $85, but emissions can be cut at a cost of less than $25 a tonne. Shifting the world onto a low-carbon path could eventually benefit the economy by $2.5 trillion a year. What we do now can have only a limited effect on the climate over the next 40 or 50 years, but what we do in the next 10-20 years can have a profound effect on the climate in the second half of this century. Guardian
Stern report on the Economics of Climate Change link to HM Treasury source.
The energy required to create, store and transmit 10 mg of data is equivalent to about 1kg of coal. Servers in the US are using more elctricity thatn 1.3 million homes. Figures from New Scientist 16 Dec 2006 page 24.
2. I was reminded today of how the things that intially attracted us to a person can grow into a problem as a committed relationship develops. That is in the nature of the workshop of intimacy. Our leading edge takes a back seat once it has done the job of securing a relationship. Then the latent areas of our selves are revealed and exposed to growth in the relationship. There can be no intimacy without vulnerability. Everyone has buttons and they become vulnerable to being pressed as we develop in the relationship. One of my clients told me that a reasonable person in an intimate relationship would not have buttons.
3. Happy holiday season. Here's some fun:
- Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.
- The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and leaky tire.
- It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.
- Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
- Always remember that you're unique. Just like everyone else.
- Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
- If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
- Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
- If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
- Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
- If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
- If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
- Some days you're the bug; some days you're the windshield.
- Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
- The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
- A closed mouth gathers no foot.
- Duct tape is like 'The Force.' It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
- There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.
- Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your lips are moving.
- Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
- Never miss a good chance to shut up.
- Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
