Medical Health

The Fisheries Turnoff

I was watching David Suzuki’s “One Ocean” on CBC Television last night, and I was again struck by one fisheries biologist’s arrogance–his choice of words, his tone of voice, his meaning. When he spoke of forcing a smile onto his face at public meetings and inquiries, he was not only insulting his audience, he was admitting insincerity. And why would anyone want to cooperate with an arrogant, insincere fisheries biologist?

Fisheries biology is an interesting field of study, but it often attracts (and subsequently recruits) autocratic individuals who as teenagers and young adults failed to muster enough smarts to succeed at jobs requiring higher levels of creativity, originality, and diplomacy.

Related Posts:

World Health and Arrogant Ecologists

Science, Ethics, and Abuse

Global Warming and Publish or Perish

Petition to Save Arizona’s State Parks

Arizona’s politicians are set to close thirteen state parks. Here is a link to a petition to save Arizona’s state parks. You may sign this petition.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-arizona-state-parks

The organizers will send the petition to Governor Brewer and the state legislators on February 1st, 2010.

You will find a slide show of Arizona hiking destinations on our Flash Gallery, our Arizona Gallery, and our Grand Canyon Trails Page.

Also see the post The Grand Canyon State: Arizona Set to Close and Sell State Parks?

The Grand Canyon State: Arizona Set to Close and Sell State Parks?

The world flies in and takes a long look at Arizona, the Grand Canyon State (see our Photo Gallery, our Arizona Gallery, and our Grand Canyon Trails Page). And soon after arriving in Phoenix, they fall in love with all the other gems Arizona has to offer: preserved yet accessible desert wilderness areas and wildlife refuges, such as the Lost Dutchman State Park in Apache Junction.

But now Arizona’s lawmakers are preparing to vote on budget cuts that could shut down the entire state parks system by July 1. And that vote in January 2010 might result in the sale of state parks to the highest bidders. That’s right: I’m hearing that once an Arizona state park is closed, it must be sold: Land speculators and developers will mutilate our public gems, our community wilderness. They will restrict access, and Lost Dutchman State Park will become a gated community or a private suburb, with lot and house prices starting at $700,000 or more.

Here’s a group of hikers who will show you how to protest the closure of Arizona’s state parks: visit the Take a Hike message board and web site.

Also see Petition to Save Arizona’s State Parks

Rupert Sheldrake and the Presence of the Past

In his book, The Presence of the Past. Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature, Rupert Sheldrake presents a valuable review of the science, religion, and philosophy of origins and change, and he gives us a promising twist on the theory of evolution. He makes field theory and the all-pervading power of habit come alive in our minds and in our views of nature. But his repetitiveness and his repeated lists of examples and possibilities makes reading his book similar to watching someone beat a senseless dog.

Harvard’s Dreams

Is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight Harvard’s new “Opiate of the Masses”? On her web page http://drjilltaylor.com/book.html, she says, “I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet.”

But since when is the “here and now” fair? I imagine that many sociopaths live in the “present moment” and feel inner peace after a “kill.” And if everyone on Earth drank themselves into a very prolonged stupor, fewer endangered species would go extinct in the near future.

Surely, rather than getting too wrapped up in imaginary “inner peace circuitry,” we must first focus on reality and root causes: we must do more to help the poor, the crippled, the abused; we must do more to curb the excesses of our hackneyed justice system; we must do more to stop white-collar crime.

Quit Sit-on-your-bottom Activities

Quit spending money sitting down. Everybody wants your dollars and cents, and they want you to spend it in a chair–at concerts, movies, restaurants, ballets, musicals, coffee shops, meditation groups . . .

Stay on your feet. Go for a walk or a hike. Lift weights while you watch the news. Find a good deal at a gym (the best deals usually appear when a gym first opens for business and offers a contract that stipulates that they can only raise your fees by, lets say, 1 percent every 3 years).

Multi-tasking, Texting, and the Service Economy

We hear all this hype on TV about how the younger generations are now experts at multi-tasking and texting and how video games help our children grow up to be surgeons. But who wants a surgeon who multi-tasks and texts? I mean neither multi-tasking nor texting contribute to a surgeon’s operating-room skills. Both multi-tasking and texting interfere with our ability to concentrate at the task at hand; multi-tasking and texting help us waste our time.

Multi-tasking and texting are products of our service economy; as skills they benefit secretaries, telemarketers, and corporate middle managers. Conversely, specialists (scientists, astronauts, mechanics, doctors, nurses, drivers, engineers, etc.) need to concentrate, not multi-task. Writers need to write, not text.

When the TV pundits and news anchors praise multi-tasking and texting and the younger generation’s ability to simultaneously do homework, watch TV, surf the Internet, and text, they are leading our young people down the drain, to lives of drudgery in a service economy.

British Columbia Should Get it Right For It’s Own Good

I have always thought that if British Columbia really had it on the ball, it would make itself over as a fisheries, forestry, and wildlife management park. In other words, British Columbia would get itself designated as a provincial or federal park, a park in which planners, ethicists, scientists, and economists would test ecological and business management plans, models, and techniques, over both the short and long terms, and often side by side. For example, various runs of salmon on various sections of the coast would experience alternative management regimes.

In essence, British Columbia would flower; it would become a research park supported by funds from all over the world and by international tourism.

That reality really would put British Columbia on the map.

Did Alan Greenspan Cause the Economic Meltdown?

I am good at seeing patterns in life and in data, and I am often good at predicting (although sometimes I do not follow my own good advice), but right now I am unwilling to spend the time necessary to perhaps substantiate the following possibility:

When Alan Greenspan decided to pop the High Tech stock bubble by raising interest rates back in 1999 – 2000 (despite the fact that corporate leaders said he was doing the wrong thing, that he should let the good times continue), he did not take into account unforeseen disasters. Yet unpredicted disaster was on us soon enough, in 2001, when the World Trade Towers fell to dust on 9/11, furthering the decline on Wall Street and in our economy.

So the big-money guys on Wall Street had to find another way to make the money they had been making during the High Tech boom, and when the government reduced interest rates in order to counter the effects of 9/11 and of Greenspan’s earlier decision to blow the High Tech stock bubble, the big-money guys saw that the housing market could be manipulated. They saw a way to make the money they used to make buying and selling High Tech stocks.

If Greenspan had taken unforeseen disaster into account when he decided to manipulate, pop, and blow the High Tech bubble, maybe the money and the money men would have stayed in the High Tech sector rather than moving on to manipulate home mortgages and subprime loans.

These guys in the government should know by now that if anything can go wrong, it will.

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October 28: A friend said, “Yeah, if Greenspan hadn’t popped the High Tech stock bubble, America would be a high-tech economy instead of a service economy.”

The Last of Brazil’s Lost Tribe

On the news last night, the reporter called it the lost tribe, but that label seems like propaganda, given that the news report was about how Brazil’s ranchers and farmers had exterminated the tribe over a number of years–obviously the tribe was not lost to these ranchers (or to the Brazilian government, which has been synonymous with unfettered ranching and rainforest destruction for decades now).

I mean the world has been after Brazil to change its ways. The world has been after Brazil for decades. Yet the Brazilian government allowed its ranchers to commit blatant genocide, and neither the United Nations nor any of its members have instituted sanctions against Brazil. I think this state of affairs–a renegade, evil Brazilian government; a United Nations that looks the other way over and over again, even after acknowledging the crime–shows us that our so-called world leaders are a sham. They come from the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. They are not doing their jobs and are probably too brainwashed and greedy to ever do the right thing.

That so-called lost tribe in Brazil, the one they talked about on the news last night, there are only 6 members left: 2 old men and 4 old women. They are too old to reproduce. The tribe and its customs and language will soon go extinct. The Brazilian ranchers wiped them off the face of the earth. And our leaders did nothing, and are doing nothing, despite the fact that millions of concerned citizens have been complaining about Brazil and its ranchers for the last 30 years or more.