Quote for the day

Stephen T. Asma:

The belief that nature is loaded with invisible spirits that live in local flora, fauna, and environmental landmarks is generally characterized by Westerners as 'primitive' and highly irrational... But most of the world is made up of animists. The West is naive when it imagines that the major options are monotheistic. In actual numbers and geographic spread, belief in nature spirits trounces the One-Godders...

Contrary to the progress-based story the West tells itself, animistic explanations of one's daily experience may be every bit as empirical and rational as Western science... As Roger Scruton says, 'The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.'...

Unlike Western fundamentalism, animism is not locked in a zero-sum battle with science... Animism is highly syncretic, adopting any and all spiritual beliefs and practices as complimentary rather than competing options... There's not much concern for, or history of, orthodoxy in animism, a trait that can render it liberal and tolerant toward alternatives, including science.

From 'The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview' in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Map of the day: Staking claim in the Arctic

For interactive map, go here.

Permian Extinction's 'smoking gun": volcanoes

Evidence in Canadian Arctic points to volcanoes as cause of massive extinction

PostMedia News: A mass extinction 250 million years ago was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that burned significant volumes of coal, causing runaway global warming to impact the temperature and acidity of the world's oceans, Canadian researchers found...

'This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction,' said Steve Grasby, a researcher at the University of Calgary's department of geoscience. During the Permian extinction 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land...

Grasby and his colleagues, Benoit Beauchamp and Hamed Sanei... discovered layers of coal ash in rocks from the extinction boundary in Canada's High Arctic that gives the first direct proof to support the belief that eruptions in what is knows as the Siberian Traps, now found in Northern Russia, produced ash clouds that had a broad impact on global oceans...

At the time of the extinction, the Earth contained one big land mass, a supercontinent known as Pangaea. The environment ranged from desert to lush forest, and the planet was already populated with four-limbed vertebrates. Among them were primitive amphibians, early reptiles and synapsids, the group that would, one day, include mammals.

'The Permian Extinction set the stage for the dinosaurs to take over,' said Grasby... It was a really bad time on Earth. In addition to these volcanoes causing fires through coal, the ash it spewed was highly toxic and was released in the land and water, potentially contributing to the worst extinction event in Earth history,' said Grasby. 'Pockets of life did survive... But it took five million years before it recovered.'

Image source here.

Face of the day: Egypt

Best coverage:

Al-Jazeera English

The Guardian

Image source here:

'This vision of Canada is being dismantled'

Erna Paris, in The Walrus (March 2011):

The New Solitudes

Canada was once defined by the schism between English and French. Today, our divide is increasingly ideological. Can it be bridged?

Most Canadians can recite our traditional values by heart, even if we no longer embrace them in identical ways. They are, in a nutshell: moderation in civil discourse; toleration of dissent; support for human rights and the institutions of civil society; respect for the rule of law; a commitment to mutilateralism abroad and pluralism at home; and a dedication to the public good, which includes a sensitivity to our uniqueness as one of the world's most ethnically diverse countries... Now this vision of Canada is being dismantled...

Errol Mendes, a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa, thinks that what drives [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] is not traditional libertarianism, which may be socially progressive because of its core commitment to unfettered personal freedom, but rather a version of hard-right, US-style Republican politics that might be termed the modern 'Night Watchman.' The Night Watchman is a nineteenth-century theoretical construct in which government assumes only minimal responsibility for the citizenry. Its role is limited to protecting individuals from crime, and the country from foreign aggression: in other words, it is responsible only for the police, the judiciary, prisons, and the military...

The underlying question is what constitutes a good society. Across millennia of human history, philosophers, political leaders, artists, and ordinary people have debated the social order of their respective eras. What matters is public engagement... We need a reasoned and, above all, courteous discussion about what we want Canadian society to look like in ten or twenty years. The language of insult is intended to intimidate and silence. Without courtesy, we cannot talk to one another.

Image source here.

Alberta's dirty secret

Tar Sands Oil Some of World's Dirtiest

The Tyee: A report (.pdf) by a major global research group representing the world's 10 largest car buying markets has concluded that Canada's bitumen is one of the world's dirtiest oils due to its poor quality, low gravity and the vast amount of natural gas needed to enrich it.

Find original, larger image on page 9 of the report (.pdf).

The study for the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), which looked at the carbon intensity of oil from 3,000 fields now supplying European gasoline markets, also concluded that increasing reliance on dirty fuels will raise greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent above that of conventional oils...

The study calculated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions created by extracting, moving and refining different types of crude oil based on specific characteristics including weight, viscosity, purity, age of the field, leaks and the flaring of waste gases...

Like researchers at the University of Toronto and Calgary, the authors of the ICCT report characterized the quality of data on carbon intensity from the tar sands as poor. 'There is a lack of detailed data/transparency on tar sands projects.'...

For nearly 100 years engineers, scientists and politicians have referred to thick asphalt-like deposits of bitumen as tar sands... Industry rebranded the ultra-heavy crude oil as oil sands in the 1990s to make the sulfur-rich resource sound more accessible and clean.

Canadians stand on guard for the Arctic

Hard as ice: eight-country poll suggests Canadians least willing to compromise on Arctic

The Canadian Press: The poll queried 9,000 people in the United States, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and both northern and southern Canada... It found that Canadians from coast to coast to coast were remarkably united on the Arctic. Just over half of both northerners and southerners said that the region should be the most important element of Canada's foreign policy... Similar percentages agreed the country's military presence in the region should be beefed up, even if it means doing less elsewhere in the world...

Canadians were also remarkably united in what kind of development the country should be pursuing in the North. The importance of high-quality public services, environmental protection and search-and-rescue capacity were supported by more than 80 per cent of respondents...

About three-quarters of them insisted the Northwest Passage is in Canadian waters, a position that has almost no international support. Norway, with 23 per cent of its respondents agreeing, came closest.

The Northwest Passage

More than 40 per cent of Canadians agreed with the statement, "My country should pursue a firm line in defending its sections of the Arctic.' That was more than any other country. Fully half of northern and southern Canadians said Canada should pursue 'full sovereignty rights' in what it claims for the Beaufort Sea. Only 10 per cent of Americans felt that strongly...

The strong stand Canadians seem to have taken on the Arctic may simply be because they're better informed about it than citizens in other countries, particularly those in the US.

Image sources here and here.

Voice of the day

Amel Mathlouti, Tunisian singer and activist:

'Tunisie -- je chante pour toi.' To listen, go here.

Quote for the day

Jeff Warren:

The world is humming with organizing patterns that affect our minds in ways we've hardly begun to appreciate. Our psychology and neurobiology, of course, shape how we receive and interpret those patterns. But my feeling is that we do not create them any more than we create the songbird's call or the movement of wind in the trees. What seems like nature mysticism now could be the next generation's environmental science: both an intimation of the biosphere's complex information exchange and a glimpse into nature's vast interiority, intelligence -- maybe even agency.

From 'Tourists of Consciousness,' Maisonneuve (December 16, 2010)

Ink in midair

The art of Shinichi Maruyama

Special forces war crimes: 'superiors walk away'

JTF2 command 'encouraged' war crimes, soldier alleges

CBC News: A member of Canada's elite special forces unit says he felt his peers were being 'encouraged' by the Canadian Forces chain of command to commit war crimes in Afghanistan... Documents from the military ombudsman's office show the member of the covert unit Joint Task Force 2, or JTF2, approached the watchdog in June 2008 to report the allegations of wrongdoing he had first made to his superior officers in 2008. The soldier told the ombudsman's office 'that... he does not believe they are investigating.'...

The documents make clear that the soldier didn't believe the military was taking his allegations seriously and that he had lost faith in the forces' leadership. He told the ombudsman's office in one of many telephone conversations he felt 'more and more of his peers are being encouraged to commit war crimes by the chain of command... which they may be held accountable for one day as superiors walk away.'

The soldier said he wasn't coming forward to have 'the guys who pull the trigger' investigated who he said were 'being incited to do these things' by their superiors. 'This is done by promoting those who do, and not promoting those who don't,' the ombudsman's office staffer handling the file wrote in the document.

The soldier also claimed the 'vision of the southern friends is being pushed' -- an apparent reference to the more aggressive reputation of the American soldiers. When the military spoke to CBC News last fall about the investigations, it stressed it was looking into the allegations against the soldier and their superior officers.

Image source here.

Quote for the day

Denis Smith, reviewing Becoming Canada: Our Story, Our Politics, Our Future, by Ken Dryden

When Stephen Harper reunited some of the Conservative fragments, Ken Dryden argues that Harper was acting on a profound grudge, bringing together voters who felt ignored, neglected and insulted by the Liberal Party's use of power. That was Harper's Big Idea... There was no grand scheme beyond it. Stephen Harper had no larger vision of the country, and still lacks one; he despises visions. He wanted to throw out the Liberal Party and reduce the national establishment of policy and institutions that it had created. Once in office, he understood that the key to retaining power was, simply, to hold on and gradually convince the public that Conservatives, by being there, deserve the office while Liberals do not. He too could govern by guile and inertia. His object was to destroy the Liberal Party and keep his non-Liberals in power.

In the Literary Review of Canada (January/February 2011)

UN: 'Without women... no durable peace'

Why Peace Is the Business of Men (But Shouldn't Be)

A Modest Proposal for the Immodest Brotherhood of Big Men

Ann Jones, at TomDispatch: Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it's time to try something entirely new and totally different. So how about putting into action, for the first time in recorded history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325?...

In a nutshell, SCR calls for women to participate equally and fully at decision-making levels in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking, and reconstruction. Without the active participation of women in peacemaking every step of the way, the Security Council concluded, no just and and durable peace could be achieved anywhere. 'Durable' was the key word...

Most hot wars of recent memory, little and big, have been resolved or nudged into remission through what is called a power-sharing agreement. The big men from most or all of the warring parties -- and war is basically a guy thing, in case you hadn't noticed -- shoulder in to the negotiating table and carve up a country's or region's military, political, and financial pie. Then they proclaim the resulting deal 'peace.'...

But... when the men in power stop shooting at each other, they often escalate the war against civilians -- especially women and girls. It seems to be hard for men to switch off violence, once they've gotten the hang of it... From the standpoint of civilians, war is often not over when it's 'over,' and the 'peace is no real peace at all...

The Security Council... recognized that men at the negotiating table still jockey for power and wealth... while women included at any level of negotiations commonly advocate for interests that coincide perfectly with civil society... all those thing that make life liveable for peaceable men, women, and children everywhere... In more than a decade since SCR was enacted, it has never been put to the test...

When men in war-torn countries negotiated peace, often with the guidance of the U.N., they forgot all about it. Their excuse was that they had to act fast, speed being more important than justice or durability or women. At critical times like that, don't you know, women just get in the way... What we're up against is not just the intractable misogyny of President Karzai and other powerful mullahs and mujahideen, but the misogyny of power brokers in Washington as well...

The sad news from Afghanistan is that a great many progressives have already figured out their own exit strategy... I'll bet many of those progressive Afghan men will bring their families to the United States, where women appear to be free and it's comforting to imagine that misogyny is dead.

Image source here.

Gun deaths: International comparisons

Image: Francois Robert

Gun Deaths -- International Comparisons

To enlarge, go here and scroll down to table.