Solar Cooking

 I am interested in figuring out how to do a solar stir fry.

Happy Naw Ruz

Our thanks to Jimbo, who sent us this quote from the Master.

"O thou whose heart overfloweth with love for the Lord! I address thee from this consecrated spot, to gladden thy bosom with mine epistle to thee, for this is such a letter as maketh the heart of him who believeth in God's oneness to wing its flight toward the summits of bliss.


Thank thou God for having enabled thee to enter into His Kingdom of might. Erelong will thy Lord's bounties descend upon thee, one following the other, and He will make of thee a sign for every seeker after truth.


Hold thou fast to the Covenant of thy Lord, and as the days go by, increase thy store of love for His beloved ones. Bend thou with tenderness over the servitors of the All-Merciful, that thou mayest hoist the sail of love upon the ark of peace that moveth across the seas of life. Let nothing grieve thee, and be thou angered at none. It behoveth thee to be content with the Will of God, and a true and loving and trusted friend to all the peoples of the earth, without any exceptions whatever. This is the quality of the sincere, the way of the saints, the emblem of those who believe in the unity of God, and the raiment of the people of Baha....


Verily is He the Loving, the Tender, the Ever-Bestowing."

(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 25)

Enter Hopefully

Whenever an environmentalist opens his mouth, no matter what he thinks he is saying people take the message to be like what was posted over the door to Hades: "Abandon Hope All Ye That Enter Here." This was just what renowned environmental broadcaster David Suzuki found out to his chagrin when he interviewed his daughter (this, I hear from friends, is the subject of a documentary series being shown on CBC). All her life she had listened to her father going on about the decline of nature. He had imagined that he was being upbeat, but no. She told him that all she had got out of what he had been telling her about the urgency of saving the environment all those years was just that we should give up hope, since we are all hurtling to hell in a hand basket. David Suzuki protested vehemently, "That is not at all what I wanted you to think!" I must say I find Suzuki's voice and demeanour reassuring, even to the point of being mesmerizing. He cannot be faulted for a gloomy aspect. But his beloved environment is in trouble, and I think I am not the only one who finds it depressing to hear about it.

After talking to his daughter, Suzuki subsequently researched the solutions and wrote at least one book about answers to the problem. His daughter is now an environmental writer and broadcaster in her own right.

This is one reason I am writing People Without Borders. When I did come across Suzuki's book of solutions in the library and glanced through it I was almost as saddened by it than his earlier, darker writing. These so-called solutions, helpful as they may be in their own context, are not going to put a dent in the rumbling juggernaut of total planetary destruction. We need far more fundamental changes than having dry cleaners switch from one chemical to another.

 

Consider, if you will, the special report in the latest Scientific American, "Managing Earth's Future; Solutions for a Finite World." The editors sum up the first article, "Boundaries for a Healthy Planet," (Jonathan Foley, SA, April, 2010, p. 54) saying,

"Although climate change gets ample attention, species loss and nitrogen pollution exceed safe limits by greater degrees. Other environmental processes are also headed toward dangerous levels."

The author of the article shows a lovely graphic of the results of a major study by a group of scientists, reported in Nature. The chart looks like a spider splattered over a wall clock, displaying nine factors threatening our survival and how close each is to bursting beyond the earth's natural limit. Only two, nitrogen and biodiversity, have blown well past the line, though one, CO2, is also slightly over the line. In a hopeful turn, they also concentrate on solutions, such as they are. The editors sum them up:

"Promptly switching to low-carbon energy sources, curtailing land clearing and revolutionizing agricultural practices are crucial to making human life on Earth more sustainable."

For the moment, let us assume that this approach is sufficient. The question remains, how do we do it? Governments go hat in hand to energy companies, not the other way around. Curtailing land clearing would require an overhaul of the economy and the entire legal system that supports it. And agriculture? Nationalist states are nominally democratic but voters are not represented proportionally. Rural voters dominate urban ones. As a result, politicians routinely bribe farmers with subsidies in order to get re-elected.

Changes to any of these are simply not negotiable.

The only hope for change is a major overhaul not only of democracy and education, but also of the very ethical and religious reflexes of the human race. How do you do that?

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On the Road

Tommy's Roadside Adventure

By John Taylor; 2010 March 18, Ala' 17, 166 BE

It is March break, and yesterday was the first beautiful spring day. I was busy writing when my ten-year-old son, Tommy, announced that he was walking to Smithville, twenty-five kilometers away. "Good luck with that," I said, and went back to work. Hours later I realized he had been serious and drove to our friend Peter's place in Smithville in hopes of finding Tommy on the way. I told Peter to let us know if he turns up, and drove back. No sign of him on the side of the road, though I did stop a few times for people that looked a little like him, once for a short Mexican worker, another for a couple of other ten year olds playing by the old railway tracks. I was determined not to panic, but I was getting nervous.

When I got back home we got a call from Canborough Farm Supply Store, from a guy who had picked Tommy up. That was in another direction completely, well on the way to Hamilton. Tommy was with him, and they were on the way home to Dunnville. Tommy said he was very thirsty, but was otherwise fine, to our immense relief. The driver, evidently a father himself, dropping him off from a big pickup requested us not to punish Tommy for wandering away from home. No, nothing could be further from our mind. After all, he had told us where he was going. He rushed to the tap to drink his fill of water. I noticed that he was limping, but other than that, he was fine. I was curious to know how he ended up so far from the road to Smithville.

"Well, I walked by Video Tonite, to the Rosaflora wind turbines, and stopped there to rest. Then I got to a little village that had one house that looked like one in Smithville, but it was too small. That was when I started wanting a GPS device. I asked a couple of kids my age where Smithville was, and they pointed it out. I found a spoon on the side of the road, so I drew an arrow with it in the dirt with my initials on it to point out to you the direction I was going, and set out. [towards Canborough, not Smithville] I was getting really thirsty, and after a while I knew that I was really lost. My foot started to hurt. In the end I put up my arm and that guy stopped for me."

We had an appointment with the barber that day, and his sister was convinced that Tommy took his road trip in order to avoid getting his hair cut, but Tommy denied it. When he told us about the arrow he had drawn in the dirt, I almost choked up. One learns, from narrow escapes like that, to appreciate the bounty of being with those one loves.

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'Abdu'l-baha Greets Followers

I was floored to find these films of the Master on meet and greets -- obviously not in Baha'i hands... from historical stock footage. You can see Lua standing by in some of these, wearing the dress the Master himself designed. Enjoy it while it is still up... It does not appear to be the same film owned by the UHJ.


Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha greets a procession of female followers.

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha greets a procession of male followers.

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: A vehicle delivers the holy man (son of the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith) to a home, where he will give a talk

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha's talks to a group of adherents.

Abdu'l-Baha's shakes the hand of an unknown follower.

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha with an unknown female follower.

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha's entourage from Persia follow their master as he speaks.

Footage from Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 visit to the U.S.: Abdu'l-Baha's poses for a photograph with his Persian delegation and American followers.

Equality of Women

Thinking About Equality of the Sexes

By John Taylor; 2010 March 17, Ala' 16, 166 BE

One of the most important principles of peace is the equality of women. I feel remiss in not writing on the Badi' blog about this principle as often as I should on blog devoted to the Baha'i principles.

Nonetheless, I have been thinking about this principle.

For example, as I was listening to a series of recorded lectures about the history of science I noticed that not only were women allowed into Plato's Academy, but also that of Pythagoras. How many ancient institutions did that? Just the two that happened to be the most famous and most brilliant in their discoveries? Could it be that Plato was influenced by this example, since he was inspired by so many other aspects of the Pythagorean school of mysteries? Any future history of the world should pay attention to this speculation.

Abdu'l-Baha once said that women have been instrumental in every great cause. Let me extend His idea to this postulate: the degree and ease with which any organization integrates both sexes may be the long-term measure of its success. The greater the equality and harmony between the sexes the better its chance at greatness.

For consider this: we know that Abdu'l-Baha said that when women enter into government, the result will be world peace. And what better mark of greatness can there be than peace? The establishment of peace would indisputably be the watershed event in the evolution of the human race. No headline could offer better news than, "Permanent Peace Breaks Out!" Think of the huge funds that would be freed up for social spending when the over a trillion-dollar-a-year military-industrial and weapons industries becomes redundant.

And we know that without equal participation for women in government, peace can never happen. Conclusion? Anything that improves the lot of women is the ultimate investment. Each dollar that we invest on educating and improving the lot of girls will, we know, allow them to grow into women who are fully qualified to participate equally in government. That means that within a few decades for each dollar put into it we would probably earn back a thousand, or a million dollars. It is like buying into I.B.M., or Microsoft, or Google, when they first went public. Or, to use an even more apposite and spiritual analogy, it is like the precious pearl that, in the parable, the householder sell all his possessions to get.

This is why I was knocked on my fanny to hear the report on my favorite newscast, Democracy Now!, of a study finding that while single white women are worth, on average, over 40,000 dollars, single Black women own only $100, and Hispanic women $120. Worse,

"The report found nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth, meaning their debts exceed all their assets. ... About a third of single Hispanic women and one-fourth of single black women have no checking or savings account." ("Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America's Future," reported at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/12/study_median_wealth_for_single_black)

I do not know what the mainstream media are nattering about now, but I hope this study is dominating their headlines. Elected leaders should be casting about desperately for a solution to this disparity. We must realize that if future mothers of colour or of non-English linguistic tradition are that poor, what hope is there that they will raise a generation of women healthy and educated enough to found world peace?

I have often thought that the first step to equality has to be to make sure that everybody has the basics as fundamental entitlements: air, food, a home, a bank account, a job, a telephone, an internet connection, an email address and other Web services. In this day and age, these are all staples. The bank account should be set up so that anybody can give charity by contributing directly to the bank accounts of the poorest of the poor. No administration fees, no middlemen. That way I could throw a million dollars or a penny into a poor box and it would automatically be distributed to those who need it most, those at the bottom of the financial pile.

As the above study indicates, most of these bottom dwellers are unfortunately women. Such a way of giving would boost the victims of whatever forces are keeping the poor down. I am not saying that this would be the only answer, but it is a necessary first step to actual, rather than theoretical, equality.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times reported on a more positive development connecting poor women in Africa with those American women who, on average, make over twice the income that our entire family manages to survive upon. How do they connect? By means of a direct deposit to the poor woman's bank account.

"Bead-for-Life, which teaches entrepreneurial skills to impoverished Ugandans, is an example of how Americans can make a difference. Bead makers earn about $200 per month, half of which is deposited in brand-new savings accounts (one huge problem for the worlds poor is that they lack a safe way to save). The women are also encouraged to trade their beads to the program for anti-malarial bed nets, condoms, de-worming medicine and family planning supplies." (Partying to Change the World March 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14kristof.html)

One more note about equality of women.

It occurs to me that equality of the sexes is the paragon of all other kinds of equality Why? Because it is based in the institution of the family. Whatever a family is culturally, in its nucleus it is the very model of a fully integrated institution. Family is the ultimate expression of equality, for it is the only known human institution that increases its numbers wholly from within. No bureaucracy, no matter how smart and efficient, can increase its numbers physically. The moment when conception takes place, nature chooses total, exact and literal equality, taking fifty percent from the male's genetic heritage and fifty percent from the female. If a zygote can do it, why can't we, who are much older and wiser?

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Why We Need a Big Mouth

Barriers to Removing Corruption

Part II in a Series on Corruption in Panorthosia

Corruption is at the root of just about every world problem you can shake a stick at. Let us start shaking.

Worried about global warming? Powerful, wealthy forces routinely corrupt the media and governments to see to it that we never go beyond impotent jawing.

Jumpy about terrorism? There are strict laws controlling the chemicals we rub into our hair and smear on our faces but the religious groups that steer our hearts are rarely even self-regulated; religious leaders spew hate speech with impunity and routinely produce cults, bigots and suicide bombers.

Nervous about war? Munitions manufacturers have their hands deep in the pockets of research, industry and, of course, government. Military ways and tools infect the young, especially boys, from the earliest age, no matter what their parents believe and teach them (my son at ten years old is already an expert on tactics and weaponry, albeit mostly out of science fiction).

Wondering whether something is safe to use or swallow? Scientists, like prostitutes and soldiers of fortune, put themselves up for sale to the highest bidder; the most dubious food, drug or policy can hire researchers ready to amass a mountain of one-sided, dubious evidence to bolster their arguments.

Getting sick from pollution in the air you breath or the water you drink? Do not look for help from politicians, unless you happen to be willing to finance their election campaign with more millions than the factory down the road has been contributing.

Are you feeling hopeful about the ability of next generation to change things? Forget it, by the time young people graduate they are so deep in hock to the banks that it will be ten or twenty years before they can say boo their employers.

Well, forget about mega-projects and major policy changes for a better world. How about something really simple and easy? What could be easier than eating less meat? That is beyond dispute the best thing you can do for both your health and the environment. For almost five years it has been known that meat production is a far worse a contributor to greenhouse gases than transportation. Yet do you hear leaders of thought advising people to become vegetarians? Not a chance.

The reason for all this dilly-dallying with issues of survival is rank corruption, starting with corrupt thinking in our brains, passing through venal pockets and spreading virally into every group and institution of society.

How can we fight such a deep rooted problem?

I have never come across a thinker who gave as much thought to removing this crucial stumbling block as John Amos Comenius. In this series I am going over what he had to say about it in Panorthosia, or Universal Reform. The entire sixth chapter of Panorthosia is devoted to the removal of corruption, being called "Barriers to Universal Reform." It starts off with this resolution:

"Let us begin to examine the hindrances to Reform, considering first those which bind us from within and render us incapable of undertaking any reform whatsoever. This is the true root of all our corruption and failure to accept reform. Let us inquire into this and investigate it thoroughly." (Panorthosia II, Chapter 6, Paragraph 1, p. 99)

Comenius then cites the Roman philosopher Seneca (5 BCE to 65 CE),

"It is mankind's most important attribute that we should not flock along the track of those who are ahead of us, going not in the right direction but where the going takes us."

This Baha'is will recognize as our first principle, the search for truth, which implies avoiding the corruptive influence of imitation and borrowed opinion. This Abdu'l-Baha considered to be a new feature of the Baha'i Faith, not in any narrow sense of Baha'is being the first and only to investigate reality, but rather qua world religion. That is, the Baha'i Faith is the first major Faith to place independent search and avoidance of imitation front and center as a duty for every believer, a fundamental social as well as spiritual principle.

Comenius explains the three main factors blocking personal reform, and the three ways to remove them.

"Three factors contribute to this habit of inwardly accepting the evils into which we have fallen, namely:

I. carelessness and stupidity;

II. prejudice concerning the true and the good already possessed; thence producing indifference;

III. lastly, the most pernicious jealousy for one's own affairs and hatred for those of others.

"These three hindrances must be completely removed and replaced by their direct opposites, namely

I. urgent attention to all current affairs;

II anxious concern for truer knowledge of affairs;

III. readiness and enthusiasm to adopt improvements.

(Panorthosia II, Para 3, pp. 99-100)

This way of extirpating corruption is, in terms of the Baha'i principles, the removal of prejudice. Prejudice is a form of inner neglect, where a person takes an unexamined opinion and takes it to be a fundamental. One replaces prejudices with an attitude of tentative enquiry, a desire to learn by disprove what is false about what we already have. The wording of Comenius sheds light on one of Baha'u'llah's most important pronouncements:

"The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy. Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, CVI, p. 213)

I recently heard a beautiful explanation of this principle of seeking reality and rejecting prejudices on a TVO podcast by a logic professor from the University of Toronto (Steve Joordens, You Can Lead Students to Knowledge, But How Do You Make Them Think?, http://feeds.tvo.org/tvobigideas). He said that music students at his school are encouraged to have "big ears," that is, to listen to all types and styles of music and look for what is elegant about it, never to reject it out of hand because of something we may not approve of about it. In the same way, we need to have "big ears" in matters of opinion. We should seek out arguments that challenge our presuppositions and lead to growth in our learning. He said that also need to have "big mouths," in that we express our opinions in the hope that they will be refuted, and then replaced by something closer to reality.

Of course, in dealing with corruption being called a "big mouth" is surely going to be the least of our worries.

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Master's Letter to Martha Root

The Exemplar Teaches a Teacher how to Teach

By John Taylor; 2010 March 12, Ala' 11, 166 BE

A Late Listing of the Baha'i Principles

In February of 1920 'Abdul-Baha wrote a Tablet addressed to several believers, which was to be transmitted to them through Martha Root. Root was a part-time journalist soon to become a full-time itinerant teacher of the Faith. Shoghi Effendi considered her the greatest teacher of the Faith, bar none. I therefore think that this Tablet is especially important not just because the Master lays out in detail how to approach the difficult task of teaching the Faith, and not only because it was one of the last times He laid out the principles in order, but mostly because of its recipient. It shows that at least somebody, Martha Root, understood the principles and carried them out just as He directed us all to do. She demonstrated in the most spectacular way to carry out the call to teach. In the decades that passed since her death in Hawaii some twenty years after this Tablet was revealed, nobody has come anywhere near the stupendous range of accomplishments in teaching the Faith of this Hand whom the Guardian called an "immortal heroine" and an "incentive and example" to all believers.

In spite of its being addressed to other believers, none of whose name is recognizable today, this truly deserves to be known as the "Tablet to Martha Root." In this essay let us go over what Abdu'l-Baha says about what to say when we teach the Faith.

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Even in His salutation, the Master mentions principles one and two, search and oneness:

"O ye lovers of Truth and servants of the world of humanity!"

Writing in the wake of the First World War, which we now know also included the worst pandemic in modern history, the Master starts off by pointing out the situation. "You will see how the world is upset with internal conflict..." and, "flourishing lands are ruined..." We can conclude that it is good for a teacher to establish the need in society for the teachings, even at the price of being what the Hippie generation called a "downer," that is, dwelling on the hardships and difficulties that lie before humanity. In the next paragraph, Abdu'l-Baha points out the cause of it all.

"The source of all these catastrophes is racial fanaticism, patriotic fanaticism, religious fanaticism and political fanaticism. The source of these fanaticisms is ancient imitations, religious imitations, racial imitations, patriotic imitations, and political imitations. As long as following such imitations persists, the very foundation of humanity is wrecked and the world of man is in great jeopardy."

The translator, Ali Kuli Khan, chooses the word "fanaticism" here, though I suspect that in the original it is a term that is more often translated by "prejudice." Whether fanaticism or prejudice, the main tap root from which the many thinner roots grow is imitation. Imitation is sight by proxy, a blind faith that takes the place of seeing things with our own eyes. The Master continues,

"Now, in such a shining age when the realities have become manifest and the mysteries of the universe are disclosed, the morn of Truth has dawned and the world is illuminated - is it allowable that such dreadful war should occur to throw the world of humanity into manifest loss? No, by God!"

The ultimate cause of all wars, conflict and strife is mental laziness, an existential negligence which He calls "imitation," using a platonic term arising from Plato's theory of the forms or ideas. We either see real objects inwardly for ourselves, or all we see and know is borrowed and unreliable. Plato explained this with his parable of the Den or Cave. Slaves and prisoners are permanently chained inside the cave so that they see only shadows of real objects projected on the wall before them. Having only seen firelight, their eyes are weak. The images projected before them on the wall seem to be the only reality, and the prisoner sceptically reject all else. This is where we get our word "education" from. Education comes from two Latin words meaning "to lead out." In order to be enlightened the prisoners must be led reluctantly out of the cave into the sunlight of "The Good," which is so intensely bright that it blinds them at first.

That is why the coming of a great teacher, in this case Baha'u'llah and the Bab, is inevitably accompanied by great disruption, rejection and persecution. The Master also points to the example of Christ, which is rejected every time the Christian West takes up the sword.

"His Highness Christ called all men to peace and reconciliation and ordered His Holiness Peter to sheath his sword. This was the council and commandment of His Highness Christ. But now all the Christians have drawn their swords! How can this be relevant to that clear text of the Gospel?"

'Abdu'l-Baha then gives a capsule history of Baha'u'llah and His proclamation to the kings, in which He prophesied to the German Kaiser the Great War just passed.

"Likewise, while He suffered wrong and imprisonment at the hand of the Turkish Sultan, and was verily incarcerated in the fortress of Akka - He explicitly wrote the Sultan that Constantinople shall be seized by a great revolution of such violence that women and children shall weep and lament."

In the Proclamation, Abdu'l-Baha says, Baha'u'llah revealed the kernel of what we now call the Baha'i principles.

"In short, He wrote all the crowned heads and presidents of republics what has been exactly fulfilled; and certain teachings were revealed from the Supreme Pen relative to the prevention of war, which have been published throughout the world."

Abdu'l-Baha then outlines what these broad teachings of peace are, in this order:

Independent Investigation of Reality

Oneness of Humanity

Religion is a Cause of Love

Elimination of Fanaticism (Prejudice)

Universal Peace and a World Tribunal

Equality of Women and Men

After explaining each of them briefly, He sums the grouping up by saying: "It has thus become clear and manifest that these teachings are the light of the world of humanity and the ideal spirit." In future essays I will try to expand upon these capsule summaries of the Tablet to Martha Root in a spirit as close to the ideal as I can muster.

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CALS Movie Review

Capitalism, A Love Story

By John Taylor; 2010 March 10, Ala' 09, 166 BE

I have been waiting six months for a chance to see Michael Moore's latest documentary, Capitalism, A Love Story (CALS). I read all the reviews when it came out in cinemas last October but did not get the chance to see it in the cinema. Yesterday CALS was released on DVD and I eagerly rushed over to Super Video to rent it.

I was not disappointed.

Moore is careful in CALS not to make the mistake that other socialists and internationalists always make of concentrating on endless injustices and coming across as stultifying, dreary and pessimistic, of making endless lists of the victories of the plutocracy and the injustices they commit, until the only response that even their most sympathetic listeners have left is Hari Kari. Instead, Moore makes his points in CALS without communicating hopelessness in the slightest, thanks largely to his wonderful gift of humour. I found myself often laughing uproariously, and not always in places intended to be funny. Anything to relieve the bitterness caused by watching the gutting-in-slow-motion of already minimal legal protections for the poor and middle classes in his country over the last three decades.

In CALS Moore for the first time openly plays the religious card. He reveals that he is a fervent Catholic, and tells the story of his early desire to be a priest. He shows that socialism is not the boogieman, but a secular expression of the teachings of Christ. He documents one of the home foreclosures that takes place in the U.S. every seven and a half seconds. I cannot help but observe that the average Americans depicted in these moving scenes are almost all obese. It is as if the food industry had literally fattened them up for the slaughter.

In another theme of CALS, Moore shows an attempt, aided by a Bishop, by an entire factory floor to fight back against their closure and robbery of the workers' pensions by forming a worker's cooperatives. Surprisingly, they gain the approval of the President and win their fight. It is pleasing to see this, but it would have been better if he had taken the time to show the history of the cooperative movement from an international perspective, as Moore did with other issues in his earlier films. As it is, a naive viewer might think that worker coops were just invented. I was surprised to learn last year that coops are almost as large an employer as private industry in many parts of Europe. Reportedly, Moore was so impressed by the coops that he met in the making of CALS that he is considering letting his own employees in on the profits in his future films. Definitely, this deserves more attention and deserves to be the topic of his next movie.

An important but little known fact of history that Moore brings up in the film is the second bill of rights proposed by FDR shortly before his death. I plan to devote an entire essay to this, so I will leave it aside for today. Meantime, you can listen to the original "fireside" radio announcement of the 1944 economic bill of rights at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3NTUNQzr3k

In the DVD extras, Moore includes the entire broadcast of a seminal speech that Jimmy Carter gave at what turned out to be a turning point in American policy. I had heard bad things about this speech, now simply known as the "malaise" speech. I had read that it depressed the American public at a time when they had been getting nothing but bad news, that it paved the way for Ronald Reagan's rise, that it spoke against the rights of the rich, and so forth. However, like most people I had never seen it for myself. Now that I have, I think it deserves to go down in history as one of the most important speeches ever given by an American leader, right up there with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" and his "day that will go down in infamy" speeches.

Not that Carter is not a bit of a downer in that address. Perhaps he should have been more uplifting and hopeful, especially in the first part of the talk, but in 2010 it is astonishingly refreshing to hear a leader speak the truth so frankly and openly. Most important, Carter points to a solution -- no, not a solution, the solution. The only way to get rid of the malaise he talks about is by working it off, by striving for energy independence, in fact by  deriving our energy from the sun rather than burning carbon. Such an initiative is still the only thing the world can do to save itself. After thirty years we are still in the same place. All we have done in the meantime is dithering, pandering to the rich while global warming creeps up on us all.

This has to be the great tragedy of our time. The average American chooses optimism and hope, even in defiance of truth and realism. Love story indeed! It is a seduction, a sordid, illicit affair of a people with their own avarice. Rather than being satisfied with substantive gains for themselves, the majority let themselves get raped by naked greed, clinging to a fond hope that they too may get rich and screw everybody over too. Meanwhile, members of the elites were openly laughing at them, as previously confidential documents reveal (this is not in the film, though).

In a dramatic moment in CALS, Moore interviews a priest, who calls the greed of unrestricted capitalism "out-and-out, naked evil." Moore goes and asks another priest, with the same answer. Then, in a little self-parody, he takes it to their boss, a Bishop, in hopes that he will contradict them. After all, elites are supposed to be for the status quo, and capitalism is totally in the ascendant in the U.S. With mock surprise, Moore finds the ecclesiastic in complete agreement with this stark assessment of capitalism.

Thank God for His holy teachings!

If only we were all seduced by the beauty and compassion of God, rather than Mammon. That would be a real love story, and best of all, our world would not be in its present fix.

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Radio Show

The Cosmopolitan Canadian, A Radio Show

 

By John Taylor; 2010 March 09, Ala' 08, 166 BE

 

 

Here is a proposal I submitted to the CBC in January for a public affairs radio show I called "The Cosmopolitan Canadian." It would be a multimedia meeting show exploring the opinions and reasoning of diverse audiences. It would act as a sort of dynamic poll, exploring not only what people think about events and issues when they happen, but also why they think that way. Better still, it would have given me the chance to do what I have always wanted to do: dress up as Socrates and engage in a live dialogue with live people. Sadly, the idea was rejected by the Powers That Be at CBC.

 

I do not submit my work to others very often. In fact, you could count the times I have done so on one hand. Why? In my formative years, I read a humour piece in Mad Magazine about a writer who got so many rejection letters that he decided to start collecting rejection letters. He papered the walls of his home with them and had only one bare space left. Just one more rejection letter and his collection would be complete. Eagerly he rushes to the mailbox, only to find, to his chagrin, that his manuscript had finally been accepted.

 

That is why I have specially designed the Badi' Blog never to reject anything I write. It has never written me a rejection letter, even when my daily essay is total didgeridoo. So, here is my rejected idea for a radio show.

 

 

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The Cosmopolitan Canadian

 

 

What would you get if you took the best of "Cross-Country Check-up," "Ideas" and "As It Happens" and put it under the benevolent but critical cross-examination of a modern-day Socrates? Answer: "The Cosmopolitan Canadian," a current affairs-meets-philosophy-meets-social media show exploring how to take citizenship to the next level: cosmopolitanism. Each episode of Cosmopolitan Canadian takes a headline or intractable current problem and brings experts and the public together to brainstorm principles, plans and solutions.

The CBC, whose embrace includes radio, television and, increasingly, the Internet, is in a unique position to introduce the concept of "plugged-in democracy" to the world.

 

 

The Plugged-In Meeting

 

 

Recently, political commentators in Canada and the United States have noted with consternation that our democracy is proving to be contentious, corrupt and dysfunctional just when the challenges facing us all, such as global warming and environmental degradation, reach crisis proportions.

 

Ironically, at the same time that applied democracy implodes, impressive electronic technology is being developed to augment and facilitate how we come together, consult and arrive at decisions. Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, for example, offers policy makers a "plugged-in" conference room dynamically linked to what they call "decision support software."

 

Unfortunately, few Canadians have heard of these innovations, nor are there demonstrations of the technology in conferences or public meetings, nor is there experimentation in using it to reform voting and electoral campaigns. The Cosmopolitan Canadian would change this by interposing Socrates, a character who in Ancient Athens was put to death by a similarly imperfect democracy. On this show, he comes back to life to help us use his teaching method to improve what Churchill called "the worst system, except all the others."

 

To begin, in my guise as Socrates I will not need anything more than a remote control device for each audience member allowing him or her to respond "yes," "no," or "maybe" to my questions. This feedback is mediated by unsophisticated "clicker" software that tallies responses in real time. Something similar is already available in many university lecture rooms. Having instant feedback would enable myself or a guest dialectician (usually a trained philosopher) to cross-examine the presuppositions and opinions of a target audience. This group can be either live or virtual, using Internet teleconferencing, or both. This technology permits what has never been witnessed in a public forum or broadcast, to have a large number of people dialogue as a single interlocutor, following a single chain of argument where it leads. For Socrates, this opens up worlds of possibility. Any number of people, lay and expert alike, can serve as foils to his inquiry into the limits of knowledge, in just the way that Plato's friends did for Socrates in the famous Platonic dialogues.

 

Here is how Socrates might apply computer-aided interaction for what he called dialectic.

 

If an audience agrees with a proposition that I (in the guise of Socrates) pose for them, then a graphical summary of their level of consent, doubt or disagreement is projected on a large screen behind me. On radio, this feedback can be dramatized by a spoken, computer-generated voice response, whose variations and intonations are modulated for various effects -- including comic effect. As anyone with young children and an iMac computer knows, such text to speech voices are fascinating, often hilarious and provide highly dramatic feedback.

 

Here is how it works: If, say, more than 80 percent of the audience agree, for example, their collective answer would be an emphatic, "Certainly, Socrates." If more than 80 percent disagree, the answer would be a vehement, "By no means, Socrates," and so forth for every shade of consent between the two. Degrees of consent are signified by spoken phrases taken right out of Platonic dialogues, varying with each shade of perplexity or certainty on the part of the audience.

Note that in order to be portable we might need to write a new computer program from scratch, and my skills are more philosophical than technical. Technicians could adapt existing "clicker" or "smart blackboard" software for this purpose, lending out cheap remote control devices even to large audiences.

 

One goal of these "plugged-in meetings" is to compare live responses from a particular audience with recent statistics, opinion polls and surveys on the question at hand. The interplay of this feedback is projected on a screen behind me to allow audience members also to contrast what they think to what other audiences believe, as well as what, for example, opinion polls say that most Canadians think about a given question. In the radio show, this information is spoken aloud, either by an announcer or perhaps a distinctive computer-generated voice. It would be interesting to see what imaginative tweaks sound technicians, actors and comedians might come up with for the software generated voice responses.

 

Although there will no doubt be moments of levity, the main purpose of the plugged-in meetings on Cosmopolitan Canadian is serious, to bring experts and the general public together and see them interact in ways that have not been technically possible before.

 

Here some ideas for sample shows.

 

An early episode asks how to improve voting and electoral procedures, in view of the rejection a couple of years ago by Ontario voters of a proposed alternative to "first past the post." This episode uses teleconferencing software to connect two meetings in real time, one held in a faculty of democratic studies in a major university along with a simultaneous meeting representing a diverse cross-section of the population. Aided by special software, each of these audiences could not only react to the philosopher's questions but also pose questions themselves to the other group, perhaps offering comments too.

 

Another show asks how to make construction and urban planning more environmentally friendly. It juxtaposes an audience in a faculty of architecture with a meeting of tenants and homeowners. Like many CBC Shows, it would comment on recent news headlines of journalistic interest. As well, Socrates would be there to veer the conversation towards universal concerns, in this case housing needs around the world.

 

Other shows attempt, for the first time in two and a half millennia, to cover the same ground that certain dialogues of Plato, looking at questions like: What is justice? Or, What does temperance mean? Even in Socrates time, this was never done in a real-life setting as part of democratic policymaking.

 

I envisage plugged-in meetings taking place over a whole evening, interspersed with music and short documentary briefings. This leisurely pace would build the cordiality and intimacy so evident in the dialogs of Plato. Later a selection of the dialog can be summarized and compressed into a one-hour weekly show. Like "As It Happens," the Cosmopolitan Canadian could furnish content and sound bites for later newscasts, making it a public affairs show that itself produces news.

 

Because this is so new, I anticipate an extended period of trial and error, trying out live meetings, small and large, before the show "goes live." I would like to work out the technology and conversational techniques with diverse groups in locations across Canada and the globe. If the hardware is portable enough, I would like to hold some meetings in counsel chambers in town halls across Canada; local government is rarely put in the limelight, in spite of the fact that cosmopolitan change starts there.

 

Just as the drama of ideas clashing in Plato's dialogues brings dry, theoretical issues to life, the interest of Cosmopolitan Canadian, especially for young people is watching sparks fly from the interaction between Socrates and audiences.

 

 

Philosophical Goal of the Dialogues

 

 

The Cosmopolitan Canadian starts and ends as a meeting show, a plugged-in meta-dialogue where one group meets another group, and all interact with a comprehensive set of principles. It takes on the central challenge of today: how do we balance the will of the people with the considered opinions of experts? Until we strike this balance, we cannot possibly respond adequately to climate change in our lifetime.

 

The goal of our consultation is to lay out the grounds of common agreement between public and expert opinion upon which future policy can tread.

 

 

Principle

 

 

The Cosmopolitan Canadian is dedicated to the proposition that we can solve conflict and environmental problems only by taking matters to the level of principle, and thereby avoiding conflict. The title is a play on what Immanuel Kant called the "cosmopolitan condition," the ability that a perpetual peace compact would give us to plan a "universal civic society," which Kant considered to be the ultimate consummation of human evolution.

 

As a life-long fan of CBC Radio, especially the three shows mentioned above, there is no need for me to praise this oasis in a vast media desert. A problem, however, especially with news broadcasts for intermittent listeners like me is that the trees crowd out the forest. Conversation flits from one crisis, disaster or issue to the next without overall perspective. The format of the Cosmopolitan Canadian is designed to correct this by uniting all major elements of the human condition into ten broad principles, and cycling through them continually.

 

Although shows start with current events framed in the usual journalistic way, Socrates job is continually to bring the listener back to first principles. As with other CBC shows, a listener who misses an episode of Cosmopolitan Canadian can keep up by visiting its web site, with links to podcasts of missed or extended shows. The site also links to the same mini-documentaries that brief members of the original live audiences about issues discussed. The difference is that the Cosmopolitan Canadian's site revolves around a series of ten world principles. It accumulates data and statistics gathered from meetings held so far; for example, you could see points that audiences agree or disagree with, suggestions that experts made and objections that the lay made in response, and so forth. These results further determine how the principles are framed in future.

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Bonny Taylor

From The Taylors etc.

Bonny Taylor

She was the firstborn daughter of my mother, Myrtle Taylor, and my father, Sydney Taylor. This photo was taken not long before her death. A year later, I was born, as her replacement. Unfortunately I have not yet come across an older picture of Thomas Taylor, the second born of the family. Here is one of the many shots of him as a baby.

From The Taylors etc.

Events, Posts and Comments

Upcoming Events

p23 ==========

Bahai Principles Series

Religion: A Cause for Love or Hatred?

Great persecution always follows the announcement of any new world religion but later great good also comes. Hear the story of Zarrin, one of the Bahai martyrs in Iran, from her sister.

Speaker: Simin Khavari

Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010

8 PM

Garfield Disher Room,

Dunnville Public Library

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Philosopher's Cafe

Open Discussion

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Wainfleet Public Library,

Wainfleet Ontario

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Overview of Recent Posts, mostly Video, to the Badi' Blog, plus some new commentary

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Motivation? Recent Thoughts and Posts

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Every weekday morning is a fight to get my daughter off to school. This morning, hunched over, she cried out, like the star to the director of some film, "Motivation?" She refused to move until she heard a good reason to move. My wife's frantic spurt of machine-gun Czech seemed to be having no effect. I was taken aback for a minute, until it hit me. "Your motivation is the same thing that moves the entire universe. Love." It did not work right away, but she did trudge off reluctantly to school.

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Last night Silvie and I watched the TED talk of an impassioned celebrity cook, Jamie Oliver, who is deeply worried about the diet of the upcoming generation of kids. His TED Wish was that people adopt a program he has devised to teach to this and the past two generations how to cook quick, easy meals. Impressed, I checked out some of his recipes on YouTube, then stumbled across "Eat To Save Your Life." I have posted all eight parts on the Badi' Blog, at:

"Jamie Oliver, Eat To Save Your Life,"

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/eat-to-save-your-life.html

Most of the information in it is received knowledge that I have read many times in articles and books, but Oliver presents it in such a graphic way that it left me shaking in my boots. It amounts to a sort of "Inconvenient Truth" for your diet. It includes the dissection of a man who literally ate himself to death. Not for the faint of heart. This was broadcast on British television, and as one commenter says, it would never, ever make it on the air in North America. Absolutely, this show should be seen by everybody with a human body to look after.

On the same theme, here is a pictorial web site that shows little balloons showing which dietary supplements are backed by real scientific evidence, which have less, and which are totally bogus.

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Another health issue is the question, what pills to pop?

Supplements backed by science

http://www.good.is/post/which-supplements-are-backed-by-science/

Ever since I read of the studies proving that, for an unknown reason, multivitamins take two years off people's lives, it has amazed me that they still sell them, and so-called experts, imitating the past, continue to recommend them. This site should be much better known. If a pill is not up near the top of this list, do not put it in your mouth, you are just paying to shorten your life expectancy.

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Eat Real

Suggested by Hamilton Baha'i, Pat Reid, this discusses the need to change our eating habits not only for health reasons but also to save the environment.

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/eat-real-suggested-by-pat-reid.html

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Here is a strangely fascinating article about disfunctional teacher training. It is a long article that goes into great detail as to why the teaching of teachers has crashed and burned so regularly over the past century.

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Building a Better Teacher, By Elizabeth Green, March 7, 2010

"There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

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All through school I was made aware that the educational system was broken, but here is a report about a bunch of researchers who recognize that and are thoroughly investigating why it fails so badly. It seems that teachers, unlike doctors and just about any other profession you can name, are not trained by older professionals. They take all sorts of courses, finish teacher's college and then on their first day just stand up cold turkey in front of a class, without anything resembling an apprenticeship beforehand. As a result most teachers remain utterly ignorant of what works, even in the mechanics of running a class. Basics like getting and retaining the attention of kids are ignored. The teaching profession has no language to even describe the techniques of teaching. (It is not mentioned here, but one of the most successful innovations of teachers in Canada is simply rigging up teachers with a microphone and PA system; it seems that most of what is said in a classroom has no effect simply because in a noisy environment kids do not even hear the teacher's instructions.)

And when teachers do teach, they fail in the mechanics of what they teach. The article does not discuss what they teach -- I have my doubts about the whole idea of full time classes after age fifteen. I have my doubts about whether mathematics needs to dominate so completely --at the price of philosophy, religion, consultation and other fundamentals that now are afterthoughts. But if you assume that it is a good thing to coop kids up for several hours in a room pounding data into their heads, then these researchers seem to be on to something. Here is a link to some video from this article demonstrating teaching tricks and tips.

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Head of the Class

March 2, 2010

In these video clips from actual classrooms around the country, Doug Lemov, founder of the charter-school network Uncommon Schools, analyzes techniques that effective teachers use to get students to pay attention and follow instructions.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/07/magazine/20100307-teacher-videos.html#/readingaloud

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Why Making Matters, by Annmarie Thomas, from TED 2010, Educational Venue

One of the most fascinating TED talks I have found recently did not make it on the main stage and was not filmed. To get it, you have to read a transcript, which is at:

http://annmariethomas.typepad.com/annmarie-thomas/2010/02/why-making-matters-from-ted2010.html

According to her, a poll found that "72% of U.S. teenagers ... had never taken an industrial arts or shop class." Americans must have a much more practical approach than here in Canada because I have never heard of any pupil getting a chance to lay hands on a tool until high school. That is zero percent, and it is absolutely pathetic. In my opinion, kids should be fully competent at at least one hands-on trade by the time they leave grade school. I am a great fan of computers, but there is no way a kid should even look at one before the age of ten. It is scandalous how theoretically obsessed our education has become. As Thomas points out,

"We would not expect a musician to be successful if they were only taught theory and then not handed an instrument until college.  The same holds true for making. You would be surprised at how many engineering students (in) colleges see who have never really built anything."

The result, she says, is that people today give up at the first hint of failure. Making something with your own hands trains you in a sort of mental toughness, a perseverence, that is rarely seen now, even in mental tasks like stringing thoughts together into a coherent argument. She points to the school that turned out the greatest intellectual and social critic in the world, Noam Chomsky.

"Educator John Dewey founded the Chicago Laboratory School which had a strong emphasis on learning by doing. Children studied the manual arts at every level of their education. Dewey championed the need for children to be allowed to build real things, with real tools. Thus, when the kids decided they wanted to build a playhouse, they got some advice from teachers and did it themselves. A two story playhouse, custom furniture, complete with the appropriate building permits, designed and built by children under the age of 14."

"Jump forward 100 years and we have a generation of kids, many of whom may never be taught how to make things with their own hands.  Im not suggesting that we give a two year old a chainsaw (mine still has a plastic tool set), but that we acknowledge that, like playing an instrument, making is a skill which takes years to develop and is best started early."

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Recent Posting: A Theory of My Father, on March 04, 2010

The Psychology of Incompetence - Ron Burk

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/theory-of-my-father.html

On the post I comment:

"My father watched a lot of politics when I was young and he said he could always predict the winner just by looking at the candidate. If he was tall, handsome, even featured, he was a shoe-in. Finally somebody else has picked up on that theory."

This five minute talk is not serious, or even coherent, but it is very good food for thought nonetheless. It starts with an old joke: "A blond and a redhead walk into bank for a job interview. Who gets the job?" Answer, the one with the bigger boobs. Same is true for men. The tall ones are promoted, even when they mess up. This is part of one of the most basic prejudices: as children we literally look up to adults, who are superior and much taller. So we elect leaders who are tall, we promote them, admire them, even when short people are smarter and better at the job. Since women average a couple of inches shorter than men, this prejudice certainly affects them as well, even when sexual discrimination is off the table.

I am sure that this kind of prejudice, built into the present system, will become more of a political issue in coming years. I think Tahireh Naylor's idea for an election, which she talked her law school's student counsel into implementing, will become universal someday (Tahireh is now a BIC rep at the U.N.). She told them that old campaining does not work. We do not need to put people's faces up on posters (she did not emphasize it, but  suchpublicity by nature opens an election up to prejudices of age, height and looks), why not publicize the virtues we need in a student counsel president? That way during the campaign people can meditate on what person shows an inner quality, not whoever somebody thinks is electable or who has the most appealing face. Her idea was implemented, virtue posters were plastered throughout the school, and by all accounts, it worked very well in picking out students with these qualities.

As this speaker, Ron Burk, points out, this kind of prejudice affects hiring as well. When a company picks a highly qualified rising star for a posting, they may be cutting their own throat. A superficially successful person has no experience with failure and adversity, and is in a mental rut based on easy victories that may not be deserved. Quick and easy fixes that happened to work in the past are all they know. Overcoming truly tough problems requires qualities that a successful person has not developed. Instead, figure out ways to choose people based on grit, not a flashy resume. Which is one reason more why the Manifestations of God are best qualified as leaders of religion, for suffering counts far more than schooling.

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More Video on the Badi' Blog:

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One God

March 04, 2010

YouTube video of the song "One God" by Barbra Streisand. Contributed by Ed, this is one of the few love songs to the source of all love.

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/one-god.html

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How to Work a Crowd, Ignite Talk, Ep23 - Alexis Bauer March 04, 2010

"It occurs to me that this is a skill that Baha'i teachers would do well to learn and apply."

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-work-crowd-ignite-talk-ep23.html

"In this week's Ignite Show episode, Alexis Bauer shows us how easy and effective it is control your own social fate and turn a room full of strangers into friends."

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