David Haas is cancer patient advocate who writes and researches to help people going through cancer. His blog is located at http://haasblaag.blogspot.com/

Ask any cancer patient what their number one fear is during the treatment process and many of them will probably tell you not having someone around them that understands what they are going through — others will probably say they’re afraid of complications. The experts in the medical community understand the psychological importance of having someone around you that you can talk to about your fears and anxiety and also to give you invaluable knowledge on the process.

Patients with any kind of cancer including common diseases like skin cancer and rare and deadly diseases like mesothelioma may feel like they are at the lowest point in their life. They may feel like there is no way they can mentally cope with their condition, but what they don’t understand is that many other patients have felt the same way when they battled cancer. This is one reason cancer support groups are important. It gives patients the opportunity to share their fears by talking with other people who are going through the same thing and have been through the same thing. Many people believe that the greatest feelings of safety and comfort come from being surrounded by people who care and people who understand.

Patients in remission will reassure new patients that the medical community has greatly advanced in recent years, making cancer treatment easier and less stressful than previous times. This article from Cancer.gov lists how far radiation treatment has come and how it helps patients.

To keep their spirits alive, patients going through treatment attend support groups to ask for advice from other experienced patients. The advice that a patient going through the same thing or in remission gives is invaluable to other patients because they know just how hard the journey is; they know personal advice that can help patients that doctors may otherwise not know.

This kind of help empowers cancer patients, renewing their positive outlook on their condition and life in general. Being positive can greatly improve the healing process by giving a person a renewed energy about their condition. Moreover, patients who are restrained to their bed can visit online support group communities. It is not necessary to appear in person to a group session. There are plenty of online sessions with real people who can help. Here are a few great online cancer support groups:

Inspire.com

Caring Bridge

The cancer support group system’s importance cannot be stressed enough. It is crucial for cancer patients to connect with other patients to share advice and to create camaraderie to fight this disease together.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&q=the+money+masters&total=630&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Normally any discussion of the economy or finance causes my eyes to glaze over. However, I chanced upon this documentary and started to watch it. Shortly thereafter, I was glued to it. I finally understand questions I’ve had for a long time.

1) How do they know how much money to print?

2) What causes recessions/depressions?

In addition I learned a lot more about the corruption inherent in our financial system. Well worth the 3.5 hours this documentary runs for. Just one question: what is with this guy and his pen?

In the past few months we’ve witnessed remarkeable events in the market. First we have the Fed bail out of Bear Stearns. What wasn’t widely covered or discussed was that this was effectively a result of a run on a bank.

Modern banking practices partial reserve banking. That is to say that the bank relies on the fact that not every customer requires their funds in cash at any one time. As a result the bank invests your funds during the intervals where you don’t need the cash in your hands. Banks in the US are required to maintain only 10% reserves. A banker can then invest 90% of the banks funds to turn a profit. This is called banker’s reach.

A run on the bank occurs when customers or investors lose confidence in your banking facility and demand their cash back. If enough customers demand their cash, the bank exhausts its reserve and enters a liquidity crisis. This is exactly the fate that befell Bear Stearns. It is interesting to note that Bear Stearns was a financial institution which survived the Great Depression of the 30′s. Had the Fed not acted as it did to bail out Bear Stearns, we may well have been in a greater depression at this very moment.

Please don’t infer from the previous sentence that I agree with the Fed. I think they served to cure the disease by killing the patient. They’ve borrowed excessively from the taxpayers and the US currency to temporarily asuage the bleeding, but haven’t sutured the severed arteries. The Fed’s own actions of forever creating bubbles and taking hindsight corrective half-measures is the very cause of our current problems, not in any way a solution.

There is no doubt that we live in ‘interesting times’ intended in the confucian sense. Just this week we’ve witnessed a second run on the bank in as many months.  This time we’re witnessing a run on the food bank.  Reports are coming in of rationing at Costco stores of rice, flour and cooking oil.  We’re not talking about Costco stores in third world countries.  We’re talking about the continental United States.

What has happened is that large commercial bakeries and other such chains have panicked at the rapidly increasing price of these staples and snapped up local supply.  Yes, eventually this will all work itself out, but the question is, why is this happening in the first place.  There are a few answers:

• The price of oil.  The price of oil affects the food supply in two ways. First it increases the shipping costs which are passed on to the consumer.  Next, it creates a surplus of money in the Middle East which then funnels its way back into the US economy as speculation.  Hedge funds use this money to invest in grain futures which artificially drives up their price.
• Biofuels.  Biofuels are a useless ‘environmentally friendly’ measure which were put in place by politicians to placate the populace.  Corn and other staples are diverted to be converted into biofuels taking food out of the food supply and putting it into our gas tanks.  There has been worldwide rioting especially in regions where food constitutes a large percentage of the general publics’ expenditure.
• Loss of farmland.  Farmland is being lost to urban sprawl and to environmental measures whereby farmers are being subsidized not to plant crops.  Sure environmentalism is great, but it turns out that humans are animals too, and our suffering should figure into environmental equations.
• Malthus.  Malthus famously argued that populations grow geometrically (2,4,8,16, …) while the food supply grows arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5,..) .  We live in a world of approximately 6 billion which is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050.  Further the billions of China and India are no longer content to eat simple rice and vegetables but also want cars, beef and the more excessive lifestyle of their North American Counterparts.  As a result, we can expect more shortages of gas and food until we learn to live within our means.

Video of the Program: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoutils/globalfiles/VideoPop.cfm?spot_id=5566&sitefolder=theagenda

I watched a program on TVO last night about overpopulation. I usually steer clear of this issue because I find it depressing. Just the same, it’s always in the back of my mind. With last night’s program, I posted a comment on their blog which I’ve included here:

A great program on an issue few are willing to discuss. However, it touched on, but didn’t flesh out the issue of exponential (or compounding) growth which lies at the core of the issue. A common math problem given to students in this regard is called the Lily Pad Problem.

Suppose a pond has one lily pad. The lily pad doubles each day. That is 1 lily pad turns into 2 lily pads each day. Given that at the end of one month (30 days) the pond is covered in lily pads: When is the pond 1/2 covered? When is the pond 1/4 covered?

Human psychology is not geared towards thinking in exponential terms. When you push a certain amount on the gas pedal, the car goes a certain speed. When you push a bit more, the car goes a bit more faster. The gas pedal is a linear system and it’s how humans think.

So let’s answer the lily pad problem and comment on the ‘poor record’ of the ‘population alarmists’ in one felled swoop. Suppose someone on day 27 shouted: “my heavens, the pond is almost full!” Casual observers may be perplexed because the pond would be 7/8ths or 88% empty. On the next day, day 28, the pond would be 3/4rs or 75% empty. Even the next day, day 29, the pond would be 1/2 or 50% empty. The alarmist would likely be dismissed out of hand. However only one short day later, day 30, the pond would be completely covered and the naysayers would be proved wrong, only too late.

“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe” wrote Albert Einstein. Powerful yes, but counter intuitive for humans and the guests on last night’s program. They pointed to the advents in technology and agriculture which have staved off any population crisis. Going back to our lily pond: doubling the size of our pond gives us how many more days before the pond is covered again? One. Quadrupling the size of the pond gives us how many extra days? Two. Not to mention, that the agricultural revolution the guests mentioned was largely brought about by petroleum based fertilizers. Petroleum in turn is undergoing and exponential growth in consumption and in price.

As a parting parable about the power of compounding: Suppose your child asks you, in lieu of a raise in his/her allowance, to give them a penny a day, doubling it every day. Sounds like a good deal, but with our new found understanding of exponential growth, we need to be cautious. After two weeks, we’d owe our child some $163 which is a hefty allowance but no big disaster financially. However, two short weeks later (30 days from the start) we’d owe them nearly $11 million dollars. Clever kid. Can the human race be this clever? Can we afford not to be?

Further reading:
http://www.ciesd.org/influence/LilyPad.shtml http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.doubling.pennies.html
http://youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

“And therefore the monkey looks like man, and is an example of a generation of men which were created and made but were only wooden figures.”

                                                                                                   — Popol Vuh 

If you started reading this hoping for chapter and verse quotations such as Genesis 10:20 “And the Lord made dinosaurs” followed by Genesis 20:30 “The Lord then made monkeys from which he made humans” you’re going to be disappointed.  Of course if such blatant quotes were available, there would be no need for this article.

The reader will need to jump through some theological hoops to find Darwin in the Bible.  However, the reader will be pleasantly surprised that those hoops are not as insurmountable as one might expect.

The first hoop come in accepting that the Quiche Maya are offshoots of the Israelites.  The Quiche Maya are of course from Central America and the Israelites were from the Middle East.  Modern historical dogma claims that there were no interactions between these two peoples.  For a detailed explanation of how this cultural exchange is plausible please see:

http://www.martincwiner.com/extensive-semitic-presence-documented-in-pre-columbian-america/

I’ll offer a short summary of the top 3 points as to why this theory is plausible:

1) One author of the Popul Vuh (The Mayan Sacred Writings) declares:

I, Don Fransisco Gomez, first Ahzib Quiche, write here on this paper of the coming of our fathers and grandfathers from the other side of the sea [ocean] whence the sun rises.” 
(Note: The sun rises in the east.)
http://books.google.ca/books?id=NQnJQR6LQuwC&lpg=PP1&ots=ALQTK0MinL&dq=popol%20vuh&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false

2) A signature biblical story… splitting the sea and crossing it dry shod appears in the Popul Vuh:

And it is not clear how they crossed over the sea. The crossed as if there were no sea. They crossed as if on some stones, stones piled up in the same. They give the stones a name, Rock Rows, Furrowed Sands was the name for the place where they crossed through the midst of the sea. Where the waters divided they crossed over.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=NQnJQR6LQuwC&lpg=PP1&ots=ALQTK0MinL&dq=popol%20vuh&pg=PA183#v=onepage&q=sea&f=false

3) There is an odd copy of the Ten Commandments in the New Mexico desert called the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone.  This is thought to be an artifact of ‘Calalus’, an Israelite colony in the New World circa 700CE.

http://www.martincwiner.com/extensive-semitic-presence-documented-in-pre-columbian-america/

If we can accept that the Maya are an offshoot of Israelites, we reap the rewards of finding references to Evolution in the creation myth of the Maya.  In essence, the Bible tells of the creation of man out of dust of the earth.  The Mayan version fills in the blanks between drafting room and final product.

The creation myth of the Maya closely parallels the Biblical one.  The interpositions of additional narrative is likely to be the preservation of details from the precursor myths to both the Bible and the Popol Vuh.  This is the second and final theological hoop one must jump through.

It is in one of these interpositions, the story of the creation of man, where we find Evolution in the Bible.

In the Mayan creation myth, the creators seek to create creations which can speak and adore their creators (self aware, and aware of creators).  First they fail with the animals:

But they could not make them speak like men; they only hissed and screamed and cackled; they were unable to make words, and each screamed in a different way.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=NQnJQR6LQuwC&lpg=PP1&ots=ALQTK0MinL&dq=popol%20vuh&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q&f=false

They go on to try again with the animals and fail.

The first attempt at man:

Then was the creation and the formation. Of earth, of mud, they made [man's] flesh. But they saw that it was not good. It melted away, it was soft, did not move, had no strength, it fell down, it was limp, it could not move its head, its face fell to one side, its sight was blurred, it could not look behind. At first it spoke, but had no mind. Quickly it soaked in the water and could not stand.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=NQnJQR6LQuwC&lpg=PP1&ots=ALQTK0MinL&dq=popol%20vuh&pg=PA86#v=onepage&q&f=false

Here we have another attempt at man:

And instantly the figures were made of wood. They looked like men, talked like men, and populated the surface of the earth.

They existed and multiplied; they had daughters, they had sons, these wooden figures; but they did not have souls, nor minds, they did not remember their Creator, their Maker; they walked on all fours, aimlessly.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=NQnJQR6LQuwC&lpg=PP1&ots=ALQTK0MinL&dq=popol%20vuh&pg=PA89#v=onepage&q&f=false

A great flood (similar to Noah’s) destroys the wooden creatures.  It is said that the monkeys (primates) descend from these beings.

So was the ruin of the men who had been created and formed, the men made to be destroyed and annihilated; the mouths and faces of all of them were mangled.

And it is said that their descendants are the monkeys which now live in the forests; these are all that remain of them because their flesh was made only of wood by the Creator and the Maker.

And therefore the monkey looks like man, and is an example of a generation of men which were created and made but were only wooden figures.

http://www.meta-religion.com/World_Religions/Ancient_religions/Central_america/popol_vuh.htm#ixzz14x3rU0IG

So here we have textual evidence of a creationist-evolutionary tale found in the sacred works of the Maya.  We have strong narrative correspondence between the Bible and the Popol Vuh suggesting that the interposed narratives are preserved from the antecedent myths of both works. 

It is a perhaps bitter irony that in order to find textual evidence of Evolution in Biblical narratives, we must accept cultural evolution and migration of the early Israelites to Central America. 

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/whats-wrong-with-the-economy/

This graph shows that the problem started back in 1913, not in 1971 as Beck describes.  Beck is however correct in asserting that it is a problem with the US withdrawing from the Gold Standard.  The US withdrew from the Gold Standard in 1933 domestically, and 1971 internationally.

Even before that, the Federal Reserve was able to manipulate (inflate) the currency to a limited degree from its inception in 1913.  It is the Fed which has and always will be the problem.  The Fed has never and will never be able to offer a solution.

For more information, please see:

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-ancient-roots-of-injustice/

Dumb

Project Lifeline is a Bush administration initiative to give distressed mortgagees an additional month before their homes are foreclosed upon. This reprieve goes not only to subprime borrowers but to all distressed borrowers. The subtext to this move is that not only are subprime borrowers in distress. One month’s grace is dumb because the amount of debt that we’re dealing with coupled with the loss of equity from falling housing prices is not something that is going to resolve itself that quickly. This is akin to giving a starving man a rice cake. We all know that rice cakes are good only as coasters, so too is Project Lifeline.

Dumber:

Interest rate cuts are an even dumber idea. Last month the Fed cut rates by a staggering 1.25%. There is strong rumour that more cuts are coming. This is a dumber idea for a few reasons. First interest rate cuts are the cause of debenture spending. The reason we’re in the mess we’re in is because people are/were spending money they didn’t have. Next, lowered interest rates cause economic bubbles such as the housing bubble which is just in the process of bursting. Finally, interest rate cuts increase government debt. The way that the Fed lowers interest is by buying treasury bills with printed money. This devalues the currency and increases government debt. Thus, interest rate cuts are the cause of the current economic quagmire, and certainly aren’t the cure.

Dumbest

The US Stimulus Package is the dumbest possible idea. Under the package, people could see $600 to $1200 in tax rebates. First off, the amount itself is a pittance. Next, where is the money coming from? The money is being borrowed from China to be repaid with interest. Where is the money going? The money, it is hoped, will be spent into the economy to buy ‘stuff’. Where does all the stuff come from? The stuff comes from… China. The real underlying problem is that the US economy has shifted from a production based economy to a consumer based economy. Until you address that problem, any attempts to throw money at the problem will simply throw money in other people’s pockets. I’ll give the government some credit though, the US Stimulus Package does manage to stimulate an economy; perhaps the government will fund moving its citizens to Beijing where the positive effects can be felt.

Capturing the voice of the customer is difficult when it comes to web visitors.  They visit, the peruse, they leave.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could allow for your visitors to speak with you in real time?

Now you can.  Simple2Chat.com has added a widget which will allow you to do exactly that. 

http://www.simple2chat.com/embed.php

has instructions on how to generate a widget for your website. 

When a visitor wishes to start a conversation s/he can click on the widget on your website:

Simple2Chat.com Widget

You are notified in a tracking conversation:

Notification in tracking conversation

You can then click on that conversation and speak with your visitor in real time.

Response to Customer

All of this is free, anonymous, and doesn’t require anyone to install any software.

Pretty simple huh?  Shouldn’t everything be this easy?

In this monthly column, Dr. Martin Kijazi discusses how we can be active participants in creating a healthy environment.

One of my favourite free events in Toronto is the Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market. While writing a serious article in this humour issue, I will at least attempt a joke: “What is a Pedestrian Sunday in Toronto? It is the Sunday when cars are grounded, there are free shows on the streets, and people finally get to see their neighbours and talk to strangers after a long time!” This past Sunday, like many other Pedestrian-Sundays lovers, I hit the streets of Kensington Market. The streets are closed to cars between 12pm and 7pm, allowing pedestrians to freely stroll the streets while enjoying a great variety of foods for sale, free street music, and talent and cultural performances.

After chitchatting with other pedestrians, I realized that Pedestrian Sunday means different things to different people. Jorge Fabiano, an immigrant from Brazil, was calmly watching a street performance of Capoeira, a mix of martial arts, sports, and music. Capoeira, now strongly entrenched in Brazil, was mainly created by descendants of African slaves from SouthWest Africa (modern Angola) with Brazilian native influences, probably beginning in the 16th century.

For Jorge, watching Capoeira during a pedestrian day meant, “feeling a great sense of connection, to my roots, to my culture.” For, Sarah, a teenager who was eating a Mexican empanada while watching a street band with her family, the pedestrian day meant, “lots of fun; you go out with family, eat great food, and watch free shows and stuff.”

On Augusta street, I met Michael Hans, a middle-aged gentleman who was sitting on a permanently parked car, stripped of its inner component and filled with soil, on which various plants, including a tree, are now growing (behold, the greener future will have trees growing on cars — and vice versa)! Michael rode his bicycle all the way from Dupont Street to Kensington Market. He has attended all Pedestrian Sundays during all the eight Pedestrian Seasons, which run on every last Sunday of every month from May to October each year. For Michael, Pedestrian Sunday means, “People’s power to reclaim their streets from polluting, unsustainable machines.”

This sample of views captures the over-arching theme of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market: community, culture, ecology. If you attend, you will notice not only a great sense of community and celebration of cultures, but also a sense of respecting the local ecology. The practice fits well with what urban planners call “Smart Growth,” or “New Urbanism.” In addition to efficiency and a mix of land uses, opportunities and activities in the “inner city,” Smart Growth attempts to provide a variety of transportation choices, including pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods. It also seeks to maintain a unique sense of place by respecting local cultural and natural features.

I hope Pedestrians Sundays in Kensington Market and elsewhere are only a snapshot of a more frequent and widespread future practice in our city, as part of Toronto’s Smart Growth. Goals of Smart Growth (according to Vision 2000, Chattanooga, TN) include: creating a positive self-image for the community; making the downtown vital and liveable; alleviating substandard housing; solving problems with air, water, toxic waste, and noise pollution; improving communication between groups; and improving community members’ access to the arts. If implemented in earnest and knit large on a regular basis in our cities, the elements of Pedestrian Sundays can open up an alternative idea of urban planning to traditional city planning that encourages sprawl. As we celebrate these Pedestrian Sundays, let’s aim higher. Let’s use what Michael called “People’s power to reclaim their streets” to demand from our politicians and planners incorporation of more Sustainable/Smart Growth goals in city plans.

Action Items:

• We hope to see you at Kensington Market on the last Sundays of September and October for the remaining pedestrian Sundays
• Visit www.pskensington.ca/ for more information including how to get involved as an artist, musician, or performer, and how to stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, or email list

Whenever you have an opportunity to engage with your local politicians and city planners, push for Smart Growth goals

Sixteen-year-old Estelle Ah-Kiow was born in Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar.

The native-French speaker moved to Mississauga, Ontario, four years ago and immediately took note of key differences. She says, “I grew up on a tropical island, so I never experienced a real winter. The language is also different. It was hard for me to adapt at first because I wasn’t fluent in English.”

Estelle also took note of similarities. “Sadly,” she says, “I saw that gender inequality is present in Canada, as it is in Mauritius and every other country in the world. Often, when thinking about all the injustice in the world, I couldn’t help but have feelings of anger, frustration, and helplessness. However, I realized that negativity won’t change anything, and instead, I’ve chosen to focus on the positive.”

Now she is using her voice to help empower, inspire, and educate women and girls around the world. Estelle, who plans on studying Human Rights and Conflict Studies or International Relations after high school, adds, “I want to be a good role model for other young girls and help them understand that women are strong, courageous, and capable of anything.”

Last fall, she joined Plan Canada’s “Because I Am a Girl” campaign, designed to unleash the power of girls and women in the developing world. As part of its Speakers Bureau, Estelle has given lectures and facilitated workshops for about 100 girls at two “Girls Night In” events in the Greater Toronto Area. She has also encouraged fellow students to organize their own events and is mentoring a new member of the Speakers Bureau.

For over a year, Estelle has been contributing to the “Strength Within Girls Group” at swiggtalk.com, a non-profit online community of women and girls sharing stories, advice, and information with each other. A regular contributor to the swiggtalk blog, Estelle has used her writing to educate and inspire other teenage girls, with topics ranging from job interview skills to debunking diet myths.

The passion and power in her writing hasn’t gone unnoticed. Estelle has already won the “French for the Future” national essay contest, “Leaders of Tomorrow” essay contest, and the Gold Award from the Royal Commonwealth Society’s writing competition.

Liz Coulson, swiggtalk co-director, says of Estelle, “I have never known anyone at her age with such vision, commitment, conviction, and dedication. I can’t wait to see where she goes.”

And neither can we!

As part of International Development Week, the Ontario Council for International Cooperation (OCIC) is honouring five young women from across the province — including Estelle Ah-Kiow — for empowering and making a difference in the lives of women and girls in their communities and around the globe.

International Development Week 2012 is February 5-11, 2012. During that time, OCIC, an expanding community of Ontario-based international development and global education organizations and individual associate members working globally for social justice, will honour five young “Global Changemakers” for their work to promote gender equality in their communities and around the world.

This initiative is undertaken with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). To view a video profile of Estelle, and to learn more about International Development Week 2012, visit http://bit.ly/ocicIDW12.

Stirling Fan

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/9051/msi_employees_stirling_engine_theory/index.html

I’ve posted information about Stirling Engines before:

can-stirling-engines-coupled-with-solar-power-be-the-key-to-meeting-our-energy-needs/

If you follow that link you’ll find a kit which can I used to build such an engine and video of it in operation.

What is cool about this latest application to cool a CPU is that it doesn’t require any additional energy to run.

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

My tried, tested and true recipe.
3 leeks, trimmed, well washed and quartered
6 carrots
1 extra large parsnip (or 3 regular sized ones)
1 entire celery
1 entire garlic bulb (separate into cloves, peel, mash and chop)
1 bunch dill
4 bay leaves
12 peppercorns
2 Tbsp white wine
3 Tbsp salt
3 Tbsp sugar
3 pkgs chicken bones parts (enough to cover bottom of a 16 quart pot)
fill water up to one inch from top

Combine all ingredients in a 16 quart stock pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low, simmer for a few hours. Refrigerate overnight and then skim off fat. For a clearer broth, strain through cheesecloth.

Yield:

30 cups = 7.1 Litres = 1.88 US gallons = alot for gentiles = enough for former slaves of Egypt

Flounder: Intelligent Design?!

 I was watching this debate on Creationism (Intelligent Design):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Q8p3GqPqQ

If you want to stump a creationist, it’s easy.  Just ask them to produce a testable hypothesis.  They’ll stamp their feet and wave their hands but they won’t produce nary a one.  While they fume, you might offer some examples of unintelligent designs to drive some final nails into the coffin of what is ultimately a stupid debate.

Here is an interactive which provides evidence for evolution through the imperfections found in nature:

http://www.funtrivia.com/trivia-quiz/SciTech/Evidence-for-Evolution–Unintelligent-Design-209350.html
http://www.funtrivia.com/playquiz/quiz20935017f89d8.html

** If anyone is aware of evolutionary imperfections, please post them in the comments.  If we get enough of them I’ll create a post list.  An example would be the fact that humans can’t make vitamin C but make it 3/4rs of the way along the chemical pathway.

Each month Azraa Janmohamed discusses timely topics relevant to teens

Give an Invaluable Gift this Holiday Season!

The holiday spirit is once again in the air, spreading joy, merriment, and laughter all around. As we simmer in the excitement that the holiday season instils in each of us, it is customary to think about which gifts we want to open on Christmas morning. What we often forget to think about is what we can give to others to make their holidays just as special.

Living in Toronto, we are lucky to be surrounded by a city that actively engages us to think about those who live in less fortunate situations. The city provides us lots of opportunities to make a family’s Christmas wishes come true. One such program that we can participate in is the Children’s Aid’s Adopt-A-Family program, whereby your family or your school can support a local family by providing them with gifts for the holiday season.

Although an exciting initiative, the Adopt-A-Family program may be hard for some of us to take part in. For those of you still looking to give back to a global community this holiday season, I may just have a little something for you: www.freerice.com is a United Nations World Food Programme initiative to help provide free education to people around the world, and end world hunger by providing rice to those who face the issue of hunger every day. Are you a high-school student acing your way through all of your courses? An older sibling trying to teach your little brother basic math? Or just a person with a passion for giving? Then this is a website that will help you achieve your personal goals, whatever they may be.

As a user of this website, you can pick a combination of subjects and a level of difficulty. Some of the possible subjects include: English vocabulary or grammar, French, Math, Geography, Chemical symbols, and Literature. Once chosen, a series of questions pertaining to the combination will pop up. Each time you answer a question correctly, the website will donate 10 grains of rice to the initiative on your behalf. If you answer the question correctly, your next question will be slightly harder. If you answer it incorrectly, then the next question will be slightly easier.

Although it may not seem like much, the 10 grains of rice that you give, coupled with those of other players, can provide a meal for a family in need halfway across the world. In your own way, you are almost giving someone the most valuable gift of all — the gift of life and sustenance; the gift of allowing them another day in which they can reach their fullest potential. In a cold winter season, this message truly warms my heart. I hope that each and every one of you will join me this holiday season by aiming to donate at least 300 grains of rice (30 questions) through this website!