Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Thirteen

In this episode of The Climate Trials, the elementary and high schools are on trial.

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An excerpt from “Education Under the Microscope in The Climate Trials”, by Dr. Fred Whitehand, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, The Journal of Pedagogical Research, Vol 43, pp34-57.

Many academics were surprised when they saw a portion of the Climate Trials devoted to the public education system. It’s a rare thing indeed for someone to find their vocation and profession placed under an inquisitorial microscope---it is even rarer still to come away from the process both chastened and glad that it happened.

In a nutshell, the critique centred around the way primary public education has developed in the modern world and how the form of teaching has tended to twist the substance. The argument was outlined by Hank Whittle whereas the system was defended by Maximilian Shrike. As many commentators have mentioned about other parts of the Trials, Mikhail Bookchin had an uncanny ability to pluck individuals out of obscurity who turned out to have an absolutely brilliant grasp of the facts and who could summarize them in a way that anyone with average intelligence and a standard public education could easily understand. Whittle and Shrike were both excellent examples.

Whittle was, of all things, a plumber with a successful middle-sized business in Gary, Indiana. Shrike was a barber from Seneca, New York. Whittle’s main points were as follows:

1. The form of public education is hierarchical and based on the industrial system of production.

2. Its content is strongly biased towards assimilating facts instead of learning how to learn.

3. School children are managed through competition and submission to authority and this doesn’t teach them how to be good citizens in a democracy.

4. Manual skills and technical innovation are discouraged by a syllabus that focuses on theory instead of practice.

Taken together, these points create a large fraction of the citizenry that are ill-prepared to understand the complexities and magnitude of the Climate Emergency. This allows them to be easily manipulated by vested interests who actively conspired to sabotage any move towards preventing catastrophe.

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I wish everyone a good Yule. I hope things are going well you and yours. It's been a bit of a "ride" for me at the Back-Grounder this year. I've put out 64 posts, starting in January with a book review trying to explain why people online often seem to be so darn angry, and, an interview with Wellington County MP Michael Chong about Parliamentary reform. In between were a lot of other stories. I have a certain pride in my output. That's why I think people who can afford it should be willing to pay for what they read online. As little as a dollar a month helps, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.   

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Whittle’s first point was that universal public education wasn’t created to help all children maximize their potential as human beings, but rather to make sure they are integrated into the economy and society that existed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. If you read the literature of the time when universal public education was first introduced, it’s obvious that many of the most influential advocates were more interested in control than edification. This wasn’t exclusively about being able to willingly work in “Satanic Mills” either. It was understood that children who weren’t at school were living self-directed lives---which was then considered to be the first part of a life of crime.

Moreover, as technology became more and more complicated, industrialists found themselves in need of a increasingly sophisticated workforce---one where at least some of the workers need to be able to read, write, and, do some mathematics. The public school system was a mechanism for identifying particular “likely lads” and giving them the training they needed to get them on the road to becoming skilled tradesmen, shop foreman, clerks, secretaries, etc.

Equally important was the cultural framework of public education. Industrial production is ultimately more about how people work together in groups than it is about a type of technology. Modern people forget how odd it is to live according to clock time. In pre-industrial societies people weren’t expected to get up every morning at the same time and all get to a place of work at once. Instead, they lived their lives according to the vagaries of weather, climate, when the sun rose or set, etc. People showed up when they showed up. No assembly line could possibly work with people acting like this.

Similarly, people in pre-industrial societies had no real experience being ordered around by bosses. Instead, they were used to a more consensual approach to group activities. Leaders routinely emerged within agricultural communities---but their authority had to be earned instead of assumed. This meant that people expected to be consulted when group activities such as harvesting or barn-raising occurred. In addition, people routinely used informal mechanisms to limit the power of leaders. Sarcasm and ridicule, for example, were often used to keep leaders from becoming “too big for their britches”. This simply would not do when people were expected to literally work themselves to death in dangerous, unhealthy conditions so some industrialist could accumulate the profits needed to invest in the technology needed to put these folks out of work!

His next point was that in public schools children are not taught to pursue a passion at their own speed and in directions of their own choosing. Instead, a standardized syllabus was created by the state and enforced through regular testing that made uniformity the most important part of education, not curiosity. This meant that smart children were bored because they had to go at the same speed as the class, and, less intelligent students were encouraged to believe that they were “losers” because they always had to play “catch-up”. No one was allowed to pursue their own personal interests because a bureaucrat in the state capital had decided what was going to be tested, and all teachers had to “teach to the test” if they wanted their school to succeed in competition with all others.

The underlying result of this was all students were taught that education is an inherently painful and difficult process---like having a diseased tooth extracted. This goes against all evidence from the lives of successful people who almost universally enjoy the process of learning new ideas and skills. If people have been taught as children that learning is nasty, they aren’t going to get into the habit of engaging with the world around them to find out the truth behind conventional wisdom. Again, this ill-prepared entire generations of people to critically evaluate the propaganda coming out of the fossil fuel lobby.

Whittle’s third point was that the form of public schooling teaches children to compete instead of co-operate, defer to an outside authority, and, does nothing to educate them in the mechanics of how to come together as a group to build a collective decision through conversation and compromise. As he pointed out, there are few actual parts of the adult world where important issues are dealt with through competition---instead, what is more common is the need for people to work together in teams. It is true that in an old-fashioned, top-down workplace managers order people around. But increasingly businesses and institutions depend on a group of people with different specialized skills being able to develop a “business model” or “project plan” instead of a “boss” telling everyone what to do. Finally, the ability to bring together different points of view, negotiate compromises from different people with different needs and abilities, and, come to a collective, practical decision within a reasonable amount of time is essential to every group---from the family to the nation. And yet, it has never been part of the way public schools teach children.

Whittle suggested that the reason why competition is so strongly valued over co-operation in public schools is for ideological rather than pedagogical reasons. While it is true that our economy is rife with co-operation, the ideology of capitalism is based on the notion of competition. Indeed, the only real justification for our present economic system is that as a general rule, individual companies competing in a free marketplace encourages lower prices, innovation, efficiency, and so on. If people ever began to realize how much this “conventional wisdom” is artificially manufactured in order to hide the fact that human beings are essentially co-operative, eusocial animals---it could result in enormous political change.

The final issue he identified was that manual skills are not encouraged at public schools. He pointed out that sometimes this is such a ingrained habit of thought that teachers are often reprimanded for encouraging children to pursue apprenticeships in the skilled trades---even though there is high demand and very good pay in many of them. Shop, home economics, art, and music are often the very first programs to be cut during budgetary crises. (In contrast, phys-ed and sports are retained and generally encouraged---probably because they emphasize competition.) Even where they still exist, students with strong academic skills are generally forbidden to take them.

This is a very bad idea because manual dexterity and physical creativity are tremendously important for the development of new technologies as well as scientific research. Scientists and engineers generally have to have the “hands on” skills necessary to build experimental apparatus and prototype machines. Tradespeople increasingly need theoretical skills such as higher mathematics if they are going to work with the modern processes. In addition, cross-training in multiple fields is increasingly important. For example, a pipe fitter installing a modern zone-controlled heating system in a home will still have to know the traditional skill of how to make joints that will not leak natural gas or water---and he will also need to know how to install a complex electronic thermostatic control system and trouble-shoot a circuit board using a laptop-based analytic tool. Trades never have been the reserve of “stupid people who can’t learn”, but increasingly they should be as highly regarded as doctors or lawyers. The rigid separation between “academic” and “vocational” streams in a public school is about as obsolete as the need to learn the Confucian classics was to the mandarins of the 19^th century Manchu Empire.

Shrike’s “rebuttal” pointed out that public schools have always been products of the society that they inhabit and it is asking too much to expect that the people administering and teaching would have the sort of subtle analysis that Whittle laid out. Moreover, social reformers have a tendency to fall for the “liberal fallacy” that says the key to any reform is education.

As he explained it, if a group identifies a specific problem they generally also realize there are powerfully-organized constituencies that will oppose any attempt to deal with it. If they want to directly change government policy, they would have to mobilize and fight against them---either through politics, public opinion, or even in the streets. This is enormously unpalatable to most middle-class liberals, who want to avoid any upset to their lives. The “easy out” is to simply suggest that children be taught about the problem so parents and grandparents can “kick the can down the road” and expect future generations to fix it.

Ultimately this is the foundation of the old saw that gets repeated ad nauseam “it’s going to be up to young people like you to deal with that problem”. What people generally won’t admit is that there is a unspoken second part to this saying “because all my friends and I are too damned lazy and selfish to take responsibility for the mess that we’ve created”. Most children would probably have a hard time articulating this message, but they have an instinctual gift for identifying hypocrisy and can easily sense when people are saying “do as I say, not as I do”.

Shrike enumerated the long list of issues that school teachers were expected to deal with because mainstream society refused to address:

1. Sex education

2. Environmental destruction

3. Segregation

4. Physical fitness

5. Nutrition

6. Poverty (just consider how many poor children depend on free meals from schools?)

7. Identifying children at risk in their home environment

8. Vocational training

9. Learning how to use new technology as it gets introduced to society

Shrike said the list could probably be added to with more thought, but this is a good start.

Whenever the public education system attempts to actually do something about this long shopping list of social problems, it immediately ends up the focus of outrage by various parts of the community. Trying to teach sex ed? There will be a religious group that responds with tremendous outrage. Try to integrate class rooms? Middle class whites immediately pull their kids and put them in a private school. Try to educate children about climate change? People who’ve been brainwashed by the fossil fuel lobby immediately accuse teachers of “political indoctrination”.

Added to this insane list of social problems is the fact that we live in a society that profoundly undervalues education. Children are routinely taught in our popular media to look down on people who are interested in “book learning” as being “nerds”, “pointdexters”, etc. Instead, the “cool kids” are the ones who excel at sports. This is especially problematic for girls, who will often try to hide their scholastic abilities because they feel that this would make them “unpopular”.

Indeed, many children only have to look at the example of the person in front of the class to get the message that studying hard won’t lead to much success. Many jurisdictions routinely pay teachers very poorly. Children can see that professional ball players are millionaires whereas their algebra teacher drives a rusty car and moves furniture to make a few extra bucks on the weekends and summer break. Deeds speak louder than words, and the deeds of our society tells children that education is for losers. Indeed, if you look at the highest paid people at American universities they are almost invariably sports coaches---not professors. (Not that full professors are poorly paid---if you want to see that, look at the sessional lecturers or adjunct professors who teach many courses. They routinely make less than the minimum wage and are treated like casual labourers by university administration.)

Think, for example, about the enormously popular television series Breaking Bad. The “hero” is a brilliant high-school chemistry teacher who ends up working at a car wash to make ends meet and who doesn’t have any medical insurance. When diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decides to spend his last years alive making and selling crystal meth so he can amass enough money to support his wife, young family, and disabled son after his death. What message is this sending about how our society values education and teachers?

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Addiction: Addendum

One of the day-to-day things I do with my website is manage the "comments" feature. Most people who feel moved to comment do so on the social media that I use to market the blog, so most of this just involves removing spam. (Frankly, I wish more people would use the blog to comment, as those ones stick with the story instead of disappearing by next week.)

I recently published a seven part series on addiction, initiated by an interview with Morgan Dandie Hannah. When I checked on the comments, I was astounded to find the following spam message from someone identified as Lydia lopicova. 

Hi There, Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us:- Buy Carfentanil Online,Buy Carfentanil Online,Carfentanil for sale,Oder Carfentanil Online USA,Buy Carfentanil Online UK,Carfentanil Online for sale in UK. Email:hahuunam7394@gmail.com Click here for more information:- more info

If you look at "Lydia lopicova" profile on Blogger, you can see that she has four different websites that she manages. Between them, they sell:

• Adderall
• Roxicoden
• Xanax
• Fake university credentials

If you look at the "more info" link above in my spam quote, you can see that someone is running a full-service illegal drug supermarket, including: 

Yup, that's what is supposed to be carfentanil---10,000 times as potent as morphine! (Screenshot by Bill Hulet)

 

I'm going to include a few more screen shots because I strongly suspect that a lot of this stuff is eventually going to be taken off line---so I want a record for future generations to show how loopy things had gotten by the beginning of the 21st century. Here's the generic "patter" that they use to start the page. (I wonder if this is done to "spoof" any artificial intelligence program that would be on the look for this sort of activity?)

Welcome to Amazing Drug Store Online

Our Drug Store Online wants you and your family to be healthy and satisfied with your health care. Medical counselled care medical plans have their own doctors, consultants, clinics, pharmacies, and pills shop.You can choose the medical health care website or direct contact for all your health care use. Medical handled care medical plans offer special and best health care such as checkups, habit tests for adults, and shots for children and youngster that can comfort you stay healthful. You can go to your primary care provider (PCP) 1st, unless it is an emergency or a family planning visit. Our pharmaceutical plan has a member services department or an after-hours number that you can call. Keeping or changing your medical plan does not disciple your ability for next programs.

Check out the wide variety of items to help "you and your family to be health and satisfied with your health care"

There's also four helpful payment methods to allow people to avoid that icky criminal law stuff---. 

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It's the season for giving. If you can afford it, why not give a subscription to the Back-Grounder? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy. It'll give you a warm glow to know that you are doing your bit to build independent media in Guelph.

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When I first started looking at the website I wondered about whether it was "for real" or just a way of swindling naive would-be criminals out of their bitcoins. But looking around on line, I found a couple reputable sources that would seem to indicate that yes, this is a real thing.

What's fascinating about this is the fact that this stuff isn't on the dark web or deep web, but the clear web. For those you who---like me---didn't know about this stuff until now, here's a definition of each:

• The dark web is the dangerous, illegal stuff that is hidden from people. Think kiddie porn, sales of stolen identities, mercenary bot armies, spy stuff, illegal drug bazaars, etc. It also includes things like hidden communication systems that allow people in authoritarian countries (like China and Iran) to still use the Web to share info and organize. It's also used by journalists who want to protect their sources when they have explosive stories---like the "Panama Papers" story about foreign tax havens.
  
• The deep web is the place where legal but still secret info gets shared on a strictly "need to know" basis using sophisticated protection on websites hidden from search engines and which can only be accessed using passwords, fingerprint or retinal scans. Think about money transactions sent by banks, credit card companies, etc.
• The clear web. Information sent out to anyone who wants to know about it. This blog, for example. 

According to a 2018 article in the Dayton Daily News

In a report released late Wednesday, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Rob Portman, R–Ohio, found that Chinese websites selling fentanyl and carfentanil are incredibly responsive, supremely confident in their ability to get drugs into the United States and likely responsible for some of the tens of thousands of U.S. deaths from drug overdoses that occurred last year.

Among them, according to the report, was a 49–year–old man from a small town near Cleveland who paid $2,500 over the course of 10 months to an online overseas seller between May 2016 and February 2017, receiving 18 packages in return. One package sent from China spent just an hour in customs before being released for delivery. The man died in early 2017. His autopsy report said his death was caused by “acute fentanyl intoxication.”

In an April 2019 press release from the Australian National University and published on Medical Xpress. It says that in Australia there is a big shift taking place in the importation of illegal drugs from China. 

Accessing these drugs is almost as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Australia is a good market, because Australians pay a premium for drugs.

There are fewer sellers selling big amounts and many sellers selling small amounts and it is in such small amounts, it makes it easy to move. It is like ants moving houses and terrifically profitable.

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I'm making a fuss about this, because there is a assumption in our culture about criminals importing drugs into this country. It may or may not have ever been true, but if we can believe what I've reported above, it certainly isn't now. 

A great many movies and television shows are based on this understanding. Here're three:

 

In a nutshell, this is the idea that there are big, bad, mobsters who are controlling the wholesale importation of drugs. Opposing them are the police who are the "thin blue line" between these awful folks and the naive children of ordinary citizens who can be seduced by dealers into becoming hooked on these awful poisons. 

What I hope I've pointed out in this series of articles (and with this addendum) is---at least now---this appears to be total and utter nonsense. The real "dealers" who hook the citizens on these drugs turn out to have often been well-meaning doctors who were bamboozled by the salesmen for major drug companies into thinking prescription opioids like oxycontin were perfectly safe. And the big bad drug tycoons who distribute these illegal drugs to street dealers now appear to be just business people in China who use all the same sorts of modern web-based techniques that any other business uses. In other words, the people flooding the streets with horrid stuff like fentanyl and carfentanil are merely capitalists---just like the folks at Amazon and Walmart.  

What this all means to me is that the only way we can really cut down on the number of addicts in our city is not by cutting the supply of drugs, but rather by cutting down the demand for the product. And that can only come by spending a lot of money dealing with the problems that afflict these people in the first place. We need to deal with homelessness, childhood trauma, poverty, domestic violence, and, put real coin into supporting people with all types of mental illness. 

Anything else is just a fantasy fueled by ideology.

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Moreover I say unto you, we must deal with the Climate Emergency!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twelve

In this instalment Mikhi and the Elders get more involved in counter-espionage. 

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I'm averaging about one news story plus one instalment of the Climate trials a week now. That's about four feature stories plus a good chunk of fiction a month. If you can afford it, why not kick me some coin? (Thanks Ben for being so awesome!) It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Field notes for agent 34 of Oprix Investigations:

day 15 of file 2205:

Another routine day.

The only event of interest was at 15:55---when subject was out away from home the thermal imaging cameras suffered an hour of down time due to what appears to have been a squirrel jumping on the remote camera unit, diverting it’s aim from the window we use to scan inside the house. Once the problem was understood, agent 34 was able to realign it and resume recording the interior.

At 17:34 the subject returned to the house, cooked something to eat, watched some Netflix, showered, then went to bed at 24:38. No activity perceived after lights out.

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Field notes for agent 22 of Oprix Investigations:

day 20 of file 2205:

While following the subject I temporarily lost the tail for approximately two hours after an elderly Asian woman came to me and started talking loudly to me in what I assumed was Mandarin. She wouldn’t let me go and kept jabbering at me. I found I simply couldn’t disengage with her without causing a scene and drawing attention to myself. Eventually a young man, also of Asian descent, walked by and asked her something in her language. He told me she is visiting her son who is a teacher at the local university. She’d become separated from him and didn’t know what to do. I told the young man that I was very busy and I couldn’t help her. He said that was Okay and he’d help her out. He said something more to her and they left together in search of an address she’d shown him on a piece of paper.

This whole event took less than ten minutes, but in that time I completely lost the subject, who had gone into a store which has separate entrances and exits. Since he has “frequent haunts”, I was eventually able to find him again two hours later. He was leaving the library with a full shopping bag. He’d obviously just been running errands downtown.

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Mikhi was in the bulk food store buying some things when Ian walked in and came up to him. “We’ve just removed your surveillance tail for a short period of time. When you’re finished here I need you to go to the Vietnamese restaurant in the mall. Go to the upstairs balcony that is on the right as you walk in the main entrance. There will be someone you recognize from the Holy House sitting at one of the tables. Sit right down with him. He wants to talk to you.”

Mikhi was nonplussed. Increasingly, nothing about the Elders surprised him. He certainly realized that the success of the “Climate Trials” podcasts was going to piss off some very wealthy people. In the past, he’d found investigators snooping around him for far, far less successful campaigns. There were incidents with sketchy looking people taking photos and video at demonstrations. Once a hard drive holding the national membership list had been stolen out the computer in the head office of an organization where he held the position of media officer. And he’d also been involved with projects where death threats had come down the pipeline---one so serious that plainclothes policemen had attended every public meeting “just in case”. So there was nothing really new about any of this. In fact, he’d often told naive volunteers that if they were ever really successful in trying to make the world a better place they’d end up being hunted by death squads. A little surveillance was “par for the course”.

He did as he was told and one of the fellows was where he was supposed to be.

“Sit in that particular chair and don’t move it. We’ve worked out the angles and no one can see you sitting there unless they walk through the door you came through. And in doing so, he’ll be very visible to other people we have on the ground floor. As well, we have people in the Mall who would recognize the people who’ve been following you. No one can get near you without us knowing.”

“If you have to leave suddenly, go to the rear of the bar and walk through the kitchen. There’s a door there that exits into the back hallway where the upstairs public washrooms are. If I say so, quickly exit that way and then got to the toilet and wait for a call on your cell phone. Answer it, and follow the instructions. That’s the “emergency” plan in case something unexpected happens.”

“Okay. Here’s what you need to know.”

“A few days back a team of ours created a diversion for the people watching your house. When that happened, we planted a ‘shunt’ onto your computer system that creates a phony stream of activity for the surveillance device that these private investigators planted on your equipment. We also strengthened the encryption on your computer so we can obscure whatever we need to hide from them. (Of course, it’s much better that they think that we aren’t hiding anything, which is why we have the shunt.) This means that we will go back to emailing conversations with you---so don’t worry about that angle of things. It helps that you use open source software because we can use a “look alike” system upgrade site to scan for more malware on your machine and to periodically repair anything that might get installed by the spooks.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a cell phone. “Here’s a Linux phone with special software on it. When you get home, transfer the SIM card from your existing smart phone and put it in this one. That should give you a secure way we can contact you quickly. Look in the “notes” section of the menu and you’ll find some info about how to use it to contact us.”

“As for the agents following you today, that’s a more difficult problem. Once in a very rare while we can intervene like we did today. But this has to be done very sparingly or else the private intelligence firm will become suspicious. What we are trying to avoid is any hint at all about the Elders’ existence and our involvement in the YouTube videos.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“What are they looking for, do you think?”

“I suspect that they are trying to figure out why your program is doing so well. You wouldn’t know this, but there is a very substantial campaign going on to ‘spoof’ the artificial intelligence programs of the major search engines to drive people to the show. In addition, the production values are far greater than would be expected from a small organization of volunteers. But we’ve been very good at not leaving any ‘finger prints’ to identify us. The people who’ve hired the investigators are probably really interested in finding out who the ‘new players’ in town are. And as the face of the Climate Trials you are the only real lead that they can follow.”

“Is there any evidence of government skullduggery?”

“No, not that we’ve seen. Nor have we seen much evidence that the big tech companies are interested. It’s true that there are political factions who are actively attempting to sabotage attempts to prevent runaway climate change. But they tend to be very wary of getting government bureaucrats involved in their nefarious deeds. Most government agencies are be run by professionals, who tend to work on objective information instead of ideology. That’s why there is so much noise about the ‘deep state’. Unfortunately for our conservative friends, objective facts tend to have a liberal bias---which means that career officials can’t be trusted to destroy the earth so someone else can get rich. Similarly, the big tech companies are dominated by young engineers with families who can understand mathematics and don’t see much value in destroying the planet either.”

“That just leaves the fossil fuel companies. Unfortunately, they still have a lot of resources to hand. And the ones that were foolish and refused to diversify are finding themselves with a lot of stranded assets. Some of them are realizing that they spent a lot of money for fossil fuel reserves---shale oil, tar sands, heavy oil, etc---that are quickly becoming worthless. Because, as the demand for oil dries up, prices drop and customers are moving towards the absolute cheapest sources, which means Saudi Arabia, not Northern Alberta or North Dakota.”

“Unfortunately, mature, large corporations are led disproportionately by psychopaths who like to take crazy risks and feel no moral obligation to play nice with people who cost them money. If they feel their power and privileges slipping away, at least some will gladly hire thugs to rub-out people like us---if we let them. But don’t worry, the Elders won’t.”

“Wow! I’ve finally got to the point where what I’m doing actually has an immediate positive effect on the world around me. I’ve always believed that if I was really doing some good that I’d end up with someone threatening my life!” Mikhi was positively glowing.

His companion chuckled. “That attitude is probably part of why the recruitment committee suggested you for this project in the first place.”

“OK. If there’s nothing else, you should go now. Leave through the back and go do what you’re going to do, then go somewhere public and visible that you would normally go to kill time---a favourite coffee shop, restaurant, the library. They’ll have people watching there on the assumption that they just lost you through happenstance. Happens all the time in their line of work, and they will just shrug it off if you don’t do anything suspicious. We’ll email you as soon as we feel sure that it’s safe---then it’s back to ‘business as usual’.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

The Modern Co-Op Movement: An Interview With Peter Cameron, Part Two

The last post on this subject serves as a bit of an introduction to the subject of Co-ops. In this one I wanted to do a little more research to explain the wider context of the co-op movement and why it has been more important to the country than I suspect most people realize. To that end, I've repeated much of what Peter said in the interview, but in the process put in some pictures and added links that will help interested people follow up whatever piques their interest.

Cloudwalking Owl · Historical Importance Of Co Ops

Maurice Duplessis,Wiki Commons

 

For those readers who know very little about Quebec history, it's important to understand that the province had been dominated by Anglo elites based in Montreal pretty much since Wolf's conquest up until the 1970s. In addition, the rural areas of Quebec tended to be very conservative, very French, and, very Catholic. A provincial party called the "Union Nationale" held sway---on and off---under it's founder, Maurice Duplessis, from 1936 to 1959. This totalled about 17 years. It also formed a government from 1966 to 1970. (After that it was overtaken by the Parti Quebecois and faded into obscurity.)

The important issue to understand is that Duplessis was very much what we would now call a "social conservative" as well as being something of a Quebec Nationalist. He favoured the Catholic church, which totally dominated education in the province. He was also a rigid anti-"communist", which meant that he persecuted labour unions, and any other progressive organizations such as newspapers, etc. (Incidentally, he also had a strangely particular dislike of the Jehovah's Witnesses.)  He used a bizarre provincial statute called "the Padlock Law" to persecute progressive groups. In a nutshell, it allowed prosecutors to lock up the premises of any group it described as "red" and keep anyone from entering the premise for up to a year. Since this would be catastrophic to anything like a newspaper or any organization that might already have a hard time renting a meeting hall, it effectively kept people from organizing the sort of progressive institutions that make up "civil society".

Jean Lesage, patrimoine culturel

The "quiet revolution" was a "change in tack" by Quebec society away from an emphasis on conservative rural values, towards secularism, and, taking back the economy from the Anglo elite. The first official stage of this change was the election of a Liberal government under Jean Lesage. One of the most important things he did was create the "Quebec Deposit and Investment Fund" (Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec), which was an institution that specifically set-out to use Quebecker pension and insurance funds to take back the provincial economy from non-francophones.

4.1. The mission of the Fund is to receive moneys on deposit as provided by law and manage them with a view to achieving optimal return on capital within the framework of depositors’ investment policies while at the same time contributing to Québec’s economic development. (Act respecting the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec)

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Alphonse Desjardins, Wiki Commons

I tried to be as brief as possible in the above, but I thought it important to mention the economic and political context of the province before I brought up an important movement that preceded all of this. It turns out that the very first successful credit unions in North America were started in Quebec. The man who got the ball rolling was a journalist by the name of Alphonse Desjardins who was appalled by the enormous rates of interest (as high as 3,000%) that he found poor and working class people were getting charged for personal loans. This came about because at this time the big banks simply didn't see it as being worth their while to service people who had such extremely small amounts of money.   

He researched the subject and found that there were "cutting edge" movements to create co-operative banking systems for working people in Great Britain and Europe. He corresponded with the people leading these institutions and synthesized what he considered the best ideas of each. He created the first one in 1900 and through the existing demand plus savvy marketing, there were 220 (180 in Quebec, 24 in Ontario, and, 9 in the USA) "caisse populairs" in existence by the time of his death in 1920. Then he was working on a plan to amalgamate all these individuals into a federation, which exists now as the "Desjardins Group", which is the largest credit union association in North America---with more than 7 million clients and members, mostly in Quebec and Ontario.

The dean of community organizers, Saul Alinsky, used to say something to the effect that "every community is already organized---the question is whether it is to exploit or to benefit the people who live there". Desjardins was able to see that the financial system of Quebec was designed to squeeze working people of their hard-won cash. That was the need. He also realized that at that time Quebec was organized around the Roman Catholic church and it's parish system. That meant that if he was going to build up his credit unions he needed to get the church on his side. He was able to do this, and with the local parish priests encouraging people to join, it helped him build his institution into a powerhouse. 

Another lesson I've learned is that no effort to organize a community ever goes to waste. The work that Alphonse put into his community to help them save their pennies instead of handing them over to loan sharks, had to have been a part of the framework that helped later reformers like Jean Lesage, Pierre Trudeau, Rene Levesque, and others help Quebeckers become "masters of their own house". 

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Here's the blue type. I know times are tough, but if you can afford it, why not subscribe? Even as little as a dollar a month will help, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal. If you don't want to commit, you can make a one-time payment through the Pay Pal link. It's all appreciated!

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In the Western provinces early on farmers found themselves at the mercy of grain traders who played them off each other to pay the lowest prices for wheat. In response, farmers formed "wheat pools" that allowed them to market their crops to the outside world---cutting out the middlemen and increasing their profits while cutting their liability. At their height, there were three different pools that controlled most of the Western Canada production. Unfortunately, during the depression the catastrophic collapse of the market destroyed these independent co-ops and they were replaced by a government agency, the Canadian Wheat Board in 1935. 

In addition, co-operative wheat pools replaced independent companies as the owners of grain storage facilities in almost all rural communities by the 1950s. (These have since been privatized and are now mostly owned by a private company.)

In addition, the largest consumer co-operative in the country---the Federated Co-operatives Limited---is based in the Western provinces. In 2010 it earned revenues of almost half a billion dollars and returned a little over $350 million in profits to its members. 

The Federated Co-operatives Limited logo, which I suspect we've all seen.

CCF Premier, Tommy Douglas

I mention the above because this tendency by prairie farmers to organize co-operatives led to the creation of a political party which eventually became the NDP, or, New Democratic Party. Some, historically-minded, people know it as the "CCF", but even fewer people realize that the letters stood for the official title of "The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation". This title wasn't taken on for trivial reasons, because one of the key community organizing processes that allowed the new party to survive and thrive, was the development of a very strong co-op movement. 

It was the CCF which was able to bring in the first single-payer, publicly-insured, universal healthcare insurance system in North America. (In Saskatchewan during a CCF provincial government under then premier Tommy Douglas---the Liberals copied it federally.) In effect, a significant part of the reason why Canada doesn't suffer the same healthcare mess that exists South of the border is because of the co-op movement. 

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I galloped a lot in this post, but I thought it important to expose readers---many of whom I suspect know nothing at all about the above---to a taste of a lot of important history. Not a single progressive thing we enjoy in our society "just came about". They all came from a lot of work by invisible, unknown people who tirelessly worked for decades convincing people to join and build new institutions to benefit society. People learned through participating in co-ops that they could do just about anything that big business could do, and they almost always did it better. That's a revolutionary idea, and at one time lots and lots of people understood it. But recent generations of Canadians often don't seem to know this fact. And a big part of the reason is because people are profoundly ignorant about their history. To some extent that is why I write this blog, so new generations of people can learn and become involved like many people in their grand-parents generation.

Anyway, that's enough for one week. There's still lots to discuss about cooperatives in future posts.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with. 

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Eleven

In this instalment of The Climate Trials we find out that someone or some group is concerned about Mikhail's work and has even heard vague rumours about the Old Ones. But this seems to be something that they are able to deal with---.

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Interim Report on Mikhail Bookchin and The Climate Trials. Prepared by Panoptes International

Executive Summary

Our analysis of the audience response to the initial five episodes of The Climate Trials indicates that a significant and sophisticated campaign was mounted to spoof all the major social media search engines in order to drive viewership much higher than normal. Part of our analysis involved discovering an entirely unknown bot army that had been infected by a totally new and very powerful polymorphic virus. It seems to have a greater ability to influence a SERP score than anything we’ve seen before. The bot army was able to dramatically increase exposure on Twitter, Face Book, Instagram, Tick Tock, Pinterest, etc, to drive extremely impressive You Tube traffic.

We couldn’t find any evidence of this being the result of a state-based player, or even known organized crime groups. Instead, it appears that there is a new, totally unknown major player on the Web. Panoptes sent out web spiders to scrape the Dark Web for evidence of communications associated with this unknown campaign and was only able to find hints of an extremely sophisticated physical layer encryption network. The only information we were able to find was one specific phrase that was being used over and over again in many different languages:

• Africaans: “Oues”

• Arabic: “alqadima”

• Hindi: “puraana”

• Italian: “Quelli vecchi”

• Romanian: “Batranii”

• Turkish: “Eski olanlar”

• English: “Old Ones”

We couldn’t get beyond this one phrase and what it means we can’t even speculate.

At this point we have hit a wall and suggest that not much more can be done until we gain access to a specific machine that is being used to propagate this network. We recommend to the client that they engage a private detective contractor to work back from the actual visible face of the Climate Trials in order to find out exactly who the “Old Ones” might actually be. Given the sophistication and depth of security that is evident in their on-line presence, we would suggest using nothing but the most experienced agencies. We have added a list of suggested firms in appendix 2 of the complete report.

****

Field notes for agent 12 of Oprix Investigations:

day 12 of file 2205:

I took over contact surveillance of subject 33 at 6:00am from agent 46. It appeared from thermal imaging cameras that subject was in bed asleep until 8:30am. For the next two hours normal morning activity---shower, breakfast, exercise (taijiquan), computer time (mostly reading news according to the the tap we installed on his modem.) Situation same routine, nothing to suggest involvement with any sort of larger organization.

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Mikhail had stopped for lunch at the restaurant that most of his friends called “the Appalling”, but at which he generally enjoyed eating. Just another greasy spoon. But the owners were pleasant, the food cheap, and, if he went at the right time there was generally lots of room to spread out and catch up on his reading. Besides, they always served a home-made soup with every meal. (Mikhail was a “soup” person instead of a “salad” type.)

This day something happened, though. In between the vegetable beef soup and the bacon/grilled cheese sandwich and fries, one of the guys that he’d met at the “Holy House” showed up and sat down in the table next to him. He asked Mikhi what was “good” and suggested that he act like he didn’t know him because he was being followed. He dropped a fork and when he bent over, he slipped a folded piece of paper into Mikhi’s boot. After that he didn’t say anything more, ordered a meal, and, stayed while Mikhi finished up, paid his bill, and, left the restaurant to walk home.

When he got home, he pulled out the paper. The first bit he saw told him to go to a windowless room and read the rest.

****

Sorry to go all “cloak and dagger” on you, but the Elders have noticed you are under surveillance. It looks like something has been added to your computer---software probably, but perhaps hardware---allowing a third party to see everything you look at online, to read your unencrypted messages, etc. Also, someone is following you when you leave the house.

We don’t want you to change anything you’re doing, but one of our people is going to get into your home and install a device on your modem that will create a copy of your normal activity and then take over what the device sees when you are on line. You probably won’t know what happens, but we consider this a courtesy in case you find out and it concerns you. I’d suggest that you continue doing whatever you did before.

As for the physical surveillance, don’t even bother looking. We have other people who will be taking care of that side of things---.

We’ll be in touch later to give you some more detail.

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Times are tough for a lot of people. But if you're one of the lucky ones, why not subscribe? We're all busy creating the new world we live in, and part of that is developing a new funding model for journalists, writers, musicians, crafts people, etc. You can do your bit by sending me as little as a buck a month---its easy to do through Patreon or Pay Pal. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.

The Modern Co Op Movement, an Interview With Peter Cameron: Part One

Years ago I heard a presentation at a Green Party conference from an organizer with one of the labour unions. He said that it's important for people spreading the word about a problem---like climate change---to not focus exclusively on how bad things are. You might think that this will motivate the citizenry to get involved in changing things for the better. But studies have shown that many---if not most---simply "turn off" and "tune out" if they get too much negative information. That's because after a "critical mass" of bad news comes in people just begin to think that nothing can be done and it's better to just stop paying attention. 

The antidote---according to this fellow---is to articulate a vision of a better world and show a road map that describes how to get from here to there. My last "deep dig" series was about addictions of various sorts and how naked greed by various businesses and the political parties they support have managed to create hordes of wretched people. By the end of it, even I was myself beginning to think "what is the point of even trying?" As an antidote, this article is about one of those better alternative futures that the labour organizer was talking about with one of the people working to show all of us how to get there.

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First, a little introduction about co-ops. Here's an excellent, short, animated introduction to the history and theory of co-operatives from their beginning in 19th century Britain.

 

Now a little about Peter Cameron. He was one of the founders of the Ontario Public Interest Group (OPIRG) at the University of Guelph, and worked there full time during most of my time as a student there. He now works for the Ontario Co-operative Association (OCA) as its Co-operative Development Manager. In the first part of my interview he explains what exactly he does.

  

Cloudwalking Owl · What Does Peter Do?

For those of you who are interested, here's a link to the latest version of the Co-operative Corporations Act of Ontario. As for looking through to find out exactly what changes Peter is referring to, here's a statement from an Ontario government website that lists them:

    1.  The Minister for the purposes of the Act is changed from the Minister of Finance to the Minister of Government and Consumer Services.

    2.  Currently, the Act restricts a co-operative from conducting 50 per cent or more of its business with non-members of that co-operative. The Act is amended to remove this restriction, provided that the co-operative’s articles of incorporation or by-laws authorize it to conduct 50 per cent or more of its business with non-members.

    3.  The Act is amended such that the functions relating to offering statements currently attributed to the Minister are attributed to the Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario.

    4.  Provisions requiring that a co-operative file certain statements with the Minister are repealed.

    5.  The conditions that must be met for a co-operative to be exempt from certain audit provisions in the Act are amended.

    6.  The Act is amended to provide that at least 75 per cent of permanent full-time employees and 75 per cent of all employees must be members of a co-operative whose articles provide that its primary object is to provide employment to its members, subject to a different proportion being prescribed by regulation.

Cloudwalking Owl · A Co Op Of Co Ops

Here's a picture of a past Co-operative Young Leaders Camp. I'm not the best person to comment about what "works" for young people, but I'm certainly of the mind that it's a very good idea to help the ones that are interested in building a new tomorrow to learn the skills necessary to make it happen. 

One summer's worth of dirty future co-op leaders!

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Time to ask for money! I know lots of people are suffering during this "plague year", but if you can afford it, why not subscribe? It's a lot of work to create this blog, but there are added expenses too. I try to use second-hand, open source, etc, as much as possible. But sometimes you just have to spend money to do a good job. To that end, I've broken down and purchased a decent microphone so I can do a better job of recording things. I found a deal, but it still cost me $80. So why not put some money in the kitty to offset it? It's easy using Patreon or Pay Pal. 

One added thought. Lots of offices and institutions used to buy newspaper subscriptions. If you read this blog, why not consider buying a subscription for your non-profit, office, union, department, etc? I suspect more than anything else, it's just because you've never thought to do so. Well, here's your reminder---. 

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I had a problem with sound quality at the beginning of the following snippet, so I did a rather abrupt edit. Just to set up the question, a few months back I was approached by a fellow who runs a successful business but was interested in creating a local on-line journalism venture. He was concerned about various issues that I thought could be dealt with through the co-operative business structure. I brought in Peter and asked him to explain what this could do to help him. I was kinda surprised by how little he knew about co-ops, but as you hear Mr. Cameron explain, this is very common with many people of his generation, even the ones that are very committed to the social enterprise ideal.

Cloudwalking Owl · Social Enterprise Vs Co Op

If anyone would like to learn a bit more about the "B Corps" that Peter refers to, I'd direct your attention to the second half of an interview I did with Mike Schreiner where I delve a bit into the idea. I suppose the most famous B Corp in Guelph is the business that own the Woolwich Arms pub at the corner of Yarmouth and Woolwich.  

 

Cloudwalking Owl · Different Types Of Co Ops

Here's a nice graphic of the seven principles that Peter mentioned. I looked around the web and found them on co-op websites from all over the world, this one comes from "cooperative.com", which is a website for American electricity generation co-ops. (Click on the graphic to get a better image.) 

 

The following flow chart (it's a slide from a presentation at a co-op conference in Burlington Vermont) explains the structure of a multi-stakeholder co-op. The "members" of the co-op have been expanded to include all the rest of the people who have an interest in the business: suppliers, share-holders, buyers, and, employees. All of them get to elect people who sit on the board of directors, who set the policy of the group and hire the Chief Administrative Officer, who then hires the rest of the managers, who control the day-to-day operation of the company. Everyone affected by the co-ops decisions, therefore, is involved when they are made.

That's enough for one story. I'll deal with the rest of the interview in a future post.

Please remember to wear a mask, keep your distance, shop local, and, be nice to one another. The vaccines are on their way. But there is still a long way to go before we can enter a post pandemic planet. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Ten

In this instalment Mikhail learns a little more about the Elders and one of the ways that they've managed to stay secret for so long.

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Mikhail got another email after he’d been working with Mir for a few months. It said that the Old Ones would like him to learn a little more about their organization. They said that Ian would come by to pick him up and go on a little trip one day. They said it was not a big deal, just a little ceremonial introduction that would give him more understanding about the historical background of their organization and a better appreciation of its operations.

This piqued his interest and he was primed for a new, interesting experience when Ian showed up in his car.

“So where exactly are we going and what are we going to do?”

Ian---as was his nature---took a few moments to think about what he was going to say before speaking. “The name of where we are going is a ‘Holy House’. To really understand what it is, you have to understand one of the Old Ones’ key survival techniques. That is, they have build their organization around a specific form of camouflage called “hiding in plain sight”. The idea is that if you try to make what you do invisible people get freaked out and very curious when they inevitably find out about it. But if you can get them to put the wrong label on something, you don’t really need to hide it. Let me explain what I’m talking about with a little story.”

“For years and years a border guard manned an isolated crossing between two countries. Every once in a while a fellow would cross from one direction on a bicycle. He always carried a back pack, which the guard searched, but he never found anything. This went on for years until the guard was one day from retirement. He asked the following question. ‘For years I’ve thought that you were smuggling something. I’m retiring tomorrow and won’t turn you in if I find out what it was. But I’m curious. What is it that you are smuggling?’ The traveller replied ‘bicycles’.”

“The secret of this story is the ‘default’ label that the boarder guard unconsciously assigned to the fellow’s bicycle. As long as he just saw it as a transportation device, it never occurred to him that it is also a valuable commodity worth smuggling across a boarder. It also never occurred to him that he’d never seen the guy coming back---because he worked a specific shift. He didn’t think that the guy might be walking or riding a bus the other way. In the same way, the Old Ones have a series of special centres where we educate and build community. They hide them first by putting them someplace where no one would expect them---in this case, a middle-class subdivision. Secondly, they’ve hidden them by making them look just like every other building in the area. In this particular example, we use a single, detached house. This hides it from the vast majority of people, who don’t really pay much attention to their surroundings. If you doubt that, ask yourself how many people know that there are also transformer stations similarly camouflaged in some neighbourhoods?”

“Finally, for that small number of people who might notice them, we hide them in plain sight by creating a second misdirecting label that allows people to dismiss them without thought. In this particular case, we pretend that we belong to a obscure Asian religion which has special ‘Holy Houses’ in suburban neighbourhoods to perform services. That’s an artifact of there being a fair number of Asian immigrants in this local area. Other communities with different ethnic make-up masquerade as Sufi groups, Daoist Temples, Buddhist sects, etc. There are exceptions, but generally we try to look like harmless minority religious groups.”

Mihail sat bolt upright in the car. “What????”

Ian chuckled. “Yeah. I know. What is a secret group of hyper-rationalist types doing with altars filled with statues of gods, chanting, wearing funny robes, etc?”

“But think about it. Religion fills an interesting role in our society. First off, you can’t really touch it with a ten foot pole or the ring-wing types will rain legal fire and destruction down on you. Secondly, people have become pretty much used to weird cults doing silly stuff. Third, most folks are absolutely sick of people trying to convert them to their weird religions. This means any curiosity that people might have once had has been burnt out of them because they tried to be polite with a Jehovah’s Witness once only to end up being hounded by them for months afterwards.”

“Meaning, unless your group gets labelled ‘extremist’ like those ones that abuse children, hoard guns, or, put up gaudy temples that lowers local property values---people will go to great lengths to just leave you alone. The elders have analyzed all these different elements and have come up with the perfect religious camouflage to protect our meeting houses. In this town they project the image that this is just a traditional religion from Asia, so it isn’t a “New Age” group with goofy ideas about space aliens. It doesn’t try to get new members, so it doesn’t harass people into joining. It has no obvious interest in any social issues like abortion. Finally, the ‘Holy Houses’ try to totally blend into the community so they don’t lower property values.”

“But on the other hand, if someone snoops around and wonders what the heck is going on, all they see are strange gold-plated gods on altars and people wearing ornate brocade robes going through rituals with incense and chanting. If anyone asks, there’s a whole song-and-dance about a minority religion from Asian that was persecuted by the government so it learned to keep it’s head down and not bother anyone. It spread to the West through immigrants. That’s usually enough to deal with any interest.”

Mikhi asked the obvious question. “But what about non-Asians? How do you explain them being involved?”

“It generally doesn’t come up. Most people are afraid of being labelled “racist” nowadays---especially the sorts of people who would feel comfortable enough to ask. For those rare folks who do, we say vague things like ‘I took a vegetarian cooking/martial arts/fine art class and got to know some people there and one thing led to another.’ That’s generally enough to explain individuals, and people just extrapolate to everyone else they see.”

“If you have any more questions, you can ask the people you’ll meet here. That’s really why you were asked to come to the service.” At this point Ian was well into a subdivision. He turned into a cul-de-sac, stopping in front of a house that looked just like all the others.

They got out, walked to the door and were greeted by a middle-aged, somewhat plump woman of obvious Chinese descent. She suggested they remove their boots and showed them where to hang up their coats. She said they could call her “Anne”.

She led them out of the entrance hall into the rest of the house. Mikhi was surprised to see that even though from the outside the building looked like a regular suburban, two-story bungalow, on the inside it was “open concept”. In decoration it looked like an Asian temple---complete with a large altar resplendent with large, gold-plated statues, and, short benches for kneeling. Anne led them to the back where she showed them simple black gowns that she asked them to put on. There were also soft cloth pillbox hats and black cotton slippers to wear too.

“People have heard of Buddhist temples where people have to go barefoot, and the monks shave their heads. Other Asian religions are the opposite. People are supposed to always cover their heads and feet as a gesture of respect to the Gods. We make sure that we always try to act the same way that real followers of this path would act. Think of it as something like ‘method acting’---we try to stay ‘in role’ as much as possible to avoid a slip-up that might reveal who we really are.”

“The service will be starting soon. I’d suggest that you just play along with everyone else. Afterwards we are going to have a small meeting where some of our specialists will explain in more detail what is going on here and where you fit into it. If you have questions, they will hopefully be able to answer them.”

Anne led Ian and Mikhi to a couple kneeling benches at the rear. Other folks were filing in, so they just sat down and waited for the “fun” to start. After a while, someone handed out sheets of paper with a bunch of seeming nonsense syllables written with Latin letters. Once in a while, the word “Kow Tow” was inserted inside parentheses.

After a while, a couple elderly men went to the front of the room. One of them sat down off to the side facing everyone else. He placed a large, shiny red object in front of him. He sat quietly with a similarly painted red drumstick in his right hand. The other elder sat front and centre facing the majority. He waited a bit, then quietly, yet forcefully, announced “Start!”. People immediately quieted down and silence filled the hall. At that point he announced “Lui joe gork sai jueen ging!” There was a brief rustling of papers as people found the sheet with that title, followed by more silence. Then the other elderly man tapped on the large wooden block with his drumstick and loudly announced “Hoy Ging Jao!” and started to chant the syllables on the page while setting the time on his instrument. When he came to place on the sheet where “Kow Tow” was written, he loudly announced “Kow Tow”, then stopped beating. At that point everyone in the main body got up off their benches and kneeled on the floor in front of them and quickly pressed their forehead into the carpet. They quickly sat down, the cantor started beating his wood block, and they went through the next set of meaningless symbols (at least they were to Mikhail---but also, he suspected, everyone else).

Once the entire set of sounds had been gone through, the cantor sped up his rhythm and the process started all over again. He did this two more times until at the end the pace was manic and it took every ounce of concentration Mikhial could muster to keep up. He was also sweating very hard under his regular clothes plus the cotton gown.

A similar process went through several of the the other pieces of paper. Then the person leading the service announced “End!” The two old men got up off their benches, and walked out of the room. At that point everyone else got up, walked into the closet, and took off their robes, hats, and, slippers. Normal conversation ensued, but at a subdued volume as everyone seemed to be dealing with a slight “buzz” from the experience.

Anne sought out Mikhail leading him to a door behind the altar, down a set of stairs into the basement---which had a meeting room plus a kitchen. She got him a cup of coffee and led him to a table where a few other people were sitting. One stood, indicated a chair and asked him to sit and make himself comfortable. He introduced the group.

He was a tall, dark-skinned Asian man with smooth facial features. “We’re not going to tell you our names. You probably wouldn’t remember anyway, and we tend to avoid using them. It’s been a long time since one of our groups was identified and persecuted---but you never know. It just makes sense to be careful for security reasons.”

A lightly built, pasty-white, elderly woman joined in. “What did you think about our little ritual?”

“I don’t really know. It was kinda strenuous. I feel like the same way I do when my taijiquan teacher is trying to build up a muscle group with one of her specialized exercises.”

“Not surprising.” A middle-aged black man with an Afro streaked with white hair was speaking. “You are using the same core muscles. The point of the chanting is to help with your breathing, your ability to project your voice, and, to get a little bit of cardio.”

“It’s also a team-building exercise. Human beings are eusocial animals---much like termites, bees and ants---we need to spend at least part of our time doing collective activities. This helps us ‘get out of our heads’ and remember that our group goals can be larger than our petty individual concerns.”

The very white old woman added to these comments. “All human activity includes ritual as part of their process---religion, the law, universities, the military, etc. It is essential to how we function. Ants work collectively because they use a combination of simple instincts activated by specific chemicals that they secrete and which are smelled by other ants. In human beings we use language and culture to manage collective behaviour. That’s why soldiers use rituals to mould recruits into a collective unit. Religions do exactly the same thing to create congregations of believers.”

An elderly man who looked to be of Chinese extraction joined in. “There are species of ants known as ‘slavers’. They have a strategy of manipulating other species of ants by imprinting stolen young with new scent markers that mimic those of the species that is enslaved. The Elders use a similar process to hide their subculture. We absorb and mimic aspects of another specific subculture---like the particular minority religion that we are emulating here. It not only allows us to camouflage our organization, it also allows us to take advantage of the cultural heritage of the group we’re copying from. There are obviously aspects of this religion that have allowed it hold group cohesion in the midst of a larger, more dominant, and, somewhat hostile culture. The Elders are just like any other subculture---we need to find a way of holding the individual members together and keep them focused on the ‘big picture’. That’s a significant fraction of why we emulate the rituals of the groups we mimic. They obviously work for the group being copied, so we are happy to let them work for us too.”

The black man with the afro finished off the discussion. “The major difference is that the Elders always make sure that we remember that no one gets ‘captured’ by the ideology of whatever grouping we copy. We always tell everyone that this is just an outer shell of something else---. Hence this introductory talk.”

Anne had been sitting behind Mikhi all through this and at this point brought things to a close. “That’s enough to process for one visit. Ian will take you home. Think about what you’ve experienced here and what you’ve been told. When you come back there will be an opportunity to answer whatever questions have ‘stuck with you’ right up until you come back.”

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.