theseus at labyrinth

Happy Canada Day to all the people I love near and far. I miss you guys who are still so far away. Not long now.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

—Plutarch, Theseus

Annoying (but very funny) Mom phrases!

Norman MacLean: “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

If you are adventurous enough to want to run the beta: Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate

This is an important and very well thought out essay. It is a tad long by internet attention span standards. I wish everyone who holds strong opinions would read it and take it as a guiding light.

The internal and possibly fatal inner contradictions which beset our civilization at large are also destroying the intellectual and cultural life of Canada.

“As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life-more akin to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism-which it would be bad form to take too seriously…”

“Yet this value-liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument-also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural.

Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice.”

Terry Eagleton suggests a way forward in the context of an articulate and detailed analysis of our current predicament.

“Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way”.

Culture&Barbarism

Family court judges are misguidedly harming children by granting sole custody to one parent – usually the mother – in bitter divorce battles, says a comprehensive new report.

Too many children are being “robbed of the love of one parent” by a legal system that is out of touch with the needs of children and treats them like property to be won or lost, says Edward Kruk, an expert on child custody issues.

“The system is set up to polarize parents, to make them enemies, to set up fights over custody and exacerbate conflict rather than reduce it,” says Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, whose three-year study is now in the hands of Canada’s justice minister.

He calls what’s happening in Canada’s divorce courts “a national shame” that leaves families bankrupt from legal fees and pushing parents, especially fathers, to suicide.

Children Harmed By Sole Custody

… the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”

Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.”

Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier.

For More Than Half A Century

Slowly but surely the awareness that parental alienation is child abuse is penetrating into society and the media. How long it will take this knowledge to penetrate into the minds of Family Court Judges in Ontario and Canada generally, is another story.

This weekend the Parental Alienation Symposium is taking place here in Toronto.

“The mission of CS-PAS, is to assist attendees in recognizing Parental Alienation Syndrome as a form of child abuse and to help the public become knowledgeable and aware of professionals that can provide solutions for intervention and treatment”.

“In 1985, Gardner coined the term Parental Alienation Syndrome to describe a distinctive family response to divorce in which the child becomes aligned with one parent and preoccupied with unjustified and/or exaggerated denigration of the other, target parent.

The phenomenon was widely observed and independently reported by other legal and mental professionals, though some contributors used different terminology, such as “Medea syndrome,” “overburdened child,” or simply “parental alienation.” In severe cases, the child’s once love-bonded relationship with the rejected/target parent is destroyed.”

The moral and emotional crime of parental alienation can be committed by either custodial parent, but as the vast majority of custodial parents in divorced or separated families are women, it is safe to say that generally, parental alienation is child abuse committed by women against their children.

The far reaching destructive scope of parental alienation and its connection to teen suicide, drug addiction and crime is beginning to be measured. It is obvious that alienating parents have mental health issues, and this too is beginning to be measured.

THE SPECTRUM OF PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME Part I

So Daylight Saving Time DST is here again, and I don’t really like it. There are pro and con arguments for having and not having DST.

I would be very happy to live in standard time year round. More natural that way. Stop messing around with our internal biological clocks.

Spring forward one hour 02:H 00:M AM Sunday Morning, local time everywhere.

Daylight saving Time Throughout the World

Some of the above image derived from artwork by:

suzi9mm

“What Killed Joe Fisher?”

I am in this documentary about my late friend Joe Fisher:

The show consists of 2 30-minute episodes of the new Vision TV series SUPERNATURAL INVESTIGATOR. They will be broadcast at 10:30 p.m. ET / 7:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday the 10th and Tuesday 17th of February, respectively.

VISIONTV

SUPERNATURAL INVESTIGATOR

“What Killed Joe Fisher – Part One: The Trap is Set”

Tuesday, Feb. 10, 10:30 p.m. ET / 7:30 p.m. PT
In the 1970s, Joe Fisher forged a reputation as one of Canada’s leading investigative reporters. But there was another side to him. The rebellious son of Christian fundamentalists, he grew increasingly enthralled by Eastern religions, eventually becoming a popular media expert on paranormal phenomena. While investigating the practice of “trance channeling,” he abandoned his professional skepticism, falling in love with a spirit entity named Filipa – an obsession that would lead him down a dangerous path. In the first chapter of this two-part episode, filmmaker Doug Williams investigates the strange case of Joe Fisher. Produced by Riddle Films Inc.

“What Killed Joe Fisher – Part Two: The Trap is Sprung”

Tuesday, Feb. 17, 10:30 p.m. ET / 7:30 p.m. PT
When Joe Fisher’s efforts to learn more about his spirit lover Filipa ended in failure, his life began to unravel. Convinced that he had unleashed psychic forces bent on vengeance, Fisher fled to rural Ontario – and it was there, on the rim of the Elora Gorge, that his demons, real or otherwise, may have finally caught up with him. In the conclusion of this two-part episode, filmmaker Doug Williams ponders the final fate of Joe Fisher.

Working mothers

The Good Childhood Inquiry cites research suggesting that three times as many three year olds living with lone parents or a step-parent have behavioural problems compared with those living with married parents.

“Children with separate, single or step parents are 50% more likely to fail at school, have low esteem, be unpopular with other children and have behavioural difficulties, anxiety or depression,” it argues.

“Child-rearing is one of the most challenging tasks in life and ideally it requires two people,” the report concludes.

The Good Childhood Inquiry

Emotional Intensity

Descriptions of emotional intensity experienced by gifted people include the following:

flooded by unexpected waves of joy
a feeling of being incredibly alive
so happy that I want to laugh and cry or be silent and shout all at the same time
beautiful music or the beauty of nature can move me to tears
even the greatest pain has been ecstatic and full of life.

These same people describe their inner experiences of emotional intensity as:

moments of disequilibrium and estrangement
the familiar suddenly feels alien
feelings of unreality
intense feelings of difference
rapid shifts in perspective
dissatisfaction with self
inner turmoil
feeling of being overwhelmed
despair. (Piechowski 1998)

Gifted children: Emotionally immature or emotionally intense?

Kazimierz Dąbrowski (1902 - 1980), a psychiatrist and psychologist developed the Theory of Positive Disintegration over his lifetime of clinical and academic work. The Theory of Positive Disintegration is a profoundly insightful and revealing approach to personality development.

Dąbrowski’s theory of personality development emphasized several major features including:

• personality is not a given universal trait, it must be created — shaped — by the individual to reflect his or her own unique character (personality shaping)

• personality develops as a result of the action of developmental potential (DP) (overexcitability and the autonomous factor), not everyone displays sufficient Developmental Potential to create a unique personality.

• developmental potential is represented in the population by a normal (Bell) curve. Dąbrowski used a multilevel approach to describe the continuum of developmental levels seen in the population.

• developmental potential creates crises characterized by strong anxieties and depressions — psychoneurosis — that precipitate disintegration

• for personality to develop, initial integrations based on instinct and socialization must disintegrate — a process Dabrowski called positive disintegration

• the development of a hierarchy of individual values — emotional reactions — are a critical component in developing one’s personality and one’s autonomy, thus, in contrast to most psychological theories, emotions play a major role in this approach

• emotional reactions guide the individual in creating his or her individual personality ideal, an autonomous standard that acts as the goal of individual development

• the individual must examine his or her essence and subsequently make existential choices that emphasize those aspects of essence that are higher and “more myself” and inhibit those aspects that are lower or “less myself” based upon his or her own personality ideal

• critical components of individual development include autoeducation and autopsychotherapy

Positive Disintegration

Kazimierz Dąbrowski