Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton strike, halting start of winter term

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'Multiple competitive salary offers' have been made to faculty, university says

CBC News · Posted: Jan 04, 2022 

Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton are now on strike after negotiations with the school's bargaining committee stalled out over the holidays. (David Bajer/CBC)

Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton walked off the job Tuesday morning after the union and the school's bargaining committee failed to strike a deal following months of negotiations.

The strike, a first for faculty associations in Alberta, is expected to halt the start of the winter term. More than 2,500 students were expected to return to virtual classes Tuesday.

Starting at 9 a.m., a picket line formed outside the Magrath Mansion, a historic property in Edmonton's Highlands neighbourhood recently acquired by the university.

The  Concordia University of Edmonton Faculty Association (CUEFA) issued formal strike notice to the university's administration on Dec. 22, warning that members would walk off the job in the new year if the school's bargaining team failed to strike a deal.

The association is the bargaining agent for 82 full-time professors, librarians, placement coordinators and lab instructors at Concordia.

Professors and instructors formed a picket line outside the Magrath Mansion, a historic property in Edmonton’s Highlands neighbourhood recently acquired by the university. (David Bajer/CBC)

As a result of the legal strike action, all instruction will be halted until further notice, the university said in a memo to students Monday.

"The strike comes in spite of bargaining that occurred over the holiday break," the university's bargaining unit said in the statement.

"The university's bargaining team is particularly disappointed by the brevity of a mediation meeting last weekend. Earlier negotiations on major issues such as workload have been successful. 

"The university's bargaining team has presented multiple competitive salary offers which are in line with those recently accepted by some of Alberta's largest public-sector unions."

Sticking points

After months of negotiation last year, the university and faculty association signed off on more than half of 41 articles of a new collective agreement but, as of last month, sticking points remained.

Should a new agreement be reached, faculty would be expected to teach fewer courses to make up for an increase in research. However, the association remains concerned about workload for non-faculty staff and salaries, among other issues.

Mediation was "unsuccessful at helping to resolve any remaining issues," the association said in a statement Tuesday. 

"Our faculty association is dismayed that the administration rejected our reasonable salary proposals," CUEFA president Glynis Price said in the statement.

"We have bargained since the late spring of 2021 and plan to continue bargaining in good faith to push the administration to improve the workloads and pay of all of our members."

• Historic Magrath Mansion acquired by Concordia University of Edmonton

• Concordia University of Edmonton faculty association could be first in Alberta to strike

Price said the university has been approved to lock out staff should they choose. In the case of a strike or a lockout, 72 hours notice is required.

In a ballot in November, 90 per cent of CUEFA members backed a strike mandate. The association said 95 per cent of members voted.

'Jeopardizing their winter term'

Price said the university has the financial resources to resolve the issues, but instead of investing in competitive wages and staff recruitment, administration spent $1.75 million on the Magrath Mansion, "a building without a clear role in the university's core operations."

"We're saddened that the administration has refused to budge and would rather disrupt students' lives and add to their stress by jeopardizing their winter term," Price said in the CUEFA statement. 

• Concordia University of Edmonton faculty association to strike in new year

The university's bargaining team said it is willing to resume discussions with the faculty association "at any time" and will continue to work toward a settlement.

"We regret the disruption to our students, their families, and our university community," the bargaining committee said. "The strike will impact student learning and depending on how long it extends could threaten semester outcomes.

"The university remains hopeful that the strike will be brief."

After months of negotiations, faculty members walked off the job Tuesday morning. (David Bajer/CBC)

Experts question usefulness of masks purchased by province for Alberta students




CTV News Edmonton
Published Jan. 2, 2022

EDMONTON -

Experts are questioning the Alberta government’s decision to purchase medical-grade masks for students in school, saying better masks should be used instead.

Students would have been back in class this week, but the province extended the winter break as Omicron cases rise.

In an effort to protect students and staff when they do return to school, the province plans to deliver 8.6 million rapid tests and 16.5 million adult and pediatric medical-grade masks to schools.

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“What we need to worry about are fit, filter and function… so called “medical-grade masks” are designed for adults, not kids,” said Dorothy Wigmore, an occupational health specialist.

“For a medical mask, the actual design of them is intended to stop someone like a surgeon spitting into a patient that they’re working on, it’s to stop material coming out of the wearer, rather than to protect the wearer,” added Dr. Simon Smith, a retired respiratory filter specialist.

“Without a good fit, you’re going to be breathing air in when you inhale that’s going to take the path of least resistance and bypass the filter entirely.”

Respirator-style masks are being recommended as alternatives which would be better suited to what students will be doing in schools, breathing, talking and learning.

“All of the medical-grade masks have been tested to meet international standards for particle and bacterial filtration, breathability, fluid resistance, and flammability of materials,” said a statement from the premier’s office.

“Medical-grade masks provide an additional layer of protection to lower the risk of in-school transmission, and when properly fitted are 98% as effective as N95 masks.”

One ER doctor in the province argues that “there is no such thing as a well-fitting medical mask.”

“They’re not designed to fit well… they’re basically a barrier,” said Dr. Joe Vipond, the co-founder of Masks4Canada and Protect Our Province Alberta.

“I’m worried the Alberta public will feel reassured that they’re getting these higher quality masks, when they’re completely inadequate for the job… it’s not useless, it’s just not nearly enough for the job.”

He recommends parents get better masks for their children to go to school with, if they can find them. Respirator-style masks are a little more expensive, but Vipond believes they’re worth the investment.

“You can wear (respirator masks) multiple days… up to five eight hour days in a row as long as it’s not smelling bad or obviously soiled… they don’t expire, they don’t get less safe after a day’s use,” added Vipond.

CANADA
Grocery managers BOSSES get big bonuses after boost from pandemic sales

 JAN 3, 2022

The practice of paying executive bonuses has been more researched in the pandemic, especially among companies that employ significant front-line employees who are unable to perform their jobs safely at home.

Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press

Two of Canada’s largest merchants – Empire Company Ltd. and Metro Inc. – paid their executives almost maximum bonuses for their most recent, pandemic-boosted fiscal year.

They joined Loblaw Companies Ltd. to reward their top executives for robust sales over the past 18 months, where many Canadians have replaced restaurant expenses with home cooking and warehousing of essential household items – a winner for grocers.

The practice of paying executive bonuses has been more researched in the pandemic, especially among companies that employ significant front-line employees who are unable to perform their jobs safely at home.

Merchants gave all workers some form of “pandemic wage” – increased wages or bonuses – in the earlier months of the public health crisis, but they lowered or eliminated wages later in 2020. Grocery retailers offered additional one-time bonuses earlier this year (and in Empire cases reintroduced bonuses in regions, where orders for stay at home were imposed). Other benefits, merchants said, included being paid free of vaccinations, discounts and gift card bonuses. But in the spring, Canada’s largest private-sector union, Unifor, called on companies to bring back universal, regular wage premiums for grocery workers during the pandemic.

Together, Loblaw, Empire (the parent company of Sobeys) and Metro have a combined market value of about $ 60 billion. They had $ 100 billion in sales over the past 12 months, with just over $ 3 billion in profits, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. While their single-digit profit margins are modest compared to other industries, they have risen from pre-pandemic levels in the last 12 months.

Empire paid its executives almost the maximum possible bonuses for its most recent fiscal year, which ended May 1, saying it easily exceeded its sales and profit targets.

That meant a $ 2.71 million bonus for CEO Michael Medline, up from $ 1.41 million the year before. Four other top executives received payouts of $ 579,000 to $ 1.01 million. All five bonuses were almost or more than double their incentive pay from the previous fiscal year.

In the year ending May 2020, Empire’s board decided to scale down bonuses for its top executives in recognition of the pandemic – especially because blowout sales in the first three months of the crisis were not part of the annual targets. For the year ending in May, however, Empire incorporated COVID-19 into its targets, setting a sales target roughly in line with the previous year and a lower performance target.

Empire said sales of $ 28.3 billion topped its $ 26.7 billion target and reported net earnings of $ 701.5 million that were exceeded by the $ 548.1 million target. Putting those numbers into the formula gave leaders almost double their target bonuses, Empire said.

Overall, Mr. Medline $ 7.49 million in the year ending May, including nearly $ 3.1 million in stock allotments. That’s below his $ 13.04 million compensation from the previous year, a figure inflated by a special $ 6.9 million stock reward designed to keep him for another six years. In the year ending May 2019, he earned just under $ 5.5 million.

For the second year in a row, executives at Metro also received almost the maximum possible bonuses after the company exceeded its profit targets. For most, however, the payments were slightly lower than the year before.

Metro paid CEO Eric La Flèche a $ 1.29 million bonus on top of his salary of just over $ 1 million for the year ending Sept. 25. He was entitled to a maximum bonus of just over $ 1.5 million. In the year ending September 2020, his bonus was $ 1.43 million.

Four other Metro executives, who were eligible for bonuses equal to their salaries, received payouts of between $ 450,000 and $ 505,000 – 82 percent to 99 percent of maximum. Their bonuses ranged from $ 450,000 to $ 600,000 in the previous year, with only Executive Vice President Marc Giroux, head of both e-commerce and the Quebec division, receiving the maximum payout for his division’s goals.

For the year ending September 25, Metro set a target of $ 823.6 million in adjusted net earnings – roughly the same amount as it recorded in the year ending September 2020, when more than six months of pandemic purchases increased the results. Metro said that by setting the target, it started by assuming a normal environment and then added pandemic-related sales.

Its adjusted net income came in at $ 854.2 million, above the maximum bonus level for all executives except Mr La Flèche, who has a higher profit threshold for a maximum bonus.

Metro said it saw a sharp increase in food sales in the first half of the year, but will fall in the second half, “as they cycled unusually strong levels” in 2020. It said pharmacy sales were hit by an eight-week labor dispute at Jean Coutu distribution center, and expenses increased due to $ 104 million in pandemic-related costs, including $ 24 million in gift cards for front-line employees.

The executive bonuses are based on a mix of company-wide earnings, divisional performance and individual goals, with Mr La Flèche’s bonus being weighted at most to the company’s profits.

In total, he earned $ 5.02 million, including $ 2.24 million in stock and option allotments, up from $ 5.07 million the year before.

Loblaw, which blew through its 2020 revenue targets but missed its profit target, said in April that the board decided that the company’s short-term bonus plan should not pay out more than 150 percent of the target for any target, instead of the 200 percent maximum plan allowed.

Loblaw CEO Galen G. Weston earned $ 3.55 million, down from $ 3.67 million in 2019, including an annual bonus of $ 648,000, which was less than 2019’s annual incentive of $ 764,640. President Sarah Davis, who resigned from the company in May, earned $ 4.53 million, including a $ 1.35 million bonus, down from $ 1.59 million in 2019.

The Globe and Mail previously reported on Loblaw’s compensation figures, which were for the year ending January 2, 2021, in April.

With files by Susan Krashinsky Robertson

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

What investors learned from the Elizabeth Holmes trial: ‘zero’


By ELLEN HUET
STARTUPS
Tuesday, 04 Jan 2022

While the guilty verdict for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes may not change how venture capital fundraising works, it may have an impact on other women founders, say industry players. — AFP

It took a jury seven full days to conclude that Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes was guilty of four counts of fraud after a three-month trial. The startup world had been watching in suspense, but it was largely for the spectacle of it all – not because anyone thought the verdict would significantly change behaviour in venture capital fundraising.

Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in the blood-testing startup of hundreds of millions of dollars, which should spur investors to scrutinise their portfolio companies more carefully, especially in the specialised world of healthcare.

And the guilty verdict suggests founders should beware of their optimism slipping into dishonest exaggeration. But in a red-hot startup investing market, no one’s willing to slow down.

"I don’t think a verdict is going to change the way founders and VCs work in the ecosystem,” said Angela Lee, who teaches venture capital at Columbia Business School and runs 37 Angels, an investment network that focuses on early-stage digital health companies. "It's about supply and demand, and there's a tremendous capital supply with the same number of awesome companies.”

When investors are competing to get into a round, one way they can edge out a rival is through speed.

"I can't tell you how many times I hear, ‘So-and-so is in this deal, they're a name-brand VC, you have five days – are you in or are you out?’” she said. "People don't want to miss out. I am not seeing more thoughtful diligence. If anything, I’m actually seeing a sped-up timeline for diligence in the last couple of years.”

Lee said the trial doesn’t seem to be prompting investors to re-examine their diligence practices. "I've heard zero people say, ‘Oh, this should make me look differently,’ – zero,” she said. "It's treated like salacious gossip or an entertaining story.”

Founders can also find it confusing to draw lessons from Holmes’s case, Lee said.

Holmes was excoriated for inflating her company’s partnerships. She admitted during the trial that she had added logos from two pharmaceutical giants onto reports shared with prospective investors that conveyed support by the drug companies for Theranos even though she wasn’t authorised to do so.

Lee said founders face pressure to make similar fabrications all the time, like putting a client’s logo on a pitch deck and suggesting a deal is in the works – or "soft-circled” – when it’s not yet at that stage.

"People will say all the time that something is ‘soft-circled’ when you just had a nice conversation with them,” Lee said. "Is that misrepresentation? I would argue 15% of founders are doing that every single day. ... It is not easy to tell when you’re right up against this line.”

Meanwhile, startup founders who happen to be women working in health tech still are coping with comparisons to Holmes, both implicit and explicit, and the verdict is unlikely to change that.

Andy Coravos, the CEO and co-founder of health-tech startup HumanFirst, said she’s all for strict due diligence from investors, especially when it involves patient care, but wants to see it directed at all founders, not just women. "Companies should be held to a high bar and that bar should be universally applied,” she said.

If people see a female founder and think of Holmes, that’s a reflection of how few women found startups, said Deena Shakir, a partner at Lux Capital, which invests in health and science startups.

Holmes shouldn’t be seen as a representative for any particular type of founder, she said: "Are we going to now say that all Stanford founders or all Stanford dropouts exhibit this behaviour?”

 – Bloomberg

Opinion: 

Theranos verdict won’t stop next big fraud


By MICHAEL HILTZIK
Tuesday, 04 Jan 2022

Holmes’ case raises the important question of whether the testimony and result will serve as object lessons for investors confronted with cheery promises in the future. Bet your money that the answer is ‘no’. — AFP


Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of the medical device company Theranos, was convicted Jan 3 on multiple counts of defrauding investors following a four-month trial in federal court in San Jose.

Theranos, which rode a tide of positive publicity in 2013 and 2014 after introducing what it claimed was novel technology for making blood testing simpler, cheaper and more efficient, shut down in 2018 after investigations established that the claims were false. Holmes and her second-in-command, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were indicted on 12 counts of fraud in 2020 one count was later dropped. Balwani’s trial is scheduled for this year.

The jury acquitted Holmes on several counts related to accusations Theranos defrauded patients who relied on the company to deliver accurate blood test results, and deadlocked on three others related to transfers of funds from investors. For the most part, the jury found against Holmes on charges that she plied investors with claims about the firm’s technology that were largely fabricated. Those counts including three of fraud and one of conspiracy to defraud.

The case raises the important question of whether the testimony and result will serve as object lessons for investors confronted with cheery promises in the future. Bet your money that the answer is “no”.

High-tech investing is predisposed to take even clearly hyperbolic projections as part of the game.

Holmes’ defense argued in effect that the misinformation with which Theranos plied investors was characteristic of tech industry exaggeration at best – that investors were experienced enough to interpret Holmes’ projections as “uncertain”, not fraudulent.

To a certain extent, that’s true. All entrepreneurs making pitches to venture capital funds are inclined to promise castles in the air and riches beyond the dreams of Croesus, or they won’t be invited through the door.

Venture investors know well that most of these claims encompass a sizable helping of hyperbole; that’s why they strive to assemble diversified portfolios, in the hope that the handfuls of successes and tinier handfuls of massive successes will pay for the losers.

The venture investment community is periodically inundated with such a torrent of capital that too much money ends up chasing too few deals. The more than 500 US venture capital funds raised a record US$96bil (RM401.85bil) in the first nine months of this year and closed a record of more than 11,000 deals.

The current frenzy is driven in part by what venture investors call “tourists” – investors coming from outside the venture community and bidding up deal prices.

“When tourists flock to hot vacation spots, the prices jump at the popular resorts, hotels and restaurants,” the Seattle financial data firm PitchBook observes. “The same thing is happening now as these tourist investors pile into competitive venture deals for hot startups, especially at the early stage.”

In 2013, when venture investor Aileen Lee first coined the term “unicorn” for startups valued at US$1bil (RM4.18bil) or more, she identified 39. Today, the venture research firm CB Insights lists more than 900.

The first investments beget further investments in what may appear to be the next big thing, as firms pile in out of FOMO – “fear of missing out”. Sober judgments about the technology underlying entrepreneurs’ promises? Don’t expect them.

The nature of Silicon Valley as a self-reinforcing ecosystem owes much to Annalee Saxenian and her 1994 book Regional Advantage. A professor of information sciences at UC Berkeley, Saxenian identified the key to the valley’s success as a culture in which “not only was risk-taking glorified, but failure was socially acceptable”.

That culture grew within an infrastructure that brought together experienced engineers and venture investors with “lawyers, market research firms, consulting companies, public relations companies” and other service providers specialising in the technology industry.

Starting as long ago as the 1930s with the founding of Hewlett-Packard, but especially from the 1970s through the 1990s. That system worked to foster explosive growth and the creation of many of the signature companies of high technology – Intel, Apple and Google among them.

More recently, however, the system has started to look like a caricature of itself, especially as less discerning investors flow in. Risk-taking and failure are not merely the source and outgrowth of ambition, but almost ends in themselves. The system has shown not only that it can pave the way to success, but reinforce fraud and failure by making them seem like milestones along the way.

To attract investors, a company no longer has to demonstrate that it has a working technology or rational business plan, but merely to promise to “disrupt” an established industry. Uber would “disrupt” the taxi industry. Zillow would disrupt homebuying.

How has that worked out? Uber lost US$8.5bil (RM35.58bil) on US$13bil (RM54.41bil) in revenue in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, and lost US$1.5bil (RM6.27bil) on US$11.7bil (RM48.97bil) in revenue in the first nine months of 2021, and still hasn’t shown that it has a path to profitability.

Zillow, which aimed to capture the gains from flipping homes by applying a high-tech algorithm to home valuations, discovered that the concept doesn’t work in markets as complex as residential housing. Last month it shut down its buying and selling business and announced plans to down the value of its remaining inventory by more than US$500mil (RM2.09bil). Its market value has plummeted from nearly US$50bil (RM209.30bil) to US$15.5bil (RM64.88bil).

Theranos presents a perfect example of the pitfalls of the new dynamic.

First, the promise of disruption. In this case, the target was the medical testing industry.

Holmes asserted that medical tests were immensely overpriced, labs operated by leading firms such as Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics were inefficient, and the sheer volume of blood drawn from patients to perform existing tests evoked, as an admirer wrote, “medicine by Bram Stoker”.

By contrast, Holmes said, her tests could cost consumers pennies in relative terms and could be performed on blood volumes that would fit in a container the size of a pain-reliever capsule.

The first journalists to publicise Theranos in 2013 and 2014 made the fundamental error of taking Holmes at her own level of self-esteem.

Joseph Rago, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, gushed in September 2013 that “Theranos’s technology is automated, standardised, and attempts to subtract human error from the process”, which “means catching disease in its earliest stages before the onset of symptoms”.

Rago quoted Holmes promising “a watershed opportunity to change the trajectory of health costs through price transparency”.

In his Fortune cover story in June 2014 – the piece that really put Holmes and Theranos on the publicity map – Roger Parloff employed the D-word: “Theranos today is a potentially highly disruptive upstart in America’s US$73bil (RM305.57bil) diagnostic lab industry,” he wrote.

He quoted Holmes’ star-struck professor at Stanford University (from which she dropped out to start the company) talking about how at one meeting with Holmes he thought he “could just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates”.

Meanwhile, the investment ecosystem had been running at full speed. Among the very first to sign on was former Secretary of State George Shultz, who met Holmes while he was a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus.

Shultz joined the Theranos board in 2011. He may have been instrumental in luring other Hoover fellows into the fold, including former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Gen. James Mattis and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

According to John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who finally exposed Theranos, Shultz also brought Theranos to the attention of the Journal editorial board, resulting in Rago’s article.

None of those board members had experience in the biomedical field, but their names alone were enough to give the company credibility. Even veteran venture investors were swayed by the trappings of success.

Carreyrou reported that, on a visit to Theranos headquarters in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, the principals of one San Francisco tech investing firm were struck by the tight security on the premises, which signalled to them that Theranos must have something to protect.

Every element of the Silicon Valley ecosystem did its part. In buying their stakes in the private company, venture investors ultimately valued Theranos at a putative US$9bil (RM37.67bil), which led to another wave of adulatory publicity. Holmes owned half of the company, so her net worth could be estimated at US$4.5bil (RM18.83bil). Accordingly, she led the Forbes list of America’s richest self-made women in 2015.

That same year, Time anointed her as one of “the 100 most influential people”, with a blurb bylined by Kissinger. Holmes accepts “only one option: making a difference”, Kissinger wrote. Yet he closed with a curiously qualified judgment: “Others will judge the technical aspects of Theranos, but the social implications are vast.”

That glossed over the obvious point that if the technical aspects of Theranos were fabricated, the social implications might not be too vast – or too positive.

Kissinger, like Shultz and other advocates, seemed to be taken with the charisma of the twentysomething entrepreneur – “striking, somewhat ethereal”, he called her. Her signature all-black outfits á la Jobs and her commandingly deep baritone voice wowed Kissinger, 92 when he wrote his encomium in Time, and Shultz, 92 when he invested, as well as others who met her face-to-face.

The company’s glittery board of directors and self-assured pitch by its founder encouraged investors to ignore the multiple red flags waving over Theranos. Trial evidence pointed to numerous investors who put money into Theranos despite being warned away by experts.

Members of the DeVos family, whose fortune derives from the Amway multi-level marketing company and which includes Donald Trump’s Education secretary, Betsy DeVos, among its members, met with Holmes after the Fortune article appeared.

The family planned to invest US$50 million, jurors were told, but after the meeting raised its stake to US$100 million – in part because the family was led to believe that it was among a handpicked group of investors invited to join in.

Questions had been raised consistently by experts about Theranos’ claims amid the tide of fawning publicity. John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford Medical School observed for an article in the Journal Of The American Medical Assn. that information about Theranos had appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Fortune and Forbes, “but not in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature”.

In many articles, the company’s choice to develop its technology secretly, as “stealth research”, was treated as a virtue. But to Ioannidis, it presented a risk: “Stealth research creates total ambiguity about what evidence can be trusted in a mix of possibly brilliant ideas, aggressive corporate announcements, and mass media hype.”

Writing in a peer-reviewed journal of clinical chemistry, Eleftherios P. Diamandis, a clinical pathology expert at the University of Toronto, asserted that the company’s pitch was based not merely on exaggerated claims for its own technology, but unwarranted criticism of competing technologies. Most of the tests performed by companies such as Labcorp and Quest cost as little and could be done as quickly as those Theranos was offering, he wrote.

As for the nirvana of personal empowerment produced by on-demand blood tests facilitated by Theranos’ ostensibly quick and easy process and promoted by Holmes in a widely-viewed TED talk, excessive blood testing isn’t universally viewed as a blessing. Holmes argument, Ioannidis asserted, ignored the drawbacks to expanded consumer-driven blood testing, such as “overdiagnosis, false-positive findings, or the potential for... misplaced and perhaps overly zealous diagnostic and screening efforts”.

Fortune’s Parloff, in a mea culpa published two months after the Wall Street Journal’s expose and 18 months after his own cover story, acknowledged that he had been snowed by Holmes, who dodged some of his questions about Theranos technology by citing “trade secrets”. But he conceded that he could have been more sceptical.

“I do believe that I was misled – intentionally,” he wrote. “But I was also culpable, in that I failed to prove certain exasperatingly opaque answers that I repeatedly received.”

How many of the factors that enabled Theranos to raise hundreds of millions of dollars without a workable technology have changed?

None. Investors are still looking for the next big thing, still looking for places to park their millions, still susceptible to superficially persuasive pitches by self-assured confidence schemers, still fearful of being left by the wayside as others pile in.

That’s human nature. The only difference is that the numbers next to the dollar signs are bigger. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service

(Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.)

Humanity's Final Arms Race: UN Fails to Agree on 'Killer Robot' Ban

The world should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It should not sleepwalk into dystopia.

A robot distributes promotional literature calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons in Parliament Square on April 23, 2013 in London, England. The 'Campaign to Stop Killer Robots' is calling for a pre-emptive ban on lethal robot weapons that could attack targets without human intervention. (Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

JAMES DAWES

December 30, 2021

 by The Conversation

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity's final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn't reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world's cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might have been the last chance to head off an arms race.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could be combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

As a specialist in human rights with a focus on the weaponization of artificial intelligence, I find that autonomous weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear world—for example, the U.S. president's minimally constrained authority to launch a strike—more unsteady and more fragmented. Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might have been the last chance to head off an arms race.
Lethal errors and black boxes

I see four primary dangers with autonomous weapons. The first is the problem of misidentification. When selecting a target, will autonomous weapons be able to distinguish between hostile soldiers and 12-year-olds playing with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat?


The problem here is not that machines will make such errors and humans won't. It's that the difference between human error and algorithmic error is like the difference between mailing a letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot systems—ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across an entire continent—could make misidentifications by individual humans like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan seem like mere rounding errors by comparison.

Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of the runaway gun to explain the difference. A runaway gun is a defective machine gun that continues to fire after a trigger is released. The gun continues to fire until ammunition is depleted because, so to speak, the gun does not know it is making an error. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately they have human operators who can break the ammunition link or try to point the weapon in a safe direction. Autonomous weapons, by definition, have no such safeguard.

Importantly, weaponized AI need not even be defective to produce the runaway gun effect. As multiple studies on algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the very best algorithms—operating as designed—can generate internally correct outcomes that nonetheless spread terrible errors rapidly across populations.

For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software used by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

The problem is not just that when AI systems err, they err in bulk. It is that when they err, their makers often don't know why they did and, therefore, how to correct them. The black box problem of AI makes it almost impossible to imagine morally responsible development of autonomous weapons systems.
The proliferation problems

The next two dangers are the problems of low-end and high-end proliferation. Let's start with the low end. The militaries developing autonomous weapons now are proceeding on the assumption that they will be able to contain and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it's this: Weapons spread.

Market pressures could result in the creation and widespread sale of what can be thought of as the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots that are cheap, effective and almost impossible to contain as they circulate around the globe. "Kalashnikov" autonomous weapons could get into the hands of people outside of government control, including international and domestic terrorists.

The Kargu-2, made by a Turkish defense contractor, is a cross between a quadcopter drone and a bomb. It has artificial intelligence for finding and tracking targets, and might have been used autonomously in the Libyan civil war to attack people. 

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY

High-end proliferation is just as bad, however. Nations could compete to develop increasingly devastating versions of autonomous weapons, including ones capable of mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear arms. The moral dangers of escalating weapon lethality would be amplified by escalating weapon use.

High-end autonomous weapons are likely to lead to more frequent wars because they will decrease two of the primary forces that have historically prevented and shortened wars: concern for civilians abroad and concern for one's own soldiers. The weapons are likely to be equipped with expensive ethical governors designed to minimize collateral damage, using what U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has called the "myth of a surgical strike" to quell moral protests. Autonomous weapons will also reduce both the need for and risk to one's own soldiers, dramatically altering the cost-benefit analysis that nations undergo while launching and maintaining wars.

Asymmetric wars—that is, wars waged on the soil of nations that lack competing technology—are likely to become more common. Think about the global instability caused by Soviet and U.S. military interventions during the Cold War, from the first proxy war to the blowback experienced around the world today. Multiply that by every country currently aiming for high-end autonomous weapons.
Undermining the laws of war

Finally, autonomous weapons will undermine humanity's final stopgap against war crimes and atrocities: the international laws of war. These laws, codified in treaties reaching as far back as the 1864 Geneva Convention, are the international thin blue line separating war with honor from massacre. They are premised on the idea that people can be held accountable for their actions even during wartime, that the right to kill other soldiers during combat does not give the right to murder civilians. A prominent example of someone held to account is Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

But how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier's commanders? The corporation that made the weapon? Nongovernmental organizations and experts in international law worry that autonomous weapons will lead to a serious accountability gap.

To hold a soldier criminally responsible for deploying an autonomous weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors would need to prove both actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms describing a guilty act and a guilty mind. This would be difficult as a matter of law, and possibly unjust as a matter of morality, given that autonomous weapons are inherently unpredictable. I believe the distance separating the soldier from the independent decisions made by autonomous weapons in rapidly evolving environments is simply too great.

The legal and moral challenge is not made easier by shifting the blame up the chain of command or back to the site of production. In a world without regulations that mandate meaningful human control of autonomous weapons, there will be war crimes with no war criminals to hold accountable. The structure of the laws of war, along with their deterrent value, will be significantly weakened.
A new global arms race

Imagine a world in which militaries, insurgent groups and international and domestic terrorists can deploy theoretically unlimited lethal force at theoretically zero risk at times and places of their choosing, with no resulting legal accountability. It is a world where the sort of unavoidable algorithmic errors that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now lead to the elimination of whole cities.

In my view, the world should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It should not sleepwalk into dystopia.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on September 29, 2021.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License


JAMES DAWES

James Dawes conducts research in human rights. He is the author of The Novel of Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2018); Evil Men (Harvard University Press, 2013), winner of the International Human Rights Book Award; That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Harvard University Press, 2007), Independent Publisher Book Award Finalist; and The Language of War (Harvard University Press, 2002).

New Poll: Amazon's Labor Violations Caused Unnecessary Deaths. Voters Want to Hold Them Accountable

PRESS RELEASE

WASHINGTON -

Less than a month ago, deadly tornadoes struck several states in the South and Midwest over the course of a single night, destroying homes and killing at least 88 people. During these devastating tornadoes, managers at a Kentucky candle factory and an Amazon warehouse in Illinois refused to allow employees to leave, resulting in 14 deaths.

New polling from Data for Progress finds that Americans overwhelmingly want to hold these companies accountable for workers' deaths by a +67-point margin. This includes Democrats by a +77-point margin, Independents by a +68-point margin, and Republicans by a +57-point margin.​
 

Read the full polling tabs and methodology here.

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Data for Progress is a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes.

 

For Immediate Release

Monday January 3, 2022, 5:09pm EST

Data for Progress

Contact

McKenzie Wilson, mckenzie@dataforprogress.org

Trump-Appointed Judge Sides With Cops Who Brutalized DAPL Protesters

The ruling "effectively legitimizes launching an hours-long barrage of freezing water, explosives, and highly dangerous munitions into a crowd of demonstrators."


Over two hundred tribes, joined by environmental activists and hundreds of United States military veterans, camp and demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline, just outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, North Dakota, on December 5, 2016. (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL

December 31, 2021

Five years after police brutalized activists opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump has dismissed a lawsuit accusing North Dakota law enforcement officers of excessive use of force—a decision that critics have characterized as a tacit endorsement of the violent repression of climate justice advocates.

Several peaceful protesters who gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to struggle against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure were assaulted by law enforcement officers on November 20, 2016. Police sprayed demonstrators with water cannons amid sub-freezing temperatures that night, and according to the plaintiffs' lawyers, they also used tear gas and fired rubber bullets and exploding munitions "indiscriminately into the crowd."

Attorneys for law enforcement officers named as defendants, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier and Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler, "say officers were outnumbered and were concerned for their lives and safety," The Bismark Tribune reported Thursday. "They sought to have the protesters' legal claims dismissed."

"U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor issued the order granting their request Wednesday," the newspaper noted, "writing that 'the Court finds the undisputed and irrefutable evidence in this case could only lead a reasonable juror to conclude the officers' conduct in this case was objectively reasonable.'"

Traynor argued that police violence was justified given the "unprecedented" nature of the situation. He cited the fact that "officers issued two code red requests and a Signal 100, requesting the assistance of every available officer in the state," which "has never been done in North Dakota history."

Morton County Assistant State's Attorney Gabrielle Goter applauded the ruling, saying in a statement that "law enforcement reasonably believed the protestors were trespassing and therefore, law enforcement was permitted to use less lethal force to protect themselves and others, from violent protestors that law enforcement perceived as" threats who intended to "physically injure" them.

Rachel Lederman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, warned that Traynor's ruling "effectively legitimizes launching an hours-long barrage of freezing water, explosives, and highly dangerous munitions into a crowd of demonstrators."

According to the Tribune:

The lead plaintiff in the case is Vanessa Dundon, a member of the Navajo Nation whose eye was injured the night of the incident.

The plaintiffs alleged in court documents filed earlier this year that officers "used a wildly disproportionate amount of force when they deployed water cannons, impact and explosive munitions at the plaintiffs, who were unarmed, peaceful, and not committing any crime or actively resisting law enforcement in any way."

Traynor in January threw out another lawsuit filed by a pipeline protester claiming that law enforcement used excessive force at a 2017 protest site. The order came weeks after a similar ruling in a case brought by another demonstrator.

A lawsuit filed by protester Sophia Wilansky, of New York, is continuing in federal court. Wilanksy claims police targeted her with a concussion grenade during the Nov. 20, 2016 confrontation. She suffered a left arm injury in an explosion and had multiple surgeries to save the limb.

Janine Hoft, another attorney for the plaintiffs, said Traynor's decision this week "is an example of how judges use 'qualified immunity' to let law enforcement off the hook for even the most extreme brutality."

After he infamously led the Morton County Sherriff's office in terrorizing opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Kirchmeier went on to advise other law enforcement agencies on how to put down anti-fossil fuel demonstrations elsewhere, Common Dreams reported in 2017.

Since DAPL, which transports crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale basin to a terminal in Illinois, became operational—and immediately started leaking—in 2017, opponents of the project have been subjected to surveillance and counterterrorism measures carried out by local police forces and private military contractors hired by the company behind the pipeline, corporate-led lawsuits, and arrests that could result in lengthy prison sentences.

Environmental justice and Indigenous rights advocates welcomed a federal judge's ruling in March 2020 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act in 2016 by approving federal permits for DAPL, which allowed construction to happen before expert analysis put forward by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe was considered.

Campaigners celebrated a few months later when a U.S. district court ordered DAPL to be shut down and emptied of oil while federal regulators conducted a comprehensive environmental review.

However, despite his campaign pledges to respect tribal sovereignty and transition the U.S. to clean energy, President Joe Biden in April 2021 refused to shut down DAPL, instead allowing the project to continue operating without a federal permit.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Court: Tyson Was Not "Acting Under" Federal Orders in Allowing Covid To Run Rampant Through Waterloo Plant

Statement from attorneys representing the families of the deceased workers

WASHINGTON -

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit today unanimously affirmed an Iowa federal court decision, holding that wrongful death claims brought by the survivors of meatpacking workers that died after being exposed to Covid-19 at Tyson's Waterloo, Iowa plant belong in state court. Public Citizen and The Spence Law Firm, LLC represented the families of deceased workers.

"Today's decision recognizes that this was an easy case," said Adam Pulver, attorney, Public Citizen. "As the court explained, the facts provide no support for Tyson's arguments that choosing to continue to operate its Waterloo plant without taking appropriate precautions and lying to workers about the safety of the plant was somehow compelled by a federal officer. Tyson's arguments had the potential to immunize thousands of American employers from negligent and reckless behavior throughout the pandemic—the Eighth Circuit has confirmed that Covid-19 did not alter well-established legal principles of federalism. Tyson was focused on profits, not the safety of the American people, much less its own workers, and its attempts to pin the blame on the federal government while delaying this case are shameful. We hope Tyson allows this case to promptly move forward so that the grieving families of its workers can finally have their day in court.

"The community of Waterloo was ravaged by Covid-19—because of Tyson's choices and conduct," said Mel C. Orchard, III and G. Bryan Ulmer, The Spence Law Firm, LLC. "As the Eighth Circuit recognized, a local Iowa jury should have final say on right and wrong."

Tyson had argued that various statements by President Trump, communications with USDA inspectors, and requests for government assistance meant that it was "acting under" the direction of federal officers, and thus only a federal court could hear the case. Tyson's Waterloo facility was the source of one of the largest Covid-19 outbreaks in America, with over 1000 Tyson workers contracting Covid-19 in spring 2020 alone. The cases decided by the Eighth Circuit today are brought on behalf of the families of four Waterloo workers who died in April and May 2020. The case will now return to Iowa state court, where it will be litigated on the merits. Read more about the cases here and here.

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Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.

The Fatal Flaw at the Heart of Our Civilization

Unless We Have a Great Transformation, We Face Three Decades of Collapse

umair haque
Jan 3 · 2022

Snowy

LONG READ


“But what is he?” I would constantly ask, frustrated. My mind would hurt. I need to figure these things out, or else I go a little crazy. And this was one question that I couldn’t figure out, for months. Nothing seemed to fit.

“Well,” my kid sis finally replied, furrowing her brow, taking a long moment to reflect, “he’s a…he’s a person.”

And then it all made sense.

“Ahhhhh.” I sighed in sweet relief. A buddy? A friend? A toddler? A child? My child? All of the answers I’d come up with were true, but only in a small way. Inadequate, not developed, not true enough. The correct answer was as simple as it was elegant. My little doggy. What was he? He is a person.

Forgive me. I know that you probably know this. But I only had a little friend later on in life. I’m slow, sometimes. OK, much of the time, my lovely wife would say.

We’re going to talk about the future, why it seems to be going wrong, how to fix it, and to do that, we’re going to have to talk about the past. And to do that, it all begins with my little buddy, and maybe yours, too.

What is this thing called human civilization, at its root? It’s a long, long struggle for personhood.

Today, you can see that struggle writ large. The forces of regress — the ones who want to undo civilisation, the fascists, Trumpists, Brexiters, and so forth — want to unmake personhood. They want to make women, minorities less than human again.

They are ascendant in the world today. Even if Trump has finally been defeated, Trumpism hardly has. Why are the forces of regress and barbarism ascendant? Why is this an age of little fires of fascism everywhere? Because the forces of progress have forgotten that civilisation is the struggle for personhood. For always advancing it, expanding it, enlarging it.

Let me explain that super abstract point, which might not really make sense yet.

In the beginning of the thing we call human civilization, there were three kinds of groups. First came kings, who were more than human. Then came nobles, who were human. And then came everyone else — serfs and peasants, who were not fully human, and slaves, who were less than human. This form of society was lopsided: persons made up a tiny, tiny minority. And those who were full persons could do whatever they wanted to everyone else, more or less, whether they were nobles in Europe, or samurai in Japan.

It took millennia for an age of revolutions to come about — in the 18th century — and personhood finally began trickling down. At last, more people were persons. Men, with enough money and land. After another half century or so, most men become persons — if they were the right skin colour. Another half century, and after a long, long struggle, women began to be persons, too. And after another long, bitter struggle, finally, minorities were recognised as person, like, for example, during the era of civil rights in America.

That’s the story of human civilisation in one paragraph. Do you see how it has everything to do with expanding personhood, enlarging it, so that it’s boundaries stretch outwards? That is how the fundamental values of civilisation — decency, kindness, truth, beauty, fairness, goodness — grow. And when we don’t expand those values, the forces of regress tend to resurface — and win, because this struggle is perpetual, as Camus pointed out.

So are we done? Is that it? To human civilization? The long struggle is over, now that minorities and women are recognized as persons — beginning to be, anyways? Let me ask that a different way.

Why isn’t the centre left fighting anymore to expand the boundaries of personhood? The answer is that it believes that we have reached the end of history — that the struggle has been won, and there is nowhere left to take personhood now.

But it is wrong — badly wrong. Believing in ends of history is always a mistake.

Where personhood must go from here is, in one sense, painfully obvious.

The planet is burning. We are in an age of mass extinction. The earth’s great ecologies are reaching tipping points, from which there’s no return. And all that is because personhood is still barely an inkling of what it should be. At the same time, more than half the world lives without decent food, water, sanitation, healthcare, education. Humanity, too, is not fully granted personhood yet, either.

Snowy — that’s him in the pic above — does something funny and strange. Something so human that I can’t help understand that he really is a person. He won’t do his business if anyone’s around — especially not if anyone’s looking at him. Which they tend to do, because, well, he’s supercute. Now, a scientist might say — “that’s just an animal protecting himself from being too vulnerable!” But…and here’s the point…what about you? I’d bet that you can’t exactly do your business when people are staring at you, either. You’re not so different.

In other words, like Snowy, you have an innate sense of what dignity means to you. Of shame and guilt, and also of empathy, belonging, grace, truth, meaning, love, beauty. You don’t have to try to be these things. You just are. Snowy will be your friend, if you are his friend. It’s the most natural thing in the world for him. He will recognize you as a person, if you recognize him as one. Do you see what I mean a little bit? Snowy passes both my tests of personhood. He has it, and he can give it. But we are failing this test of personhood. We are not giving it as much as we should. When we would go for our little daily walks, I pass by the old, old trees, on the street where the college is. I wonder: why don’t they have names? They’ve been here longer than any of us have. Perhaps you see what I mean.

In 1972, James Lovelock offered the Gaia Hypothesis. What if, he asked, the earth was alive? I don’t know if I “believe” the Gaia hypothesis. That’s a very American way to put it. A religious one. Educated minds, enlightened ones — they contemplate, reflect, entertain, think about. I contemplate what the Gaia hypothesis might mean. And it leads me to another question.

What if the earth was a person? I mean: how would our world change institutionally, politically, socially, culturally, if we recognised the earth as a person?

Well, one thing we’d immediately begin to see is that this person is a slave. One thing that “civilization is always expanding the boundaries of personhood outwards” means is that we are always faced with new slaveries. And the unrecognised slavery of the 21st century is about nature. We enslave it. If the earth were a person to us, it would be a person who did most of our work — provided our water, air, food, and medicine — but received less than nothing in return. It wasn’t paid for the work it did — and so how could it sustain itself? It had few rights, if any, and mostly, they were superceded by our right to abuse and exploit it, however we wished. Is it any surprise, then, that just like a slave, nature is in shock, terrorized, traumatized, dying slowly?

If we recognised the earth was our slave — but should be a person — then our systems would have to change. All of them. Our economics could no longer be built on the foolish idea of GDP — which counts profits, but not, say, the species going extinct to provide them — and “stock markets” booming, while life on earth begins to go extinct. We’d need to reinvent our economies wholesale — at a conceptual level, not just with money.

Our politics would have to change radically, too. We’d need to probably have parliaments with Speakers for the Earth. Endow this person with constitutional rights — make it free and equal and deserving of fairness, which is what personhood is — and then grant it representation, too. Imagine that the Speaker for the Earth could get up and object, every time some Senator who’s a well-paid corporate shill demands more of the planet and life on it to abuse, exploit, and enslave.

That’s how we begin to have a livable planet again — through this kind of deep change. A Green New Deal is good, but it’s a band aid for a civilisation that has stopped being one, stopped expanding personhood outwards, so the forces of regress are winning.

Let’s go further still. How would our societies have to change? I often wonder why our cities are so…ugly. Recognising the earth as a person would mean what some call “rewilding” our cities. Letting animals and plants thrive, and learning to live beside them, making space for them, instead of simply concreting over them. Why is it that you have to travel to a zoo to “see” animals”? Why don’t they just get to live in parks, on every block?

“LOL,” you might say, “Umair! Grow up!! What’s the point of that?” I’m coming to that. How do you think that would affect us — being closer to a planet we recognised as a person, instead of walking apes living in isolation in concrete and steel bunkers?

We’d be much, much happier. More peaceful. More pleasant and kind and empathic and generous and loving.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s what having a little buddy, a dog or a cat, does to a person — tons of research proves that. Want to be happier? Get a pet, not (only) a shrink. But the lesson is profound. We are alienated things, living in our shining towers of glass and steel, in our concrete cities and suburbs.We’re deeply unhappy as a civilization, and it shows in everything we do. In our addiction to anti-depressants — can you think of another species like that? — in our constant need for dumb, violent escapism, in our endless wars, in our susceptibility to superstition, in our need for the acquisition of shiny things to fill the gaping hole in our lives.

We have a life-shaped hole in our lives, my friends, and it exists because we live in such a way that nature is not really part of it. Put nature into it — even in the way of a tiny pet — and our sense of happiness and meaning and fulfilment all skyrocket. That says, too, though, that our way of life needs to be redesigned.

Why does our happiness and meaning and fulfilment go hand in hand with nature? And by nature, I don’t just mean “animals” or “woods.” I even mean a dancefloor. Something as simple as that.

The answer goes like this.

We’re social beings. That’s our nature. And the more social that we are, the more happiness, meaning, and fulfilment we’re capable of. Those things come from having social bonds, from enacting them, from expressing them, from enlarging them.

Now think about us through that lens. Excising nature from our lives with an industrial-age scalpel, what have we really done? We’ve massively reduced our own sociality, which just means we’ve massively limited our own chances at happiness and meaning and fulfillment. One, we live in isolation. Two, we don’t have the opportunity for sociality with the planet, for relationships with nature.

Remember those trees on my block with no name? That’s a lost relationship. But Snowy’s become a part of the naeighborhood. Everybody smiles when they see him. “Hi, Snowy!” they say. That’s sociality becoming happiness, in vivid reality. Do you see what I mean a little bit when I say that bringing nature back into our lives is how we expand sociality, and since we are social beings, that is how our own happiness and meaning and fulfilment grow?

I stay up all night, because the light can kill me. And standing by the window at night, as Snowy sleeps, I smoke a cigarette, and a clever little fox walks by. At 3AM, every single night. Doing his nightly rounds for food. I chuckle. Another little guy. But why does he have to live in fear, skulking around? Why doesn’t he have a real place, a protected space, to live on my block, too? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone — making the kids happy, the parents, the dogs, and so forth, all a little happier, closer? Why don’t they greet him by name? Why isn’t he part of us?

The answer is that we walking apes have fallen prey to a dangerous delusion. We imagine that we’re supreme. You might not be a racist, but I bet you believe in human supremacy. The idea that you’re better than, above, an “animal.” Are you? Who said so? Just because our species destroys everything it touches? How is that “better”? In what sense, really, are you any more of a person than a dolphin, a dog, a tree, or a little fox? They all feel just the same things you feel. They all communicate and emote and know and love and bond and touch and want and live and die. Just as you will, one day.

How much happier would you be if you recognised all of them as just like you? You wouldn’t be so alienated, and so you wouldn’t be so unhappy.

Human supremacy is a toxin. It bears no fruit. It isolates us, limits us, restrains us, while justifying the slavery of the 21st century, which is the annihilation of our world. We aren’t supreme. We are just here, like everyone else. And all of us — fish, forests, reefs, rivers — are people.

Until we recognize that — really recognize it, reshaping our world politically, economically, socially, culturally, my guess is this. We’ll go on being the violent, brutal, walking apes who destroy everything they touch. Maybe, finally, including themselves. Their violence comes from their loneliness, their isolation, their sense of meaninglessness. Not a single God they’ve ever invented, the walking apes, has reduced their capacity for violence one iota. Think about that for a second. Not one. Nothing has. So what can? Just being here, like the rest of everything living. Learning to recognize every single life has dignity, worth, purpose, and truth, too. Then, as our happiness grows, as our sense of meaning and fulfilment expand, maybe our need for violence, to enslave and exploit and terrorize, finally declines, too.

Human supremacy is the fatal error our civilisation has made. Will it be the one that finishes us off?

Let me connect those final two ideas. The more people — recognized persons — that there are in our society, the more opportunities for happiness there are for all. Think about the fight for gay rights. Before, they weren’t people. Poof — opportunities for happiness lost. Today, they can marry, date, romance, share — that’s personhood creating happiness.

We are deeply unhappy beings, us walking apes, because our opportunities for happiness are so small. It shows, in us being a civilisation that is still — still — built on violence, on slavery, on abusiveness. Of nature, and also of the half of the world that doesn’t have a decent life, while 1% of it has too much. How do we change all this? Fix it? Redress the balance?

The time has come to recognize the world as a person, too. To employ the half of humanity that doesn’t have enough in better things than being neo-slaves earning pittances for making baubles for the 10% of the world that enslaved them. Neither of these parties should be exploited and abused like slaves — the planet, or the half of humanity that still doesn’t have enough. Recognising them both as full persons is how our own opportunities for happiness expand — those of us in rich societies, anyways.

That’s a lot of ideas for one essay. Maybe they’re a little too disconnected, I don’t know. I hope you get, a little bit, the spirit of what I am trying to say to you. If you want me to sum it up more simply, take a look at the pic above. Little puppy, big world. That’s not just Snowy. That’s me and you, too.



Umair
January 2022
Eudaimonia and Co