In its New York premiere, Touching Nickon: A Jamaican AIDS Story will be screened as part of the African Diaspora Film Festival on Tuesday, December 1 at 8:30pm at the Cowin Center (Teachers College, Columbia University at 525 West 120^th Street) and Friday, December 4 at 4:30pm at the Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue at 2^nd Street). There will be a question and answer session after the screening.

Touching Nickon (Jamaica, 2007), by David Graham and Leslie Chin, is a groundbreaking Jamaican documentary that tackles the stigma, discrimination, social disruption, alternative healing, cultural acceptance, and the personal impact of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. The film explores the lives of children born with the disease that are left up to the benevolence of the nation, orphans who have lost both parents to HIV/AIDS, surviving relatives, and community members, to show the complexities of trying to face, understand, rationalize, and deal with the effects of the pandemic.

For full schedule, see http://www.nyadff.org/films.html

Image from http://www.unicef.org/jamaica/hiv_aids.html

SALT: Saint Andrew Leadership Team

SALT is our youth leadership team.  They serve for a 5 month period and plan a service, fun, fundraising, and worship event for the rest of us in that time.  They are an incredible group of teenagers!  SALT meets the last Sunday of the month from 4-5 and as needed in addition.  Think about if you are interested to helping lead youth ministry at Saint Andrew for the next SALT season.

Meet this Season’s SALT Leaders

ADULTS: David Graham and Susie Uppman

SENIORS: Emily Atteberry and Lindsey Johnston

JUNIORS: Ginny Helgeson and Alexx Burnside

SOPHOMORES: Luke Holsinger and Abby Schleicher

FRESHMAN: Ryan Dugan and Jon Atteberry

TALON (at Grayhawk), Scottsdale, Arizona: This is your standard unbelievable Sonoran Desert course, designed by David Graham and Gary Panks. Tucson has great golf but doesn’t compare to the Phoenix metro area, which Scottsdale is part of. I could not even sneak any Tucson courses onto my top 50 list. It gets a little warm here though. In the summer you can play for $50 after 10 A.M. Quite a deal, if you can take the sun. I have not played the “Raptor” at the same resort but it’s a Tom Fazio so it is good. RATINGS: 74.1/143 COST: $50 (summer)-$190 including cart.

Visit my website here.

Florida Friendly yards is about conserving water and reducing water pollution from fertilizer and pesticide run-off.

The key is to remember that more than 50% of our water usage is outdoors for yard watering.

Here are eight Principles for Florida Friendly yards adapted from floridayards.org:

1. Place the right plant in the right place, and limit grass areas to that needed for recreational use ( mulched planting areas use far less water). Remove invading plants that steal water from your landscaped plants. Choose Florida Native plants whenever possible.

2. Water efficiently. Collect water in rain barrels and only water when needed using an efficient drip or micro-spray syatem.

3. Fertilize Appropriately. Use slow-release fertilizers and use iron instead of nitrogen to green up your lawn. Don’t fertlize just prior to heavy rains.

4. Keep mulch at 2-3 inches, and try to use recycled materials such as pine needles. Apply mulch twice a year and limit grassy areas.

5. Protect the life of wild life visitors by limiting pesticide use only to areas that need it. Use less toxic pesticides like oils and insecticidal soaps.

6. Leave grass clippings on lawns to recycle nitrogen, or simply use a mulching lawnmower. Recycle other yard material.

7. Use mulch, bricks, gravel or other porous surfaces for walkways, patios and driveways, to reduce water run-off.

8. Protect shorelines: Establish a 10–30 foot “no fertilizer, no pesticide” zone along your shoreline and Plant a buffer zone of low-maintenance plants between your lawn and shoreline to absorb
nutrients and to provide wildlife habitat.

Keep in mind that:

A lack of conservation is a key reason the St. Johns River Water Management District is considering proposals to take up to 262 million gallons of water a day out of the St. Johns River to meet the water needs of Central Florida.

So here is an action item form the St Johns Riverkeeper:

SAY “NO” TO WATER WITHDRAWALS

HELP PROTECT THE ST. JOHNS AND OCKLAWAHA RIVERS

On April 13th, the Governing Board of the St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) will vote on a permit from Seminole County to withdraw an average of 5.5 million gallons of water a day (MGD) from the St. Johns River. Seminole County’s Yankee Lake facility would eventually be able to withdraw up to 55 MGD.

This initial permit from Seminole County represents the beginning of an Alternative Water Supply (AWS) program that could eventually result in the withdrawal of over 260 million gallons of water a day (MGD) from the St. Johns and Ocklawaha.

This is not just about the future of the St. Johns and Ocklawaha. This is a fight to protect all of our water resources in Florida – our aquifer, rivers, and springs.

Here is how you can help:

1) Attend the SJRWMD Governing Board meeting in Palatka on Monday, April 13th at 1:00 p.m. Where they will decide the fate of the Seminole County water withdrawal permit. St. Johns Riverkeeper will be providing bus transportation from Jacksonville to Palatka.

SJRWMD Headquarters
4049 Reid Street
Palatka, FL 32177

2) Send an e-mail to the SJRWMD Governing Board members and Governor Charlie Crist and let them know that you oppose surface water withdrawals and support water conservation.

Click here to learn more and to send an e-mail today.

David Graham documents America as a place where the intersection of cultural and actual landscape leads to moments of strange beauty. His cheerful supersaturated color photographs, graced by a bemused appreciation of his native land, capture a vivid jumble of roadside attractions and manmade structures locked in unexpected tension with their environment. Almost Paradise, his newest book with a foreword by noted writer Jack Hitt, ventures into dark territory with images of post-Katrina New Orleans sequenced together with objects in a wax museum and sunny days in no-man’s land. Graham’s postindustrial scenes devoid of the humans who created them will haunt your subconscious in the best possible way.

One issue that interests me is the relationship between libertarianism and animal rights. In particular, one argument for animal rights (and the one I think future generations will look at as the turning point) is the argument from marginal cases. Originally developed by Platonists such as Plutarch and Porphyry, it does the difficult work of either forcing libertarianism to concede animal rights or that some members of the species human lack such rights.

The argument goes that a standard (rights-based) libertarian defends that humans, in particular, have certain rights because we are creatures that function with rationality, we engaged with our society and our fellows in certain ways unique to us. Human beings, put simply have a privileged place in nature.

This already, before we even get to marginal cases, seems to presuppose a certain view of rationality that has been soundly beaten by modern thinking. Rationality is not a binary, one does not either have it fully or lack it. We have rationality in degrees and there is even the case that we should not consider rationality a unified concept, but as several species of rationality under the same umbrella.

This can be treated as an aside, though, libertarians are not committed to outmoded views of animal psychology (including that of humans). A libertarian could happily say that human beings are the only ones who develop sufficient reason to possess these rights. I will leave aside cases such as dolphins and other higher primates whose mental capacities include the potentiality or actuality for language use and advanced conceptualisation, since a libertarian might argue that these other animals specifically should not be harmed and possess negative rights, but not, say, an ocelot or an ursine.

What we do have though are cases of beings that are humans, but do not specifically possess the functions we associate with humans generally and, which libertarians believe, give rise to those rights as human beings. In the case of a child, these may be defended as being “foetal”: the child is going to acquire rationality eventually, all things being equal. There is a lot of debating about this going on and I think one of the central arguments revolves around the idea why treat a potential right as a right?

I don’t want to address this here; thought I agree a potential right is not a right, it is unneeded. I want to discuss the cases of humans, through some birth defect or disaster, who never will develop or lose the fundamental features of humans that enable our rights (but, for the sake of debate, still retain animal-level sentience). If these still have rights, the argument goes, it cannot be because of these features. It must be either because of some feature they still possess (and if so, don’t other animals share that feature?) or that they simply don’t possess these rights at all.

There are three libertarian lines that have tried to show this is a false dilemma. The first is offered by Tibor Machan (in Why Animal Rights Don’t Exist) and can be called the argument from species normality. He writes:

The most telling point against me goes as follows: “But there are people like very young kids, those in a coma, those with minimal mental powers, who also cannot be blamed, held responsible, etc., yet they have rights. Doesn’t that show that other than human beings can have rights?”

This response doesn’t recognize that classifications and ascriptions of capacities rely on the good sense of making certain generalizations. One way to show this is to recall that broken chairs, while they aren’t any good to sit on, are still chairs, not monkeys or palm trees. Classifications are not something rigid but something reasonable. While there are some people who either for a little or longer while – say when they’re asleep or in a coma – lack moral agency, in general people possess that capacity, whereas non-people don’t. So it makes sense to understand them having rights so their capacity is respected and may be protected. This just doesn’t work for other animals.

As David Graham notes, this immediately equivocates between temporary and permanent lack of the necessary functioning. Yet, this is just a flaw of Machan’s original and a more refined argument can be extracted, thus:

1) Human beings generally, as a species, possess features that [when combined with other arguments from rights theory] produce negative rights (such as personal freedoms).
2) Those who are permanently without these features are still members of a species that generally possess these features.
3) A pre-requisite for those rights is that if most members of a group have them, all do, including marginal cases.
—-
C. Marginal cases have rights, without needing to argue for animal rights.

This argument is easily shown as extremely weak when one begins to pick at it. First of all there is James Rachels’s case of a creature that has, through some means, acquired the features and functions of a normal, everyday human. Do we deny this creature the right to non-interference because he belongs to a species that normally doesn’t have these features? If we judge people by the normality of the species then why give this creature added rights?

Graham moves from Rachels’s example to ask why do we restrict this argument to rights? Why do we not apply the normal duties and ethical responsibilities of humans upon the marginal cases? Yet, mens rea in any civilised nation shows that this is not what we do. Machan is committed to a prescriptive position whereby a child or severely mentally ill person is tried and sentenced as if a mentally healthy adult, because they are of the same species.

Two points I would like to add is, first, why do we assign species as the category? Machan has accepted that these classifications are not rigid and so why not dive headlong into the nonsense of “identity politics”? Graham notes this when he states that we are being judged as a species, not as individuals. No thank you, Professor Machan, your “libertarianism” is not for me.

Further though, on Graham’s point, is this fact that Machan doesn’t seem to provide an adequate reason why we choose the species over, say, the race or family or the ethnicity. I will bring up my reasons why I think he doesn’t later.

My second addition is that Machan completely ignores what it is that makes me possess those rights. It is those features that being a healthy, mentally-fit human enables me to possess. The being a human drops out of the pictures except as a causal, not moral, explanation of why I possess those features that grant me those rights. In the case of Rachels’s chimp, he has some other means (not being human) of acquiring those features. The features themselves, mixed with an objectivism about rights, is what gives rise to my rights.

There is a second argument, though: one I believe, at first stronger, but ultimately quite weak, and was written by Roderick Long. It concentrates on species normality, also, but where it differs is that it talks about a key difference between a, say, cow and a mentally deficient human in that the human has a lack from the norm of the species whereas the cow does not. In the case of the human, the “blank spot” (the norm deviation, as Long calls it) is something that another human being can step in and take over as a kind of surrogate agent on the others behalf.

It seems already that most, if not all, of Graham’s argument brings this new argument crashing down. It already judges an individual on the norms on their species and seems to do so arbitrarily, what is it about the gap that allows the new individual to fill that gap? If I am given moral guardianship over a “cow-minded woman” and, in my place as filling the gap of moral agency, decide I want to hire out her body to people of rather strange sexual fetishes then if my moral agency allows me to do it to my own body (which we can assume, as libertarians, that it does) then I have the full right to do so to her, I am the moral agent in this case.

Again, there is this flawed attribution in Long’s argument over where the source of rights lie in a human’s nature. It is because humans have or lack a certain feature as individuals, not as a general rule. Such “de-individualised libertarianism” is hardly fit to bear the name of libertarianism at all. It is those features that I actively possess, not what others who are like me in any number of arbitrarily set ways are like. It is not that I am accusing either Long or Machan or misunderstanding libertarianism here, but I will expand on why that is latter.

Finally, there is a weaker argument still that accepts the problem of these marginal cases, but seems to rest of the difficulty of drawing the line. The problem, like many arguments that fall back on blurred lines, is that the situation is like a Venn diagram. There are the blurry edges and okay, we may have to give the benefit of the doubt to these blurry cases, but look at a patient in a terrible accident, his brain so heavily damaged that barely enough higher brain functioning for self-awareness is even possible, only the sort of pain responses that rudimentary intelligence possesses and the bare knowledge of self-existence possessed by most mammals. There is just no blur here. Further, because we have gone from thinking animals just automata in the Scholastic period to our modern conception of animal psychology, the blur works both ways. Further to this, we can imagine a future state where medical science completely removes any and all blur. After all, the only reason we know now that some individuals were falsely diagnosed with PVS was that advances in technology and practices allowed such errors to be corrected.

So, we are left with the dilemma. What I think the correct response to this is comes from Graham again (though not originally) when he correctly identifies that fact that we can suffer and have a vested interest in avoiding suffering that means we, as moral agents, must avoid harming each other (including animals). Of course, the possession of this right is not the same as the possession of moral agency and that animals or marginal cases possess these rights does not require that they possess this moral agency also. If possession of moral agency is a prerequisite for the possession of those rights, this affects marginal cases as much as animals.

These arguments by Machan, Long and others are all very weak and I think that their defeat symbolises a dilemma that few libertarians face out of, I believe, intellectual dishonesty (and the almost hash natures of the arguments given by them are not real engagements, I could have told Machan how a person like Singer and Rachels would have demolished his argument before the ink was dry on his argument). They do not want to face the idea that marginal cases have no rights (though some do, but I have not addressed their claims here) or accept that animals have rights as well. I’m sorry, my fellows, but (at this point, at least) you have no other options.

Of course, I will want to argue further that we only have one of these options (i.e. animal rights), but that is for another time. My parting remark is that I think libertarians (like most people) generally want to believe marginal cases have rights and non-humans do not, but avoid this dilemma out of avoidance of cognitive dissonance (like most people). They do not want to face the fact that two deeply held beliefs are incompatible and so simply refuse to follow the train of thought, though logical, that leads them to the realisation that they believe at least one false thing. This is why, as I said earlier, I do not believe Long or Machan are misunderstanding libertarianism, but perhaps the truth is even more dishonest.

Jackson Araújo acaba de me enviar um presente musical nessa tarde de sábado: David Graham tocando Cry Me A River em vídeo P&B do YouTube.  Duas referências cinematográficas me ocorrem: Balão Vermelho o cult movie de Albert Lamorisse que ganhou em 1968 o grande premio do Festival de Cannes para produções de média metragem; e Big City Blues, de 1962, com roteiro e direção do holandês Charles Huguenot van der Linden, que concorreu a um Oscar de melhor curta metragem, perdendo para o francês  Heureux Anniversaire, de Pierre Étaix.

Several industries make money referring their clients to competitors when they can’t fulfill their needs, and now it appears as though the insurance industry is following suit. Much like airlines, insurers are sending leads to their competitors, and cashing in big as a result. The recent alliance between More Than and Junction highlights this growing trend.

Currently, potential customers of More Than that don’t get a quote to their liking, will find themselves referred to Junction for a better deal. More Than will then get a small fee for referring their customer. Although it does benefit consumers by providing them with alternative pricing for many different types of insurance, such as health insurance or even car insurance, experts wonder how quickly this practice will grow and become acceptable amongst general insurers in retaliation to the growing number of insurance aggregator/comparison websites.

The trend also highlights a changing attitude within the insurance industry. As competition gets stiffer, many are finding it necessary to take advantage of any income stream they can come up with, even if it does mean sending potential customers away in search of a better deal. This shift from plain insurance to comparison service has been gradual, but is picking up speed.

Without a doubt, consumers seeking different policies will find it easier to save money in the long run, but the lines of demarcation between insurance companies are definitely growing less clear, leaving many to wonder just how far the insurers will go to make a profit. This practice, which is common with US car insurance companies, may just become standard over the next few years.

About the Company:

No Claims Discount offers consumers the opportunity to get real pricing from real insurance companies, without all the hassles. Thousands of customers have been able to find the right insurance plan thanks to their efforts. By offering consumers real world information about insurance policies, the site provides a valuable, unique service that is unmatched.

© Heason Events

Dave is a world-class boulderer and sport climber from Maine who has both established and repeated some of the world’s hardest lines. He is of course also familiar to us as a regular in BigUp Productions Dosage series and many other films.

The mention of Dosage brings to mind the fact that the franchise features Chris Sharma more than any other climber. For any world-class climber, comparisons with Sharma are inevitable, though I am sure that both Chris and those who are compared to him get pretty tired of it all. For Graham maybe the comparison comes to mind particularly easily through their age, nationality, shared ascents and longstanding friendship. I’ll get this stuff out of the way early and move on to hopefully more interesting territory.

In his Dosage interviews (which are sometimes fairly brief), Graham can appear the yin to Sharma’s yang. Where you get laid-back Californian surfer-dude, mixed with some Eastern philosophy from the latter; with the former it is more high-energy, high-intensity and maybe an element of quirkiness. One aspect of this contrast is that, to me, Dave stands out as perhaps representing something a little different.

I’ll also get something else out of the way up-front. I have always had something of a soft spot for Dave. In my younger and slimmer days the epithet of ectomorph was something that I got very accustomed to receiving. Regardless of what training I did, my body could no more look like Chris Sharma’s than it could Dalia Ojeda’s. However, if I had taken up climbing in my teens and been more careful with my diet over the years, I guess I would have come closer to Dave’s physique; if sadly without his outrageous talent. So I was particularly looking forward to the talk and Dave did not disappoint.

At first it seems that what you get with Graham in person is just the guy from the DVDs. The energy, the number of words per second, indeed the quirkiness – that word again. But you also begin to get some other things. With a longer exposure to Dave’s thoughts on a wide range of subjects, both climbing related and general, the supposed quirkiness morphs into the realisation that he has an active and alert mind, that he thinks about a lot of things and makes non-obvious connections between them.

A couple of times in his talk, Dave speaks about some of his approach to climbing being driven by his physical attributes and these maybe pushing him down the path of subtlety rather than brute force (though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle with him). However the impression I formed was that this approach suits his mentality as much as his physique; he seems incurably inquisitive, always looking for a different way to do things; in climbing and in life. He makes correlations that seem obvious and true, but which you had never thought of before.

It is clear that a lot of thought and effort has gone into producing Dave’s slides and that he wants to serve up something more than “here is a photo of me on my latest hard climb”. What is also evident is that, even in the act of presenting, the material is sparking new connections in his ever active brain. He sometimes pauses to consider the implications of a new thought or an idea for restructuring his presentation to better put forward his themes. This could perhaps be off-putting in a less engaging speaker, but with Graham it feels more that you are witnessing a creative act.

Dave’s talk at The Arch was his second in the UK, after an initial lecture in Swansea. It started late, for reasons that were not entirely clear at the time. A subsequent booking of the venue (a massive railway arch adjacent to the climbing wall and surely a previous Bat Cave set) meant that Dave had to abridge his material on the fly; not easy when you are constantly having additional thoughts as you present. He did managed to negotiate this challenge, but I would have liked for him to have at least an additional 30 minutes to cover his middle-to-late material at a more even pace. Hopefully this is something that he will be able to achieve in later sessions.

What Dave managed to deliver overall was a great mixture of sheer enthusiasm, an inside track on the world of a professional athlete and a more reflective slant on climbing and its place in life than many of the other top pro-climbers seem to offer. He was human, funny, humble, original, insightful and real. I have never heard a top-flight climber make things seem so relevant to bottom-flight climbers like me. It made me feel part of a continuum in the sport, which was pretty inspiring. When he spoke about trying harder it felt more like something that I could do, rather than just an abstract comment.

In summary, and in answer to my initial question, there is a lot more to Dave Graham than we perhaps suspected and he seems to be much more than the sum of his various DVD appearances. I’d recommend anyone to go along to one of his talks, you will learn some new things about climbing, and maybe about life as well.
 

The price of superphosphate  is likely to increase to $700 a tonne according to Ballance Agrinutrients chair David Graham.

That would be a 218% increase in 18 months and a 49% rise since June.

A year ago, superphosphate was selling for about $220 a tonne, but Mr Graham said $700 a tonne was not unrealistic given soaring international prices.

Fertiliser is the biggest item on most farm budgets. The price is already putting a dent in the high dairy payout, it will be even worse for sheep and beef farmers even with the improved prices.

And those who think a drop in the value of the dollar is good for primary producers might want to consider the impact on the price of fertiliser.