I have been watching CCTV News quite a bit lately. A broader world view that what we see on US News, more optimism and less vitriol. Fairly objective, as well...which is rare here.

I have a couple of friends who live and work in China. He's a Chinese citizen and she's a US citizen. They are doing rather well, have two girls...yes, they didn't kill them or put them up for adoption. China is on the move upward...their transportation systems and infrastructure are making ours seem antiquated and obsolete. They have many problems, mind you...but the people there (from what I understand) are more interested in having good garbage collectors and progress than they are with bickering back and forth between tweedle dee and tweedle dum in the houses of congress...paying lip service to the masses while accomplishing nothing except dividing our nation...and lining their pockets.

I also listen to World Radio Network (WRN) to broaden my scope of understanding.

The world no longer revolves around the US. We waste our treasure on senseless wars for the daddy warbucks and neglect business at home.

Today

Buddhist Economics

Buddhist Economics - It Makes More Than Cents by Barbara Bamberger Scott

Who could imagine that young people, charmed by notions of small-scale farming, homesteading, and alternative energy, would find themselves attracted to the philosophy of an old man who did some of his most remarkable work as Chief Economic Advisor to Britain’s National Coal Board? Who would think that such a man, someone who wore three-piece suits and stalked the halls of power, would eventually become famous for promulgating a credo called “Buddhist Economics”?  That he would be adored and remembered for developing technologies to scale work down to human size?  That a foundation in his name would champion communal land-use and community-based organic farming? When I first arrived at Emerson College, in Sussex, England, to study bio-dynamic farming and gardening, I was invited to a ceremony.  The group was small.  The day was grey and chilly.  I knew no one there apart from my husband, though the assembled few would be my classmates for the coming semester.  We stood encircling a tree.  It was a new little tree with fencing around it to keep deer away.  It was being dedicated to E. F. Schumacher, who had encouraged the Emerson gardening program, and especially its newest component, of which I was to be a part – the Rural Development Program, aimed at small scale sustainable agriculture for villages in the Third World.  So though the ceremony was modest, the attendees few, and the skies cloudy, it was an august and significant moment.  I was told by our course director that we were commemorating Schumacher’s life by doing what he suggested: everyone, he said, can plant at least one tree.  If I took away anything else from Emerson – blisters, a knitted wool cap, a pair of muddy wellies – that was a small plus.  But what I gained in my life from the teaching of E. F. Schumacher is enduring: a set of truths about how we can better live. Once introduced to the writings of Schumacher in general, I devoured them in detail.  His best-known book is Small Is Beautiful – Economics as Though People Mattered.  It’s an alluring title and the ideas in it are revolutionary, in a sane, healing way.  It has been translated into 27 languages and in 1995 the London Times Literary Supplement cited it as one of the hundred most influential books written after World War II.   Another of his essay collections is A Guide for the Perplexed.  We are perplexed, aren’t we?  We find it hard to make right choices, always wanting to act in a way that is moral, simple and practical yet seeing so many divergent opinions about what that means, and experiencing so much confusion about the possible outcomes of our actions.  The third widely published collection is Good Work, something we are all concerned with, especially now when many people may be thinking, “It’s just good to have work!” – but is it? I drew so much sustenance from Schumacher’s views, especially on the thorny issue of “good work” – that I am sometimes surprised that so few people have heard of him.  But his way was always quiet, even serene – so much so that when he died of heart failure on a train the policeman who was called to the scene said the old man looked so orderly and composed it was as if he was prepared for the moment.  Wouldn’t that be a wonderful way to go? Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, known as Fritz, passed away in 1977 (the Emerson tree was planted in 1980).  He was born in Germany and lived through two world wars in Europe.  He was educated at Oxford and Columbia, and emigrated to England rather than live under the Nazi regime.  He spent some time in an English internment camp where he wrote papers on economic theory in his “spare time” and rather enjoyed the back-breaking work on the farm.  His writings soon drew attention and he was widely quoted, even as he still lived in a barracks far away from academia.  Finally he was drafted to assist in the English war effort and quickly rose to prominence.  In his work for the National Coal Board (1950-1970) he predicted the ascendancy of oil-rich nations and the impracticality of relying on oil as a long-term energy source.  This is one example of Schumacher’s visionary genius.  Since his death, his vision lives on in the Schumacher Society (largely involved with land trusts), Schumacher College in Devon, England, and the Intermediate Technology Development Group, now known as Practical Action, an international charity working on small-scale solutions for Third World farming and industry, as well as for First World scale-downs – everything from bicycle-operated laptops to locally constructed wind pumps. Despite his position as a highly placed consultant in a huge organization devoted to profit and multi-national power-brokering, Schumacher gradually revealed his anti-materialist nature.  He visited Burma (now known asMyanmar) as part of his job for the Coal Board, and was deeply impressed by Buddhist theology.  He was also a believing Christian, whose core faith was that we are all pilgrims and our lives have purpose. Because life has purpose, we must work purposefully.  InSmall Is Beautiful Schumacher stated, “If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace.”  Having recently lost my full-time job as a result of downsizing, I can attest to the terrible truth of that assertion.  Yet Schumacher did not applaud wage slavery.  Far from it.  He had a high standard for what constitutes “good work.” His essay, “Buddhist Economics,” collected in Small Is Beautiful, has emerged as the most enduring of his writings.  In it Schumacher proposed three essential elements for “good work” based on his observation of life in Burma: 1. It should allow the worker to use and develop his/her talents and abilities to the maximum; 2. It should reduce opportunities for egocentricity by working as part of a team; 3. It should have the goal of producing goods or services that enhance the lives of the workers and others. Schumacher, being an economist, also articulated ideas about pay.  How much pay is enough?  He believed that a worker should receive sufficient recompense to keep him/her from becoming disgruntled, but not so much that arrogance and dissonance would result.  I used to think that was an odd idea, not so much the first part, which seems sensible, but the latter part.  Why would anyone be upset by earning too much?  Then I had a job (I have had many!) in which for the first and only time, I was overpaid.  My duties were few, my hourly wage was far in excess of what I thought my efforts were “worth,” with the result that I felt vaguely paranoid all the time that someone would discover the truth and I would be fired, even though I was doing exactly what I had been hired to do.  It never happened, but when the job came to a natural end there was a part of me that was glad.  Lucky for me, I suppose, I have yet to be paid that much again! Schumacher’s world view posited that all people should have work that enlivens and enlightens them, that harmonizes with leisure rather than being a stark contrast to it.  To the standard economists who argued that stability lies in getting enough labor at a low enough cost to the manufacturer and a just high enough rate of pay to the worker so that all can affordably consume the products of industry, Schumacher, inSmall Is Beautiful, declared: “From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity.  It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to the forces of evil.”  Those are pretty strong words.  They echo with somber resonance in these times of economic downturn, when all of us, I believe, are questioning our economic “worth” and wondering what we would do if we were one of the many to lose our paid occupations. If these ideas plainly reflect Schumacher’s contact with Buddhism, they also demonstrate Schumacher’s essentially Western respect for order, inspiration and the force of will.  One suspects that in describing Buddhist economics, he was far ahead of many Buddhist thinkers on that subject: "Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related.  The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: 'Cease to do evil; try to do good.'  As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use.  Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.  "From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale." Part of his theory of “economics as if people matter” dealt with the differential between the highest and lowest-paid workers in any company.  Schumacher proposed that the ratio should be no greater than 7:1. If the lowest paid janitor received $10 per hour, the CEO would receive $100 per hour.  Not bad pay for the CEO, some might consider.  In fact 7:1 was the ratio used by the founders of Ben and Jerry’s famous ice cream stores.  However, when they sold their chain to mega-corporation Unilever, the ratio rose to 20:1, a giant leap forward for the new management with no comparable improvement for the janitor (and, curiously, it made Ben and Jerry’s stock more risky).  But in light of current practices, 20:1 is still laughably low, with some executives, as we now know, making up to 500 times as much as the cleaning lady.  That’s right – while the cleaning lady can count on a gross pay of $400 per week, the guy whose office she dusts and mops will be taking in a whopping $200,000 a week. I’m pretty sure Schumacher would have reacted with the same disgust and righteous indignation that we all do when we learn about these kinds of numbers.  Especially when one remembers that many of the CEOs so compensated are failures, running near-bankrupt businesses. Schumacher believed that no one should be paid too much, that being overpaid would create a sense of moral discomfort (as it did for me).  Lamentably, the CEOs of large industries in America and in the financial sector seem to be able to deal with this dissonance better than I did.  Their consumption of goods and services can be no greater than average – how much food can one person eat, how many times a day can he or she take a taxi or use the internet or turn on the shower?  So what reason can anyone have for earning such vast sums, money that benefits only a handful of other people?  This is not “good work” and we all sense that even if we do not have the words to decry it.  Schumacher would have decried it.  He pointed out in “Buddhist  Economics” that it is not material wealth that is wrong, but the craving for it: "It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.  The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence.  From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern -amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results." This fact is not original to me, but bears repeating in case it isn’t blaringly obvious to my readers: Japan, offering an apparently successful business model for automobile manufacture as compared with the American model that is in disarray and disgrace at present, is a Shinto/Buddhist society. In his last lecture Schumacher pointed out that even a huge ship carries lifeboats, and suggested that it is now time that the world begins to build lifeboats to save itself. Schumacher wanted people trapped in poverty to have buildable, useable technologies that could be operated at a rational speed to perform needed tasks to produce income or food for families and communities.  He envisioned land sharing as a salvation for rural areas where without some intervention, land would be lost to agriculture forever. So there you have it: a brilliant man who could have had a princely salary, could have managed an international financial institution, who chose instead to encourage people to care about their own lives enough to do good work, to divest in complex things and enjoy simple ones, to produce and consume locally – and to build planetary lifeboats, in cooperation with others.  Meditating on the mega-crisis we are facing at this time, I long for the steady confident voice of Fritz Schumacher.

May the peace and love that is represented by this holiday celebration come into all our lives, our nation and the world. Shunning material gain and greed, remembering that it is the poor and unwashed...the 'other'...who He walked among...and considered family and friends.

Love to you, peace on earth.

Winter Solstice

As we toasted shedding our skin over a bloody caesar brunch..."Imagine" played unannounced and unexpectedly on my Pandora QuickMix.

May You Live in Interesting Times

An ancient Chinese curse.

The end of the world as we know it would be welcomed by me.  I'm all in favour of a saner way of life.  I'm not certain that it needs any help in collapsing, ala Derek Jensen or John Zerzan.  Perhaps it will play out as Chellis Glendinning and some others have opted for.  A simpler and saner life.  She had found that for awhile in NewMexico...but recently moved... She now lives in a small village near Cochabamba, Bolivia.  


  http://www.chellisglendinning.org/books.html

Season's Greetings

Cheryl sent out some cards recently...some were square.  The postmaster said that the square ones still went through the sorting machine fine, but for some unknown reason the postage was 20 cents more than rectangular envelopes.  What?

Cleaning and preparing the garage for the party tomorrow and getting some cooking done.  Since we have a couple of Israelis who keep kosher (as well as a number of vegetarians) I have to cook with an eye to that, as well.  I'm making gotas and pakoras with a couple of chutneys...falafels with tzatziki...and the tzatziki will be good with grilled chicken wings and skewers of slouvaki.  (spell check doesn't recognize these words)...doing a bison roast with peppers, onions and garlics for taco fixin's...corn tortillas, salsas and pineapple.  There'll be a veggie tray as well as the veggie pakoras...and a fruit tray.  Got 8 cheese pies from Holy Land bakery to make grilled pizzas.  Of course they'll have peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic and cheese...but I may make 4 of them with italian sausage...but then, there's plenty of meat, so maybe not.  I'm also making baked jalapeno poppers, stuffed with cream cheese, garlic, feta and romano cheeses...rolled in wheat flour first, then stuffed, then rolled in egg and then rolled in panko.  (another word not recognized...but heck, spell check didn't recognize romano...and when I spell like I normally do, esses instead of zees, or that extra u in flavor etc...spell check screams red at me)...

Others are bringing a finger food tray...it's to be a pot luck...but I can't count on that, and everything I mentioned will be good as leftovers.  

'Tis the season to be jolly.  

Santa has a lot of hoes.

Ho, Ho, Ho.

Be well, all.

Peace on Earth...and in whatever vision of heaven you may have.

Can we find solutions?

I believe this country is going to tear itself up from within...there are 50 seemingly autonomous entities with disproportional representation.  Secession is being suggested from heads of states.  Out of the ashes has to come something.  How will it play out?  Haven't the foggiest.  I'm a pragmatist...just how do we get everyone's voices heard over the din of propaganda and corporate money?  Perhaps each state will eventually, in turn, elect to have parliamentary systems...or as Minnesota is going toward, instant run-off voting.  States can gerrymander their districts any way they wish...perhaps MN will eventually use proportional representation to select our 8 representatives to Congress.  Perhaps we will elect our governor through instant run off voting...perhaps, as many on the right wish to do, the USA will repeal the 17th amendment and a proportionally representative governor will appoint the senators.

We are in such a quagmire...and we've only begun to slog through the muck.  We need a different way of governance and a voice for all the people.  I would suggest term limits for Supreme Court Justices, as well.  They should be appointed (IMO) for no longer than the maximum length of a President's ability to serve...which is now set at 8 years.

The Apparent Global Swing to the Right

Germany was one of the first to have a national health care system under Bismarck in the late 1800s.  It wasn't the health care system that created Hitler, it was WWI and the effects from it...and a global depression in the late 20s.  No society is immune from xenophobia, especially today...with so many wars and disruptions in the Middle East and refugees pouring into European (and North American/Australian) countries.  It is extremely common to pit one group of people against the other...for political gain.  The best way to unify humans is to create an enemy...the other.  We see it here in this country.  I hear it coming out of the mouths of the poor and middle class...they see money coming out of their checks and are told the bogey man is social welfare programs...and that the rich need more money so that 'jobs can be created'...the very jobs that were decimated by the uber wealthy's manipulation of monies and shipping of jobs out of the country...high unemployment can have that effect when the others are scapegoated.  Meanwhile, wars continue...the M/I complex and big pharma and for profit medicine (run by corporations, not the caregivers) get richer and richer.  Fuel crisis, Exxon needs to make more money.  Health crisis, the for profit health care system needs more money.  Terrorists...we need to fight them there, so they won't come here.  Illegal immigration...we need more money for border control and stiffer laws against the other...Drugs, killings...we need more money for the war on drugs...we need to give Mexico military aid...we need...we need.

Meanwhile, in the cigar smoke filled back rooms...the Daddy Warbucks are toasting each other and  laughing their asses off.  

Beware the Marauders

Whenever any population of animal exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment there is a die off...quite rapidly in some cases.  It can be highly localized or a thinning of the entire general population...time will tell.

A collapse of infrastructure, the grid, food distribution, fuel distribution, etc, unless immediately restored will be catastrophic.  That is the environment in which many live and the skills they have learned to survive in that environment (starting the car, driving to a store, shopping for the food, filling their tanks with gas, turning the tap for water) will be of no further use.  In an extreme climate in the winter, there will be a massive die off from exposure, thirst, and hunger.  In an extreme climate in the summer there will be the same.  Perhaps in a temperate time, people can wander and pillage using the few tools that still work.  Guns and ammo.  Beware the marauders.

The year in review

The Child Nutrition Bill

Okay.  This is why I am a conservative in my daily life.  I have what I need, I can glean for myself.  Have for decades.  I'm not wanting.  I have a partner and a community of friends who are like minded, not politically, but naturally...our political statements are how we live our lives.  Simply but gracefully.  A can of beans?  Why, when dry beans don't contain all the packing salt, no can to dispose of and dried beans are a fraction of the cost.  Carry that into all my life.  I live in nature as a part of it, not apart from it.

Now, why some of my views are seen as liberal.  I understand urban areas.  I understand the plight and blight.  I grew up next to the projects.  The county hospital down the road.  Discarded needles littering the alleys, discarded whiskey bottles in vacant lots.  Brothers and sisters who each had separate fathers, none of whom they knew and a mother who sold herself to make the rent and get high.  The only options for learning was from their peers and from school.  There was no breakfast on the table, it was everyone fend for themselves...find what scraps you may.  There were no books in the project apartment...there was no place for a garden...what's a garden?  There were no deer or grouse running through the woods...there were no woods.  Nature was a pigeon or a rat.  The natural world and community was gangs.  Often times the only opportunity these children have, born into this mess through no fault of their own, is at school.  For sustenance in learning, for sustenance for the body.  The options for the future look pretty bleak to many of them, it's the rare exceptions who struggle through of their own volition (with the help of some mentors) and break free of the cycle...otherwise the choices are prison, gangs, drugs or the military (and endless wars).  Hell, there's not even a grocery store.  Taco stands, maybe...fast food restaurants for sure.  A dollar buys a burger.

‎"How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?" ~ Theodore Geisel

Caution. Dangerous and unhappy citizens of dangerous Mexico

Thanksgiving, post facto

"Behind the picture we paint in our minds of the people we know, are layers of complexity and depth, pain and elation, sacrifice and abundance, fear and courage, gentleness and fierceness - and more, more than we will ever know. Honor and be thankful for what is beneath the surface in us all..."

I'm a homesteader who believes anyone should do whatever they want, but who has spent a couple of years in combat learning that the point of a gun isn't what I want to see around here.  To that end, I believe it's important that we have an equal opportunity Republic in fact not just theory.  That the wealthy Daddy Warbucks are running this country and we are all just a bunch of little orphan annies without regulations and constraints on monopolies/duopolies/or cartels.  I believe the corporate wing of the Democratic party is very much the old Republican party, while the Republican party has fallen into the hands of uber nationalistic, irrational, evangelicals...and that America has become more concerned with Dancing With The Stars and the Kardashians then they are with rational discourse about policies which will effect us for decades, dragging us into the dustbin of history. 

From Gin and Tacos: The Mandate

The other side of the wall

stucco finish

Last one to load

Scratch coat on archway

Where's Bucky?

View from Cheryl's desk 5 minutes ago

MCKEE, KY. - The folks of this hamlet hidden in the Appalachian foothills have the distinction of having dislikedPresident Obama long before now. They didn't like him as soon as they heard of him.

McKee is the seat of Jackson County, where Obama in 2008 registered his worst performance in all of Kentucky's 120 counties, taking home just 14 percent of the vote.

So for many of the roughly 900 people who live here - many of them older, most of them poor and virtually all of them white - next week's midterm election is an opportunity to reclaim a nation they believe has been hijacked by dangerous Democrats with a socialist and anti-Christian agenda.

"I just feel like they're trying to destroy our government and our Constitution and make a socialistic society," Viola Johnson, 72, said over fried chicken and coconut pie at Opal's restaurant off Main Street. "They're trying to take our freedoms away - no doubt about it. And you know that old saying, 'I'm mad as hell about it?' Well, I'm mad as hell about it."

She looked across the booth at her friend, Edna Banks, 78, who offered a similarly pessimistic take: "I think we're going down. Our money's not going to be worth anything. And there's not going to be any jobs. Our grandchildren are going to suffer trying to pay the debts back."

"I wish I could do more," said Johnson, a retired accountant. "But all I can do is vote, and I fully intend to."

This is a deeply religious town where, according to U.S. Census data, 99.5 percent of residents are white. Like much of Appalachia, McKee has long suffered economically and was in decline well before the latest recession. The data show that about half of McKee's residents live below the poverty line and nearly three-quarters subsist on government money, said a county official, be it from Social Security, welfare or another entitlement program.

By Philip Rucker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2010; 12:45 PM

Bud Grant on hunting nowadays

"For much of my life, conditions were tough while hunting deer in Wisconsin. We didn't have snow machines, of course, or four-wheelers. All of our hunting was done on foot. I could tell story after story about dragging deer through deep snow. 

Compare that to today. The weather is milder. And thanks, I think, to rising deer populations, we've raised a generation of people for which deer hunting has become deer "shooting." 

Some of these guys shoot at anything. I was in the store the other day and a guy said he had shot 37 times while hunting. Thirty-seven times! For many of these people, "if it's brown, it's down" sums up their hunting style. Hunting for them is not about following a track, or figuring out where a deer crossed a creek, or figuring out, in retrospect, what led you to get a deer. It's about shooting. "

Does this foster a sense of the commons? Common Sense?

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Vintage Wine, Vintage Friends

I've learned more in my life from my failures than I have from my successes.

Landscaping finished...interior still in progress