[eco-misery] the search for a sustainable solution

You silly moo

[Chesterton, in the] 1910 What's Wrong with the World ... advocated a view called "Distributism" that is best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow."

The economic pillar of this distributist idea entailed:

Private property

Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery ... [and] the "co-operative" approach ... recognise[ing] that such property and equipment may be "co-owned" by local communities larger than a family, e.g. partners in a business.

Guild system

The kind of economic order envisioned by the early distributist thinkers would involve the return to some sort of guild system. The ... existence of labor unions promotes class interests, whereas Guilds are employers and employees cooperating for mutual benefit.

Banks

Distributism ... eliminates ... the current private bank system, or in any case, its profit-making basis. This does not necessarily entail nationalization.

The fine detail, unfortunately, still involves government or social coercion in a plethora of legislation but at least it appreciates the great social dilemma - given the ideal that a free market needs to be also a fair market, that private property should be recognized for all members of society and that the system favours people of enterprise, nevertheless the system will always tends towards monopolization and cartels.



Would you not agree that a healthy society is one in which a man and/or woman can labour to produce direct betterment of their condition, in a climate where this is not swamped by prices driven up by price fixing?

Eliminate the banks and the cost of a house would sooner or later become "affordable" for the average family and would require no borrowing. It is the borrowing which is the problem. To borrow to improve your condition is one thing - it involves usury - and yet to legislate against usury is again state coercion.

At base level though, with no borrowing whatsoever, the cost of a basic house should still be affordable on the mean wage and this needs to be somehow enshrined in society.

So it's a pretty problem.

It also fails to take into account two other things - the mushrooming population, with its consequent strain on natural resources plus greed and evil in high places [Ephesians 6:12].

I keep quoting that verse and argue that it very much must be taken into consideration in developing any sustainable economic theory and yet most economists, by nature, would reject the notion. Therein lies the potential failure of any social order - from capitalism to communism - if you won't accept the existence of some sort of malicious cynicism up top.

The system must, therefore, necessarily fail because it does not recognize "malice" as a factor, as a motive. Not just "incompetence", not just "selfishness", not just "greed" but actual malice in high places.

Well all right, let's call it instead "deep cynicism".

It knows that certain policies such as sub-prime lending and the inevitable effect of credit availability for the masses, leading to skyrocketing costs, must inevitably also lead to crunches, crashes and war, which devastate the masses and in fact criminalizes the ordinary citizen. However, for a certain class - it turns an obscene profit.

It's this profiting from human misery, under the banner "business is business", which is the most troublesome in my mind, a mind which, in principle, embraces the Coolidge maxim that the business of the state is business.

Small government, therefore, needs to run four things:

1. defence; 2. social security for the truly needy; 3. facilitation of enterprise within its borders; 4. anti-cartel, anti-monopoly legislation and anti-price fixing.

But who will do Point 4? The people who rise to the top of government, by definition, meet the old money and are seduced by the elite ideals. I was on my way to this at one time in the distant past. Which is worse - state slavery or business cartel slavery?

Choose your flavour.

How can we devise a system which will actually work and yet does not involve government in any but those four areas?

The problem or the solution?

[thought for the day] wednesday evening

This post is dedicated to Calum Carr, Bendy Girl and all the others out there who are in similar positions.

Cheer up - the worst is yet to come!

[Philander Chase Johnson - 1920]

Before you get angry with me, let me explain:

In 1989, in Finland, I came off the end of a bobsleigh run, sailed through the troposphere and landed halfway down the hill.

In the hospital, two orderlies took my hand, braced their feet against the bed and hauled it so that the wrist bone went back inside the skin.

What gets you through things like that are prayer and cracks like, "Hey doc, they're trying to steal my hand," and other such corn.

Zero to do with courage - just a simple defense mechanism - true fear in fact.

On the 15th of this month my appeal is decided. If successful, things continue pretty much as they were. If not, for reasons I can't publicly write here, it's the end of the line [smiles to himself].

My mate, not being appraised of the fine print, felt it was less dramatic than that until I explained the ... er ... complications of me going out there.

He's in more shock now than I actually am and looking for solutions.

The interesting thing is the effect on the psyche when something is hanging over you - you've all had it at some time or other - and you almost wish to get it over and done with. Sometimes a strange levity comes over a person.

And so the days of May drag on and nice things happen like an angry sunset this evening after today's storm, a girl who unexpectedly didn't wish me to leave this afternoon, many friendly faces and a nice cheesecake.

You have to laugh.

Just to make us all feel better, here's a photo, courtesy of Julie, of tomorrow morning's sunrise.

And a giggle from Brummie Mum.

Each night for this week until he 15th, I'll try to present one musical piece:

boomp3.com

Lyrics here if you're interested.

Have a nice night, readers.

[komodo] looking for a pet?

Why run this post again? As Jim Carrey said, in The Mask:

Because I just gotta ...

Some Wiki facts to set us straight [I know you all swear by Wiki]:

The largest verified wild specimen was 3.13 metres long and weighed 166 kg, including undigested food. Komodo Dragons have a tail that is as long as the body, as well as about 60 frequently-replaced serrated teeth that may be 2.5 centimetres in length.

I love this next bit:

They have red, blood-like saliva, because their teeth, which are almost completely covered by their gums, slice their own gums while feeding. This creates an ideal culture for the virulent bacteria that live in their mouths. It also has a long, yellow, snake-like tongue.

Think you can outrun them?

With the help of a favourable wind, they may be able to detect carrion up to 8.5 kilometres away. They are capable of running rapidly in brief sprints up to 20 kilometres per hour.

Outswim them?

They are excellent swimmers, diving up to 4.5 metres.

What about climbing a tree?

They climb trees proficiently through use of their strong claws. To catch prey that is out of reach, they may stand on their hind legs and use their tails as a support. As they grow older, their claws are used primarily as weapons, as their great mass makes climbing impractical for adults.

Although they eat mostly carrion, studies show that they also hunt live prey with a stealthy approach followed by a sudden short charge. When suitable prey arrives near its ambush site, it will suddenly charge at the animal and go for the underside or the throat.

What if you escape by some miracle?

The bacteria in the mouth cause septicemia in their victim; if an initial bite does not kill the prey animal and it escapes, it will commonly succumb within a week to the resulting infection.

Still, little chance of that, eh?

Komodo Dragons eat by tearing large chunks of flesh while holding their food down with their forelegs, then swallowing it whole. The copious amounts of red saliva that the Komodo dragons produce help to lubricate the food, but swallowing is still a long process (15-20 minutes to swallow a goat).

But all is not lost:

Because of their slow metabolisms, large dragons may only eat 12 meals a year. Whew! So you're as safe as houses. First you'd have to go to Indonesia. Then you'd need to be present around the time of its monthly meal. Then again, if you threw it a goat, you'd be fine.

Have a lovely night. Sleep tight.

[heraldry] blogger family crests

You'll possibly recall this recent post and it appears some of our fellow bloggers already have crests:

Wonko, who's about to fly off to Gordotaxland:

First found in Lancashire where they [the Parrs] were seated from early times and their first records appeared on the early census rolls taken by the early Kings of Britain to determine the rate of taxation of their subjects.

Cherie, who shares a very famous surname:

I did a little check and it seems 'We Jeffersons' have one already! But my ancestors seem to have been from the Whitby area! That being the case I can't tell you which county I was born in!!!

It appears JMB has a few as well but she's not showing.

Lord Nazh appears to have one though:

First found in Leicestershire, where the Martin family was seated from very early times. The family was granted lands by Duke William of Normandy, their liege Lord, for their distinguished assistance at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 A.D.

For many English families, the political and religious disarray that plagued their homeland made the frontiers of the New World an attractive prospect.

[food crisis] price fixing, deregulation and other goodies

Quite frankly, we are in the grip of gonzo-economics right now when speculative funds poured into wheat futures and stockpiling in the U.S. and Europe cause a Japanese butter shortage.

There was always bilateral and multilateral trade and there've been depressions but the rhetoric now is about "global" food prices and "global" downturns - everything global, including good old monopolies, of which more later.

Excellent article over at International Political Will on food prices.

So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population,” Bush said.

Not so fast:

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the number of middle class Indians is only 50 million (defined as having an annual income between $10,000-20,000). It’s difficult to claim that just 50 million Indians are having more impact than 300 million Americans…so Bush went ahead and “fudged” the numbers.

The Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh said: “Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics. And he has just proved once again how comprehensively wrong he is. To say that the demand for food in India is causing increase in global good prices is completely wrong.”

More importantly, there is the matter of scale. The average American consumes 1,046 kilograms of grain each year – the average Indian consumes 178 kg. That means in terms of global impact, each American equates to ten Indians.

So here is a blatant example of hypocrisy, of apportioning blame elsewhere and of course - price fixing. If you feel price fixing is a myth, look at one of the areas less on the media's mind just now - the Roche, BASF and Rhône-Poulenc vitamin monopoly:

[T]hese are the same two global giants that masterminded the most rapacious price-fixing cartel in modern business history during the 1990s and got nailed with the largest criminal fines ever levied. Roche paid $954 million and BASF more than $500 million after entering guilty pleas with the US Department of Justice, Canada, Australia and the European Union.

When the cartel was exposed in 1999, Roche, BASF and Rhône-Poulenc (now Aventis) -- which escaped charges because it was the first cartel member to cooperate with the DOJ -- controlled about 75 percent of the $6-billion-a-year global vitamin business. They had used their industry dominance to pressure at least twelve smaller vitamin makers in Europe and Asia into an arrangement that top executives had taken to calling "Vitamins Inc."

But now, three years after the cartel was exposed, instead of having been reined in, Roche, BASF and Aventis/CVC (in November Aventis sold its vitamin business to CVC Capital Partners of London for an undisclosed sum) are close to grabbing a near-monopoly in the global production and distribution of vitamins, having increased their dominance to at least 85 percent of the global market.

Why should this be of concern? Because these vitamins are blended into feed grains for animals and that's global trade. Buy your vitamins from this cartel or be undercut. Business is business.

China itself is in the grip of price fixing:

The government accused Chinese instant noodle makers in August of pushing up food costs by illegally colluding to raise prices by up to 40 percent. It has given no indication whether it has evidence of illegal behavior by other producers.

The price surge, which began in mid-2007, has so far been limited to food and is blamed on shortages of pork and grain. The government raised gasoline and diesel prices in November to curb rising demand, but said that should add only 0.05 percentage points to monthly inflation.

The surge in food prices has been especially painful for China's poor majority, who spend up to half their incomes on food.

In simple terms, the mechanism is - deregulate markets, in move the cartels, monopolies are created and prices fixed - all causing immense instability. Example:

Deregulation in agricultural markets, like economic deregulation in many sectors, reached full tilt in the eighties and nineties. Trade and development economists preached the wonders of open markets, unfettered production, and industrial agriculture. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund conditioned loan policies on the elimination of government intervention in agricultural markets.

Global commodity agreements, price supports, and other mechanisms which helped keep global supplies and prices stable were dismantled. The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture, together with multi-lateral and bilateral agreements including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), slashed agricultural tariffs in the developing world, and opened up markets for a growing global agribusiness industry.

In the U.S., the 1996 Farm Bill eliminated the last vestiges of domestic price supports for most commodities and replaced them with a massive system of subsidies-the only thing left to prop up a farm economy in perpetual crisis. Market liberalization and the dumping of cheap commodities swamped small farmers here and abroad, pricing them out of local markets.

Cheap feed crops fueled industrial livestock production, increasing meat consumption and driving out small producers. The few independent farmers who stayed in farming shifted production to a few commodities including corn and soy that can be stored and shipped to distant markets.

Wonderful idea in an ideal world, deregulation but it cannot work. An analogy is livestock in a corral in a clearing. Stretching the analogy, imagine ravaging wolves in the surrounding forest. The fences are dismantled to allow the livestock to roam free and the result is pretty obvious.

Can we appeal to the wolves to act altruistically? So how can we regulate the wolves? With subsidies? And that's why we're paying more and more and can do absolutely nothing about it.

A previous article on the matter is here.

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

As Captain Masafumi Arima said to the brave young Kamikaze fliers as they took off:

I want to see a real do or die attitude out there today.

[pirates] answer these five, yer lubbers

1. Who eventually decapitated Edward Teach?

2. What terrible death did Henry Morgan suffer?

3. Jack Rackham is known for his two female fellow pirates. One was Mary Read - who was the other?

4. What happened at Captain Kidd's first hanging at Wapping?

5. Whom did Grace O'Malley petition at Greenwich?


Answers [usual method]
1. Lieutenant Robert Maynard; 2. not terrible - he possibly died of disease at his home; 3. Anne Bonny; 4. the rope broke; 5. Queen Elizabeth

[rewarding kids] extrinsic and intrinsic

View all these vids here.


The Quiet Man draws attention to an issue I hadn't given much thought to - that of extrinsic rewards in class for work well done. He took the line that:

Time was when pupils seeking special treatment from their teachers would bring an apple into class. Now teachers wishing to lavish praise on their pupils are rewarding them with chocolates and sweets.

With all due respect, I count chocolate in its dark form as a good food source, as distinct from sweets but no matter. Further on, the real issue emerges in one quote:

I know there are many more effective ways to get the best out of children, bribery never works long term, makes those who may miss out feel bad and sends the wrong message. Children need to learn to make good achievements for themselves.

Well, yes. So what about these two situations?


Mea culpa 1

Long, long ago, I took a team of young cricketers to a match against a much vaunted side. In a nutshell, we were getting a drubbing and the little tykes were not overly happy about the experience. One of the parents approached his own son and his best mate whom the parent had driven to the match and offered a trip to Alton Towers if they could go out there and score 20 runs apiece [it was a 15-15 match].

My guilt was that I laughed when I heard that and took the point of view that what he did in a private capacity with his two kids was not affecting the rest of the team.

The two kids did team up at the fall of wickets and simply Bothamed the opposition round the ground. This inspired the rest of our boys and we won the match convincingly. However, another parent had been standing close by and on Monday I was hauled up before the boss.

The boss had just sung the praises of the team as a whole at assembly and was in a difficult position. He told me what the disgruntled parent had said and said it was best to stop this tactic being used in future, which I subsequently guarded against.

As I went out of the door he smiled and said well done.


Mea culpa 2

Cut to our local area rugby tournament where the U11 boys and I trained and trained for three weeks prior to it, developing a way of running off the shoulder then suddenly reverting to the Australian style of throwing the ball wide. With this age we needed some strategies for the breakdowns as well.

It was a lot of hard work.

As we then played practice matches against the U12s and U13s before being knocked off by the U14s, the attention of the rugby staff turned to our little tykes and the forwards coach came in and offered tips and the backs coach trained our backs.

On the day we had an army of parents with hot toddies, blankets and so on and the kids were rotated to stay warm. The tournament result from 4 twenty minute games was 128-8.

There was a local area sports teachers meeting which deplored the tactics of our school in general and me in particular for developing such a ball-aggressive manner of playing [I'd drummed it into the boys that the ball was the entire focus, that tackling was best done in pairs and done hard to prevent injury and that in such short matches constant motion was the best tactic to worry the other team and to keep our bodies warm] and the slick approach to winning.

Well, all right - OTT but they could have done that too, the opposition, had they wished.

Sport is sport and class is class. In sports like rugby and cricket, whatever is the point of going out there to get a drubbing? It seems to me that one uses all the resources at one's disposal to the maximum, one looks after one's players and if defeated, at least the opposition will know they've been in a game.

The classroom is different and here compassion has to kick in for all children. I firmly believe in two principles here:

1. Excellence should never be mediocritized and the able should never be dragged back to a standard just so the less able may feel better. If my child is capable, then I'd expect the school to maximize his opportunities to pursue excellence. As a teacher, it is his job to extend that child any which way, with no reference to class norms but only to the pleasure the child gets from achieving as the goal, no extrinsic rewards.

2. That same teacher, if he fails to explore the less able child's whole being in order to seek out something, anything which he can then boost in order to give that child a taste of success - that teacher is being negligent. The teacher really must do everything possible to assist the less able to find some sort of success in some area and to allow his peers to praise him for it. He must construct situations in which this can occur. He must be the rock on whom that child can depend.

3. A teacher without compassion should not be in the classroom. At the same time, providing false successes and encouraging an attitude of "we don't have to do anything as we're going to be rewarded anyway" is skewing the whole meaning of point 2 above. Rewording failure is not the same thing as providing opportunities for genuine success which the child knows in his heart can't be taken away from him. Kids know if it was real or if it was a sop.

Where do sweets come into this? I feel they shouldn't - nor cabbages or other foodstuffs. It's a false signal.

In sport though - well, I'm not so sure, as it is a competitive environment and while the lengths many coaches and parents go to to win are just plain wrong and should be condemned, still - you're there, aren't you, to equip your kids with the means to play at a level which will enable you to win. It's a total package of successful strategy and man-management.

It's a fine line.

[texas levees] and security fences

To bring non-Americans up to speed:

Man-made levees can fail in a number of ways. The most frequent (and dangerous) form of levee failure is a breach. Levee overtopping can be caused when flood waters simply exceed the lowest crest A sand boil occurs when the upward pressure of water flowing through soil pores under the levee (underseepage) exceeds the downward pressure from the weight of the soil above it.

There's not much doubt that, in Texas, this is a sizeable problem - look at how many levee locations there are in the state and they all require cash to maintain.

Plus the Federal government wants Texas to build an enormous security fence to keep the aliens out but not everyone is enamoured of this:

The proposal has raised environmental concerns because plans for a fence that small wildlife could pass through were replaced with plans for a 16- to 18-foot-high impermeable concrete wall. Many residents and elected leaders in the Rio Grande Valley are opposed to the plan to build a fence. They fear that private land would be lost and that the sister communities in Mexico would take offense.

However, politics makes strange bedfellows and thus they now have:

The federal government and a county in South Texas have reached a final agreement to build a combination of levees and a border fence, a project intended to address national security concerns and local flood-control needs. The agreement on the $113.9 million project, which will stretch along 22 miles of the Rio Grande, calls for the federal government to pay about $65.7 million. The pact, announced on Monday, puts long-awaited levee improvements in Hidalgo County on a fast track, with a goal of completing them in less than a year.

The security fence proposal is a genuine puzzle. With the NAFTA superhighways and the SPPPNA start date of March, 2009, one wonders why the need for such an expensive structure as the security fence?

If North America is soon to be a free trade zone, with most functions of state under the control of the NAAC, then why the wall where it is actually scheduled to be?

[blog crawl] new game in poor taste

Click pic

This may well be my least acceptable post to date.

The immediate criticism is that it directs you to other blogs for spurious reasons. I argue, in reply, that either you usually visit there anyway or if not - it might have let you find a blog you might not have ordinarily done.

A second criticism is that it trivializes the post from where the fragment was drawn. This one worries me but I still feel it's better to go to the site rather than not to. Anyway, here are the rules of the game:

If you follow the path below and select the words indicated from those posts, when put together - they create a message. What is that message?

So let's start clicking:


Jailhouse Lawyer - first eight words, paragraph 2 after the extensive links - I would have thought if you take the
Calum Carr - last three words, paragraph 2 - desired path

Cherie - last two words of the heading - in life

Liz - words 10 to 13 , paragraph 1 - I really don't believe

Jeremy - paragraph 2 from "by" to "another" - by speaking so that you can be properly understood, you'll run into problems of one kind or another.
Ordovicius - last paragraph, up to the first comma - This seems like a good and sensible proposal to me.

Bob G - section 3, "anyone" to "clue" - Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get a clue.


Right, well that was a trial run. Next time we'll do it for real. Oh, by the way, if you'd like to see the combined text, highlight all the text in this post and read the italics. Cheers :)

Bet no one looks at this sentence - if you can read this, you win a trip for two to Mogadishu.