aug.31 Debt is not Sustainable

Hi - summer is over; now the reality of our decrease of 0.1% GDP and the election will wake us up to smell the roses. Our reality is that we, that is the baby boomers, have enjoyed a huge party at the expense of our children in many ways - today I will only present the monetary, debt, that we have bequeathed to the next generations. And by the way, this is not an Ontario problem, or Canadian problem but a world wide problem for all Westernized democracies; we have all lived beyond our means. Let's start by asking; when and why did this all start?
We have to go back to the 1970's when two coupled events conspired to put an end to the "real" post war boon; the Viet-Nam war whose cost encouraged R.Nixon to go off the Gold Standard in 1973 and allow funny money, Peak Oil in the US in 1971 coupled with the Arab Oil embargo in 1973 caused by the US support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war of the same year. Until then US and all western debt was miniscule but after these events grew, until today, exponentially.
Now we are stuck. To see how badly read this article from The Telegraph from today titled

When debt levels turn cancerous

 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100011744/when-debt-levels-turn-cancerous/
Enjoy.

German Quality is Beating Chinese Junk in Growth

Believe it or not there are MANY people who would rather spend on quality rather than cheap quantity. Currently that battle in the export market is being fought between Germany and China. Clearly, China with 1.6 billion people has a larger economy than Germany but little Germany is #2 on the world export market! Why? Well according to the July 2100 edition of the ECONOMIST [pg.59] "Sales of Mittelstand [medium family size business that specialize in more complex high quality products] industrial products are growing at nearly 12% a year; more than the Chinese economy." How is this possible? They produce well-engineered products built to last and are very fast at delivering the latest products to custom market niches. They also work closely with Universities who research for them and owners rub shoulders with their workers; no confrontation between managers and union there!

Perhaps there are some lessons for Ontario firms, government and Universities. Rather than participating in the "RACE TO THE BOTTOM' [ie. cheap, low quality] why not focus on niche industries we can excel in and that provide well paying jobs? As a matter of fact, if we want to maintain our current standard of living we have not choice.
So this election let's choose to work strategically and NOT follow the failed American model of a no holds barred, de-regulated economic system. It didn't work for banking and housing and it isn't working for industry either. So let's elect a government that can get all the right players to the table to build a 21st century economy.

august 20 - Japan's Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels as its Nuclear Program Fades

The New York Times (which I read every day online) has a great article which indirectly supports Ontarios' Green Energy Act. Here is the link and an excerpt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/business/energy-environment/quake-in-japan-is-causing-a-costly-shift-to-fossil-fuels.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all


"Japan, the world’s third-largest user of electricity behind China and the United States, had counted on an expansion of nuclear power to contain energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, its nuclear program is in retreat, as the public and government officials urge a sharp reduction in the nation’s reliance on nuclear power and perhaps an end to it altogether.
As its nuclear program implodes, Japan is grappling with a jump in fuel costs, making an economic recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami all the more difficult. Annual fuel expenses could rise by more than 3 trillion yen, or about $39 billion, the government says. But as it doubled down on nuclear power plants, Japan was slow to develop alternative forms of energy, like solar or wind power, which account for just 1 percent of its electricity supply."
Let's make sure we don't end up in the same boat; let's continue and expand our Green Energy!

August 18 Dragonflies

We are still at the cottage in the Quebec bush. All there is to entertain us are the woods and lakes and our imaginations: they have sufficed. Today goes down as the day that a bit of heaven came down to earth in the form of dragonflies. Yes, dragonflies. You see – they eat the mosquitoes and other noxious bloodsucking vermin that make these north woods uninhabitable for several months a year. But now, in late summer, nature has had time to create the antidote for them – dragonflies.

I love them.

I love them as I drive down the road to pick blueberries. The blueberries are plentiful this year – as is to be expected in the cycle of life after a terrible harvest last year. We picked a mere 40 minutes but each of us filled our baskets. And the sun! Just the right temperature and soaking into old bones as we sat between bushed laden with blue treasure – a treasure a pirate could lust after. Mind you, the berries are small, but to toss a few warmed by that sun was to taste a bit of heaven itself.

I love them – those dragonflies, as we sat on the rocks of the waterfall and as my girls slid down the steep and slippery cliff into the pool of warm water below. What a place. On Mont Diable [Devil mountain] the ice ages scraped and chiseled to leave a shallow lake near the mountain's top with a rocky granite boulder strewn stream with fresh, but for the north surprisingly warm, waters jumping from boulder to boulder and pool to pool through the dark forest green until the smooth rockface of the almost vertical (well, it feels that way as you slide down!) where sheets of silver only inches deep careen into a deep pool – just the right depth for shrieking children and parents. It was worth the hour trip on gravel roads.

We did meet two families there – but only two. It is august, so not quite high season in these north woods, and yet up here summer is only 2 ½ short months. Any other time frosts can come and kill all your flowers and attempts at gardening. Only two families. To wondour at the dragonflies.. I wondour if they saw them too from the top of that enchanted waterfall – darting back and forth, round and round, making our day blissful as the warm, but not hot sun, warmed our bones after our many collapsing falls into the depths?

These simple pleasures; it seems that so few people, at least in North America, get a kick out of them. After a week at crowded, but lovely, Cape Cod; filled with its shops and restaurants and hotels and parking lots it is shocking to be almost alone.

In the silence. Almost alone – except for a family or two and our soul's companions – sky, wood and water – those elemental being from whom we came and to whom we return. They are our family, they are our best friends and they speak to us all, if we could but listen and hear, in so many languages.

Today, the language I understood them speak was dragonfly, a beautiful darting dainty language who, fortunately, I heard today.

And I am grateful.

Thank your dragonflies, thank you forest and stream and lake and sky – my family up here in the north woods.

Aug.15 Silence

Silence.

The true silence of the north woods.

Not a peep from the frogs. Not a rustle from the leaves. Not even a bird twittering gaily away.

Silence. Not cars clanking or motorcycles roaring or trucks rumbling in the distance. No neighbours calling out for their children or wives and husbands arguing over who knows what.

Silence – is truly deafening. It roused such a strange sense of foreboding. Like the calm before a storm. Like a pregnancy just before the birth. Like a look from my wife just before she kicks me under the table for yet another social 'faux-pas'.

It filled me with joy, with wondour, with trepidation. With a sense that the woods and lakes and sky were trying to tell me something, something important, but I was unable to hear. Was I was deaf? Had the city life of hustle and bustle destroyed my ability to hear in the silence? Was I doomed to yearn for a word from creation, a creation that begged and yearned for understanding and companionship; was I doomed to hear only the lies of man made consciousness – a consciousness full of self-conceit, a consciousness so unaware of its role in the grand symphony of life that it had turned music into noise, laughter into tears, and truth into lies.

Silence is, perhaps, the antidote for lies.

All the lies we tell ourselves and others and we attempt to create significance for our lives. But clearly, based upon the wars and violence and drug abuse and alcoholism and depression and heart attacks and cancers whatever lies we tell ourselves to bloat ourselves with deluded self-importance have not truly convinced us that our current values and ways of living are life-filling or life affirming. Because the way we live seems to only bring more death.

Even, or especially, the fact that there are now 7 billion of us infesting Mother Earth, tells me that we have become that worst of all cells in the body; cancer. Growing exponentially in number, with no specialized function to help the entire body, the body of the Earth, become healthy and achieve its true purpose (more on that later). No, like cancer cells, we are becoming all the same, all sucking resources from the body of Mother Earth and giving nothing in value in return except poisons like carbon dioxide that is altering the climate in ways that we will only understand in retrospect and nitrogen runoff from fertilizers that run into the oceans and kill all life in that region.

No – there is not enough silence, yet, to cut like the sword of truth through the lies of our current so called 'civilization'. For, if we were truly civilized how is it that the suffering not only of people, but plants and animals and the very earth filled with worms and bacteria itself groan and cry out for justice.

They cry out for silence.

For the truth it brings. For the wake up it will bring, for the removal of the blinders that make us unable to see the destruction and hate that we are, admittedly blissfully unaware that we are doing so, inflicting upon each other in our feeble attempts at happiness and meaning creation.

So, dear friend, find silence. Bask in in it. Let the roar of it fill your being. Let time flow so it stops and you realize, perhaps for the first time, that your life is a lie. That our current dreams our only wrecking havoc and death and destruction.

And then choose another dream. Dream.

Perchance to choose to live out a new dream. A dream where silence is not to feared by is welcomed like a best friend.

Thank you friend.

Thank you silence.

slow down & do it right - aug.12

my wife and I are cleaning our windows today - first time in years and boy are they dirty!
it has taken us this long because, like you, we are 'too' busy. yup - guilty as charged. somehow even though i work part time and have the summers off [being a HS teacher] i am too busy! so now, as I try to 'walk the talk' as the GPO candidate for the upcoming provincial election, i will try to be an example of one aspect of living 'GREEN' - living slower by doing one thing at a time and doing it right.
This is tough for me, tough for you, and even tougher for the young generation who have been brainwashed into thinking that multi-tasking is 'efficient' and you get more done , faster. False! According to recent research ( http://www.whatsbestnext.com/2011/07/when-multitasking-is-not-a-good-idea/ ) : "
A rash of recent studies shows that multitasking is not a solution. In fact, studies show that multitasking is actually a misnomer. While we think we are multitasking, we are actually task switching, doing a little bit of one thing and then doing a little bit of another. Our brains just won’t allow us to perform two complex operations at the same time with the same skill. Quality necessarily suffers, as does depth. Not only that, but multitasking is not even very efficient. David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, found that “people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”
Meanwhile, if we surround ourselves by too many stimuli, we force our brains into a state of continuous partial attention, a state in which we keep tabs on everything without giving focused attention to anything. . . .
Whether through multitasking or through monitoring so many sources of input that we remain in continuous partial attention, we lose the ability to think in a sustained way."
There you have it. On top of this research finding life experience has taught me, against my natural inclination as I usually do everything FAST, that doing that ONE thing SLOWER is essential to do the job properly. Or, as the folk wisdom says: "A stitch in time saves nine."Here is a concrete example.
Yesterday I did not close the outer gate to my chicken yard. I was busy in the house and our younger dog was very bored -so she got into trouble, of course. She went to the inner fence by the chicken coop and dug a hold under the fencing and all the chickens escaped. Later, as I was rushing (!) out the door for dinner I saw the chickens, had to repair the hold, try to corral the chickens in, finally walk the dog.. and was thus an hour late for dinner.
So, simply not slowing down, and focussing on the task at hand, in this case closing a gate, cost my an hour of work and hassle.
So today, let all of us do what we know.
Slow down.
Do one thing at a time.
And do that one thing properly.

August 4, 2011 Does the End of Abundance mean the end of Democracy?

Perhaps.

Or maybe a better way to say it is 'maybe'.

These unsatisfactory answers rely upon the fact that in spite of all I have seen of blind and self-defeating human behaviour I still believe that we have the power to choose our futures and are not victims of fate.

However, in The Limits of Power – Andrew J. Bacevich p.23 writes: "historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point; “ not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people,” he wrote, made American democracy possible.”( the frontier in American history, NY 1921)

a half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a symbiosis between affluence and liberty. “A politics of abundance,” he claimed, had created the American way of life, “a politics smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.”

… In short, expansion fostered prosperity, which in turn created the environment within which Americans pursued their dreams of freedom even as they argued with one another about just who deserved to share in that dream.”...

In other words, no abundance, no freedom.

No love of freedom, no democracy.

End of story.

Postscript – august 5 the ratings agency S&P lowered the US debt from AAA to AA+ rating; the 1^st time this has ever happened. It looks like the maybe is coming closer to a certainty. The gift the US had of a virgin continent to plunder has been all used up – I hope and pray that we can learn the lessons and make intelligent choices for a new way to live... or else....

august3 - poverty

Today while at Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod, watching my 2 girls cavorting in the early morning waves I was struck deeply by the following quote from my current favourite writer Michael O'Brien in his sumptuous novel “Strangers & Sojourners” where on page 300 he writes:

“The world is full of hatred because it refuses to be poor.”

How it is that it struck me down at this time and place is a mystery, perhaps. But maybe it is not such a mystery as I stay in a lovely home surrounded by nature preserves, wealth, lovely people just enjoying themselves all day long with no worries worthy of mention, in the country which has been ruling the world for over half a century but has slipped into an early dotage as it not only allows but encourages its richest not to pay taxes and cuts food stamp programs for the poorest of the poor...

Poverty.

My mother fears it even though she has so much money she does not know what to do with it as she saves her pennies buying day old bread at the supermarket. My mother-in-law loathes it as she spends the last extra cash she has from the sale of her condo on fancy curtains and a beautiful leather arm chair that she does not need but fancies even though she has not enough savings to keep her in a retirement home for more than a few months.

Poverty. Which kind? Material? Spiritual? Relationship-wise? Emotional ? There are so many kinds of poverty. For today let us stick to the most obvious poverty of materialism and suppose for the sake of this conversation that without some material poverty the other poverties rear their ugly heads as they seek in their twisted ways to help us see the real poverty in our souls that can only be healed by … what? That I do not yet know.

What I do know from a life time of bitter mistakes and delusions lived out in foolish grandeur for all to see is that material poverty, that is, not hunger, not cold, not want of the basics for living but poverty in the sense of an acknowledgment that you could and should and deserve more is very real and true and puts you in a situation of discomfort in a world where to be purposely poor is to be viewed as a loser or a fool or well meaning but deluded idealist at best. Yet here I am surrounded by wealth and comfort and luxury and realize deep in my bones that all I am surrounded by that seems like the vestiges of the good life have created all the fears that push me to want material wealth as a security in an insecure world but that this desire for wealth to be protected from the nasty world out there is what has and is creating the nasty world out there that I am trying to protect myself and my family from in the first place.

A Catch-22 if there ever was one. One of many Catch-22's that abounds in life for all that is truly life-filled is filled with paradox. Here is an admission: these paradoxes are what attract and confuse me all day long. I strive for wealth to allow me to live the life of a genteel country farmer south of Ottawa replete with expensive cars, solar panels, flowers, chickens, bees and gardens to show the world that I am self sufficient and have the time and money to display beauty and values that show my good taste. Now that is not what I thought I was doing when I developed my version of a wealthy life-style that I now see as poor in spirit because it focused on self-sufficiency instead support by and for others in the world who want and need a helping hand, just like I do if I was brave enough to admit it.

Alone. Afraid. Poor; in spirit.

Perhaps the antidote is self-imposed poverty? Perhaps living with less on purpose will keep the wolf of self-doubt and lies at the door? I will not know until I have tried this path. This path well trodden by Saints of old. The path that most of us seek to avoid like the plague because it seems too difficult and wearisome a choice. So I, like most people, probably like you dear reader, have chosen what seems like the smart and easy path; the path of wealth and self-reliance and strength. Yet where has it gotten us? To a world filled as much as ever with war and disease and famine and rape and drugs and addictions and suicide and depression and anxiety and fear.

Yes, especially now after 9/11 we live in a world dominated by fear. Perhaps because we refuse to choose, on purpose, poverty. For a life without cheap oil and cheap 3^rd world slave labour would, after all, mean the end of our gluttonous post WWII party. But the party is over even as we, especially here in America where I am no on vacation, attempt to prolong the orgy with more debt and more war. Yet, many of us, I am sure, feel in our bones that the world is changing, has changed, will change, and we will be poor. But we fear it. As we should – IF we let that choice by made for us.

But if we have the courage to choose poverty it is transformed from a thing of fear to a state of freedom. Because we chose it. Poverty chosen is then not to be feared but to be longed for. Like a lover who is strong and who makes us aware of how vulnerable we truly are. And yet without that love we will only destroy ourselves. As we are doing today.

So I am choosing poverty. To be free. To be happy. To be more truly alive.