i had to run a bunch of errands this morning. wal-mart was absolute choas (as is the norm here), but i was bound and determined to get car washing stuff and knock that to do item off my list and something, anything for eddie to chew on since i know that he will just help himself to erin's trailer if not presented with a more convenient option. after fighting through the chaos (like most of my life down here), i then battled the traffic on hwy 49 to the post office, which was packed.
standing in line was not what i wanted, but probably what i needed. a little girl was there with her mom and brother. she was holding the biggest handful of dandelions i have ever seen and faithfully presenting every woman who walked in the door with a bright yellow gift. it was incredible to watch the surprise on people's faces as they walked in the door, saw the insanely long line and then a little girl standing silently in front of them holding out a dandelion. that little girl transformed the place with her simple offering. i totally got shot down when i asked her if i could have one, being informed that they are only for girls, much to the enjoyment of everybody in earshot. but nevertheless, i think she taught me this morning that i need to start silently handing out more flowers if i expect to really make an impact down here...
15 March 2008
14 March 2008
always playing behind the eight ball
i have been doing more home assessments lately. after spending a few months focusing on being a great host and meeting volunteer needs, i has been great to talk to homeowners again and work on constructiony type things. but also part of the deal is jumping back into the quagmire that is still reality for so many people down here. there is still way too much work that needs to be done. a lot of organizations are in transition again and the reality is that there are still too few (and getting fewer) people capable of meeting the needs of both organizations and homeowners. like i said, i've (in all my construction savvy) been doing home assessments.
13 March 2008
glass half full
it's now been a week of stuffy head and foggy brain and tired body. yucky. it has been good to get out and about more the last few days. funny how easily we take for granted our health. today i am thankful that i have access to antihistamines and decongestants since i know that many others are not so fortunate elsewhere...
12 March 2008
a great escape
erin and i went to the new orleans hornets game tonight. it was so great to get out of the disaster world for a while and enjoy some footlong hotdogs, nachos and basketball. it's often pretty hard to get out of the work world down here since your work is your world and i am so glad erin and i could set that part aside and be normal people for an evening.
11 March 2008
my clever roots...
US Drinkers Upstage Smoking Ban - BBC News
Bars in Minnesota have found a dramatic way to get around the US state's recently introduced smoking ban.
The law grants an exception from the ban to performers in theatrical productions. So the bars have become theatres, and their customers, actors.
Now some bars print bills listing the "cast" of bartenders, and ashtrays become "props". Drinkers don costumes and attempt strange accents.
But a health official said it was time for the curtain to fall on the ploy.
'Before the Ban'
At the Rock, a heavy-metal bar in Maplewood, owner Brian Bauman explained why his clientele were doing little more than sitting around, smoking and drinking to a soundtrack of deafening music.
"They're playing themselves before 1 October - you know, before there was a smoking ban," he said, according to the Associated Press.
"We call the production, Before the Ban!"
Other bars have taken to the scheme with greater gusto, with customers dressing up in costume, the entrance labelled "stage door" and promising productions such as the Tobacco Monologues.
Up to 100 bars across the state are relying on the legal loophole to allow smokers to continue lighting up.
Health warning
But the state's health department says they are indeed breaking the law, and has threatened to hit them with fines of up to $10,000 (£5,000).
"The law was enacted to protect Minnesotans from the serious health effects of second-hand smoke," said Sanne Magnan, the Minnesota health commissioner.
She said the "theatrics" would have to end.
But bar owners fear their takings will fall once the ban is reimposed, while others will miss the antics.
"It's turned into the most fun thing I can imagine," said Lisa Anderson, owner of a bar in Hall City.
Bars in Minnesota have found a dramatic way to get around the US state's recently introduced smoking ban.
The law grants an exception from the ban to performers in theatrical productions. So the bars have become theatres, and their customers, actors.
Now some bars print bills listing the "cast" of bartenders, and ashtrays become "props". Drinkers don costumes and attempt strange accents.
But a health official said it was time for the curtain to fall on the ploy.
'Before the Ban'
At the Rock, a heavy-metal bar in Maplewood, owner Brian Bauman explained why his clientele were doing little more than sitting around, smoking and drinking to a soundtrack of deafening music.
"They're playing themselves before 1 October - you know, before there was a smoking ban," he said, according to the Associated Press.
"We call the production, Before the Ban!"
Other bars have taken to the scheme with greater gusto, with customers dressing up in costume, the entrance labelled "stage door" and promising productions such as the Tobacco Monologues.
Up to 100 bars across the state are relying on the legal loophole to allow smokers to continue lighting up.
Health warning
But the state's health department says they are indeed breaking the law, and has threatened to hit them with fines of up to $10,000 (£5,000).
"The law was enacted to protect Minnesotans from the serious health effects of second-hand smoke," said Sanne Magnan, the Minnesota health commissioner.
She said the "theatrics" would have to end.
But bar owners fear their takings will fall once the ban is reimposed, while others will miss the antics.
"It's turned into the most fun thing I can imagine," said Lisa Anderson, owner of a bar in Hall City.
10 March 2008
Thoughts on Poverty
Christian Science Monitor: Why so much aid for the poor has made so little difference
SAN FRANCISCO - Is poverty a problem of policy or destiny? Experts tend to pull in one of two directions. Some focus on the social fundamentals for prosperity. Others, on the technical and financial requirements for sustainable growth.
It's cultural.
In this view, policy is beside the point. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam says that "social capital" – how closely people in a community are connected – supports the basis for trust essential to commerce. Economist Gregory Clark of the University of California argues that prosperous societies grow their economies through Industrial Revolution values such as patience, hard work, innovation, and education. Some cultures support such values, some don't, and they certainly can't be imported or master-planned. Implication: Some poverty is permanent.
It's technical.
Others say the developed world has the policy tools poor countries need and the obligation to show them how to use them. While specific proposals vary, development economists such as Paul Collier, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz argue that wealthy nations know how to create the conditions for accountable governance, open markets, capital formation, low taxes, reliable institutions, and regulatory frameworks with courts to enforce them. Implication: The right combination of solutions is (almost) within reach.
Whichever side of this debate you're drawn to, it is clear that decades of effort and at least $2 trillion spent by rich countries since 1945 to bring development "to" the world's poorest have delivered, at best, mixed results. A World Bank study by Craig Burnside and David Dollar found a positive impact in countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. Later analysis by William Easterly, and Raghuram Rajan at the International Monetary Fund, indicates zero impact from Western aid on growth in poor nations – with or without sound policies. Possibly these countries would have done worse without aid. Certainly, we can do better.
The first place to push – for both cultural and technical reinvention – is not in the poor nations' ethics or economies, but in the developed world's institutions. The West's efforts to help the last billion still resound with echoes of the Marshall Plan, a top-down approach that worked wonders after World War II in educated, formerly wealthy societies, where centralized planning and imported capital made the critical difference. This approach is ineffective now – not to mention damaging to the morale of committed people in these troubled countries.
Aid institutions too often pursue disconnected agendas. For every development success story, there's another about exporting plans and resources irrelevant to needs. Excelling at raising money, uncertain about results. Struggling to coordinate 21 US agencies and 50 operating units that deliver aid. Subsidizing (through clenched teeth) shameless kleptocracies and grotesque dictators. Funding fiascoes, such as $5 billion spent since 1979 on Nigeria's Ajaokuta steel mill, which has yet to produce any steel.
Humanitarian aid budgets aren't focused on the last billion, where the average person has an income one-fifth of those in mid-tier developing countries. Seventy percent of the last billion live in Africa, yet in 2008 only a third of all US government direct aid will go there. (This is progress: In 2001 it was only 8 percent.) Instead, Israel and Egypt together get 10 times the US direct aid that Darfur does. Russia gets as much as 20 sub-Saharan nations combined. Ireland gets 167 times what the Central African Republic does. These may be rational political transfers – but they're not life-saving assistance.
Development agencies around the world can't find staff to serve in places such as Chad. The World Bank has offices in every middle-income country, but only one staff member in the Central African Republic. The aid posts with the most people from most rich governments are in places such as China and Brazil, which don't need the help. And when the help is there, too many of the rich world's best efforts have unintended consequences. Malawi agriculture, for instance, withered under a prohibition against subsidizing fertilizer and seed. Finally, in 2005, Malawi defied the World Bank – and after decades of dependence, became a net grain exporter.
Some aid efforts hurt even as they help. Take food aid: First-world farmers get subsidies to grow crops. Surplus food stocks are then bought (with more tax dollars) and shipped to a struggling nation, where they're distributed or converted into currency to fund (hopefully peaceful) projects. But here's the problem: Local farmers can't compete with "free" produce. No indigenous capacity ever develops. So aid reinforces a tragic cycle of dependency.
While wealthy nations underwrite this diffuse agenda, the last billion continue to pay for it with their lives, and instability spreads. To eradicate abject poverty in one lifetime, the developed world's approach must change – in some ways subtly, in others significantly.
SAN FRANCISCO - Is poverty a problem of policy or destiny? Experts tend to pull in one of two directions. Some focus on the social fundamentals for prosperity. Others, on the technical and financial requirements for sustainable growth.
It's cultural.
In this view, policy is beside the point. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam says that "social capital" – how closely people in a community are connected – supports the basis for trust essential to commerce. Economist Gregory Clark of the University of California argues that prosperous societies grow their economies through Industrial Revolution values such as patience, hard work, innovation, and education. Some cultures support such values, some don't, and they certainly can't be imported or master-planned. Implication: Some poverty is permanent.
It's technical.
Others say the developed world has the policy tools poor countries need and the obligation to show them how to use them. While specific proposals vary, development economists such as Paul Collier, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz argue that wealthy nations know how to create the conditions for accountable governance, open markets, capital formation, low taxes, reliable institutions, and regulatory frameworks with courts to enforce them. Implication: The right combination of solutions is (almost) within reach.
Whichever side of this debate you're drawn to, it is clear that decades of effort and at least $2 trillion spent by rich countries since 1945 to bring development "to" the world's poorest have delivered, at best, mixed results. A World Bank study by Craig Burnside and David Dollar found a positive impact in countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. Later analysis by William Easterly, and Raghuram Rajan at the International Monetary Fund, indicates zero impact from Western aid on growth in poor nations – with or without sound policies. Possibly these countries would have done worse without aid. Certainly, we can do better.
The first place to push – for both cultural and technical reinvention – is not in the poor nations' ethics or economies, but in the developed world's institutions. The West's efforts to help the last billion still resound with echoes of the Marshall Plan, a top-down approach that worked wonders after World War II in educated, formerly wealthy societies, where centralized planning and imported capital made the critical difference. This approach is ineffective now – not to mention damaging to the morale of committed people in these troubled countries.
Aid institutions too often pursue disconnected agendas. For every development success story, there's another about exporting plans and resources irrelevant to needs. Excelling at raising money, uncertain about results. Struggling to coordinate 21 US agencies and 50 operating units that deliver aid. Subsidizing (through clenched teeth) shameless kleptocracies and grotesque dictators. Funding fiascoes, such as $5 billion spent since 1979 on Nigeria's Ajaokuta steel mill, which has yet to produce any steel.
Humanitarian aid budgets aren't focused on the last billion, where the average person has an income one-fifth of those in mid-tier developing countries. Seventy percent of the last billion live in Africa, yet in 2008 only a third of all US government direct aid will go there. (This is progress: In 2001 it was only 8 percent.) Instead, Israel and Egypt together get 10 times the US direct aid that Darfur does. Russia gets as much as 20 sub-Saharan nations combined. Ireland gets 167 times what the Central African Republic does. These may be rational political transfers – but they're not life-saving assistance.
Development agencies around the world can't find staff to serve in places such as Chad. The World Bank has offices in every middle-income country, but only one staff member in the Central African Republic. The aid posts with the most people from most rich governments are in places such as China and Brazil, which don't need the help. And when the help is there, too many of the rich world's best efforts have unintended consequences. Malawi agriculture, for instance, withered under a prohibition against subsidizing fertilizer and seed. Finally, in 2005, Malawi defied the World Bank – and after decades of dependence, became a net grain exporter.
Some aid efforts hurt even as they help. Take food aid: First-world farmers get subsidies to grow crops. Surplus food stocks are then bought (with more tax dollars) and shipped to a struggling nation, where they're distributed or converted into currency to fund (hopefully peaceful) projects. But here's the problem: Local farmers can't compete with "free" produce. No indigenous capacity ever develops. So aid reinforces a tragic cycle of dependency.
While wealthy nations underwrite this diffuse agenda, the last billion continue to pay for it with their lives, and instability spreads. To eradicate abject poverty in one lifetime, the developed world's approach must change – in some ways subtly, in others significantly.
09 March 2008
huh?
i know i haven't been feeling the best, but even on my best days i'm pretty sure there is no way i could ever wrap my head around this sentence...
"As to economic matters, I found the analysis to be a neo-Malthusian politically progressive retread of Niebuhrian Chrisitan-socialist thinking so ubiquitous in Mainline Protestant academic circles."
"As to economic matters, I found the analysis to be a neo-Malthusian politically progressive retread of Niebuhrian Chrisitan-socialist thinking so ubiquitous in Mainline Protestant academic circles."
08 March 2008
mississippi twins
so most people reading this little section of cyberspace probably know by now that i have a twin brother. kevin is nothing like me. we spent most of our growing up years realizing how different we are, and i gotta say, our parents did a really good job of helping us grow up as competent (well, somewhat) individuals capable of independent functioning. Not to mention how much as kids we loved it that our favorite baseball team was the minnesota twins...
why bring all this up now? today, in at the vet clinic, i realized that i have twins. like kevin and i, oscar and daisy are cut from very different molds. it has been quite the trip these last two months incorporating these two into every single facet of my life. there have been plenty of ups and downs and piles of poo in the wrong places. But above and beyond all of that, it has been something special to see them learning different things at different times and even teaching each other a thing or two that they've figured out. yup, i have twins. awesome.
why bring all this up now? today, in at the vet clinic, i realized that i have twins. like kevin and i, oscar and daisy are cut from very different molds. it has been quite the trip these last two months incorporating these two into every single facet of my life. there have been plenty of ups and downs and piles of poo in the wrong places. But above and beyond all of that, it has been something special to see them learning different things at different times and even teaching each other a thing or two that they've figured out. yup, i have twins. awesome.
07 March 2008
Do Something That Won't Compute...
Manifesto: A Mad Farmer's Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry
Originally published in The Witness magazine, November 2001
Thursday, November 1, 2001
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
By Wendell Berry
Originally published in The Witness magazine, November 2001
Thursday, November 1, 2001
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
06 March 2008
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