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Category Archives: Pondering
Why Am I Vegan?
People seem to be asking me a lot recently why I am vegan. This is likely because I have recently been around people socially a lot more than I have in a very long time. My problem is that I have no idea how to answer that question. I know what my reasons are, but I am also pretty sure that no one actually wants to hear them. I am particularly sure of that when I am asked during a meal why I am vegan. Since I have no desire to cause a scene or freak anyone out, I never know what to say. You see, at this point, asking me why I am vegan is like asking someone why they are Muslim or Hindu or Feminist. It is such a part of my ethical and moral DNA that it is almost offensive to be asked. For me, being vegan means doing all that I can to make sure that other animals (human animals included) do not suffer because of my arbitrary choices. It means reveling in being able to, in great degree, live my life without causing suffering to my fellow creatures. On the other hand, it is also… Read more
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A New Direction
For the few of you who read this blog regularly, you have undoubtedly noticed the paucity of posts over the last several months. This is attributable to many things, but mostly it is because this blog, and all of my online doings, have become part of a wholesale reappraisal of my life (getting a jump on that old canard the mid-life crisis). During that reappraisal, I spent a good bit of time reading the things I have posted here over the years, and decided that I didn’t like the direction my writing here was moving in. It had become too reactionary, too temporally topical and in some cases downright silly. Instead of continuing on in that vein, or simply walking away completely, I have decided instead to refocus my writing on subjects near and dear to me, but to shift the emphasis from that of critique to something more like reportage; focusing on things as I encounter them, making sure to keep in mind that watching them on television or reading about them on the internet is… Read more
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Some Outdoor Activity Definitions
Reading through a bunch of hiking and backpacking message boards brought up an interesting subject recently; namely, what is “backpacking”? After some pondering, I think I have arrived at a satisfactory answer, to me at least. Hiking is walking (and only walking) in natural environments, often but not always, on trails specifically for foot traffic. It is the natural environment bit that separates it from walking. Camping is living outdoors temporarily(?) , often in the wilderness and generally in non-urban areas and may involve the use of a tent, primitive or natural shelter, or no shelter at all. Backpacking is the convergence of hiking and camping. To be backpacking is to hike while carrying all of the gear one needs to camp (shelter/cooking facilities/etc…).In my definition, it is also necessary to actually use those camping items to camp (or intend to). Synonyms to my definition of backpacking would be trekking, tramping (in NZ) and bushwalking. So, one can hike for… Read more
Danny MacAskill – Inspired Bicycles April 2009
Danny MacAskill is a serious Trials (MTB) rider from Edinburgh (tartybikes.co.uk) and has been working on a new video for some time and it’s finally been released… We knew it would be good but nobody was prepared for this! Once you’re properly wowed, go check out his mates Sam Oliver and Joe… Read more
First Sign of the Econopacolypse
Truly, the head-in-the-sand Ponzi party is coming to an end when even uncritical wing-nut neo-classical economist fanbois like Thomas Friedman are announcing that growth-capitalism American-style is bad. In his own words: We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese … We can’t do this anymore. Will wonders never cease? Will the CATO Institute come out in favor of replacing land ownership with usufruct? Will Ron Paul admit that he’s a power-hungry demagogue only interested in the socialized health care he gets as a high level federal employee? Maybe not, but as the econopacolypse… Read more
Atalissa Is Complicit
The saga of the “Henry Boys” continues. It seems now that they were promised a non-existent ranch at the end of their “employment” at Henry’s Turkey Service: According to several Atalissa residents, the men were promised a “ranch” when they returned to Texas after they retired. Though retirement would have come next month, Thiede said there is no ranch in Texas for the men to go. Shades of George and Lennie there, no? That quote above is from an article in the West Liberty Index, a web-paper local to the scandal. In a recent article, the townspeople boo hoo in best paternalist fashion, and the author seems to be taking the slant that somehow something wrong was done by removing the men from the squalid, exploited position they were in. The people in the article go on and on about how important to the community, how loved and cared about, these men were. It makes me sick to read this feel-good self-exculpatory prattle. I am full of rage at the self-satisfied idiots who never,… Read more
A Liberal Decalogue
From The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 3: 1944-1969, pp. 71-2. : Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. Do not fear to be eccentric in… Read more
On The Importance Of Blogging – Part IV
Almost three years ago, I left off this series of ruminations on what exactly blogging was (to me at least) with a discussion of what blogging is often mistaken for, but is not. In the intervening years I have gotten a lot more comfortable with blogging in general, and with how I see it, and now I feel compelled to update a bit and expand on what I have said previously. Let me begin with a quote from Roger Darnton, writing in The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000: Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it . . .The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed… Read more
Santayana On Haters
In The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, George Santayana provides this excellent analysis of what Bertrand Russell called the fury of conventional people for those who depart from convention: It was the anger of the well-meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he has been doing as a matter of course. He doesn’t want to ask those questions because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic’s awareness that what he is doing is wrong, or else, if he doesn’t want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desire to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation. To most people, radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief… Read more
Posted in Pondering
Tagged Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, George Santayana, hypocrisy, Noam Chomsky
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Reactions to Veganism
Since Jen and I have become vegan, we have been explaining our position and our reasoning to the people around us, and through our blogs, to the wider world, whatever that may be. What has been interesting to me is the gamut of reactions we have elicited from people. Those reactions have run the gamut from “right on, it’s about time” to “dude, what the $#%@ is wrong with you?”. I suppose that is to be expected, but some of the reactions have been particularly interesting. First off, our hunting, fishing, “they’re pretty and tasty” friends and relatives have been the most supportive, or should I say least perturbed, by our choice. I must admit that I didn’t see that one coming. The quarter I expected to get the most grief from has been the most supportive. I have yet to figure out why that is. Secondly, there were the predictable “you make me uncomfortable”, “I don’t want to think about where my steak comes from”, “why do you always have to rock the boat” reactions, but those… Read more
Cows With Guns
I’ve always thought this was awesome: It’s even more awesome… Read more
Animals Matter Because We Are Animals
Down the road of veganism I go, one philosophical step at a time. The first step in becoming vegan was, for me, realizing that morality is not, as is currently vogue to think of it, a business transaction. It is not an unwritten contract between two “moral agents” to agree to certain constraints and obligations. Morality exists regardless of the object of moral consideration being able to reciprocate. Anything else is patently ridiculous, as is elegantly reasoned by Joel Marks in the current issue of Philosophy Now. As he so succinctly puts it: “The moral worth of a being should depend on the nature of the being and not on our attitude towards it.” and the excellent ending: …so far as we know, the only valuers are animals, and all animals are valuers. Therefore animals move to the center of what ethics is all about. The discussion of nonhuman animals turns out to be not some special issue of ‘applied ethics’, but rather part of ethics’ core (we human animals are the… Read more
American Hypocrisy
Now that the Democratic primaries are over, it’s election season again, which means it’s time for America’s favorite game show; Who Wants To Be a Hypocrite. It’s time to listen to the party voters explain how they aren’t party voters and how, after much soul searching and deep thought on the issues of the day, they have decided to once again vote for the party they have always voted for and always will vote for. It’s time to undertake deep, penetrating analysis of which candidate we are emotionally predisposed to based on ethnicity, gender, familiarity or unresolved daddy issues and make up as many reasons for everyone else to vote for them as possible. It’s time to watch the poor and barely-not-poor vote against their own economic interests based solely on a misidentification with the candidate that most closely matches the paternalistic fantasy they have created for themselves. It’s time to discuss whether or not the American populace is too stupid to vote rather than… Read more
What About The Middle Class?
Recently, with the prices of gas, food and most everything else moving shockingly close to subsistence-level wages for those who make the goods, there has been much hand-wringing and boo-hooing about the fate of the middle class in America. Every other news story is about some “hard-working American family” who has had to endure the unthinkable, like not eat in restaurants but once a month and cancel their Constitutionally-guaranteed beach/mountain vacation. Some of these poor folks have even had to sell their second houses and third cars just to keep up the payments on their 3000 sq ft suburban McMansions. Newsflash: The middle class is a figment of its own imagination. There is no such thing as a “middle class” and it is high time these yahoos learned where they actually stand. For half a century these mouth-breathing idiots (and their mouth-breathing idiot parents before them) have allied themselves with the owning class based on a complete fiction. They have pretended that… Read more
Me, The Brand
We live lives so completely dominated by commercialism and monetary exchange that we think of everything, even ourselves, in the terms of the marketplace. Not content with turning time into a commodity (to be earned, spent, wasted, saved), we now endeavor to turn ourselves into commodities, brands, our own tiny little multinational corporations – Me, Inc. We fret over our corporate image, as reflected in our blog layouts. We design our Yahoo, eBay or Etsy stores to communicate the right message about ourselves as brands. We attend network marketing seminars where we learn to ‘sell ourselves first’. We wonder if our varied interests (if we have any left that are not market mediated or created) present a unified, sellable whole to the world. To help us maintain our fantasy world of individualistic isolated commercial success, we pretend to have relationships with people we do not know, people who do not even exist. We have relationships with other peoples carefully crafted… Read more
How To Choose The Right Thing To Do
Is it even possible to do so? How to go about discovering what in the East is called ‘right-action’? How is “right” defined, and is that definition flexible, subjective, relative? Relative ‘truth’ is self-refuting, so is relative ‘right’ also self-refuting? Why can’t we discuss ‘right action’ without constant and overwhelming recourse to the dialectic of ‘need’ and ‘want’. “Authenticity” – how is this concept of authenticity anything, in the modern usage of the term, other than an exercise in solipsist utilitarianism? Isn’t the popular search for authenticity really a method of discovering the wants in yourself that the fulfillment of will bring the largest amount of… Read more
Precarity In America
While I was living in Europe I found myself involved in quite a few pub discussions about Precarity and its adjunct flexploitation. One thing that popped up in all of those conversations was the question of why there is no discussion of precarity in the United States. I said then, and still believe that there is a discussion in America of precarity, but that discussion is not taking place in the chattering classes, but amongst those who are already in positions of precarity. See MayDay 2006, when hundreds of thousands of Latin-American immigrants marched for visibility. Precarity in America, like in Europe, is divided along class lines, but in America class lines are more closely congruent with racial lines than they are in, for example, the UK. So no, white guys in pubs in the US don’t generally discuss precarity, so we, as white guys in pubs, are not privy to that discussion. The other big difference I see is that while Europeans tend to immediately glom on to the negative… Read more
The Interstate System
The simplest map of the United States… Read more
The Four Pillars of Libertarianism
As Wendy McElroy, Fox News’ resident Libertarian pundit aptly summarized in a column for the Independent Institute, American political Libertarianism is based on Murray Rothbard’s synthesis of four schools of thought, the radical anti-statism of the individualist anarchists and wed it with Austrian economics, the foreign policy of the Old Right (isolationism) and the natural law tradition. Let’s look at each one of these in turn and see what they have to say. Individualist Anarchism There is no better critical examination of the differences between individualist and mutualist schools of Anarchist thought than Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism – An Unbridgeable Chasm. Austrian Economics See Victor Aguilar’s Critique of Austrian Economics. Isolationist Foreign Policy When speaking of foreign policy, Isolationism goes well beyond military non-interventionism to couple it with a protectionist economic policy. It is therefore doubtful that any… Read more
William F. Buckley – Only the Good Die Young
One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry, surely, that he stopped writing. – William F. Buckley Apparently the correct way to write is to dress up a thinly veiled version of yourself as an action hero, give him the name of a gay pirate and have him navigate 300 pages of blunt implausibilities to save the Queen of England-punctuating the plot along the way with the tweedy aphorisms of your favorite Yale professor… With the smug pompous racist dead at the ripe old age of 82, who will we turn to now for socially acceptable hate and condescension and empty threats of violence against anyone who questions political conservatism? To Gore Vidal: “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll knock you in the God-damned teeth.” “I pray every Negro will not be given the vote in South… Read more
Home “Investment” Comes Home To Roost
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I wasn’t buying the idea of “good debt”with respect to home mortgages. Now, with foreclosure rates skyrocketing and the housing sector in the early stages of a pretty serious crisis, I am once again reminded of that idea. Yves Smith, who writes the Naked Capitalism blog, makes a couple of interesting points on this front: The idea that they are homeowners in the traditional sense is spurious; it’s more accurate to view them as renters who bought a home equity option. I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. Having a note on some property does not make you a homeowner in any normative sense, no matter what the legal fiction. What I find most amusing is the way that home lenders have been blindsided by the rising rate of “voluntary default” on home loans. What else did they expect to happen? They, and associated financial businesses, have spent a lot of energy over the last decade or more in convincing people that their home is their… Read more
Intellectual Property
Cory Doctorow has an article in The guardian about the silliness of “intellectual property”. The article begins with the obvious marketing of the term: aren’t you more sympathetic to someone who has had their “intellectual property stolen” than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated”? The important bit is that “intellectual property” is not property, in any proper sense of the term. You cannot be excluded from intellectual property. Once you have heard a song, you can’t unhear it because it “belongs” to someone else. As he says: Copyright – with all its quirks, exceptions and carve outs – was, for centuries, a legal regime that attempted to address the unique characteristics of knowledge, rather than pretending to be just another set of rules for the governance of property. The legacy of 40 years of “property talk” is an endless war between intractable positions of ownership, theft and fair dealing. If we’re going to achieve a… Read more
The Economics of the Internet
It boggles my mind that there are so many businesses that have yet to comprehend the basic reality of the internet (Movie studios and music labels, I’m looking at you) These businesses are in the distribution business, which is to say, they are in the scarcity business. For their products, scarcity is directly related to price. The harder it is to get a copy of their product, the more expensive that product is. Conversely, without high scarcity, prices fall. At zero scarcity, prices are also zero. Basic stuff, no. Well, here’s the bit they don’t seem to get, though I’m sure they DO get it, they are just trying to jam the genie back into the bottle. The internet destroys scarcity. It is the most efficient distribution mechanism yet invented: for many products (theirs included) it is basically zero price for infinite copies. That’s good news for everyone who doesn’t make all their money on distribution, but bad news for everyone that does. Stop trying to legislate that… Read more
‘Canes Shake Things Up
Well, well, well. Stillman and Commodore are off to Ottowa in trade for Joe Corvo and Patrick Eaves. As the only “big” trade in the NHL yet, this thing is getting a lot of press. Lots of analysis here and here. One of the games everyone plays when these trades take place is the “who won the trade” game. Here’s my take on that: Ottawa: They get recent Cup experience, a top-six forward and a top-four defense man, and tighten things up for a real run for the cup. Carolina: They get a puck-moving defense man in Corvo (something sorely lacking), and a potentially solid forward in Eaves (if he can stop getting injured constantly). Even better, both Stillman and Commie will be free agents at the end of the season, so Carolina could potentially grab them right back after the Sens cup run. The Winner: Cory Stillman, with a real chance to grab a third Cup ring in 4 years (2004 w/ Tampa Bay, 2006 w/… Read more
The Politics of the Uterus
Unless the national leadership of the National Organization for Women comes out and takes a stand against the rampant stupidity of the NY chapter, even the remaining few friends they have in the world will write them off as completely loons (no offense to any aquatic birds reading this). It seems that the NY chapter of NOW has said that Caroline Kennedy is a sex-traitor for not endorsing the only uterus in the presidential field. Using language you would expect to find in a white-separatist screed against “race-mixing” and ending with this doozy: This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us. So, as far as I can tell, if any woman looks at the candidates for the Democratic nomination… Read more
Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul & Racism, Oh my.
Here’s a giant surprise. Ron Paul swears up and down he has no idea who has been writing bigoted rhetoric under his name. Never mind that the author was Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. Never mind that the author, founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute fan club Lew Rockwell is well known to have worked with Murray Rothbard to produce an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives.” Never mind that to this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy, and publishing his books. Of course, none of this should be surprising coming from people whose favorite science fiction novel bears striking resemblance to the Turner Diaries and presents a “utopia” in the form of an… Read more
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Most (il)Literate American Cities
Does anyone actually care about what city is the most literate in the US, a country in which the vast majority of books sold or borrowed from libraries exist only to keep fat people on couches from feeling a vague shame when watching other fat people on daytime television? Of course, when you measure literacy by consumption of books-as-objects (or is that media loci as objects?) instead of understanding of literature, I suppose that the view that Oprah is the best thing to happen to literature since Skikibu (who?) seems more reasonable. How about we rank cities by how many random people on the street can correctly pronounce Mahabharata… seems just as relevant, if not maybe a bit more… Read more
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Juries & Laws
Why do we (as Americans) see no problem with the fact that private citizens, the “average Janes and Joes”, are allowed, expected even, to sit in judgment of another persons life, but are not to be trusted, or even consulted really, on how to spend our tax monies or deploy our… Read more
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Dear America
Dear America, I miss you. You are the land of my birth, the place I spent my formative years, and I have many fond memories of you. Even though I now live across an ocean, in a very different sort of place, I long for you, America. I long for what I have left behind. For me, nurtured in your mountains and on your plains, you were a land of never-ending highways, of hidden mountain valleys, of desert vistas so wide and awesome as to take my breath away. You were a place of close-knit neighborhoods and stalwart rural towns, of all-night diners and riding bicycles in the streets. I knew a place where black folks would defend the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march and assemble, secure in their belief that in a great democracy of ideas, truth and right could win the day without censorship and repression, even of the those who hated them. A place where white folks would stand shoulder to shoulder with those same black folks, to bear witness that the majority was united against hate… Read more
Presidential Library Burns
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A tragic fire on Thursday destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. Both of his books have been lost. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president was devastated, as he had not finished coloring the second… Read more
Lesson For Today
Today’s lesson is more of a question than a lesson, because I just can’t get it off my mind. Being back in the South, I am surrounded by Obese people Professed Christians The thing that bothers me is how often these two groups intersect. It should be painfully obvious to anyone with even a passing understanding of the tenets of the Christian religion or of the Bible, that obesity is gluttony and gluttony is a sin. Supposedly Christians are not to let their appetites control them, but rather they are to have control over their appetites. See Deuteronomy 21:20, Proverbs 23:1-2, 2 Peter 1:5-7, Proverbs 23:20-21, and Proverbs 28:7. So I suppose that today’s lesson is that hypocrisy is okay as long as it doesn’t leave the dinner… Read more
Friday’s Feast #164
Appetizer Name a great website you would recommend to others. Other than my own? The one I use most is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Soup On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 as highest), how often do you dream at night? There is no universally agreed-upon biological definition of dreaming, and most functional definitions of dreaming are limited to remembered dreams, so I will say 2, since I rarely remember my dreams, if I do dream according to your definition of dreaming. Salad Did you have a pet as a child? If so, what kind and what was its name? I had a cat named Oscar. Main Course If you had the chance to star in a commercial, what would you choose to advertise? It would be fun to do a commercial for Labour & Wait Dessert What is your favorite kind of hard candy? Hmm, tough one here. Hard to pick between Anise Squares, Mary Janes, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Licorice… Read more
Lesson For Today
With regards to electoral politics, there are people who believe that politicians are differently motivated or differently principled based on the party affiliation, and there are people who believe all politicians (but not necessarily all possible future politicians) to be essentially the same; money-grubbing, power-hungry influence peddlers who are only interested in personal acquisition and aggrandizement. The lesson is not that these two views exist, or that I hold the second view, but that I am increasingly uninterested in discussing politics with any but the most open-minded and least serious of the first group. Partisanship, which inevitably takes the form of either “wah wah look what unfair thing THEY did to us” or “wah wah look what unfair blame they place on us”, now strikes the same emotional response center as the English no-empire-no-more limp-armed whining – it just makes me want to slap someone and yell “Get off the cross, we need the… Read more
Lesson For Today
‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so everyone thinks they’re winning.’ ‘But it’s another con?’ ‘Complete. Today’s tourist goes nowhere. … All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. … Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.’ ‘And that can’t be done?’ ‘There’s nowhere to go. The planet is full. You might as well stay at home and spend the money on chocolate fudge.’ ———————————————————- J.G. Ballard. Millennium… Read more
Exceptional Drought – Exceptional Stupidity
As most of you are aware, I am back in Georgia, where I was born and raised, and the big news, as it always is in an agricultural state (yes, GA is an agricultural state, ask anyone but the recent transplants to ATL) is the weather, particularly the rain, of which there hasn’t been enough of here in several years. More than a quarter of the Southeast is covered by an “exceptional” drought — the National Weather Service’s worst drought category. Georgia is smack in the middle of the affected area, which extends like a dark cloud over most of Tennessee, Alabama and the northern half of Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia. The whole state is a condition of drought (map) with the northern portion of the state recently moved into a “level 4″ drought category, meaning that, well, it means you can’t water your lawn. Almost everything else is exempted, particularly anything that generates tax revenue. The thing about this drought is that… Read more
Lesson For Today
Lessons Learned Watching the Carolina Hurricanes win their fifth game of the season (5-1-3) last night, I found myself annoyed with the way that they played in the second half of the game. You see, when the Hurricanes build a lead, they tend to slack off and try to protect the lead instead of pouring on the kinds of pressure that got them that lead. More often than not this strategy lets their opponents come back. Last night it was only one goal, but in the past it has cost them many games. In hockey, being in the lead is not enough, which is why 2-0 and 3-1 are considered to be the worst leads in hockey – you slack off and put yourself in danger of losing the whole thing through complacency. You have to finish the game. A hockey game is 60 minutes, andyou have to play the whole 60 minutes if you expect to win. you can’t play for 30 or 40 minutes, coast through the rest and hope to win consistently. I doubt that this lesson can be extrapolated to all of life, but it certainly… Read more
Peak Oil Passed?
The German-based Energy Watch Group has released a study that claims world oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030. They go on to say that Peak Oil is not a problem for the near future, it is something that has already happened; last year. More at The… Read more
Lesson For Today
It is actually a good bit harder than I thought it might be to glean a lesson from every day, particularly days like today, when I basically did nothing. So, leaving behind the life lessons type of learning for today, I did, in the course of planning our Spring garden, discover that between Jen and I we consume the produce of 11 coffee bushes and 20 tobacco plants every… Read more