Bicycle Diaries

 

I have been thinking of little this spring and summer other than bicycles. As I was visiting a bicycle store in Westdale, I came upon a book store which had a book called "Bicycle," (http://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-History-David-V-Herlihy/dp/0300104189) a history of the invention that I regard as one of the greatest of our age. I immediately bought and devoured it.

 

 

 

I did not realize that the idea of paved roads and automobiles and even airplanes grew out of the first bicycle craze in the 1890's. That is, they grew out of bicycles, not the other way around. Plus, the velocipede, a running aid more than a means of transport, was around for fifty years before anybody, with only a couple of exceptions, ever thought of putting pedals on them. Both started in France, and their word for bike, "velo," reflects velocipede rather than the more recent bicycle, also originally a French word. There will be bicycles, I would be willing to bet, long after the last automobile has been dumped in a metal recycling deposit. There is much in this history of the bicycle that I found fascinating and surprising.

 

I just read another book called "Bicycle Diaries," by David Byrne, a musician in a group called Talking Heads (see: http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/books/bicycle_diaries/). When the group goes on tour, he packs a foldable bicycle as a second suitcase and, when he arrives, he rides the bike around the city in which the gig takes place. In this way, he has not only gone to most of the world's major cities, thanks to the bicycle he has actually seen and toured them first hand.

 

 

 

Bicycle Diaries is the product of Byrne's meditations about what he saw. Written around 2005, the start of this most recent bike boom, Byrne's book reports on what has only recently crept up on me as a new thing, that we are in what could be called the "post global warming bicycle boom." It must be at least the fifth bicycle boom during the past two centuries. This boom was just getting underway when Byrne wrote his Diaries. Only now is this boom noticeable around here.

 

One of the exceptions to the boom, he finds, is Buenos Aires. It simply does not have biking as part of its otherwise rich culture. During his week long visit he only encounters one or two natives on bicycles. His use of a bike to tour the town with is so unusual an event that his adventure is written up as a feature article in the local newspaper.

 

European cities, on the other hand, have bikes engrained in their culture, but not in the way we do here. There, you commute and shop with a bike, and install carriers on front and rear. He remarks that they not only dress in ordinary street clothes when they ride, they actually look elegant. In North America, biking is more a sport and recreational activity. For a long time, bikes sold here did not accommodate mounts on which carriers can be placed -- including one bike that I recently bought. That, however, is starting to change.

 

 

 

As I write, I sit by our bay window over Lock Street here in Dunnville and look out at the street. Since spring arrived, from early morning to late in the evening, bicyclists ride by every few minutes. Not as often as the roaring cars, but surprisingly often. When we travelled to Quebec City in May, and I found myself taking photographs of bicyclists far more than the usual tourist attractions. I will share the pictures with you soon enough.

 

I told my elderly neighbour about my new interest in bicycles, and she reminisced about the days in the Nineteen Eighties when she owned a flower shop in town. Her late husband never had a license or owned a car, but you do not need to in this part of town, since all the conveniences are within easy walking distance. She became known to locals as "the lady on the bicycle." It was such a rare thing to ride a bike back then that this vague descriptive sufficed. Now you would have to say something like, "You know, the lady on the green [product placement expunged] beach cruiser."

On Fools and Doctors

A Thought about Wisdom, Medicine and Doctoring

By John Taylor; 2011 Aug 04, Kamal 04, 168 BE

Forty years ago a prescient article appeared in World Order Magazine that predicted the runaway expansion in the price of health care that you read about now every day. It was "Scientific Medicine and Health: A Case for Reappraisal," by a philosopher of science whose work was in public health, by the name of B.B. Page (Summer, 1977). Now that drugs and big pharma are so much more wealthy and powerful, I look back at the recommendations in that article and wonder why nothing was done to change the current model of medicine. Our memory is so short. I first read that article in World Order I was a teenager. Now the magazine itself is defunct. I had almost forgotten about it when, lately, I was going over the writings of Comenius and found that he made the same prediction. As long as we do not pay attention to living a wise lifestyle, health care will expand indefinitely in both expectations and costs. And Comenius was writing back in the 1600's!

Here is the passage I am thinking of.

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"Let me quote some examples to show how previous cures have merely aggravated the diseases! Medicine is an important branch of human knowledge. Let us see how it has grown and what it has achieved! In olden days men knew only one cure for diseases, and that was frugal living.

"When in course of time they indulged in luxury and intemperence, different diseases broke out. Men sought cures for these and found them in a rudimentary but satisfactory form. As the diseases spread, so the art of medicine improved, and this became a continuous process. The art combats diseases in every possible way, and in turn the diseases combat the art.

"While the latter achieves an infinite variety of cures in human bodies, it also stimulates the growth of countless seeds of diseases (otherwise dormant), and so men rush into all kinds of intemperance and risk the pains of hell and ruin their health, only to find in the end that the medicine upon which they rely is failing them. Hence it would appear that the happiest men today are those who know nothing about medicine and have no use for it, but who behave with such moderation that the need for it never arises."

(Panegersia, Ch. 7, para 33, p. 37)

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I regard Comenius as a minor prophet. Call him the prophet of education and world government. One writer, Jalalu'Din Rumi, was writing in Persia around the same time as Comenius. Abdu'l-Baha confirmed that in fact Rumi was a minor prophet, that is, a messenger "without a book," meaning a book revealed directly by God. Rumi of course wrote several books of both prose and poetry. Anyway, one of my favorite stories (it is more of a joke than a story) of Rumi plays upon the same theme that Comenius is talking about above.

Rumi tells of a fool who, noting that the world's best doctor is living in his village, decides that it is a good idea to drink a vial of poison. Why waste the talents of such a brilliant physician? Why make his job easy? He will become a better doctor if he has to cure me, says the fool to himself. Such is the folly of us all today. We live sloppy, lazy lifestyles, pump ourselves with garbage disguised as food, and then hope that the health system will save us from our sorry sinning against the human body.

Plans, Personal and Continental

 

A Plan and Two Ideas

By John Taylor; 2011 May 01, Azamat 03, 168 BE

 

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Contents

A Plan and Some Thoughts about Weight Loss

Idea One: An Idea About Continental Embassies

Idea Two: Pooled Funding and Voting

 

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My Plan for Weight Loss

 

 

My body mass index is, as I recall, 36, just over line into "obese," as opposed to just overweight, which is under 35. I just weighed myself, and I presently weigh some 232 pounds. About five years ago I became a vegetarian, and stopped eating the horrible diet of junk food, sugary cereals and TV dinners that my wife prepares for our kids. I started cooking my own meals, which tend to make more sense from a dietary point of view. At the time I dropped down to about 205 lbs. Unfortunately, the weight loss lasted less than a year. As happens in about 95 percent of diets, I shot right back up to where I had been before, to slightly less than 240 pounds.

 

Now that I think of it, probably what happened was that I started to eat my meals and the junk food that is always left lying around the kitchen as well. If food is set before me, I eat it. It is not only hunger, but a desire not to waste. As a result, I become around here a sort of walking garbage can. This is probably because I was an athlete as a teenager, and I got into a lifetime habit of vacuuming up whatever is presented before me. So now I subsist on two diets at once, one sensible and the other junky. I do not know much about dieting, but I think it is safe to say that two diets are not a good idea, even if one of them is a fairly decent diet.

 

Last week, some hope broke on my horizon as I was going through a science magazine. I read about a study that was inspired by an old bit of folk wisdom, the proposition that if you drink a glass of water before a meal, it will be easier to lose weight. These scientists decided to test it with a controlled experiment. They set up a year-long randomized study that had some subjects do nothing, just eat normally, while others drank a half a litre of water just before each of three meals a day. The results after six months showed that in fact they had lost weight. Subjects were so encouraged by their weight loss that after a whole year all but one of them were still drinking the two large glasses (by my calculation) of water before meals, and still losing weight.

 

You could not ask for a cheaper and easier diet! I swear, even I, weak willed non-entity that I am, could do it.

 

So, I think I will try.

 

I have been on the water before meals diet a couple of days now, and it is easy as pie to follow. Already I find I can go longer without eating than I tended to do before. It is so easy probably because I already drink prodigious amounts of water during the day in order to control my migraines. Now it is just a matter of switching the times that I drink water over to just before mealtime.

 

I noted above what I weigh right now. Next year at this time let us note on the blog what my weight and BMI are. Hopefully, this will work.

 

Continental Embassies.

 

 

We have friend who is a teacher at the high school where my daughter is a student. This teacher runs an annual school sponsored trip, lasting ten days or less, sometimes. This year they are going to Paris and Spain, at a cost of several thousand dollars, well beyond our means. Even if I could afford it, though, I would hesitate to send our daughter on such a brief trip. It seems extravagant to travel so far, and burn up so much carbon into the upper atmosphere, just for an experience, however edifying, of only a few days.

 

To save on flying, and to encourage immigration, we should start up continental tourism centres tied to the educational system in each locality. Then we could eliminate much unnecessary travel, while still reaping the advantages of frequent flying. With these centers, tied in closely to local immigrant groups, whenever tourists, students and businesspersons contemplate visiting a certain continent, they can go to the center and take an orientation or a more in depth course. Contacts can be made and consultations carried on virtually, without having to leave in person at all.

 

Build a continental embassy and tourism center into every neighbourhood, and you would expand the educational uses of tourism -- and, better still, you would do it in a much more egalitarian way. Let every student take a virtual tour of a given continent as a class trip, instead of the small minority who can afford it, as now. A continental center would be much closer and cheaper to visit, so why restrict students to a rare trip to one continent? You could require, as part of the curriculum, that students visit and study virtually at least one new continent every year.

 

Starting in the earliest grades, send every class of young people every summer or Christmas vacation on a two or three week virtual tour of one continent. Make sure that when every student graduates from high school they have studied and toured all of the continents. This would, at the very least, assure that parochialism, local bias and geographical ignorance would soon be a thing of the past. Once students enter post-secondary education, they could then be prepared to go on to visiting places in the flesh.

What would be in these continental tourist embassies? Build in them huge multimedia cinemas that can duplicate as closely as possible a trip to any point on that continent. Stage in the center epic educational adventure games set in the continent to which it is dedicated, rather like the old computer game, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" Bring along touring musicians, artists and other cultural groups from that continent; this would expand contacts of visitors with that continent's legacy to the world. Also, the center would strive to tie in local residents who are native to that continent.

 

The great advantage of these continental centers is that, organized properly, they would equalize the cultural impact of the several continents. The domination of the rich continents, meaning Europe and North America, over the minds and hearts of the world would be gradually reduced as each school child throughout their formative years visits virtually all continents, include places presently ignored, like Antarctica, South America and Australia. Indeed, why not consider the sea as a "continent," the most ignored one of all, the one that takes up most of the surface area of this planet? We would be much more cosmopolitan if we visited places like that as often as we do the usual tourist magnets.

 

Pooled Funding

 

 

How would all this happen? Such things always start with money. All you need to do, then, is forbid donations directly to the embassy/tourist centers of any given continent. Every dollar, be it a donation or tax allocation, must go into a common pool, which then is distributed by a world cultural authority equitably to all of the continental educational centers. That way, the poorest continent, Africa, would have same representation as any other continent.

 

This has to apply especially for the rich nations. Right now, the United States, Earth's richest nation, spends great sums spreading its influence, which goes beyond cultural to the geopolitical realm. With a world government all geopolitical spending would simply be converted into international taxes. If the U.S. wants to spread its cultural influence, let it contribute to the central continental tourist center fund, which in turn will improve all continental centers, including those of North America.

 

Generally speaking, this idea of limiting funding options should be applied to other areas as well. Medical research, for example. For whatever reason, people are willing to open their wallets to fund research on breast cancer but not on lung disease or lower bowel disease. As a result, diseases that are more likely to kill us are ignored, while those that pull on our heart strings are given lavish attention, even when, as with cancer, the possibility of a cure or of having an effect on mortality is remote. Let epidemiologists and other disease experts decide where research money is spent, not the general public.

 

This principle of funneling funding into larger pools should apply for science generally. For example, it should be illegal for companies to pay for research in areas in which they have a vested interest. All money for forestry research, for example, should go into a single fund that is distributed in such a way that humanity, not any single industry or company, will be the main beneficiary. If a company wants to spend money researching something in their interest, let them do so, but do not call it scientific unless and until it bears scientific scrutiny. If a scientist wants to research something that is clearly wrongheaded or futile, let him, but strip him of the title "scientist" until he proves to his peers that he is right and they are wrong.

 

This is what my Cosmopolis Earth book series contemplates for the funding of religion and politics too. When I give money to my religion, a percentage of my donation should automatically be directed into an interfaith funding pool. If it is true that all religions have a common purpose and similar ideals and teaching, then that should be reflected in how people fund their faith. A common interfaith pool would pay for projects that are in the interest of all religions, not just my parochial religion.

 

Same thing for political donations. Redirect part of every political donation into a common fund promoting the purpose of politics, which of course is peace. Let this peace fund help fund world peace through world government, and then when that is secure, direct it into more local bases of peace.

 

Pooled Voting

 

 

 

 

Not only funding and taxes but democracy as well should reflect our commonalities and the fact that we live on one planet. Why not have votes and representation not only for politics, but for official interfaith affairs organizations? These interfaith groups would have a neutral goal, to encourage cooperative initiatives that involve all faith groups in the local population, as well as all people who are not committed to any particular affiliation as well. Elections should be a part of the world of work and careers -- why do so few workers have the right to vote in their own bosses? -- and schooling too.

 

Future historians will look back at us and wonder why were content with so little democracy, and why our so-called democracies tolerated such primitive, stunted ways of choosing our leaders.

My Big Fat Tax

Fat, Climate and Farming

By John Taylor; 2010 July 30, Kalimat 17, 167 BE

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In this posting:


Fat Taxes
No Change in Climate Change
Local Farming Initiative
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Fat Taxes




Consider this news item:




"Leading British doctors will urge the UK government Monday to impose a `fat tax' on junk food and introduce cigarette-style warnings to children about the dangers of poor diets and products high in fat, salt or sugar. [an expert says that] ... the consumption of unhealthy food should be seen to be just as damaging as smoking or binge drinking. `Thirty years ago, it would have been inconceivable to have imagined a ban on smoking in the workplace or in pubs, and yet that is what we have now, are we willing to be just as courageous in respect of obesity? I would suggest that we should be.' The doctors are also demanding a tough government action plan to stop fast-food chains opening outlets near schools, restrict the advertising of products high in fat, salt or sugar, and limit sponsorship of sports events by fast-food companies such as McDonald's." (British docs demand 'fat tax' on junk food http://www.torontosun.com/news/world/2010/07/11/14679421.html)




Also suggested were "fast food free zones" in city planning, and a ban on advertising of garbage foods -- indeed, it occurs to me, why not force them to call a spade a spade on their labels? Why not stick a big warning label on the front: "This food is rated 8 out 10 on the garbage food scale of the World Dietician's Association."


A fat tax would hardly be popular with the public, especially now that the majority in Western nations are obese themselves -- or should I say, ourselves, since I am a good fifty pounds overweight. Few politicians, therefore, would dare touch this issue, urgent as it may be. I must think differently from most fatties, since I look down at my ugly waistline and dream of an economy where sweet and sugary food was expensive and good food was cheap.




No Change in Climate Change




Nor are things going well in the climate change department, also an urgent priority. The obvious policy change would be to impose a carbon tax, but again, any new tax would be unpopular. The U.S. government just effectively rejected any serious action against carbon emissions. In his NY Times column, economist Paul Krugman explains why,




"So it was not the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it? The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice. If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole would not be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries above all, the coal and oil industries would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines."


"Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you will find that they are on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades. Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/opinion/26krugman.html?_r=2&th&emc=th)




Krugman rightly points out what the real cause of this dithering is: attachment to ideology. Even when it becomes self-contradictory to the point of absurdity, the rich cling to their shibboleths,




"It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy's growth rate."




This is why I think that the next Einstein will not be a physicist but an accountant or game designer. Not even an economist, but a genius with numbers who can make the numbers vivid using charts, displays and incentives.




A Local Farming Initiative




I recently bought a "share" in a cooperative farming effort called "Shared Harvests," pushed largely by a local farmer and a local physician, Reza Kazemi (an Iranian Muslim). It costs twenty five bucks to get a basket full of produce every week. I blanched at the price of what I was getting, but Reza pointed out that the group is called, "Triple Bottom Line for Sustainability Inc.," -- you have to write it all out on every check -- because as consumers we have to be aware when we are paying for something that the money should go to those who produce it, that there are three bottom lines, "financial, environmental and social responsibility and sustainability." I still blanched at what I was getting for what I had paid, but my responsibility self-image rose a little.


I got my first "share" of produce last week and was forced to do something with a big batch of kale, which I had only seen in cans before that. I steamed it up and it kept me in meals for a few days. It was good soaked with olive oil. Since I eat two cobs of microwaved corn every day, I held my cob of corn over the kale and soaked it in the extra olive oil. Here are some interesting facts extracted from their newsletter,




"There is a farm income crisis happening in North America. Farmers on average have been earning incomes below the poverty line for 15 of the last 20 years according to the National Farmers Union. The average age of a farmer in Canada is 52.6 and increasing yearly and the family farm is decreasing at a rapid rate. These are troubling facts, endangering the very existence of rural communities that have relied on small family farms for its sustainability and prosperity. It also endangers our food security. ... millions of Canadians including many of us in Dunnville spend long hours and resources caring for our grass instead of growing food; and millions of tons of local food perish due to lack of manpower to harvest it!"

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Freedom from Kitchens

Gastronomy and Common Kitchens

By John Taylor; 2010 May 30, Azamat 12, 167 BE

I believe that homes should not have kitchens.

While I have been arguing that we need more exposure to agriculture in general, I would argue the reverse for exposure to food itself. We need to keep it out of view until it is on the table, ready to eat. Instead of every home having a kitchen and expecting that every homemaker prepare meals, why not offload the task to the neighbourhood level? What we call gluttony and sloth often are not personal failings as much as laxity in planning, a structural lack of order and discipline in the social environment.

Food preparation, then, should take place only in larger kitchens in separate locations, where economies of scale can reduce waste, lower costs and where materials are handled safely. A larger facility can train its workers in correct procedures and has the space to import, store and freeze foodstuffs in bulk. It has the financial wherewithal to purchase the latest equipment to, for example, protect against exposure to pollutants.

Waste, for example, is a major flaw in our present food distribution system. Studies conducted in Sweden found that a great proportion of the fresh vegetables purchased by households are not eaten. They rot in the refrigerator, even in well-organized homes run by competent homemakers. And not all homes are organized or diligently run. One study reported by Science News found that the pleasant, aromatic smell of a home cooked meal is actually a witch's brew of volatile organic compounds that can seriously compromise health. Ordinary home cooking can emit "easily inhaled pollutants that travel throughout a home and can linger for hours." (Science News, "Inhaling your food--and its cooking fuel," <http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040410/note14.asp>) While food preparation in a factory is more efficient in some ways, in other ways they are extremely wasteful, for example in packaging. Broad studies found that waste seems to be built into the very structure of the economy.

"There are reports of rich countries throwing out 25-30% of what is bought. Add in what never even makes it to the cupboard or the refrigerator, and the scale of the problem is considerably larger. [the study found that] ... the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day. That amounts to 150 trillion kilocalories a year for the country as a whole -- about 40% of its food supply, up from 28% in 1974. Producing these wasted calories accounts for more than one-quarter of America's consumption of freshwater, and also uses about 300m barrels of oil a year. On top of that, a lot of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) emerges when all this food rots." (A hill of beans; America's food-waste problem is getting worse," The Economist, Nov 28, 2009, p. 94)

By segregating food preparation in a large community kitchen or restaurant we protect against dangerous practices, not least of which are raids by residents on the pantry or refrigerator. Having food too ready to hand is by all accounts unwise. Dietary research has found that a major cause of the recent epidemic of obesity is that it has become socially acceptable to eat and drink anywhere, anytime. Children from the earliest age are allowed to snack freely, to wolf down salty confections and slug sugar drinks, even at study sessions in school. We should be as tolerant of snacking as we are of bathroom functions performed in public -- and for the same reasons, since overindulging in food will kill just as surely as contact with excrement. Obesity may take longer than a communicable disease, but it kills just as dead. So, let us especially avoid anything that leads to overeating, or eating too quickly, especially buffets and smorgasbords, and tax salt and sugar to the hilt. We can use both social pressure and the design of our buildings to keep temptations to eat out of our faces most of the time.

In a hillside block the freedom to stuff oneself is severely limited. Large food preparation facilities prepare adequate meals and distribute them to households at mealtimes, and only at mealtimes. They can use pneumatic tubes and dumb waiters built into the superstructure of the building to deliver hot meals to dinner tables just at the time they are needed.

Gastronomy

The abolition of home kitchens has proved to be the least popular of my ideas for hillside construction. For instance, in response to earlier versions of this essay, one reader recently wrote:

"I do not want to eat in a sort of cafeteria type surrounding.  I like to cook my own choice of food - and eat it when I want to eat it. I am saying this because I think it would be helpful for you to get some feedback."

The love of good food is both a basic human need and a fundamental part of happiness and the good life. I have described a negative aspect of the design, the lack of kitchens in hillside homes. The saying, "hunger is the best seasoning," describes the wisdom of this. The French call it gastronomy, eating small portions in a highly social setting. The hillside block building is designed from the ground up for gastronomy.

This comment brings up two issues that I should deal with in order.

First of all, choice. Although delivery takes place quickly and with great efficiency, this does not mean that everybody eats the same thing at every meal. With the aid of computers and "smart cards," residents can plan and personalize their own meals to their own tastes and medical requirements. Indeed the nutritional smart card will soon allow persons with restricted diets to eat anywhere, and to know exactly what they ate, when, and how much it cost. Such advances are happening without hillside housing, but they are slow in coming. As always they are not quickly adopted because standards must be agreed upon and interests other than those of the health of the public are liable to be accommodated first.

Second, participation in food preparation. The fact that cooking takes place off-site does not mean that residents are forbidden to cook. Many kitchens will be cooperatives that encourage work for meals bartering and other kinds of volunteer service arrangements.

The principle of conformity in essentials and variety in non-essentials would demand that there be variety not only in the types of food we eat but also in the specialization of the process of preparing it as well. Some households in natural areas may want to involve themselves both in cooking and in growing, as subsistence farmers and hunter gatherer aboriginals have always done.

There may be only a few households who choose a lifestyle with such radical non-specialization. However, it is in everybody's interest that they always continue, there every region have at least some available so that anybody who feels ready for a change can visit such a communal household. A vacation there would provide experience with a simpler, more traditional lifestyle that will reorient a city dweller's outlook on life.

All I can do here is to describe the default. The beauty of the cosmopolitan condition is that it will encourage a wide variety of lifestyles, diets and techniques for daily living. The hillside project just assures that most residents get enough, but not too much, nutrition at meal hours. Other aspects of the design of these buildings will encourage people to eat meals with others, together in their own households.

The social and spiritual utility of meals is not to be underestimated.

Mealtime is a chance for family or group members to share information, be they young or old. It rounds out the day and gives a family the chance to deal with problems and plan their lives. This offers further benefit for health, since the hubbub and distraction of group meals encourages slow eating, which allows the body to feel satiated before the stomach is full.

So far we have considered what the contribution of block kitchens is not.

A large hillside block building housing hundreds of residents and dozens of households would have many specialized kitchens competing with one another to send a meal to a resident or to cater an entire household's next meal. Within the bounds of proper nutrition, kitchens would be free to specialize. Some kitchens might choose an ethnic specialty. The Chinese are already adept at this. The level playing field of a hillside block would encourage other minority groups adapt their own cooking to compete with Chinese food. Some kitchens might be cooperatives with many residents participating; others might be corporations, family businesses or the showpiece of a school or ethnic neighbourhood.

Smaller or rural hillside blocks might have a single cooperative kitchen, perhaps one using large parabolic solar collectors or solar ovens in order to cook without using electric power. Residents who need more variation in their diets could supplement these dishes with ingredients, servings or whole meals sent in insulated containers from kitchens in larger hillside blocks. This would still be economical since the pneumatic tubes built into these buildings sends food very rapidly.

The hillside kitchen system not only offers variety of choice for the residents sitting at the top of the food chain, it also bolsters the farmers at the bottom. They have an assured local market for their harvest, and a ready demand for even exotic plants, fruits and meats. Since grower, cook and most of the dining clientele are all neighbours, there is bound to be great concern on everybody's part for safety, waste-avoidance, quality and promptitude.

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Invictus

Invictus, A Movie Review

By John Taylor; 2010 May 25

I recently watched "Invictus," a movie about how the newly elected head of state brought the races together by inspiring the national team to win the Rugby World Cup (http://en.wikipedia/Invictus_(film). In my opinion this is a great film, one of the best ever done. I have been inspired to go back and watch other products of Clint Eastwood's direction that I missed, such as "A Perfect World." Invictus is a better film than the recent blockbuster, Avatar, though not as important. Why? Not because the latter made more money but because of the unique role that Avatar is playing in uniting aboriginal peoples around the world in their own cause.

Normally, barriers of distance, language and culture block them from discerning their own common plight. Anyway, although I was in tears throughout most of Invictus, at times my tears were for the human race itself. What a terrible disadvantage a world government has against nations, who can unite in a sports event in rooting for their own against another nation's gladiators. How can a world government compete against that? Maybe it will someday, if another race or races of intelligent aliens are discovered. Maybe there will be a Galactic Rugby Cup that will unite humans in a common cause someday against a formidable alien rugby team. Whether that would be a good thing, I cannot say. My tears were for the fact that we have no hope to be inspired, it seems, by anything less. Our inspiration slams against borders like invisible force fields.

On the other hand, I am not from South Africa, nor am I Afrikaans or Black, yet I was inspired by the movie. Especially by Nelson Mandela's ability to include both former rivals in a common cause, rugby. This truly was a stroke of management genius. The movie is correct to focus on Mandela's long time in prison. It prepared him to see what none other saw, and it inspired the players to put out the ultimate effort in winning against a "dream team" from New Zealand. It also shows the power of the word, how that "captain of my soul" poem inspired Mandela, and then kept the players going through thick and thin.

In a word, I was inspired by the ability of the right leader at the right time to inspire in a right cause.

This is the sort of indirect inspirational leadership that the UHJ seems want us to be aiming at by applying the Ruhi program. We do not dazzle people with revival meetings or scripture thumping speakers, we take them in and involve them in our core activities, and thereby they enter orbit. As the House said in their latest message,

"Whether the first contact with such newly found friends elicits an invitation for them to enrol in the Baha'i community or to participate in one of its activities is not an overwhelming concern. More important is that every soul feel welcome to join the community in contributing to the betterment of society, commencing a path of service to humanity on which, at the outset or further along, formal enrolment can occur." (UHJ Ridvan Message, 2010, para 4)

The Ruhi program takes an end run around our normal ways of human learning, which are slow and clumsy, and exposes us to the Word Itself. It takes us down the primrose path of faith, and from faith we derive the universal patriotism that the world needs most right now. As Baha'u'llah wrote,

"The understanding of His words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no wise dependent upon human learning. They depend solely upon purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit. This is evidenced by those who, today, though without a single letter of the accepted standards of learning, are occupying the loftiest seats of knowledge; and the garden of their hearts is adorned, through the showers of divine grace, with the roses of wisdom and the tulips of understanding. Well is it with the sincere in heart for their share of the light of a mighty Day!" (Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 210-211)

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Eat To Save Your Life

Jamie Oliver Eat To Save Your Life Part 1 Of 8

"Make ye then a mighty effort, that the purity and sanctity which, above all else, are cherished by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, shall distinguish the people of Baha; that in every kind of excellence the people of God shall surpass all other human beings; that both outwardly and inwardly they shall prove superior to the rest; that for purity, immaculacy, refinement, and the preservation of health, they shall be leaders in the vanguard of those who know. And that by their freedom from enslavement, their knowledge, their self-control, they shall be first among the pure, the free and the wise." (Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 463)

How to improve the air you breathe

Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.



 http://www.ted.com

Cooking as lost art

from:

The Commander in Chef

By AMANDA HESSER

New York Times: May 31, 2009

Michelle Obama’s good food campaign is missing a crucial yet neglected aspect of the discussion: cooking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31hesser.html

"For most of the last century, Americans have been told repeatedly that cooking is a time-consuming drag. Companies like Kraft and General Foods promoted mix-and-eat macaroni and cheese, rice with mix-in flavor pouches and instant pudding. Pillsbury, the flour maker, became Pillsbury the biscuit, pie and cookie dough maker: baking just by turning on the oven. According to a 2008 NPD study, of all supper entrees “cooked” at home, just 58 percent were prepared with raw ingredients.

"The twist, of course, is that convenience foods save neither money nor time. As Marion Nestle pointed out in her 2006 book “What to Eat,” prewashed romaine hearts cost at least $1.50 a pound more than romaine heads. And the 2006 U.C.L.A. study found that families saved little or no cooking time when they built their meals around frozen entrees and jarred pasta sauce."

What Price Freedom?

A Roundabout Answer to a Question About Laser Tattoos


I continue reading Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the story of a dentist, traveling with a couple of doctors and nutritionists in the early 1930's. It was in this area and right around this time that Shoghi Effendi vacationed and regained his strength from his severe illness.

In the early chapter I am reading, Price and his friends examine the health of members of one village after another in various places in rural Switzerland. At the time, these isolated mountain people were just coming into contact with the rest of the world. Roads were being built connecting some valleys that had subsisted with little or no outside contact for centuries. Price found that villagers in one valley might have vineyards, which allowed grape juice and wine (and therefore vitamin C) as part of their diet, and in the next valley they did not. They never touched alcohol.

But such is the nutritional quality of locally-produced food that it made no difference, almost everybody was fit and healthy. Dental caries varied somewhere between two and four percent, compared to as much as fifty percent in places that had access to factory-processed, imported foods (in such areas, between a quarter and a half of the teeth examined had had a cavity at some point).

This is the reverse of what you would expect. You would think that if you had access to more varied foods that were made with the latest, scientifically helped food production techniques, that it would improve peoples' diet and health. Price found in every case that the reverse was the case. When upon examination a subject had a few more than the usual number of cavities and facial deformities, that they had spent a few years outside their home valley eating the modern diet. As soon as they came back, the cavities stopped appearing.

Price noticed other side effects of this healthful lifestyle. Almost everybody, being properly nourished, had a full, deep, beautiful singing voice. They practiced what we now call sustainable agriculture. On the mountainside terraces runoff topsoil was collected at the edge and carried -- by hand -- back to the inner end of the field. Labour saving devices? These people did not need to go to pay a personal fitness trainer to stay fit, they did strenuous but useful work and felt all the better for it.

Sometimes locals would hold a regional fair where athletic contests were staged. The prize for the winner of a race was a bowl of fresh cream! These Swiss treated cream as a treat, just like we do ice cream. No doubt it tasted much better, with no sugar, no chemicals, no flavouring, no colouring, no junk at all. Just cream from a cow that had spent its life outdoors eating real grass in fresh mountain air. The cows and other livestock were healthier and happier than our poor grain-fed creatures kept indoors in giant factory farms hooked up to Matrix-like milking machines. For our food producers quantity beats out quality.

Price's findings in this book are surely among the most important in dietary knowledge of the 20th Century. His discovery that local diets are superior is something that the popular mind still has not come to terms with. I am sure that if you offered the athlete's prize, a bowl of fresh cream, to any diet conscious modern, they would refuse to eat it, invoking poorly understood buzzwords like "fat" and "calories." How grossly misinformed we are about what is good for us! Misinformation on diet is rampant.

With envy I read about these Swiss peasants and long to go live in the mountains too. Flatlands are boring and un-healthful. Here in North America we have spent decades using bulldozers to erase every hill and valley to build malls and parking lots when if we had a lick of sense we would be using earth moving equipment to do the reverse, to make large, mountainous, valley-filled urban living areas whose deep contours force people and animals to climb wherever they go. That alone might end obesity, which is all but unknown in mountain people.
After Price's dietary discoveries in the 1930's, the economic bullies expunging traditional, local diets and replacing them with commercially based food became more ruthless. All around the world sinister corporations have corrupted the foreign policy of Western governments, which literally at gunpoint forced aboriginal and traditional peoples to have the "choice" of eating local, or eating fast food hamburgers and drinking carbonated sugar-water. The only capitol city that escaped was Havana, which was forced by an American boycott to become the world's greenest city (for more on this, seehttp://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/09/12/UrbanAgriculture/#). More vulnerable poor regions that refuse to "liberalize" their markets face dire, bloody consequences. Instead of learning from the superior diet of these people, unfettered capitalism routinely exploits and preys upon them for ephemeral profit. As a result, today obesity is catching up to smoking and alcohol as the overall worst health threats around the world.

What God must think of our present uglification of the human body, not to mention our planet! So terrible is our diet that obesity is ubiquitous not only in rich lands but is even worse in poor ones. Yesterday I ended the daily Badi' essay with this quote from the Master,

"Man is the temple of God. He is not a human temple. If you destroy a house, the owner of that house will be grieved and wrathful. How much greater is the wrong when man destroys a building planned and erected by God! Undoubtedly, he deserves the judgment and wrath of God." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 498)

Coincidentally, my nine-year-old son Thomas asked me a question that gave me a chance to apply this quote. He has evidently been thinking about today's fashion of tattooing the body. Yesterday, outside the local tattoo parlour, he asked, in his usual science-fictiony way, "What if when I grow up they invent a laser that will paint a picture on the body without pain? And what if it could be removed painlessly? Should I get a tattoo?" I answered that that would be his decision. If after reflection and your heart still moves you, and you consult with a variety of people, and your local LSA and your parents all agree, I suppose you might decide to get a tattoo.

However, you should consider it carefully. Historically, religion has been very suspicious of images, especially Judaism and Islam. And they have a good point. I myself find images by nature irksome, and I quickly tire of the same picture on the wall. And as the Master says, it is a fact that our bodies are temples of God. They are not our possession but His domain. Myself, I would be very disinclined to mark it up in any manner. I went into a long history of how Islam forbade images entirely, and how that forced artists to decorate temples with designs so ingenious that they actually pioneered new branches of mathematics.

In any case, essentially what happened in the chalets of Switzerland was that the people were not corrupt. They had no choice, so they chose to live well. If they had not made that choice, these mountains long ago would have become uninhabited.

As Price found, even their faces were prettier for having no dietary choice, no choice but to walk uphill so very often. As far as good health goes, the Swiss villagers were surely far wealthier than almost everybody today, even the richest of us. But we should not forget that they were information poor. The isolation of these mountain villages was total. We would think of them as hopelessly unsophisticated. I doubt if I could keep my sanity if I lived there, cut off from news, radio, phones, computers and screens, longer than a month. However, this makes me wonder. Have I become addicted to cheap data in the same way the modern diet has made me addicted to cheap calories and unnourishing fat? As a father, I am witnessing this happening to my children even worse than, at a later stage of life, it hit me. They cannot stand to be away from a screen more than a few hours.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) their data poverty, I envy the rural Swiss. At the heart of our problem, I think, is how we misunderstand and mismeasure wealth. Wealth is not money alone. All the money in the world is useless if you are sick. Wealth is happiness, godliness, a healthful lifestyle full of variety and nourishment for mind, soul and body. The lesson is that purity must come before choice. Otherwise, liberty only undermines health and leads to further corruption. Corruption should not be an option.

Some Swiss villages close by virgin ones had had roads for a while, which allowed them more choices, more contact. They traded with the outside world and chose, for example, to keep their cows indoors, feed them grain and use the milk to make the famous Swiss milk chocolate instead of giving it to their children to drink. The ugly effects on their teeth and bodies were strikingly apparent to Price and his team of doctors.

Given a choice, most, including those who had eaten traditional diets all their lives, would prefer to gobble down sweets, chocolate and ice cream, rather than good food. Given a choice, we would all be happy to let machines do all our manual labour. However, it would be most sagacious to avoid false choices before they come up. We need purity first, then freedom. Corruption cannot be an option.

Without thinking or deliberating, we on the Western diet have handed these crucial choices over to corporations and other centralized institutions. The result is desecration of our body, the house of God. We deface ourselves internally far worse than an external tattoo ever could.

That trend, in a nutshell, is what the open, multi-pronged approach in "mound architecture" would be designed to reverse. You start by building as much surface area as possible into the locality by piling up mounds of earth. Then, place modular buildings and homes into the hillside. This would introduce "labour creating" devices into the lifestyle of all. But it would also increase surface area and aid in locally-grown agriculture and urban agriculture, which could grow the sort of local, healthful food that made traditional Swiss so healthy.

But this project would involve more than an outward reengineering. It would depend upon fundamental improvements in both democracy and capitalism. Mound agriculture would ensure that as many people as possible live in dense proximity (which is easiest on the environment), and in order to do that their whole day would be designed to put purity before license. This would turn as many important decisions as possible over to locals concerned to beautify the house of God. Each neighbourhood would be plugged into an open building code under the oversight of science and a world governing authority.

Mostly, this system would remove the corruptive influence of corporations. Plato called the merchant the "nursemaid of society," but as things are now, our nursemaid is a Frankenstein monster run amuck, whose first victims are children, the poor and vulnerable. Employers routinely downsize and lay off millions of workers every day but rarely if ever do governments consider disbanding a corporation. Even discussing such a blasphemy is anathema in the press. No corporation, no matter how evil or destructive, has lost its charter in America at least three decades. Lately, even banks that commit suicide are untouchable, even at the price of trillions of dollars and are deemed "too big to fail." This is the same blind, self-destructive, ideological madness that brought down communism. Any system that refuses to reform is doomed to be wiped away. We should be thinking about what to replace the carcass with once the stink becomes unbearable.

Abdu'l-Baha saw the Great War coming, and did what He could to alleviate the suffering of those close to Him. He quietly stashed away corn and grain, and later when food was not available He just as discretely distributed it to the people. Such realism, foresight and planning is what our Exemplar did. In our present crisis of global warming accompanied by the collapse of liberal, unfettered capitalism, I believe that starting projects like mound architecture would be just what the Master would be doing if He were alive today.

That is what this Badi' Blog is dedicated to establishing.

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