SWCAMBORNE

Thanksgiving is one of my two favorite holidays.  It is not mixed up with any particular religion, there is no requirement to buy gifts and most stores are closed.

Have a wonderful day.  Focus on positive things.  We live in a meritocracy.  Most of us have enough to eat.  In our country civilians are safe and opportunities are abundant.

My Thanksgiving wish is that you are surrounded by family and friends and that you can argue with them without animosity.

Here are two more examples of mysterious structure.

Flotsam and jetsam (I don’t know the difference and neither do you) have been been put on a piece of driftwood in the middle of a beautiful Caribbean beach.

Stone piles have been built in Eaton Canyon Park in Pasadena.  These piles are near where the trail that leads to the waterfall and Henninger Flats crosses the stream

and are being built by school groups.  I admit to building some of them a few weeks ago when I first had this idea  just to see if they would become self perpetuating.  Within a week of my building four or five piles there were a dozen more.  Last week I observed a school group on a tour from the nature center.  The leader of the group asked the students to help build the “guiding stones.” And they did.

Building monuments like henges, pyramids and totem poles is the penultimate example of the harnessing of this human instinct to create mysterious structures.  The fairy homes, rock piles and driftwood collections I have shown are evidence that this instinct is common in people and can be harnessed by group leaders.  So if you are leading a group and are charged with keeping them busy, make up a story about ancient peoples or fairies and have the group use found materials to build homes or trees or stone piles.  It sounds crazy but it will work.

OOMS is the acronym for On the Origin of Mysterious Structures. It is a story that started on swcamborne.com yesterday.  BTW the name is a takeoff on Darwin’s classic “On the Origin of Species.”  I expect that, in the fullness of time, OOMS will be as significant a work as Darwin’s.

We went on a walking tour in Maine in September and while walking on Monhegan Island between the harbor

and the high cliff

we passed through a wooded glade.

Nestled in the roots of the trees were some mysterious little houses.

Our guide called them “fairy houses” and we stopped for a few minutes to admire them.  She explained that this was an enchanted wood that was the home of a forgotten group of faries.  Before long she suggested that we might like to help build some new houses for the fairies to replace the ones that had been destroyed by the long winter or some such malarkey. We took the bait and for a short while we were busy building little fairy houses.

It was only a few days ago that I realized that this event in Maine offered a solution to the puzzle of the Mysterious rock piles on Maui.  The answer is tour guides.  They distract their groups and help them to bond with each other and the area by allowing them to participate in what becomes a self perpetuating mystery.  Everybody benefits from this tiny subterfuge.  Tourism is slightly enhanced.  The tourists are entertained at no cost.  A little mystery is good in every-one’s life and we all connect a bit more.

Tomorrow two more examples that provide more evidence to support my brilliant solution to the mysterious structures mystery.

A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

Alexander Tyler

Democracy is Temporary

On the island of Maui, past the snorkel bay north of Kapalua

and before the famous church,

you pass a barren cliff with a huge collection of rock piles on it.

The rock piles are “Mysterious Structures.”  They were built for no apparent purpose in a far away place.  Who or what built them and why?  We journeyed around the world to find out the answer to this question.  Read tomorrow’s installment to learn what we discovered.

Do you think you know?  Leave your answer as a comment below.

In Southern California unemployment is nearing 10%.  This is a scary number until you put it in perspective.  The base line unemployment is between 3% and 5% and somewhere between 8 and 10% of the jobs in the area are historically in the construction industry.  Construction as we all know has almost stopped.  So the real question is why isn’t unemployment somewhere around 13% (4% +9%)?  Maybe the rest of the economy is stronger than we think?  Perspective.

Here is an implementation plan for the idea of using the American Idol model for selecting political candidates. I have promoted the American Idol Model for selecting the presidential candidates a couple of times but it is hard to get something this different started on a national scale.  The idea could first be tried in a medium sized city with an active civic community.  The first test would be in the selection process of candidates for Mayor or city council.

The benefits that would accrue to the local politicians would be national attention to a new idea and if it worked more people active in the political process.

The run off events could be filmed and shown on the public access channel so most of the infrastructure already exists.  The events could be things like talking to students, visiting neighborhoods, town hall meetings, entertaining friends and working at the homeless shelter.   There would still be a general election between the finalists.  Now this has a homer ring but Pasadena would be the perfect city to try this idea.  It is a creative city with lots of media savy people and access to production types from the LA film and TV industry.

Thanks to Dave Szamet a brilliant young film maker for this implementation enhancement of the original idea.

Hope is a goal without a deadline or a desire without a plan.  Hope alone is never enough.

The Spanish verb for hope is Esperar.  Esperar is also the verb for wait. It illustrates the problem I see with hope.  Hope is fatalistic.  It presume that you don’t have control.  I reject that idea.  I believe that there are always some things you can do to affect your fate.

In English this is illustrated by the difference between affect meaning “make a difference to” and effect meaning “a consequence of an action.”  You can hope an effect is positive or you can try to affect a positive outcome.  One is active the other is passive.  Hope is almost never the best strategy except when trying to win an election.

Note to regular readers:  This completes a little run:  Faith, Hope and Charity.  What is the famous mention of these three virtues?

In their Bibles the Jews and the Christians are exhorted that when harvesting their crops they should “leave some grain in the corners of the field”  This was so that the poor could glean and survive without begging.  Glean is a somewhat archaic word meaning “to gather (grain or the like) after the reapers or regular gatherers.”  Since most of us are no longer farmers how can we fulfill this biblical injunction today?  I propose that we think of coins we get as change in markets and restaurants as the “grain in the corner of the field” and following the biblical injunction we should leave it where people poorer than us can find it.

• In a fast food restaurant leave the change on the counter.
• When you get change at the post office leave it on the retaining wall outside.
• At the clothing store throw the coins you get as change in the bushes outside the store.
• When there is a tip jar always put at least the coins you get as change in it.

Leaving something for the gleaners is direct charity.  It doesn’t involve middlemen, administrative expenses or thank you notes.  The finder is blessed but not obligated.  According to Maimonides Eight Levels of Charity giving anonymously to an unknown recipient is this the second highest level of charity. By leaving your change you can be charitable everyday.

Other benefits that will accrue to you and society are:

• You will move faster through your day if you are not fussing with change.
• The poor will be slightly less dependent on government programs.
• You will have the nice feeling that comes from having done a good deed.
• Your purse, and your heart will be lighter, saving energy and increasing happiness.

Some math:  100 million people make transactions each day that generate about 30 cents of change.  If half of this were left for the poor it would be $15 million dollars a day.  About 5 billion dollars a year.

Make a change.  Leave your change.  Its the new gleaning.

Resolve to start today and see how it feels.

This is one of my Faith, Hope and Charity series.  Read them all.

My faith is not in politicians.  My faith is in The Wisdom of Crowds.  As explained by James Surowiecki in his book of the same name a large, well organized and disparate group can over the long run find better solutions to most issues than a small number of specialists.  Democracy and Free Markets are those large groups.  I wrote about this last year on my Radical Immigration Site in an essay titled: How Free People Vote. In the world today we have lots of opportunities to vote.  We vote not just with ballots.  We also vote with our dollars, our time and our feet.  I have faith that collectively we will vote correctly and the progress toward freedom and away from poverty will continue.

This is one of my Faith, Hope and Charity series.  Read them all.