Recipe for America

via FB:

Date: Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Time: 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location: 101 Morgan Hall, UC Berkeley Campus

Description
Join us March 10 at 7:30 pm for a conversation with Jill Richardson, author of Recipe for America, and Michele Simon, author of Appetite for Profit.

The dynamic conversation will run the gamut of food issues - the Farm Bill, community food projects and councils, food labeling, school lunches, food safety, and animal agriculture. Be part of the conversation to learn how you can take action from voting with your fork and beyond.

Jill Richardson got involved in food policy activism after working for several years in health care and observing the high rate of diet-related chronic illness among the American patient population. She blogs at La Vida Locavore . Recipe for America : Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It is Jill's first book . Marion Nestle hails Richardson as “a fresh voice in the movement to create a healthier and sustainable food system. This book will be part of the burgeoning food social movement, as it provides a guide to the most important issues and how to work on them” and Civil Eats calls Recipe for America "a handbook for the sustainable advocate in training."

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been writing about the food industry since 1996. She has a master's degree in public health from Yale University and received her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She specializes in legal strategies to counter corporate practices that harm the public's health and lectures frequently on corporate tactics and policy solutions. She has written extensively on the politics of food, and her first book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back,was published by Nation Books in 2006.

Books are the figurative seeds of the spring authors series. To bring literal seeds to the community, at each event Agrariana will have open-pollinated heirloom vegetable seeds and cover crop seed mixes available for purchase. Bring your seed collection for an ad-hoc seed exchange and check our information table with a variety of literature on seed saving and cover cropping.

UC Berkeley Events Calendar: Recipe for America

Recipe for America
La Vida Locavore
Activist of the Month
Review at Sustainable Table.
Book Chat: Recipe For America with Jill Richardson | Crooks and Liars
TakePart Exclusive: Interview with Jill Richardson
With Recipe for America, Sustainable Food Advocate Jill Richardson Invites You to Join the Cause
Question & Answer With Jill Richardson
The Progressive interview (mp3)


Related:
Slow Food Berkeley
The Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology.UC Berkeley

The Hawaiian Libertarian recommends this series over at Full of Grace, which looks at critiques of Feminism and the suffragette movement when they were still in their infancy.

I found this one amusing, if sad: How Hindu Women Viewed American Women in 1910.

Zenit: Father Cantalamessa: Why Christianity Is Like No Other
Explains What Makes Grace Hard to Accept

He illustrated today what sets Christianity apart from other religions.

"Christianity does not begin by telling man what he must do, but what God has done for him," he said. "Jesus did not begin to preach saying: 'Repent and believe in the Gospel so that the Kingdom will come to you'; he began by saying: 'The Kingdom of God is among you: repent and believe in the Gospel.' Not conversion first and then salvation, but salvation first and then conversion."

This seems ok, in so far as God tells us what He has done for us, and prompts us to respond. He does so not because He is needy, but because of the weakness of our intellect. Salvation is not effected completely for the individual until he converts.

And it is not hard to understand why grace is a difficult concept for modern man, Father Cantalamessa contended.


He explained: "To be saved 'by grace' means to recognize someone's dependence and this is the most difficult thing. Noteworthy is Marx's affirmation: 'A being does not appear independent unless and only in so far as he is lord of himself, and he is not lord of himself unless and only in so far as he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the "grace" of another is considered a dependent being [...]. But I would live completely by the grace of another, if he had created my life, if he was the source of my life and the latter was not my own creation.'

Zenit: A Cardinal for Canterbury?
English Debate About Making Their Country Catholic Again

Full text of the debate.

Zenit: The Priest and the Canon of the Mass
Father Gagliardi Explains the Eucharistic Prayers

FRESH in Los Altos

First, something brief about the movie -- while the documentary isn't perfect as a movie or argument, it provides good portraits of sustainable farming, both in rural and urban settings, and should be viewed for that reason, especially by students in high school.

The showing last night was at a local fitness center in Los Altos. There were only two Asians in the room. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, since the showing was in Los Altos, not Cupertino. A lot of Bay Area/CA SWPLers; most of them were older. The ratio of males and females was about 1 to 1, I think. I was in a sour mood and judgmental as I was looking at the other members of the audience. Would I be able to relate to the people in rural No. Cal more?

Who is a member of your tribe? Is having a consensus about the production of food enough for the perpetuation of a community? Can Bay Area crunchies be anything more than people with you you can exchange food or talk about sustainable agriculture? Can they become people you'd consider a member of your tribe, if there is significant disagreement about other aspects of morality, including sexual morality?

One needs food to survive, but given our social nature, most of us do not like to eat alone, or reduce meals to consumption. Leon Kass writes about how we seek to elevate eating to something higher. But can we share food and fellowship with liberals, beyond the rare occasion? If we had common tables, as Aristotle seems to advocate for example, would we be able to sit at those tables everyday with them? Any mention of religion, politics, or morality would have to be eliminated, but if that happens, the quality of the conversation or the fellowship will probably go down, especially for men. It would be like handling those sort of divisions within a family--how long can a community like that survive, when bad behavior has consequences, especially on the next generation?

FRESH needs to be shown at local parishes. Perhaps parishes could promote farmer's markets.

The owner of Thompson River Ranch was present, and she prepared much of the food that was there.

Should I check out Andronico's? I could take a walk to Trader Joe's San Jose; I was there once last year looking for dried cherries, and I didn't take the time to look at the rest of the store.


Related links:
Professor Ikerd is featured in the documentary.

Growing Power
Missouri Farmers Union -- Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative

NLM: The Consecration of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary Chapel - An Account of the Ceremonies (Part 1) by Gregory DiPippo

Jack Hunter, RE: Gunning Down the Constitution—Kevin Gutzman Defends

E. Christian Kopff, Julius Evola & Radical Traditionalism

NLM: The Consecration of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary - Some Preliminary Photos

Consecration of Chapel of Ss. Peter and Paul, Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary

Welmer takes issue with a Catholics Come Home commercial. What does Leon Podles think? Does it portray the Catholic Church in a way that returning to the Church becomes attractive to "masculine" men? Does Jim Caviezel's Christ appeal to men? But using images from the The Passion of the Christ may be too controversial. It is impossible to directly convey the richness of a deep interior life centered on Christ. How about an ad that shows a variety of male saints? The celebration of the OF in many Uhmerican parishes does exhibit traits of worship being feminized. (Has Leon Podles criticized Catholic liturgy specifically, or contrasted the EF with the OF?) It seems to me that how men are to achieve union with God must be elaborated, and thus can be done with illustrations from lives of the saints. But laymen also need to understand their role as fathers and husbands, and that sort of catechesis requires an explicit rejection of radical egalitarianism and cultural Marxism.

The discussion of Cardinal Levada's homily continues. I write:

"In so far as someone is criticizing a product which first exists in the intellect or soul of the author, then one can be said to be criticizing the author. But usually when we say we are cticizing someone, as opposed to a product, we are attributing to them moral failings, character flaws, and bad actions. Now, some have criticized certain popes and bishops for what they judge to be imprudent actions. But I think this is not equivalent to the first, although one may go from the latter to the former -- i.e. the cardinal was imprudent, etc. in giving a homily such as this. But it doesn't necessitate it."

Personally I think the homily had some good points but could have been reworded for the sake of pastoral sensitivity. But as it has been said, Cardinal Levada does not seem to be a "people person." Maybe that's an erroneous judgment, but there are a lot of people with long memories.

Are historians the only ones who can make a judgment about the pontificate of Pope Pius VI, for example? Or are traditionalists justified in judging him to be a rather weak pope, in his handling of the new missal and what transpired afterward, along with the various dissenters in the Church?

Zenit: Caravaggio Candy; a Struggle to Turn to the Light and Pope Acclaims Jesuit Sophia University of Japan

Fr. Peter Milward, S.J. is still at Sophia. Eccentric Country - England.

Sophia University

Agribusiness Gets Handed Its Lunch By MARTHA ROSENBERG
From School Meals to Antibiotics

Is the Recovery Real? By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Going Nowhere

Defense Department, Inc. By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES
The Untouchable Budget

Not exactly something to brag about.

From the latest Chronicler: "Students at Christendom are active in the College Republicans as well as other conservative and pro-life organizations throughout the year."

Magister on Cardinal Merry del Val

Here's a Perfect Secretary of State. But from a Century Ago

(via Fr. Z)

Related:
Religion: Merry del Val Jubilee - TIME

Francesco Sisci, A new battle for Confucius

A new battle for Confucius By Francesco Sisci (via the Western Confucian)

A new translation of Mozi's corpus has been made available by the Chinese University Press:
The Mozi: A Complete Translation by Ian Johnston (Translator). The Chinese University Press (December 15, 2009). ISBN-10: 9629962705. Price US$85, 1,032 pages.

It looks like the same translation is being published by Columbia University Press here in the States. Too bad it's not bilingual.

Mr. Sisci writes:

Furthermore, Mozi's doctrine of "universal love" sounded like the idea of Christian love propagated in the 17th century, as well as like the drive to egalitarianism by the communists in the 20th century.

The Confucianis criticized the Mohists for obliterating social relations -- if this charge is accurate (I haven't read the complete Mohist corpus, only selections), then Mozi and his followers are more like liberals than Christians. The Christian tradition has a doctrine of universal love (which is not identical with Confucian ren, given that the object of charity is primarily God), but it also recognizes that there is an order in charity. Moreover, we have different duties to people, according to their relation to us, or what they have done for us. Hence, the allied virtues to justice. I do not recall what the Mohist account of justice is, and whether they recognize these duties. It's something I'll have to research, if I obtain a copy of the complete corpus.

He also contrasts Mozi with Sunzi:

Importantly, the book provides a basis to reconsider an important aspect of Chinese traditional thinking - military strategy. Johnston is the first person to provide both a credible Chinese textual reconstruction and a translation of Mozi's military chapters. Mozi theorized about defensive wars and his followers, the Mohists, were renowned tacticians who helped organize the defense of small states being attacked by larger ones.

This was at a time when small states were being gobbled up by large ones competing for dominance in the Chinese central plain. The aggressive theories of famous strategist Sunzi helped conceive those and many other future wars of attack, whereas Mozi argued against aggressive wars.

It is very likely that, as popularly described in the unsuccessful 2006 Chinese-Japanese movie production Mo Gong, in the Third century BC Mohist militants aided small states to withstand attacks and then tried to apply radical political and social reforms that went against the interests of the local elites.

Johnston's translation of Mozi could cast new light on Sunzi's theories and Chinese strategic thinking. It's possible that gong, a word commonly understood as aggressive war, at the time meant more precisely war by a large force against a small one, as Lu Xiang, a modern student of Sunzi argues in a forthcoming essay. This kind of war is what Sunzi preferred and Mozi opposed.

Sunzi does not appear to be in favor of unjust wars of aggression, as he does discuss the moral component of victory. Teachers of maneuver warfare and 3GW claim Sunzi as one of their own; numbers may be important if one is one the attack, so it is not clear to me that this is a justification of conquest of smaller polities by larger polities. Did Mozi advocate a purely reactive form of warfare? If so, he would seem to be a bit too idealistic, to the point of causing defeat for anyone who followed his teachings. I remember reading one issue of Lone Wolf and Cub in which the protagonist tells a dying samurai who was disgraced because he did not stay with his lord's palaquin but chose instead to go on the offensive against assassins that attack and defense are the same, since they have the same object.

(How deep is Mr. Sisci's understanding of contemporary Chinese society and classical Chinese culture? He seems to be an apologist for the present government and the Patriotic Associations.)

I'd like to read up on Mohist logic. (Indian logic too.)

Related links:
墨子
Mozi - Chinese Text Project
SEP
Mozi and Confucianism

Life after growth

Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute

The "normal" late-20th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated. That "normal" is gone. One way or another, a "new normal" will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters?

(original)

Food security and peak oil: a message to local citizens and leadership
Jason Bradford, The Oil Drum: Campfire
What I have said may provoke anxiety, and is certainly an immense undertaking, but ultimately we have no choice so let’s not whine and delay. Let’s take it on as a great adventure, a thrilling challenge. Our success or failure is going to hinge on our attitude. We need to take control of the circumstances and become active participants in transition.

(original)

Rorate Caeli: Summorum Pontificum: A real application of Sacrosanctum Concilium

A translation of a report published in Rinascimento Sacro on the talk on the sacred liturgy given by Antonio Cardinal Canizares Llovera on November 28, 2009.

A plea for civility?

Theodore Dalrymple, Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself

With the coming of the internet, the tone of the criticism changed. It became shriller, more personal, more hate-filled. It wasn’t just that I had made a mistake, I must be an evil person, probably in the pay of some disreputable organisation or other. (There are very few of us who are not in the pay of someone, and no one is entirely reputable.)

Now of course I am not entitled to conclude from the change in the tone of criticism that I received that the internet has filled the world with hate that was not there before. It is possible that the kind of person who used to write letters to the authors of newspaper articles had fallen silent, while those seething individuals who fired off derogatory or insulting e-mails had previously been silent. But I rather doubt it.

The immediacy of the response which the internet makes possible also means that people are able to vent their spleen in a way which was not possible, or likely, before. The putting of pen to paper, to say nothing of the act of posting the resultant letter, requires more deliberation than sitting at a computer and firing off an angry e-mail or posting on a website. By their very physical nature, then, letters are likely to be less intemperate than e-mails.

The question now arises as to whether it is a good thing that people should be able now so easily to express their rage, irritation, frustration and hatred. Here, I think, we come to a disagreement between those of classical, and those of romantic, disposition.

According to the latter, self-expression is a good in itself, irrespective of what is expressed. Indeed, such people are likely to believe that any sentiment that does not find its outward expression will turn inward and poison the person who has not been able to express it. Better to strangle a new-born babe and all that.

The person of more classical disposition does not believe this. On the contrary, he believes that there are some things that are much better not expressed at all. He counterbalances his belief in the value of freedom of opinion with that in the value of freedom from opinion. He believes that rage will not decrease with its habitual expression, but rather increase with it.

By now it should be clear which of these two viewpoints seems to me to be the more accurate. The habit of not containing your rage is likely to lead you to easily provoked enragement. And, as almost everyone knows who has taken the trouble of self-examination, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had from rage, especially when it supposes itself to be in a righteous cause.

‘So,’ I hear an imaginary interlocutor say, ‘you are in favour of censoring the internet.’

I know that this is how some people will respond, because when I argue that the balance of the evidence suggests that children who grow up with a mental diet of violence on electronic media are more likely themselves to become violent than those who do not, someone will almost always pipe up ‘So you are in favour of censorship.’ In vain do I point out that there is no strictly logical connection between the causation of violence by electronic media and censorship, because one might think that censorship was a worse evil than any resultant violence; after all, no one wants to ban cars because there is no speed at which they are entirely safe and without the possibility of causing a fatal accident. There is no need to blind ourselves to the undesirable effects of violence on television, films, etc. just because we don’t like censorship. Indeed, to do so is a form of voluntary self-censorship, perhaps the most insidious kind.

So it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been. It releases people from inhibitions, and allows them to breach psychological barriers. Even wit suffers, for it is far easier to insult than to think of a really damaging, but amusing, witticism. To write to Professor Dawkins that one feels ‘a sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat’ is easier than to explain succinctly why he is wrong, if he is wrong.

Moreover, the fact that one can vituperate using a virtual rather than a real address promotes such verbal intemperance.

I don’t suppose there is an easy solution to this problem; that is, if it is a problem. The auguries are not particularly good if it is also true, as it is in my experience, that professors of literature are among the worst offenders. If those who teach youth are unable to control themselves, and to keep their disagreement within the bounds of common civility, what can we expect of youth itself?

Catherine Austin Fitts: From Permaculture to Profits

A brief profile of Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables.


(1 of 4 parts)

Permaculture Magazine

I haven't posted anything by Bill Bonner recently. Here are some:
Government Spending Induces Counterfeit “Expansion”
The Zombie Economy
How to Enjoy an Economic Depression
Depression Causes a Shift in Economic Models

Jason Peters on college

Majoring in Idiocy

I would not be misunderstood. I am not objecting in principle to the fact that a college education comes with a price—that is, with a price tag. I close the classroom door when I lecture because, as the old joke goes, “they’re lining up in the halls out there, and I don’t do this for free.” But I am objecting to the fact that whereas education does come with a price and a price tag, it no longer comes with a cost.

It does not come with a cost because colleges and universities are essentially diploma retailers obsequiously bent on making the shopping experience of their customers enjoyable and painless. Discounts are everywhere. Items are clearly marked. The choices are many, the objects glittery. Can I get you some coffee? Hot chocolate? Be sure to visit our café on the third floor. Please take the moving stairs. One of our associates will be glad to assist you.

Consider the distribution requirements that have replaced core texts and core courses, and behold with what dispatch the university flatters commodity consciousness. See with what precision institutions imitate desperate retailers when these same institutions trot out their pre-professional programs and permit the students in them to avoid any meaningful contact with philosophy, theology, history, literature, political theory, or languages, whether ancient or modern. See how cheaply science holds itself in requiring no knowledge of its own history, in cultivating no suspicion of its own methods, and in sponsoring no inquiry into its fundamental assumptions. Behold the options in this sleek package: business, business administration, accounting, or economics—take your pick. No need to bother with land use, resource management, ethics, or thermodynamics. Business-as-usual will have no hecklers.

For education presently conceived and presently practiced has but one goal: the mass production of idiots.

I’m speaking—I hope—in fairly precise terms here.

An “idiot,” from the Greek idios (“private,” “own,” “peculiar”), is someone who is peculiar because he is closed in on himself or separated or cut off. In short, he is a specialist. If he knows anything, he knows one thing.

It may be difficult to salvage liberal education in the universities once the political economy begins to gasp its last breaths.