Thursday, September 6, 2007

Presence, Memory, Thinking

Typically, we project words or stories, prejudices and assumptions – prestructs – onto what we experience. The prestructs enable us to move about in a familiar world that we know and understand.

Bohm talks about the distinction between thought and thinking. Thought is past tense, because thought is experience that has already been rendered into words. Thoughts are the stories, assumptions and constructs that we carry around with us and use as ways of interpreting experience. We fit experience to thought. Thought often puts us in a rut.

There is a dialogue between thought and thinking.

Where is memory? There is worded memory, memory of thought. But there is also memory of experience, a memory of sensations, atmospheres and flavors that go beyond thought.

There is a dialogue between thought, thinking and memory — or is thinking the dialogue between thought and memory that occurs in the present of thinking?

How to Make Prosciutto

The basic method of making prosciutto:

After having cut and cleaned the leg, let it lie flat for a day in a cool place. Then cover it with salt and let it lie fiat on one side for 4 days, then, again for 4 more days on the other side.

When the salting period is over, rub it vigorously with fresh salt and let it stand for a few more days without salt.

Wash the leg several times with cold water in order to remove the remaining salt and hang in a dry, airy, ventilated place.

This stage is very important since the air plays a primary role in the quality of the final product. It is not possible to set the length of this stage in advance; it depends on the local climate. The prosciutto will be ready when entirely dry. It generally takes 12-18 months to achieve a fine quality prosciutto. (In Italy, the production is supervised and approved by a local
board, in charge of controlling and preserving the quality of the product.)

NOTE: Prosciutto can be made anywhere that has moderate climatic conditions. The fact that prosciutto is so distinctive, in terms of aroma (fragrant) and taste (sweet) is because the climatic condition in Italy allows for a subtle aging. It is a natural phenomenon that cannot be easily explained or duplicated.

http://www.milioni.com/salumi/inglese/dati/10.htm




Salt Cured Ham

Ingredients

2 pt Salt
1 Ham

CURING PROCESS:

Instructions

You will need a FRESH ham. If at all possible, find some Jefferson Island Salt. We have less trouble losing hams when we use that. If not, use canning salt -- DO NOT USE IODIZED SALT.

For each ham use two pints of salt. Rub salt well into all sides of ham, filling bone cavity.

I suppose that I should have told you prior to this that you have to have a salt box constructed of wood -- a very strong salt box. It may have to withstand the assault of neighborhood dogs. Box should be large enough to hold hams in a single layer. (Ours is 3'x5' on the bottom and about 2' high.) Size doesn't matter much as long as hams don't butt up against each other and it's not so small that the dogs can move it.

On to curing: You will have salt left after rubbing on hams. Place a thin layer of the salt in the bottom of the box. Place ham on this, skin side down. Pour the remaining salt on the ham. Place top on box and secure. Find a handy calendar and mark down three weeks.

Okay, ham comes up then. Wash salt off ham and LIBERALLY coat with black pepper. (Use dust mask from workshop if pepper bothers you.) Place in cloth sack (old pillow case will do nicely) and hang.

Do not cut for at least 6 months, 1 year is better. All of this should be done when the temp is 35 to 50 degrees. Good luck. No guarantees. (Sugar cure is better!) Virginia (KY)

http://recipes.chef2chef.net/recipe-archive/7/A07845.shtml

The Size of Nations - Small Countries Fare Well

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0502/S00021.htm

The Size of Nations [ & the Trend towards Devolution]

Roger Kerr, New Zealand Business Roundtable

... A brief glance around the world today confirms that many small countries are faring very well. The richest member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is Luxembourg with a per capita income estimated by the OECD of around US$50,000, more than twice that of New Zealand. It could be argued that Luxembourg is hardly a country, merely a small region within the giant European Union economy. But Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Sweden and Finland, all OECD countries with a population of around 10 million or less, have an average per capita income above the OECD average, while tiny Iceland, with a population of a mere 300,000, is in 10th place in the 30-member OECD.

Outside the OECD, Hong Kong and Singapore are of course well known cases of small, successful countries. In Africa, Botswana is a country with a growth record that has far exceeded much larger countries like South Africa and Nigeria in recent decades. Tiny Mauritius, with its remote location in the Indian Ocean, is another strong performer.

An even more extreme case is Bermuda. Its population is only 60,000, it is a barren island in the mid-Atlantic, and it has no valuable natural resources. Yet its per capita income is above that of the United States and nearly twice that of New Zealand. . .

Of the ten countries with populations over 100 million, only the United States and Japan are prosperous. Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, has noted that since 1950 real per capita GDP has risen somewhat faster in smaller nations than it has in bigger ones. . .

[As] the debate on the economic effects of smallness and remoteness continues ... economists Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore [in their book] The Size of Nations ... remind us ... that globalisation has been accompanied by a substantial increase in the number of countries. Since 1945 the number of independent countries has more than doubled, from 74 to 193. More than half have fewer people than the US state of Massachusetts, which has 6 million inhabitants. Relatively speaking, New Zealand is not as small as it once was.

Why do we need reminding that the number of countries has been rapidly growing under our noses? Because we are used to thinking that globalisation eliminates national borders. In 1990, a book was published titled The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. Its author, Kenichi Ohmae, viewed the expanding multinational networks as having ever less attachment to any home base, so making national borders increasingly irrelevant. That is the direction in which many people have imagined a globalising world to be moving. And yet, since Ohmae’s book appeared, many thousands of kilometres have been added to the total length of international borders in our so-called borderless world.

The great increase over the last 50 years in the number of countries, and their falling average size, has mostly followed the break-up of empires. Decolonisation of the old European empires added several new countries to the world list, especially in Africa. The collapse of the Soviet Union added 15 more. The continuing demise of communism in Europe led the federation of Yugoslavia to fall bloodily apart, whereas Czechs and Slovaks arranged an amicable divorce. Against the trend, Yemen reunified, and so did Germany. But ... showered as they have been with largesse by their rich Western relations, they have done far worse than their Polish and Czech neighbours, who had no choice but to sort themselves out as independent countries. This is also the lesson of foreign aid: at best it is a minor factor in helping countries to develop .... At worst it helps prop up corrupt and ineffective governments and holds development back.

The growing number and falling size of nations has often been accompanied by devolution, even within old and well-established countries. In response to growing regional sentiment, Spain has adopted a system of regional government. In the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland, now have their own assemblies. . .

All these trends share an underlying logic that Alesina and Spolaore articulate in their book. Part of that logic is globalisation: free trade in goods, services and capital makes small countries viable. ...

[In most countries, there seems to be a trade-off between size and diversity. The more diverse a country, the greater the costs of size are likely to be.] The big apparent exception ... is the United States, which is not just the world’s most successful large economy and society but also very diverse while also being highly democratic. No trade-off between size and diversity seems to operate there. The obvious answer to the riddle is federalism: a form of devolution that has enabled the United States to enjoy the benefits of size while allowing considerable leeway for the expression and realisation of diverse preferences. The country would not otherwise stay together.

Besides Spain and the United Kingdom, several other European counties adopted devolution in the 1970s and 1980s in response to taxpayer dissatisfaction with the standard of government services. They include the relatively small countries of Denmark and Sweden. Half of Denmark’s 14 counties have fewer than 10,000 people, yet they collectively control two-thirds of Danish public spending and run transport, secondary schools, hospitals and other health services. A system of what we might call ‘competitive localism’ operates whereby patients can choose a hospital in another county. Subordinate municipalities run primary education. Sweden too has a devolved system, with nearly half of all taxes going to local government. Service standards diverge widely, as do policy models. Under devolution such divergence can be controversial and open to the charge of inequity. However, in Sweden the central government redistributes from richer to poorer municipalities by block grants, and in any case people are free to move among localities to obtain their preferred mix of local taxes and benefits.

The best example of the potential for devolution is Switzerland, another small and rich country and a miracle of diversity with its four language groups. The central government collects less than a third of tax revenues; most services are provided by the cantons. Any system of substantial devolution generates a good deal of local politics; in Switzerland this includes the widespread use of the citizen initiative and referenda, which are also used in some central government policy areas. . .

The popularity of devolution in continental Europe can be contrasted with widespread dissatisfaction with government services in the United Kingdom, which over the last two decades has gone against the European trend and increasingly centralised the funding and control of public services. Britain has the best-performing economy of the big European ones, but its public services are notoriously poor: its public transport is a shambles, its health system mediocre, its school system slowly disintegrating, and its clear-up rates for crime low and falling. No wonder: service providers are tormented by a permanent drizzle of performance targets issued from the centre. As under the old Soviet system of central planning, such targets can be met only in devious ways that actually reduce service standards and that cause bureaucracies to grow out of control. In New Zealand we have recently seen similar trends towards re-centralisation of services such as health and education, and similar levels of community dissatisfaction.

...

In theory, if there are no barriers to trade between countries with similar endowments, and if all products are tradable, wages and returns to other factors of production would equalise across countries, even if some factors of production (like land) are immobile. ... Only higher transport and communication costs would limit returns to a producer in a small, distant economy and to be competitive, other costs in that economy – such as the costs of land, natural resources and non-traded inputs – would have to be lower to compensate. It is easy to see the same pattern within a country: a farmer on remote land may do as well as an equally competent farmer on better located land, but the price of the remote land may be lower to offset the costs associated with distance. If we could put an outboard motor on New Zealand and push it up to the coast of California, we might all be a bit better off. However, with domestic and international transport and communication costs continuing to fall, the gap between actual and potential incomes and asset values is shrinking all the time.

Let me summarise the implications of what I have said and draw some general conclusions.

First, Alesina and Spolaore’s analysis of the optimal size of nations crucially turns on the optimal size of jurisdictions, and that depends on the kind of service being provided. Many such services can best be supplied in small, local jurisdictions. ... At the local government level, our experience suggests bigger is typically not better: smaller councils tend to be more efficient and more responsive to local preferences. Where economies of scale matter, such as in defence and infrastructure, for example, better solutions than larger jurisdictions are supranational organisations and international alliances on the one hand and commercial structures, joint ventures and private sector participation on the other.

Secondly, the evidence is clear that small economies tend to perform at least as well as large economies, if not better. Moreover, the economic penalty for remoteness allied to smallness seems to be small and reducing. To see why geography is usually relatively unimportant, just think of the relative levels of prosperity of tiny Bermuda and giant Brazil, or of Canada and Mexico, just north and south of the US border.

After the Nation State: The Council System (Hannah Arendt)

The mere rudiments I see for a new state concept can be found in the federal system, whose advantage is that power moves neither from above nor from below, but is horizontally directed so that the federated units mutually check and control their powers. For the real difficulty in speculating on these matters is that the final resort should not be super-national but inter-national. A supernational authority would either be ineffective or be monopolized by the nation that happens to be the strongest, and so would lead to world government, which could easily become the most frightful tyranny conceivable, since from its global police force there would be no escape – until it finally fell apart.

Where do we find models that could help us in construing, at least theoretically, an international authority as the highest control agency? This sounds like a paradox, since what is highest cannot well be in between, but it is nevertheless the real question. ...

Since the revolutions of the eighteenth century, every large upheaval has actually developed the rudiments of an entirely new form of government, which emerged independent of all preceding revolutionary theories, directly out of the course of the revolution itself, that is, out of the experiences of action and out of the resulting will of the actors to participate in the further development of public affairs.

This new form of government is the council system, which, as we know, has perished every time and everywhere, destroyed either directly by the bureaucracy of the nation-states or by the party machines. Whether this system is a pure utopia – in any case it would be a people’s utopia, not the utopia of theoreticians and ideologies – I cannot say. It seems to me, however, the single alternative that has ever appeared in history, and has reappeared time and again. Spontaneous organization of council systems occurred in all revolutions, in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution [and in Argentina after the recent economic collapse]. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before. Hence the council system seems to correspond to and spring from the very experience of political action.

In this direction, I think, there must be something to be found, a completely different principle of organization, which begins from below, continues upward, and finally leads to a parliament. ...

The councils desire the exact opposite of [the communes of hippies and dropouts that renounced the whole of public life and politics in general], even if they begin very small – as neighborhood councils, professional councils, councils within factories, apartment houses, and so on. There are, indeed, councils of the most various kinds, by no means only workers’ councils; workers’ councils are a special case in this field.

The councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it. The booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for this booth has room for only one. The parties are completely unsuitable; there we are, most of us, nothing but the manipulated electorate. But if only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinion of others, then a rational formation of opinions can take place through the exchange of opinions. There, too, it will become clear which ... of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council, where in turn our view will be clarified through the influence of other views, revised, or proved wrong.

By no means every resident of a country needs to be a member in such councils. Not everyone wants to or has to concern himself with public affairs. In this fashion a self-selective process is possible that would draw together a true political elite in a country. Anyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied with their being decided without him. But each person must be given the opportunity.

In this direction I see the possibility of forming a new concept of the state. A council-state of this sort, to which the principle of sovereignty would be wholly alien, would be admirably suited to federations of the most various kinds, especially because in it power would be constituted horizontally and not vertically. But if you ask me now what prospect it has of being realized, then I must say to you: Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all - in the wake of the next revolution.

[Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution" (1972)]

Norms - For Conformity or Action

Such a skill involves recognizing the conditional reality of “norms" -- an instance of (objectivity).

Norms can be good or bad: pleasing manners are norms (say “hello” when you see someone you know); racism, too, is a set of norms. By “norms” I mean certain impersonal “forms” of behavior that are acknowledged by some group of people — they can be the result of unconscious consensus or of explicit agreement. "In this group, people do not speak about their feelings." "In this group, people don't wear jeans." "In this group, if someone says 'hello' to a second person there is no expectation that the second person should respond." Norms concern "people in general." A norm establishes a group: a norm concerns a general behavior in a general set of circumstances and general responses to the behavior.

I call norms impersonal, because they are linguistic-behavioral structures that any person can take up and dwell in or act on the basis of, like language. (In fact, as I suggest below, I understand words themselves to be a kind of norm. We are acting on the basis of a word when we say it, in order to dwell in a thought or communicate a meaning.)

Being impersonal — that is, not a property of individual persons, but a way of behaving any individual person can “take up” — norms create a kind of place, a relation, where we can “meet,” where we can bring the wild, irrational and exciting parts of ourselves into contact with one another, and yet do so upon a shared platform, so that human relationships can be sustained even while we are making contact (and, one hopes, friends) with “wild”, unexplored or unarticulated domains of Being. The norm is a mutual construct on which we stand by means of which we can look outward together on the yet-unexplored.

Through norms we constitute the “normal.” However, I do not take norms, or the “normal,” to be objectively-existing standards to which we should conform. When people understand norms in this way, they make the normal into a tool of oppression. Instead, I view norms — at least when they are shared and mutually accepted — as useful references by which we are able to reasonably predict the consequences of certain behaviors (they enable us to expect certain responses from others to certain behaviors). Such “predictability” can be used either in the service of conformity or in the service of change. Norms enable or they stifle. [depending on ... what?] (A special kind of behavior, “action,” changes norms themselves. In order to change something, one must bring to it another something from a different domain. So, in order to change a norm, we must bring something else to that norm. What might that be? We can hold this question for later.)

When not shared, i.e. when people who are interacting are independently referencing different norms, norms can become sources of confusion and misunderstanding. Conversely, when we agree that a behavior shall have such and such a meaning, or when we agree on a certain set of boundaries, we have a shared basis for communicating. Every norm is a shared platform from which we can approach the “not normal,” together — together being a key. But when we are relying on a norm that the other person does not acknowledge, for whatever reason, then we are liable to get confused in our communications.

Knowing together includes having and holding to mutually accepted norms.

Whenever we communicate with someone else, we consciously or unconciously feel out “norms.” Words themselves, in fact, are a kind of norm. Words and norms are impersonal behaviors serving as platforms of agreed-upon meaning that anyone can access from a public domain.

When we communicate or receive words, we reference a set of norms, explicit or implicit. These norms can collectively be conceived of as a “platform of understanding,” which is to say, the collective of norms we reference consist in something very much like an imaginary “any person” to whom we are speaking and who will understand whatever we say through reference to some set of norms, expectations, experiences, feelings and understandings. In our communication with someone else, we refer to how this “any person" (or the "group person") might “likely” respond to what we say. But this imagined “ANY person” is itself a norm, a figment, something that people together agree, although usually unconsciously, to fabricate, to facilitate communication, trust and confidence in one another. This "any person" is ourselves.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Hum - A new personal pronoun, inclusive of all genders

Hum (pronoun, third person singular - possessive: hum's)

Hum is a personal pronoun, coined by me, which is explicitly inclusive of any and all genders. Instead of saying "his or her book," one can say "hum's book." Rather than say, "He or she likes pudding," hum can say "Hum likes pudding." Hum is more efficient than "his or her," more graceful than alternating "he" and "she," more personal than "one" (as in "one likes to read one's book") and, in terms of embracing varieties of human gender, more inclusive, even, than "his or her."

Hum derives from the word "human."

I've used this new pronoun here and there for fun, and have been delighted to find that it works quite well, and to my ear sounds just fine. Everyone is entitled to hum's own opinion, of course.