Posted on 01/20/2011 1:39:27 PM PST by dalight
I get that, but just the same you probably wouldn't like the folks I associate with. I really don't know who in particular you are talking about so this is a bit blind. What he says and how he backs it up would make about 50% of my friends heads explode.
But, he left GreenPeace for ethical reasons and has spent his time arguing for change and the environment in a way that assumes that half of mankind needs to be eliminated to solve the problem. Instead he assumes we have to find a way to sustain ourselves and not solve the problem through accepting atrocities and then argues how we might do that.
He supports nuclear power, genetically modified foods, he is a big advocate of heat pumps and other sane ideas. I have read a number of his articles now and find him to be pragmatic and open to facts and reason and changes his position when the science provides that a better way is more reasonable.
So we are left with your complaint about his friends. Which friend or friends of his are so disturbing to you?
He came here to Santa Cruz at the behest of Bud McCrary of Big Creek Lumber Co, but I'd known him by email considerably before that. He'd read and commented on some of Natural Process before it was published. Not long after he left Greenpeace and published his first book, Greenspirit - Trees Are the Answer (I have a signed copy) he was meeting and collaborating with major timber corporations of the Pacific Northwest. Effectively, he was making a living promoting his defection. I do not remember specific names because that was about 2002, but I do recall that some of those very companies are mixed up in the ISO 14000 series of UN regulations. He is a big fan of corporate landownership instead of individual stewardship. Now, a lot of people think that is a good thing, but I'll tell you that large global interests are some of the prime drivers behind the kind of regulatory corruption I wrote about in my first book, Natural Process. For similar reasons, it should not surprise you that the California timber market has been dominated by the two corporations that have always had their representatives on the California Board of Forestry (Simpson and SPI). They write and approve rules that make things tough for smaller concerns, economies of scale in the paperwork business being what they are.
Paperwork doesn't do a damned thing for a forest. Focusing only on trees does not a forest make. From the technical side, the complexities of restoration do not lend themselves to large scale ownership. That is just how things are, and it is the essence of where I disagree with Mr. Moore.
What is Shemitta?
Shemitta is the Hebrew name for the Year of Release, also the year of the Sabbath for the Land. The word comes from the Hebrew root, shin-mem-tet (שמט) which is the root of the first major command word in the first specification for the Sabbath for the Land found in Ex. 23:11, tishm'tena (תשמטנה) currently translated as "let rest" (which is plainly wrong). Most of the uses of the root are in the context of the release of debts found in Deuteronomy 15:1-9.
Well, simply put, a single worldwide complete Sabbath for the land is insane regardless of the justification and thus this teaching has been thus far ignored generally. The Torah is very much like a fractal though and some of the things written there only make sense when the context is correct. But, I can't imagine a situation where food for nearly 7 billion people and their domestic animals for an entire year could or should be stored and consumed which is how this has been interpreted.
The idea of release and abandon would point to moving on, but this is a world where populations great and small cannot do that any longer. Even the wanders of the desert, the Bedouin only keep their tents for tourist trade.
You are obviously a brilliant, passionate and religious man. To the extent that I could read about your hypothesis, it is interesting, but to me unsatisfying on a number of levels.
But, as I said, somethings in Torah are just plain inscrutable, and the Sabbath of the Land is one of the most inscrutable of them all. On a small scale, what you propose may be possible, perhaps workable but once you step up to the scale of a county much less a state, the whole thing becomes intensely insane once again. Not that there isn't a glimmer of hope here, but I am afraid it is still not clear how this may work especially on the scale of 7 Billion humans.
But, folks have desperately tried to work out how this might make any sense for several millenniums so a new swing at it isn't all that bad. It isn't reasonable for a man of science though to hold out a hope as a solution. If you want to move from waving your hands to teaching this, you must find a community, a county and a state to implement this and show the way. But, it is food for thought.
I am not "attacking" Mr. Moore. What I said was true. He associates with a claque of globalists and believes in "reasonable" regulation. Whatever that means is necessarily subjective. I am not a fan of politically derived subjective solutions.
Unfortunately, any solution to any problem that involves more than two people is going to be political. Sorry.
Your suggestions may be very successful, but you are first insisting that they accept your frame of reference before considering your ideas. This is a sure ticket to staying marginalized.
I don't think my post insisted on anything. It did criticize regulation as a means of socialization, which is what it is, control being equivalent to ownership.
Well, the stance of control being equivalent to ownership is insightful and limited at the same time. The tension between individual liberty and the needs of an orderly society have always been a problem for humans. When the Israelite's begged Samuel to raise up a King to rule them so that they may be an orderly society, he cautioned them that a King would oppress them and be a tyrant and an implacable master. The advice was to accept God only and forget Kings, but the people insisted and Samuel anointed Saul because he was a King among men, tall, regal and full of life and power. Yet from this moment, Israel's doom was sealed and the story of the Kings was that of futility and defeat.
Our founding fathers read and understood this so very well and yet they did not set up a system that would approximate the modern Libertarian ideal. Instead, they crafted a society with the assumption that each group and level would act to maximize their own power and thus must be checked and controlled and frustrated by other equally powerful groups that had motivations to root out and cleanse the body politic. They developed a system of government where the highest and every official was a servant to the people of the country as a whole or as specific distinct groups. The brought back the rule of Law in the form of Judges that would interpret the Law and serve as a check to protect and establish the rights of the lowliest individual or the most mighty leader.
This system has not been perfect, but anything composed of the actions of men pursuing their own ends is not likely to be. Instead the goal was practical. Politics and its horrors is a means by where each of us might have a say and be heard, it is not an evil thing, but a place where ideas are traded and sold just as wealth and property are exchanged. In this way, an individual has the opportunity to sway the whole, and the whole has a way to work in concert as a greater organism just as the cells in the body work together without any conscious knowledge of each other.
The difference between our brain and a faction of elites who would set themselves up as our brain is any faction of cells going wild is normally termed a cancer.
Yet humanity has a collective brain brewing, and it acts very much like each one of our human brains does. Ideas flinging right and left, constructed and deconstructed and emotions and impulses in coordination and in conflict. It is our ability to talk, the word, and now the computer and the imagery of the imagination unlimited that serve to create an enormous ability to examine and extract knowledge from unthinkable data streams. Yet, at the edge, only a small bit of attention seems to be be fixed and one focus can drive the next out of conscious consideration. Politicians and pundits call this the news cycle and it functions very much like human consciousness, the pointer that keeps track of the line of thought that seems to be actively be considered. Yet below, the chatter continues.
I read most of his site and found much of it interesting, some of it insane, and all of it based on passion and love for nature. I see Carry_Okie as more of a Libertarian than a Conservative and he is given to grand dreams that may or may not be practical, but he is also a man of practicality and gets his hands dirty so I won't fault him for his efforts or his teaching.
I still haven't seen anything that would justify his casting aspersions on what Moore is saying in this clip or the majority of ideas that he has proposed.
They are not doctrinaire Libertarian stances (Moore's) and he has not jettisoned his core values that led him into forming GreenPeace, instead he jettisoned the doctrinaire socialists who hijacked his vision of making the world a better place through pushing for action on specific issues that relate to the property of the community or the whole of the community that he sees as being implemented via law and regulation.
The fact that Moore is proposing rational regulation and how to decide what is rational is a vast step forward and provides a path to downsize government when insisting that we attempt to abandon government completely is not a realistic option for public action.
Now at some point it might become realistic, Glenn Beck's sharing of the Overton Window is very instructive in understanding the limits of what might be done next verses what ultimately might be done. The left understands these principles in their bones. The right has proven terrifyingly adept at studying, applying and ultimately countering the strategies the left has constructed over the years such as those put forward by Alynski, Clovin-Pivin, Soros, Ayres and Company. So, there is hope, most especially hope that through concerted action we might push the pendulum back toward freedom and liberty.
As land ownership is still available to the individual for as small a plot as you would like, nothing prevents someone from attempting to compete with the mega-corporations. If they are less efficient, then they will be gutted by the competition. To the extent that these folks use regulations to provide effective barriers to entry by competition, the regulation and the regulators need to be challenged in the courts and the legislatures. However, if the reason the Mega-Corps are in ascendancy is because of economies of scale and coordination, then your position is no different than any other socialist shaking his fist at the rich man for owning so much.
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