No surf, but beautiful

And there was almost no surf. I can count the number of times I surfed on two hands, mostly knee to waist high. But – the weather was great, friends kept me in fish, I have work and a lively family – I keep a smile on my face. As we enter fall and shadows get long, I begin to get a little edgy. I love summer – winter is cold and grey. So right now I try to revel in it. I surfed in no surf today. I said to one of the guys that I knew the swell was dead, but I just wanted to come out and kick the body. Gruesome. But it was all nothing compared to other’s troubles.

We are human beings, beings amongst many others, breathing the same air; happiness, sorrow, and stress. Krishnamurti said, “You suffer, you are uncertain, you are anxious, you are in agony, pain. That is what you are. You have belief, knowledge, character, and that is what you are. And that is exactly what your neighbor is. He is suffering; he goes through agony, sorrow, pain, trouble. So, is your consciousness separate from the rest of mankind? No, of course not. If you admit that, if you see the truth of that, then are you an individual? You may think you are an individual because you are dark, you are short, because peripheral activity makes you think you are an individual, but deeply, are you not the rest of mankind? When you realize that, the truth of that, you will never kill another, because you are killing yourself. Then out of that comes great compassion, love.” I believe this. So I was deeply hurt when I saw the results of a beating inflicted upon one of the forgotten in our community. This person lives mostly outside the common place, the common expectations, the common comforts, and the common get-along. I see her most days – she works, she laughs, she has good times with friends, she has bad times, she gets harassed and gives it back, she has a smile on her face – and when she discovered my name – she used it to say hi. She walks a hard road – no boots – no boot straps to pull up. I said hi today – and trying to hide her face – she responded – but I noticed the pot of gold at the end of her rainbow was gone. She took her sunglasses off and raised her head so I could see her face. I was so hurt. Black and blue deep bruising swollen – I felt her pain in my dantien. She said the rest of her body was the same. Someone came to her nest while she was settling and beat her. Beat her and beat her. In our community. I note community because this is our center – where we start. Where our relationships are near. Again Krishnamurti: “Life is a process of relationship. There is no life without relationship. This is a fact. You may be a hermit, you may be a monk, you may withdraw from all society, but you are related. As a human being, you cannot escape from being related. You are related to your wife, to your husband, to your children, you are related to your government, you are related to the hermit who withdraws because you feed him, and he is related to his ideas. So relationship is the basis of human existence. Without relationship there is no existence. You are either related to the past, which is, to all the tradition, to all the memories, to the monks, or you are related to some future ideation. So relationship is the most important thing in life. Do you see the truth of that, not verbally, not intellectually, but actually with your heart and mind?” So how does beating the forgotten happen? Who cares? Who is responsible? Who does not understand community and relationship? How do we learn – how do we change? I am sad tonight.

“Man to man is so unjust, children, you don’t know who the trust.” Supposedly we can all trust the law because we are all treated the same under the law (guaranteed under the Constitution). And, if one citizen is treated or acts outside the law, it diminishes the law and diminishes our Constitution. As I have said before – Repub-low-crats are all the same – different at the edges. My solution – impact my community – the people I meet – relationship. Here is some more insight - John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

Max Keiser – when you have companies that are supposedly free market who are in the oil business and they don’t include the externalities of the pollution that they’re creating or the cost of that pollution, they are by force subjecting other people downstream to deal with the consequences and, in many cases, deadly consequences of the force of those externalities being pushed on those people. Consider the explosion at the Chevron refinery recently as a close-to-home example – we will pay for the actual damages and the externalities linked to the whole enchilada.

Sandeep Jaitly – Money is the universally acceptable ultimate extinguisher of any debt and, as far as I can tell, fiat credit which is the system that we have currently, doesn’t fit that bill. Throughout time, the universally accepted extinguisher of any debt has always been . . . ultimate extinguisher I should add . . . has always been gold or silver. American consumers, are digging in their heels though the entire power structure has been pushing them relentlessly to buy more and more with money they don’t have, and borrow against future income they might never make, just so that GDP can edge up for another desperate quarter.

Basically, Romney’s plan is “trickle-down” economics: Give rich people more money, and eventually this money will work its way down to the middle class. If the problem in our economy were that there was a scarcity of investment capital, this might be an effective solution, but there is plenty of investment capital available. The problem in the economy is that the economy’s primary customers, the hundreds of millions of people in the middle class, are broke. And one reason they are broke is that this country has been trying “trickle-down” economics for more than a decade, with tax rates on the richest Americans almost as low as they have ever been. During that period, inequality has grown, economic growth has stalled, and average wage growth has stalled—to the point where the middle class has gone broke. What will create sustainable jobs in our economy right now, therefore, is not “richer rich people” but a healthier economic ecosystem, in which entrepreneurs, investors, employees, and customers are all healthy. And right now, the most important one of these elements, the customers, are sick.

Last Word: The power to command frequently causes failure to think. -Barbara Tuchman, author and historian (1912-1989)

No problem with southern exposure

Both ways in the summer

California - an island - don't you wish?