New home in Oregon!

Recall that we arrived in Oregon at autumn just as it was getting cold and this left us with a tough choice. Should we go south where it's warmer and risk not returning to the Pacific northwest? Or should we stay through the winter and experience Oregon in the springtime? Chant and Susanna at Trillium Farm made it easier to decide by letting us power our trailer off their electricity in exchange for work around their place, and so we stayed there from October to January. In fact, we spent Christmas day in their warm farm house while they went to Hawaii.

We were able to learn some interesting things while we were at Trillium. We helped them build a bath house out of cordwood, where logs are "mudded" into a wall with a cement mixture (with an insulating layer in the middle). I helped Chant cut the hardibacker flooring before tiles went in and rough in his wood stove. Over the winter there was applesauce to be made, firewood to be cut, runs to the dump, and pottery to be spun. (Susanna is a talented artist and teaches art at the highschool). And of course, there was the special place called Trillum to experience and explore. Over the course of four months we had many dinners and good times together with Chant and Susanna and consider them to be of the highest calibre of awesome good people.

Since we were in one place for a while, mingling with locals, new opportunities came up. We were invited to move onto the land of a young family and work around their place in exchange for rent, "work trade" it's called. And so, that's where we are now. We have moved into their hobbit hut cob cabins and plan to stay here at least until October of this year.

Our main activity will be cultivating their vegetable gardens, and there will be many opportunities to learn how to build with cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. We are off the electrical grid and so through the winter months with short days we have to watch our power use. We have a dial up internet connection which we're still getting used to, and we see our children less often now that they spend many hours playing in the woods with the other family's two children who are just about the same age.

So, here's where we'll be for a while. Stay tuned!

Review of the novel, "Island"

I just read the novel, "Island", by Aldous Huxley. This book came out in 1962 and tells the story of Pala, a mythical island where oil has recently been discovered. The protagonist of the story, Will Farnaby, is a British journalist and economic hitman who has been hired by corporate tycoons to negotiate with the island's royal elite for the right to extract the tiny country's oil wealth.

The job of the economic hitman is to bribe a country's leader to betray his people so that a western corporation can steal the nation's assets from them. Economic hitmen are very real and have been a major strategy of the United States to steal the wealth of the third world since Mossadegh--the democratically elected leader of Iran--was driven out of office by the CIA. For more read "Economic Hitman" by John Perkins.

During the course of his visit to Pala Will Farnaby entertains himself by taking a guided tour of the island and its remarkable culture. Pala is a utopia: its people are well-educated, well adjusted, superbly healthy in body and mind. It soon becomes obvious that Huxley's main purpose with the book is to wax on about his social theories for reasons that should be known to you, but sadly are probably not.

When one understands who Aldous Huxley is it should become clearer. Huxley was the son of T. H. Huxley, a British intellectual and member of The Royal Society. The entire Huxley family was active in British politics and policy and are, in fact, propagandists for the British empire. For example, Aldous' brother, Julian, was the first director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promoting world education congenial to empire. Aldous' role was to write books that introduced key ideas (memes) into society so that when they were later proposed as policy they would not seem shocking, a phenomenon called "predictive programming".

For example, he spends a lot of time in the book describing the education of Palanese youth who are given training in the hard sciences, but also in physical and emotional health, and Buddhist spirituality. They are selected, based on their abilities and personality type, for special instruction. This may sound appealing but in the end what is revealed is education of children for the benefit of society at the expense of individualism. And what Huxley doesn't share with us is that the country's leaders get to decide which behaviors are promoted and which are not.

I was very impressed with Huxley's intelligence and insight into human nature, as it is obvious upon reading him one is dealing with a superior mind, but there is a certain tragedy to the man that came through in this book particularly. His own education was, of course, British boarding school with the attendant alienation and estrangement from family and deep love. The character Will Farnaby is, I am certain, patterned after Huxley himself, and is a thoroughly unsympathetic character who exhibits all the traits of a psychopath. This is what he had to say about his girlfriend's attempts at pregnancy:

"He was not much interested in babies and had always been thankful for those repeated miscarriages which had frustrated all Molly's hopes and longings for a child."

The best propaganda buries the lies within a spoonful of sugar and "Island" does just that. It is fitting that Huxley writes himself into this story as an economic hitman because that is what he was in real life too.