YESTERDAY'S HIKE

Got up and went for a hike at a place called Little Pond with a witty electrical engineer named Mark Schneider. Schneider is the husband of my wife's pal, Julie Hilsun. We drove about forty five minutes down Route 2, and then commenced to hike. The Catskill Hikes book said 3.1 miles, but it didn't say that most of it was fairly steep climbing. Mark is a marathon runner and bicyclist, so suffice it to say I was walking after him as well as I could, breathing hard. It's rained 18 out of the last 21 days (as I type this there is a terrific thunderstorm) so the trail was sopping wet and almost a stream at many points, and steep. I think we climbed about 800 ft. in elevation (guidebook says 740 ft. rise), and spent 2.5 hours doing this 3.1 mile hike. Mark is very fit, and for about a year I've been using him as a model of fitness to get some off some fat.

This is part of the Catskill Forest tract but was once farmed. There was a basement to an old house with a tire in it up on a ridge. You could see about twenty miles out, and there were no visible houses. Just trees. If farms existed they were way off the grid. Some of the trees appeared to have been planted by hand -- a ridge of pines that formed a windbreak for what used to be the house. A bunch of apple trees. But the trail was nearly covered over as not many people seem to use this trail. Mark spotted a paw print for a bear. It was fresh, and pretty hefty, and I got a picture of it, but I don't know how to download the photo from my digital camera.

Mark is a Presbyterian. We talked about the George Tiller shooting and he said he had read my blog and wondered about the 60,000 abortions Tiller claimed to have done. He said do the math. I think that is a lot of abortions, but breaking it down into a year amount, over 20 years, you get about 3000 a year, which is about ten a day. How long does it take to do an abortion if women are coming down an assembly line, all anesthetized and there is no counselling before and after -- just the procedure itself? Tiller specialized in late-term abortions, and perhaps at least a few of the abortions might have been on twins or triplets, or even quadruplets, which would up the numbers while minimizing the time spent, but then since they were often third tri-mester (is that legal?), perhaps the children fought for their lives, which used up more time. It's hard to get the numbers straight because I would have to familiarize myself with the entire procedure, but Tiller's own websites proclaimed 60,000 successful abortions. I asked Mark what he thought about this, and he asked me what I thought, and we were both careful to be both Christian, and yet, reasonable, and to remain within the law. It's hard to know what to think about hot button issues and harder still to think about them when you're not sure where another's person's non-negotiables might be.

Mark is fairly conservative but open-minded. He said that Cuba's got some of the problems of localized food production licked due to their not being able to participate in globalization and that we ought to learn from them. He said 25% of the food that is eaten in Havana is actually grown in Havana. I suspected that this was 2nd-hand Cuban agit-prop, but it could be right. Mark checks his facts. Still, I've known people who claim that in Cuba you can do anything you want including just write poems, and I doubt if that is true, and if it is, the poems had better be about what a cool guy Castro is or you'll end up as fertilizer in a banana plantation on the outskirts of Havana. Havana Other Banana.

Back at his house later last night, we ate beans and rice and cornbread, with kale (a spinach alternative) and he told me about his erstwhile neighbor, a man named Theodore Burczak, who now teaches at Denison University. Burczak is an economic historian who has published a book called Socialism after Hayek. He grew up in the tiny hamlet of Delancey, so small it hasn't even got a store. I googled Burczak's book last night when I got home and read the 1st fifteen pages. Copyright doesn't allow me to read any more of it (his publisher is invested in private property!), but it seems to follow the economic theories of Hayek who taught at the University of Chicago for many years until his death in 1991. Hayek is the centerfold of much conservative economic theory that argues against centralized economies as unworkable. H.W. Bush gave Hayek a Freedom Medal in 1991. Burczak has attempted to revive Marxism using Hayek, it seems, and has garnered enormous interest among the usual elites. I might read the rest of Burczak's book, but it's quite expensive: $14.95 at Amazon.com for the cheapest used copy.

We appear to live in two worlds. In one, there is justice, and peace, and love. It's a kind of vertical economy. In the other, there is competition, market forces, and individual appetites. To bring the two together so that appetites are satisfied, and yet justice is maintained, is the millenial dream. If you focus too much on one, the other one suffers. That's why Luther separates them into two kingdoms. At the same time, he argues they are intertwined. The number 8 is often used as a symbol for the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, but it is set on its side. That is roughly the same symbol we use for infinity. But inside of infinity is also finitude. We appear to be in both worlds at the same time. Our resources are finite, but the universe is infinite. There are probably a few Lutheran economists in the Scandinavian countries who do a better job bringing the two economies together, but they don't teach in our universities and write in unreadable languages, so their work is not available.

My legs are a little sore today. However, I ate too much food last night, so I did not lose weight.