All posts by Jim Selman

Tempests in a Tea Party

By Jim Selman | Bio

A good friend of mine is a Canadian that grew up in Lebanon. His family still owns a bit of land that is situated between two of the refugee camps. It is a bleak scene by all accounts. I asked him what he learned growing up in that kind of environment. He said, “I learned it only takes a very few people to screw it up for everybody”.

I had the same impression as I watched the ‘9/12 tea party march on Washington’ this past week. It is fine for any group to demonstrate. That is their right. But I am also a bit perplexed why a campaign that has a few thousand people should be getting the same kind of coverage in the media that other ‘causes marches involving millions’ such as the civil rights movement receive. I am also perplexed that the media doesn’t make a distinction between hate-filled Nazi style

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Dirt is Everything

By Sharon Knoll | Bio

I think an essential part of literacy today is literacy with food growing. I was raised on farms and in urban gardens (although we didn’t have the word ‘urban’ at that time). Translated: Mom and Dad were raised in Kansas and settled in the big city of Denver after WWII. Our vacations consisted of driving to Kansas and helping bring in the harvest. I got to stay until the end of summer.

During those summers, we just ate great food and I weeded a lot and helped Gram butcher chickens. The dirt was always great because my Dad or Granddad or Grandma were always throwing some kind of poop on something. Meanwhile, the cows were in the fields doing what they do best—eating and pooping. I got to understand very early on that ‘real’ dirt gives us great food.   

Dirt is everything. One of my top ten heroes (I have a distinct list for heroines)

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Practical Economics 101

By Jim Selman | Bio

I am not an economist. Thank goodness. This is not a good time to be one. There is a wonderful overview of the field, “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?”, by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The bottom line is that the current situation “which nobody could have predicted” was predicted and it doesn’t take an economist to know that:

  • Nothing goes up forever,
  • People aren’t always rational,
  • We should learn from the past, and
  • The ‘house’ always wins. 

With all the theoretical back and forth between the various ‘schools’ of economic theory, one word jumps out at me: “technocrat”.

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National Grandparents Day

National Grandparents Day is this Sunday, September 13th. The day has been celebrated in the US since 1978 and Canada since 1995. Jimmy Carter signed the proclamation declaring the first Sunday after Labor Day as a U.S. holiday with a purpose: "… to honor grandparents, to give grandparents an opportunity to show
love for their children’s children, and to help children become aware
of strength, information, and guidance older people can offer." The founder of the

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Changes

Starting this month, Serene Ambition will be adjusting our publishing schedule. Rather than posting five days a week, we will focus on connecting to other conversations, topics, issues and news of the day that are relevant to aging and Eldering as they occur. You can look forward to continuing to receive timely, informative perspectives from all of our regular contributors on a frequent basis.

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Online Gossip: Push it Back

By Jim Selman | Bio

Yesterday I received yet another of those ‘big lettered’ alarms about how appalled someone or another is about some left-wing motivated travesty against America, our troops and/or God. This one was about how the words “So Help Me God” were intentionally deleted from Roosevelt’s ‘Day of Infamy’ inscription on his Memorial in Washington D.C. About 30 seconds on Google and the facts are that this “eRumor

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Our Food and Health: At the Tipping Point

By Sharon Knoll | Bio

“I am not an optimist because I am
not sure everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist because I am not sure
everything ends badly. I carry hope in my heart.”

—Václav
Havel

I come from generations of food growers. And it is clear to
me that eating is one of the most intimate of actions. We take into ourselves
the whole of the plant or animal, including the environment in which it was
raised and killed. We take in the work and the well-being, or lack

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Souls 2009

By Jim Selman | Bio

Our group of men met for our semi-annual retreat on Vince’s farm in New Jersey. We’ve been meeting twice a year every year since 2000. Next year will be a decade of friends coming together for no other purpose than to support and empower each other in our lives. We’re older and we’ve been through a lot together. What I’ve grown to appreciate is that we’re all very willing, able and open to being vulnerable in sharing our lives, our experiences and our wisdom with

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“Only God Can Save Us”

By Jim Selman | Bio

It was said that the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s last words were “Only God can save us.” He was, perhaps, one of the deeper thinkers (at least in modern times) on the question of who we are and what is really going on. As far as I know, he wasn’t religious. So what he meant by these words, if indeed he said them, is open to question.

My view is that he was talking about the fact that all human beings live in interpretations of “reality”—cultural and linguistic

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