MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

Great Huffington Post article on the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and, especially, the question and answer session with Buffett and Munger.  The article claims that there is nothing like this in the corporate world.  It also discourses on the Midwestern values of event.

One section I did like, because it paralleled a position I've been taking recently, was on energy:

On energy, Munger said we should use the rest of the world's oil, then our coal and only then our now very cheap natural gas reserves. He scoffed at the call for U.S. energy independence ("one of the stupidest things I've heard adults discuss"), prompting sidekick Buffett to call that "Charlie's version of saving up sex for your old age."

The "Drill, baby, drill" crowd doesn't make any sense from either a resource conservation or national security perspective.  National self-interest should mean we want to be the last people with carbon-based fuels that we can then sell to everyone else.  The drilling crowd are so wildly mistaken on the longterm national interest; you don't even have to take a pro-environment position in order to criticize them.

Berry on economy

And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.

Berry on capitalism

In his Jefferson lecture, Wendell Berry has this to say about capitalism:

But now, three-quarters of a century later, we are no longer talking about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.

It All Turns on Affection

A masterful lecture by Wendell Berry.  He was the Jefferson lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Read these central paragraphs and ponder to good effect:

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

 

WE WON!

In case you haven't seen, we won the vote at the Omaha City Council today.  Gay and transgender citizens will now have workplace protections.  You can read the brief OWH article here.  I'll be posting more later.

One news piece about it (quoting your's truly).

Support strong in latest poll

We conduced another poll over the weekend demonstrating strong public support for the ordinance and opposition to making it only for city employees.  Read about it here.  I can send you the poll memo if you'd like to see it.

Equal Employment Commercial

Everyone share our beautiful Equal Omaha commercial:

Omaha lags in protecting its gay citizens

A great article today in the Omaha World-Herald.

Among the 50 largest cities in the nation, Omaha is one of 15 whose gay residents have no specific legal protection from discrimination.

Although such gay rights measures have been criticized as radical, the growing list of cities putting legal protections in place indicates that the issue has become more mainstream nationally.

 

Survey: Job bias for gay community

Omaha World-Herald article on the UNMC survey.  A quote from yours truly is included.

World-Herald Endorses Ordinance

The Omaha-World Herald has endorsed the Equal Employment Ordinance.