Content Thieves

A brief note to all of you who are minded to contribute to charity, please don't contribute to Homeless Advocate, a blog. In this post, they have reprinted a post of mine, made it look as if I am one of their contributors, and placed a request for donations at the bottom. They did this without my permission, and have ignored my attempts to contact them, and refused to publish my comment at the bottom of the post.

Very nice, Rabbi Dale.

Request for Reader Comments

Without a doubt the most scandalous, most commented upon, and most joked about suggestion I've made in this blog has to do with getting a good, nearly waterless shave. I suggest a dab of generic sex lube and a thimbleful of water to help the razor glide over your skin.

I've never had a complaint about this advice. No one has ever told me that it didn't work well for him. That is because no one has admitted to trying it.

Come on.

Are you afraid the cashier will think you are having sex?

And the downside of that is?

Someone who has tried it, tell me, was it okay? Is it now part of your survival skill set? What did you think?

Changing Your Life

It has been said before, but it is worth repeating: the homeless problem is the problem the housed have with the homeless.

I was just reading a terrific little blog item about a kid in Washington that had managed to set himself up as a computer consultant using a Starbucks wifi network while homeless. When Starbucks was closed, he spent the night at Kinko's. He scrounged for food and computer equipment. He worked for tips. He kept himself very clean. He surfed the internet for girls. In short, he had created a lifestyle. The blogger who was writing about him gave him a substantial amount of money hoping he would change his life. Of course, he couldn't understand why the wifi kid spent it on computer equipment.

The blogger couldn't understand it because he refused to acknowledge that this man had a legitimate and sustainable lifestyle. When given money, he reinvested it in that lifestyle, as any responsible, reasonable person does. The blogger was angry at him. Why, oh why, didn't he struggle to get a home? The man was already home.

Homelessness changes you. So does having a house. Your priorities become the priorities of the extant lifestyle. What you do with money has much to do with how you are living. All lifestyles are investments, and we continue to add resources in an effort to improve their performance. Abandoning a lifestyle is something we never do without a serious push. Once a lifestyle is comfortable, why should it be abandoned?

This is another reason that charity is so unsavory. It comes from a position of superiority. The charitable feel they have a right to determine the goals, purposes, and uses of their charity. It lacks dignity. I don't mean for the recipient. I mean it is not dignified to try to direct the lives of others, to be so involved in the details of other lives. It's a failure to understand boundaries.

Homeless in Australia

I just had a question from a reader about wild foods, bush tucker, in Sydney. I'm from California, and while I hate to be provincial, I have no idea what is growing in Australia. How can I advise someone on how to find bush tucker on a continent that boasts marsupials and crocodiles as its natural icons?

Hey, that reminds me of a story about the first Europeans to make landfall in Australia. I've heard they died of starvation with food all around them. Don't let that happen to you. You have to know enough to recognize the bounty at your feet. That's what this whole blog is about. Learning to have some insight into how a home and comfort are achieved, with or without societal assistance.

Rely on experts. Learn native skills. Listen to locals. Realize, though, that when someone is an expert on one thing, it doesn't make him an expert on everything. Think critically.

Wild Foods

It's worth knowing which weeds and decorative plants are edible in your part of the country. In southern California I often breakfasted on eugenia berries, included dandelion leaves in a salad, or roasted their roots for dandelion coffee, or snacked on natal plums or the rather bland fruit of the strawberry tree. Wild blackberry is a treat not to be missed in the northwest. In the Spring if you can run, just after Easter abandoned rabbits are fairly easy to wear out, capture, and dress for dinner. If you know your wild foods, life can go a little easier.

Be ready to be told that the berries you are eating are poisonous. If you know better, just ignore foolish advisors. I've been told eugenia berries are poisonous more times than I can remember, though I've been eating them since early childhood and every book on botany and horticulture notes that they are edible. On more than one occasion I've been told that a perfectly ordinary fig or strawberry was poisonous. Just figure that the foolishness factor on unsolicited advice is about 90%.

Why Lying Works

Once again I had a comment expressing fear of being caught lying. I don't know how to tell you that there is nothing to fear, but let me tell you why lying works.

First, there is a social barrier to catching you. It is embarrassing to catch someone in a lie. It is almost impossible to call someone a liar outright. When people do, it's a shock to everyone within hearing. Even if you are caught, most times the person who caught you will participate in a cover story. You might not get the thing, whatever it was you needed, but you also won't face retribution for the lie.

This is contrary to our sense of justice. We believe that if we break the rules we will be punished if we are caught. That simply is not the case. Power and social constraint are much more powerful ideas than justice. You must apply the right paradigm to your circumstances if you want to understand what is happening. Justice is the wrong paradigm. The power of social regulation, over the other person, not you, is the right paradigm.

Second, and perhaps even more important, it takes work to reveal a lie, and most people are simply too lazy. I worked on a school paper while I was in college, and one day an advertisement came in for placement in the paper that denied that the Holocaust occurred. My editor wanted to run the ad, on the basis of free speech. I opposed, but said if he was going to run the ad he should at least allow me to investigate the source and the citations in the ad and run my resulting story next to it. He agreed and I set to work. The first thing I did was look up all the citations. There were quotes of Elie Wiesel said to have been printed in the NY Times, so I looked up the dates offered. The NY Times is archived in just about every university library, so it was easy. There was nothing. Elie wasn't there. I went through every page of the issues cited, even the classified ads and the coupon supplement. Nothing. I looked for books mentioned and could find no reference to them anywhere. As far as I could tell, they didn't exist. So I called the advertiser.

I told him I was having a little trouble with fact checking, and asked if he could send me clippings from the papers and copies of the books. He laughed and said that in the many years he had been publishing this ad, no one had ever asked him to prove his citations. I told him that without proof of his claims, his ad appears to be a libel to Jews, and he quietly withdrew his request to publish it.

This is an example of the method used for evil. It is as powerful when used for good, the good of your survival. The plain and simple truth is that fact checking requires effort, and most people won't put that effort out.

Comments Restored!

Last night I spent a couple of hours cleaning comment spam off the blog. The crap was everywhere, money quick scams, male enhancement scams, weight loss scams, even designer shoes and motorcycle sales. I must have had fifty comments to remove, all from the same six or seven people, scattered over all the posts that I have in my table of contents. So, without delving into the kind of psychological disturbance that drives a person to do that to a blog, I've suspended my comments, because I can't be bothered to clean this crud up every day.

For my loyal and kind readers, we've been lucky. The blog has been here for more than a year and this is the first real assault it's received. If you have something to add to the blog, a post or comment you'd like to make, some tip to pass on, email it to me. I've been attending to things better around here, and if I think your words are valuable, I'll make a post or a comment and credit you.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm hopeful it won't have to be permanent. Such things are like storms. They pass.

The Big Easy

Like many of you, I've been watching the news about the New Orleans disaster with sorrow. We knew that New Orleans was vulnerable, and perhaps some people therefore blame those sufferring now for having stayed at all, but each of us lives near to disaster most of our lives. The rich in Malibu regularly slide down the hill when the season of fire, rain, and mud takes their houses, predictably. All of tornado alley is unlivable if your criteria is some kind of storm safety, and that includes quite a few states. Washington is persecuted by a volcano, California by earthquakes, New York by terrorists, Chicago by hard winters, Florida by disease carrying mosquitoes. This world is not safe, and never will be, so we live where there are people and opportunities that make our lives good, regardless of the local dangers. I feel tremendous sadness, loss, and regret that I never visited the Big Easy before it was changed by hurricane Katrina. I hope it somehow recovers.

I don't know if the relief efforts have been competent, or if they've been all they can be. That's for politicians to argue about, news reporters to ask pointedly, petulantly, about. Who cares? For the people in the city, relief efforts have been mostly absent, and people who stay in the stadiums and on the flood free grounds, do so at their peril. There has never been a better example of what not to do in a homeless, refugee situation. Never, ever, ever, head into the central processing areas of a disaster. Don't do it. Remember, "shelters are for someone else" is a principle that applies equally well to disaster shelters and to homeless shelters, run by government, church, or FDNY. No matter how well intentioned, they become hells.

The only thing to do is to leave, and some people have been leaving. They walk out. They swim out. They leave without food, clothes, shoes, half naked, scraps for possessions, with fast friends around them for a little protection. They leave the zone as quickly and carefully as possible, because the only thing that matters is to get out of the disaster alive and unharmed. Work out the rebuilding process from a safe distance.

Good luck to you all.