Making Farming a Reality in Rose Bud, Arkansas

I met Steve Grappe ten years ago in St. Louis when I was attending a Lightroom course he was teaching. Back then, Steve was an excellent photographer who eventually became my photography mentor. He taught many other people too. He was the center of vibrant photography community. I quickly learned that Steve was an indefatigable man with an expansive skillset and nonstop creativity. A few years ago Steve left St. Louis to reconnect with Kelly, his prom date from many years earlier when they attended high school together in Arkansas. They were married in May 2018. He took a day gig as a car mechanic and she continued her job as a telecom executive. They settled down and lived happily ever after. The End.

Actually, that's not quite the end of the story. A few months later, they bought a dilapidated old farm in Rose Bud, Arkansas. It was actually much worse than dilapidated. I think Steve said he bought it for a bag of acorns. They worked around the clock to fix up the place and this took an enormous amount of sweat equity. Steve and Kelly were helped considerably in this project by Kelly's teenage daughter, Grace.

Steve and Kelly were still most definitely not farmers, but at about this same time they decided they needed to learn how to run a farm, so they attended one of the best farm schools available: Youtube. They also asked lots of questions and listened to others in the business. They jumped right in and brought in some livestock, including chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and pigs. They named their special place "Forevermost Farms," a name based upon a syrupy romantic encounter that I don't have time for right now. All of that was such long time ago . . . To recap, Steve and Kelly got married all the way back in May of 2018. They then bought a run-down farm, turned it into a really cool place where some of the animals wear clothes and sometimes sing in little animal quartets. Steve and Kelly went to YouTube University in order to learn how to humanely and organically raise these eccentric critters. Their work has become their passion and I now realize that they were just getting started.

Fast forword: In the past couple weeks, Steve and Kelly said goodbye to their latest batch of 3,000 chickens that they raised over the past few months. They also recently said goodbye to 300 turkeys, 60 pigs and, if I'm remembering correctly, a partridge in a pear tree. Most recently, they announced that one of their dogs is pregnant, which will provide them with more dogs to help them raise their livestock. Things are always happening at Forevermost.

The above numbers boggle my mind, but I've visited Steve and Kelly and I've seen their beautiful place. I've seen many of their animals and I know that many of those animals have both personalities and names. Steve has also become an expert in the mating habits of their animals. He carefully (some would say voyeuristically) observes the animals to see who is doing what to whom. Beware. If you ask Steve a question about animal sex, he will speak to you much more directly than your parents ever did when they gave you the "sex talk."

As Forevermost Farms has become a reality, I've seen a special glow in the eyes of Steve and Kelly. They have accomplished something I would have thought impossible until I saw it with my own eyes, especially in that short time frame, and it was all done on a limited budget. But guess what? My two wonderful upbeat hard-working friends have now most definitely become farmers.

If you'd like to know more about the story of Forevermost Farms, you are invited to follow Steve and Kelly on Facebook or at the Forevermost Farms Website. Please do visit their website so that you can take in some of this celebration that has become their lives.

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Heterodox Academy Offers Suggestions on How to Disagree Civilly

Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz

in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a website and a blog in September of 2015 — a venue for social researchers to talk about their work and the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions — soon grew into an international network of peers dedicated to advancing  the values of constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity as cornerstones of academic and intellectual life.

All members of Heterodox Academy embrace a set of norms and values that they call “The HxA Way.”

“I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.”

HxA offers a tipsheet on how to how to approach moral disagreements in constructive ways. HxA encourages us to "engage in open inquiry and constructive disagreement can use these strategies to build mutual understanding and have better conversations on difficult issues."

I highly recommend visiting this entire article, but in this short article I'm setting out the basic ideas:

  • Lower the perceived state of the disagreement or conflict
  • Don’t sling pejorative labels or assign bad motives
  • Agree upon facts first ("Then talk about what to do about it or how best to address it. Start small and build out.")
  • Lower a disagreement’s visibility ("In public environments, including digital forums, there is much more pressure to conform to one’s group and to virtue signal. It is also far more embarrassing to admit you were wrong to the whole world than to a single person. People are generally much more reasonable in more intimate settings.")
  • Don’t demand too much from the conversation ("In cases of deep disagreement, the initial and primary goal should be simply to clearly understand where the other is coming from and to be well-understood oneself.")
  • Appeal to identity, values, narratives,and frames of reference
  • Speak to people in their own language ("people become much more willing to reconsider or even change their views and to accept controversial facts when presented to them in terms of their own values, commitments, and frames of reference")

The final point of this HxA tip sheet is to "Understand that it’s worth the effort." HxA elaborates:

If you do a deep dive into a radically alternative worldview with an open mind – that mind will be blown. The exploration might, at times, be disorienting, frustrating, or triggering – but you will learn a lot. You might not abandon your own commitments, but you’ll definitely come to see things in a dramatically different way. At the very least, you will discover that your rivals have legitimate reasons for holding the positions they hold on many issues. That in itself – really internalizing that – can be huge.

HxA position is that they prize pluralism and value constructive disagreement. They offer these additional five bullet points for accomplishing these goals:

  • Make your case with evidence.
  • Be intellectually charitable ("However, one should always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, ‘steel-man’ opponents rather than ‘straw-manning’ them). One should be able to describe their interlocutor’s position in a manner they would, themselves, agree with (see: ‘Ideological Turing Test’)")
  • Be intellectually humble ("Take seriously the prospect that you may be wrong")
  • Be constructive.("The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic and natural worlds.")
  • Be yourself. This is a critically important point. Standing up to outgroups, in-groups and organizations sometimes takes considerable courage:

At Heterodox Academy, we believe that successfully changing unfortunate dynamics in any complex system or institution will require people to stand up — to leverage, and indeed stake, their social capital on holding the line, pushing back against adverse trends and leading by example. This not only has an immediate and local impact, it also helps spread awareness, provides models for others to follow and creates permission for others to stand up as well. This is why Heterodox Academy does not allow for anonymous membership; membership is a meaningful commitment precisely because it is public.

HxA offers many additional Tools and Resources for engaging in Heterodox Conversations. This is an excellent site to visit to prepare for conversations that might turn contentious.

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This Thought Experiment Offers Instant Gratitude – Courtesy of Sam Harris

What? Your life is not perfect? Your friendships and romantic interests sometimes become strained and they occasionally fall apart completely? Does your aging house need many types of maintenance and repair work? Are you concerned about your finances? Is your body failing in minor and major ways as you age? Do your digital devices often need new trouble-shooting, upgrades and passwords? Are the people you care about the most so worried about these same things that these worries and struggles are the topics that dominate your conversations?

No one ever promised us that our lives would be lived happily ever after. We have no right to believe that we would never be required to work hard to maintain our physical and social environments. These daily unrelenting challenges should actually be seen as opportunities because these "burdens" are not distractions from our lives. These "burdens" are the essence of Life. As Sam Harris notes in his thought experiment below, if you take away all the things that make our lives irritating, exhausting and scary, nothing of value remains.

Continue ReadingThis Thought Experiment Offers Instant Gratitude – Courtesy of Sam Harris

A Thanksgiving Message

We are not in "normal" times, but there is so much for many of us to be thankful. If you are looking for these good things, you will find them everywhere. Those who are looking only for problems and imperfections will miss most of the good things. On this Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of those countless people who strive daily to reach out to each other in reassuring and civil ways. Doing this takes many forms, including simply offering friendly greetings and encouragement (at a distance) to oftentimes randomly encountered fellow humans. But it also includes visiting your loved ones who are shut-in, living alone, hanging on, waiting to get to the other side, who suffer from the loud dull pain of social isolation.

I repeatedly think of the millions of people who have worked so hard to developed digital tools that have allowed so many of us to connect to each other. Thanks to incredibly smart people, my elderly mother and sisters have had a weekly Zoom visit each Sunday that has turned out to be a highlight of each week. I also feel deep appreciation for those many thousands of health care workers (including a recent graduate nurse named JuJu Vieth--my daughter) and STEM experts who have worked around the clock to nurture the onslaught of COVID patients and to give all of us extraordinarily sudden hope that a vaccine might be around the corner. We will get through this as a people. That's a given. It's time to raise the bar a bit, though, and aim to get through this in non-divisive ways that make each of us proud to be fellow Americans.

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What is a Cult? Descriptions from Cult Education Institute

There's a lot of accusations that Americans on both the political right and left are now members of "Cults." What exactly is a cult? After doing a bit of research, I found these helpful descriptions / definitions / traits of Cult Leaders and their followers from the Cult Education Institute. The following material is from the CEI webpage titled "Warning Signs":

Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.

  1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
  2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
  3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
  4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
  5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
  6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
  7. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
  8. Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
  9. The group/leader is always right.
  10. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.

Ten warning signs regarding people involved in/with a potentially unsafe group/leader.

  1. Extreme obsessiveness regarding the group/leader resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration.
  2. Individual identity, the group, the leader and/or God as distinct and separate categories of existence become increasingly blurred. Instead, in the follower's mind these identities become substantially and increasingly fused--as that person's involvement with the group/leader continues and deepens.
  3. Whenever the group/leader is criticized or questioned it is characterized as "persecution".
  4. Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed conversation and mannerisms, cloning of the group/leader in personal behavior.
  5. Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
  6. Hyperactivity centered on the group/leader agenda, which seems to supercede any personal goals or individual interests.
  7. A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
  8. Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
  9. Anything the group/leader does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful.
  10. Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.

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