Sam Francis Fitness

Archive for January, 2010

As Lauren found out, sometimes the hardest part of investing is “putting your mind to it” and just getting started. Most of us don’t realize how much money regularly slips through our fingers, money that could be invested in our futures. Not long ago one of my colleagues realized that he and his wife had been paying $50 a month for a DSL connection that they never installed and therefore never used. What with work and family, the couple was so busy that they simply hadn’t taken time to carefully examine their bills. They just paid them. ‘that’s six hundred dollars a year!” he confided in an appalled voice. “If we invested that, it could grow into a tidy sum!”
Most of us are guilty of that same lack of attention—if not about bills in particular then about where our money goes in general. Many of the day-to-day “needs” in which we indulge may be day- to-day luxuries that are sapping our bank accounts of potential investment funds. The Schwab Center for Investment Research calls this the “Doughnuts to Dollars” savings theory. For example, let’s say that instead of buying an eighty-cent doughnut twice a week (at a savings of $83.20 per year), you invest that money. If you did this for twenty years and got a hypothetical 10% return, you would earn about $5,240. Or as another example, let’s say you save $13 a week by not ordering an appetizer and dessert when you go
out to eat; that amounts to about $675 per year. If you did this for twenty years and again earned a 10% return, you could have close to $42,000. Of course, all of us have spent unwisely from time to time. For one thing, it’s easy to get distracted by our immediate desires. Caught up in the moment, we can lose sight of our long-range goals, so we buy on impulse. We figure that the purchase is insignificant, and that the amount spent won’t change our lives or our fortunes to any great degree. That’s where we’re wrong. All too often the little things become missed opportunities to invest, and consequently our ultimate dreams remain unfulfilled. The bottom line? By reviewing your outgoing cash with your family members, you too can save money without giving up too much in the way of enjoyment. The returns could be well worth the negligible sacrifice.

Although the experiences and memories most of us have of chickens are colored by ill-founded biases, it is hard to forget the feeling of seeing freshly-hatched baby chicks, their little yellow heads pushing out from under their mother hen’s feathers, their tiny yellow beaks just beginning to peck about. To many of us, freshly-hatched baby chicks are the very picture of innocence and adorability. Yet perhaps they also speak of something deeper, something inspirational. In pecking their way out of the egg, they can seem as well to symbolize our ongoing need to outgrow old limitations, our deep need to push against and expand beyond boundaries which have served a needed purpose, but which now must be left behind. In this, the little ones stand for the very opposite of the guilessness we have been conditioned to think of as “chicken.” They stand for courage. They peck their way out, not knowing what will await them. And when they emerge, they stand naked and new amidst the ruins of a past to which they can never return, having undertaken an irreversible journey into the unknown, simply because it is their destiny to do so.
Somehow these little chicks remind me of the bravery of the human spirit, and as well, of our situation as a species. Are we not also driven by an evolutionary imperative, by the call of our own growth and potential for expansion? Are we not, as a race, standing now amidst the slime and eggshells of our primeval past, not knowing what will become of us, yet already dreaming of the stars?
One thing’s for sure. Chickens are far more sensitive than most of us give them credit for. A study at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that chickens flourished when treated with affection. Researchers there spoke and sang gently to a group of baby chicks. As a result the chickens were friendlier, and put on more weight for the amount of feed consumed than did chickens who were ignored. The well treated birds were also more resistant to infection than the other chickens.7

Like the most people, I would like to minimize the unnecessary suffering in the world. I want to eliminate needless violence and pain and I give my support, wherever I can, to a positive approach to this goal. But like most people I never gave much of a thought to the impact my way of eating had on the world. Sure, I knew animals were killed for meat, but isn’t that the way of nature? Isn’t that the way of life’s food chains?
But I’ve learned that the animals used for food in the United States today are not just killed; something else happens to them. And finding out about it has changed me forever.
The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve felt that if people knew what really goes on they would make major changes in their food choices. Major changes that would go a very long way, not only towards improving their own health, but towards reducing the suffering in the world as well.
Let’s start with chickens. In order to understand what happens to these animals, it helps to have a feeling for what kind of beings they are. Unfortunately, most of us have rather stereotyped visions of them. The word “chicken” is often used as a synonym for “coward.” But that is a human moniker. Chickens, while high-strung and quick to startle, are anything but gutless, timid creatures. Roosters are renowned for their pride, ferocity, and the adamant assertion of their power. Many cultures have exploited this fact in the so-called “sport” of cock fighting. And throughout the world a wide variety of cultures have acknowledged the potent spirit of the cock by using his name as a synonym for the male penis.’ In languages all over the world the word for the male chicken is also used to signif’ human male sexual potency.’
Female hens are likewise not the craven creatures we’ve been conditioned to think they are. They can be absolutely fierce in defending their little ones, even against terrible odds and much larger predatory birds. A scientist who studied chickens for years, E. L. Watson, watched a mother hen defend her little chicks against the awesome attack of the dreaded raven.

Here is an in-depth ethnographic and historical tour of Huarochiri, a fascinating Andean province near Lima, Peru. Among the highlights of this web page are significant extracts from the Huarochiri Quechua Manuscript, which alone among colonial documents explains a pre-Christian tradition in an Andean language. The web site also provides riveting memoirs of recent visits to modern highlanders who still, to this day and despite all obstacles, inhabit and interpret the beautiful and mythic landscape of the Andes. Huarochiri, though close to Lima, is an area of harsh economic conditions. Several non-governmental organizations collaborate with Huarochiri vilinfus- lagers to promote reforestation, improved crop storage, Mothers’ Clubs, restoration of agricultural terraces, improved irrigation techniques, appropriate technology, improved diet, and biological pest control. Among these are the Instituto de Desarrollo y Medio Ambiente (IDMA), Diaconia, Perü-Francia, etc. Agronomists and other technical personnel travel the Province by truck and motorcycle attending village meetings and work bees. Two notable tendencies are the prioritization of “bio-development”, meaning ecological sustainable production with a minimum of chemical inputs, and micro internet regional approaches bringing together the communities of each river catchment. Governmental agencies at national and Department level provide ad-hoc project aid to ventures such as reservoir improvement and school building. Visit this informative, lushly illustrated web site for more details.