(NUNAL) (EYEBALL)

Skye and I made a short film for the BuddhaFest Film Festival , which is taking place in Washington, DC on June 14-17. The film is called "Buddha in the Bee Yard" and you can view it here. This is a contest, so if you like it please vote for it! The film reflects on our approach to beekeeping in line with Buddhist environmental ethics.  This is something I have been working on for awhile and plan to have a completed book about in relatively short order.  It is going to be a practical hive management guide that reflects this ethical approach and creates a more sustainable method of keeping bees. You can also view the other films here .

A busy spring, to say the least.  The usual end of the semester intensity and then an unusually strong spring for the bees.  So, of course I spent any and all of my extra time with the bees rather than blogging. 

This article by William K. Black on the complete failure of the Obama administration to punish those responsible for the financial fraud that led to the collapse of the housing market is essential reading. The contrast with the 1987 savings and loan crisis is even more damning. "The Obama administration’s record of prosecuting elite financial frauds is worse than the Bush administration’s record, which is a very large statement. This fact is demonstrated by a November report by Syracuse University’s Transitional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), “Criminal Prosecutions for Financial Institution Fraud Continue to Fall.” The truth is that neither administration has prosecuted any elite CEO for the epidemic of mortgage fraud that drove the ongoing crisis, in contrast to over 1,000 elite felony convictions arising from the Saving & Loan debacle in the 1980s. Yet today's ongoing crisis caused losses more than 70 times greater than the S&L debacle, and the amount of elit...

I thought Paul Krugman's critique of the Charles Murray book was dead on. Krguman sees an attempt of the right to switch the debate from economics, which have essentially gutted the prospects of the working class, to a fictional crisis of morality, and then to shift blame for the decline of morality on liberals, the Sixties, and the host of usual suspects. I am interested to see how the Murray attempt to change the terms of debate plays out in this political year. First the Tea Party discovered an intense love of limited government and fiscal conservatism which had, astoundingly, somehow remained dormant during the profligate Bush years. For a time, the cultural war was eclipsed by the Tea party's clothing of a kernel of race war against what they believed Obama represented within the rethoric of orginalism. Sure, there was still the Palinesque language of "real America" but it was linked much more to questions of government power more than to critiques of morali...

I was speaking with my night students about the sad passing of Angel Flores, a great conjunto accordionist. Since my guess is that not many of them ran to look up old footage of him playing, I am putting some here:

Suffolk is weighing whether to pass a law in the schools to prevent students from wearing clothes ""that [are] not in keeping with a student's gender" "Board Vice Chairwoman Thelma Hinton, who initiated the dress code discussion, said Wednesday that she's pleased with the superintendent's proposal. "You can be whatever you want to be," she said, "but as long as I'm on the board, I'm about safety." Hinton mentioned reports from last summer that boys who wore feminine clothing had to use a faculty restroom because they felt threatened by their peers. She doesn't know the motivation behind their dress, " but when it becomes a safety issue, how far do you go with freedom of expression?" " Right, let's not get carried with this "freedom of expression" foolishness in the schools, what good could that possibly do? Oh yes, safety is paramont. No state understands this better than freedom-embracing Vi...

We had such a warm winter that whales are congregating off Virginia Beach .