Belmont Stakes

For those that might not have noticed, there’s an important horse race to be run today at Belmont Park, New York.

To begin, California Chrome has a chance to win the Triple Crown, a feat that hasn’t been accomplished since 1978. This entails winning three consecutive races against the best three year-old Thoroughbreds in the country, The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and finally the Belmont Stakes. While there are more valuable races, none carry the prestige of these three classics.

The race takes on particular significance this year. California Chrome is owned by a pair of working class men and their wives, hardly Thoroughbred racing elite. The owners of the horse also were his breeders; he’s the product of a relatively cheap mare and a second-tier stallion, a California home-bred in an industry dominated by Kentucky elites.

Kentucky is hardly a center of power among states until you talk Thoroughbreds. It’s there that the kings and power players of the world operate with a relative strangle-hold on the best racing bloodlines to be had. If they don’t own the best, they soon will.

Texans, New Yorkers, Floridians, Californians, Saudis, Japanese, British royalty; they and more all bow to the Kentucky elite.

The consolidation of power in the Thoroughbred industry is not unlike what you see in public and private industry with the empire of the United States or the European Union, perhaps the newly emerging BRICS nations, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Microsoft, the Federal Reserve bank, etc.: bigger entities dominate, subdue, and swallow smaller competitors to the point of elimination. Submit or die.

One may say that is not the desired effect of these entities; that point is arguable; the result is not; they have in effect wiped out most adversaries.

The battle is not over. Nature favors entropy: a big body forms; wind and rain and storms break that body into smaller pieces.

Cajuns want to be Cajuns; a mountain man will do as he wills. A Northern California hippie lives as he sees fit, as does a Maine fisherman. Puritans fled the Church of England; Martin Luther broke from the Catholic Church. Afghani tribesmen live as they wish as do Arab Bedouins. An Oregon logger lives in a different world than a New York stock broker.

People refuse to submit to a one-size-fits-all mentality.

When it became apparent that Perry Martin and Steve Coburn owned a freak of nature, an anomaly, the big horse from humble origin, they were offered 6 million dollars for a 51% stake in the animal.

They refused the offer.

They are not wealthy.

But they had a dream and that dream was not for sale.

They kept their horse and to date, they have beaten the big boys.

They acknowledge that the horse is no longer theirs, that it has become property of the people, all the little guys out there with dreams of one day rising from the fray, not to make money, but just to be.

Un-owned.

Go California Chrome.

Michael Ruppert commits suicide

I never met Michael Ruppert in person, but we did exchange emails and phone calls occasionally and he also interviewed me on his radio program once. I was shocked and saddened to learn that he ended his life with a bullet to the head Sunday night. It will take time, but the work he has done will come out. And the rats will scurry.

Cheering for the home team

If cheering for the home team, right or wrong, is the rule, then I am a bad example. If hoarding during times of want becomes the rule, then toss me from the protected zone. There will be no protected zone for those who lose empathy for others.

We are sick

I’ve written little of late. It’s not that I don’t feel the need, but instead that it pains me so much to say what needs to be said. I am disgusted, dismayed and appalled by the direction my country has taken, the bluster and blunder of our leaders, facsimiles of honorable men and women from our past; their words may sound similar to something you once heard and believed, but now they’re hollow, rendered meaningless by a near total lack of conviction and an absence of heart and honor. I am so fucking tired of hearing John Kerry issue wolf tickets. The cocksucker couldn’t whip his way out of a wet paper bag, but he imperils your kids every time he opens his clap trap with threats he can’t back up. I tire of hearing Obama tell us how exceptional our country is. Have you taken a look around lately, cocksucker? And then to hear people like John McCain trying to one-up every aggressive move Obama makes as if the only mistake is that it wasn’t grand enough. An illness has crept into or perhaps grows from our society, so easily bought with cheap-made shit, stolen from or conned out of the hands of poor laborers, modern day slaves from around the planet. Real conservatives have been replaced by neo-cons, true liberals by neo-liberals, imperialists and corporatists, disloyal to their own country and citizens, a multinational class of opportunistic thieves and fraudsters. Both cry, what’s in it for me, none appear the least bit interested in offering anything in return. Members of the press have become compliant lap-dogs, eagerly disseminating propaganda you’d think people would see through, but they swallow it like poisoned kool-aid. Either that or they just don’t give a damn. What the fuck, people? I take no solace from the fact that it’s equally as bad or worse in other countries around the world. This changes nothing about whom and what we have become. There was a time when I took pride in this country and its people. That time is gone. We are sick. Sometimes sick people get well; sometimes they die. Nations are no different.

East of Eden

By Don Henry Ford Jr., on February 4th, 2014 It’s early. The rain sounds louder than it actually is on the tin roof of our home. But the noise was enough to startle me out of slumber and into the cold. A worker left a battery charger connected to a manure spreader truck and I feared water might ruin the charger. So off I went. Now I’m awake. If you happen to be reading this on my personal blog, the formatting may be fucked up. I am warned that my browser is no longer supported. Meaning whatever I was sold some three years ago is now obsolete. WTF? I guess I need to buy the latest (complete with the newest and best version of NSA spyware, I assume). We finished pecan harvest last week, apparently just in time. Early on I received a dollar a pound for native pecans. Each subsequent week the price fell. The last I sold fetched seventy cents. The buyer told me he was doing me a favor at this price. It would be less today. Considering this was a short crop nationwide, supply and demand of product apparently has less to do with the price farmers receive than supply and demand of dollars buyers are willing to risk. When I say buyers, I’m not talking about the ultimate consumer. They pay high prices. I’m talking about the ever-dwindling number of brokers that accumulate the crop and have unique access to the market, denied the rest by unnecessary regulation (when’s the last time you heard of someone getting sick by eating a pecan), or more importantly, the inability to get financing. Fear dominates nowadays. It’s for that reason we continue to have deflation, in spite of continual, unabated liquidity injections by the Fed on the order of 85 billion per month. Except when it’s actually more. More, by the way than bush’s TARP bailout that was so loudly decried by the public, each and every month. All that money goes to shore up the piles of bad debt big banks fail to acknowledge, keeping the ultra-wealthy, ultra-wealthy. The trickle down ain’t trickling. People out here in the real world, producing integral goods and services, continue to struggle, while elite financial entities thrive. I recently saw a post on Facebook: Africa is not poor; its resources are being exploited. It’s not so different in the modern South or the Mid-West. While liberal intellectuals often belittle these states, talking about federal assistance they receive and their concurrent poor state of affairs, they fail to acknowledge that the reason these states are poor in the first place is that they get fucked out of resources by people who sit on their asses and do nothing. Take note that well-meaning but propagandized citizens of these states, denied good educations and job opportunities, disproportionately get to go bleed in our imperial wars as well. Farm and energy subsidies aren’t offered so much to protect farmers as they are to insure cheap food and fuel. The real beneficiaries are consumer states. And of course, those corporations that sell them finished goods. All three of them (so maybe it’s twenty. It ain’t you and it ain’t me). Steinbeck once wrote a book called East of Eden. What was once considered unacceptable by a God-fearing Christian nation has become the American way: Wave the flag, fuck em out of their goods and labor, put em in jail or kill em if they don’t like it. Praise Jesus! The world is ours for the taking. Sorry. This shit overflows and has to come out, now and again.

Who is JSOC?

Your president is a cold-blooded mass murderer. Watch this movie when you have an extra hour and twenty six minutes.

Edward Snowden interview

Here's an interview of the man "intelligence" officers of the United States would like to kill.